At the time of The Madcap Laughs Syd had already completely surrendered.
Syd began taking acid regularly with enthusiasm many found alarming. The world was changing and he thought we should all be perfect beings, cool and groovy. Syd really did believe the psychedelic revolution was flowing through him. It was almost a religious-like experience for Syd, and many others who indulged. Barrett and his friends were taking the infamous LSD-25, a powerful psychiatric drug still legal in UK those days. Oh find me inside of a nocturne, the blondeĭuring the recording of the album Syd was also on Mandrax and he’d sit on a stool and then fall off it. It was something the engineers tried to avoid. The sessions all together were not very productive because in those days recording four or five songs on just guitar in four or five hours wasn’t considered very productive. Syd had recorded songs Opel (a beautiful misty ballad that would not see the light of day until 1988), No good trying, No man’s land, Here I go and Love you. Over four sessions beginning on April 10th 1969. By the start of 1969 Barrett, somewhat recovered, resumed his music career and started working with another engineer Malcolm Jones, after both Jenner and Norman Smith (Pink Floyd’s producer at the time) had declined his request to work on the album. Shortly after July sessions Syd suddenly stopped recording, breaking up with his then girlfriend Lindsey Corner and then going off a drive around Britain in his Mini only to end up in psychiatric care in Cambridge. Peter Jenner, who had worked on these sessions claimed that they had not gone smoothly although he got on well with the singer.
Sessions resumed in June and July produced songs Late Night, Octopus and Golden Hair all featured on The Madcap Laughs. Syd Barrett first entered the studio as a solo artist on 30th January 1968 just ten days after his last show with Pink Floyd, for what would be an unfruitful session. Loneliness is seeping through the cracks on the striped floor. Angry outbursts and fragmented conversation. He is sad and alone, yet his darkness intimidates me. The album cover shows Syd crouching in his room, a vase of daffodils next to him. One morning, after having spent some time meditatively staring at his blanket, a painting by Gustave Caillebotte called “The Wood Floor Planners” suddenly came to his mind and he decided to paint the bare wooden floors of his room in stripes of orange and blue. The handsome young Englishman with messy black hair and velvet trousers was slowly going mad…. The cheerful, fun-loving, chatty and friendly Syd was gone. The outside world did not matter anymore. Into his new bohemian abode, he brought the stuff that remained after many moves around London a small table, a mattress and a striped blanket, some scratched LPs, Penguin edition books by Shakespeare and Chaucer, barely touched canvases stacked against the wall. Alone in the loneliness of his Victorian pad in Wetherby Mansion in Earl’s Court Square, the Psychedelic Mad Hatter was slowly descending into a haunting state of introspection, melancholy and illusions. Gustave Caillebotte, Wood Floor Planers, 1875Ī new chapter in Syd’s life and musical career began. And already, on 15th January 1968 Syd played his last gig with Pink Floyd. Let me provide you with a few dates to show you just how fast it all happened their first single “Arnold Layne” was released on 10th March 1967. His creative period with the Pink Floyd was short but strong, like an explosion, or a shooting star. The increasing consummation of the drug of the moment, LSD, did not help matters.
#MADCAP LAUGHS FULL#
Music and art were fun for Syd, and coming up with witty lyrics and simple catchy tunes was easy for him because he seemed to have approached things in a childlike way, full of curiosity and wonder at the world around him, but the stress of the band’s success, the interviews, the popularity proved to be too much for him. The genius behind the lyrics was Syd Barrett at the time a drop-out art student from Cambridge who overnight found himself in the centre of the psychedelic underground culture. “Who writes stuff like this?”, I thought to myself.
They had the magic, the wittiness, the dreaminess that made them linger on in my mind. Those were more than just pop songs that will be forgotten in a few years.
It was love at first sound with me and Pink Floyd’s early hits such as Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Scarecrow I intuitively felt that something very imaginative and strange was hiding underneath the exterior of your average great pop-song. The album is in many ways a musical portrayal of Syd’s state of mind at the time. The music has a bittersweet feel to it the melodies are childlike and innocent while others take on darker sounds. Syd Barrett’s debut album as a solo artist, “The Madcap Laughs” was released on the 3rd January 1970.
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