[This Is Not Here]

Heres something fellow Barrettites might appreciate, preceeding a long period apart due to gap year travel arrangements me and my two best freinds each made eachother a compilation of our all-time favourite tracks. We wrote about each track and why it means what it does to us. This is what I wrote about Syd Barrett:

15. Syd Barrett – Here I Go, from the album The Madcap Laughs 1970
Pink Floyd were one of the first notable British underground bands. With their beautiful shambling visionary of a frontman Syd Barrett, a prodigious talent at both pop song writing and sonic experimentation, Pink Floyd were to become London’s premier underground act, as house band of the infamous UFO club. However, the band lived a double life, whilst performing lengthy psychedelic epics at ‘freak-outs’, they would release a top 10 album, The Piper At Gates of Dawn, and two superb top 20 pop singles. Pink Floyd under the extraordinary talent of Syd Barrett, would progress rock into wholly new territory. However, all of this lasted for only a year. Accompalishing more in 12 months than most musicians will in a lifetime, coupled with a gargantuan consumption of psychedelic drugs, took a horrific toll on Barrett, he was replaced by his best friend David Gilmour. As ‘67 gives way to ‘68, music may never be the same again, but the band’s frontman is barely recognisable. In early 1968, after a brief experiment as a five-man act, the Pink Floyd, the band Syd had named, fronted, written every song for and launched to international acclaim, sacked him.

Casual Pink Floyd fans often ask me ‘if Syd was so crazy, how come he was in a fit enough state to produce two solo albums?’. The answer is always the same; ‘he wasn’t’. Any listen to Syd’s first and best solo album The Madcap Laughs makes this crystal clear- its not so much an album but booty brought back from a nightmare, postcards from the precipice. At the point of recording Syd was still taking vast amounts of acid, and more concerningly Mandrax, an extremely dilapidating drug indeed. Therefore, its just as well The Madcap Laughs doesn’t try to sound remotely like a coherent album. Both solo albums were produced by Syd’s ex-bandmates David Gilmour and Roger Waters. On Madcap Gilmour decided to keep a number of false-starts and studio chatter in the final cut, usually Syd getting extremely frustrated, and these insights into Syd’s fragility make the album so powerfully raw. The second album, simply entitled ‘Barrett’ doesn’t do this, it’s over produced; a vain attempt to cover over the cracks - and it screams of it. Though thoroughly a cult album and often overlooked, Madcap’s rawness has earnt it a much deserved place in rock history. It’s often hailed as one of the first ever lo-fi rock albums, a production technique that would become so insurmountably part of punk and whole host of other music genres. With this, the sprawling feedback on ‘No Man’s Land’ can be seen as the first notable British embrace of what would later be called Noise-Rock.
I love music because of The Madcap Laughs. It’s part in my appreciation of unconventionally good music is vast. In music, we all seek a good tune. However, a good tune is a series of mathematical patterns which are pleasing to our brain. For me, this takes some of the magnificence and soul out of music, it makes it a technical thing, and something of gamble in that some tunes will be catchy and memorable and some not. The Madcap Laughs is the first piece of music I heard that had a poignance to it could not put down to a good tune. I soon realised there were more ways to appreciate music than ‘verse chorus verse’. I do have a good tune quota, everyone does, even those of the most intense tastes. However, I believe where the real floodgates open is when fans seek at atmospheric, emotional and more intuitive response to music. This album is where it all began for me.
This track is probably the most coherent of all on Madcap, it’s a lovely Carnaby Street pop song, and a rarity for Syd’s solo songwriting, it has a narrative instead of the usual stream of consciousness lyricism. The result of a more clear-minded recording session, the story is very uplifting – about ditching that bitch and shagging her sister, and provides some welcome relief – with this, it also includes a veiled stab at Pink Floyd- “she said a big band is far better than you”. Yep, the singings out of tune, the guitar is amateur – and I fucking love it.