Syd Barrett: The Haunting Legacy Of Pink Floyd’s Fallen Genius (Full Documentary) | Amplified

the merry bubble and joy the thin clear happy call of the distant piping such music i never dreamed of and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet for the music and the call must be for us [Music] i really love you and i mean you the star above you crystal blue well oh [Music] was one of the most unique talents to surface from the 1960s underground music scene his dramatic rise to stardom and mysterious untimely departure from public life is now the stuff of folklore underneath his erratic charms is a body of work and a personality that has made his legacy live on even though barrett himself has been conspicuously absent there's no doubt a genius is madness it's a type of abnormality that a lot of people never relate to does sid barrett fit into being a genius i would say absolutely extraordinary gifted songwriter and a very talented musician in his music it didn't follow i mean even the simple songs they don't really follow straight straight path of other songs you're warm to him really whatever the song whether it's some silly song like bike or jug band blues or octopus whatever he's singing about you're drawn to him it's a very attractive kind of personality this film is an exploration of sid barrett's short recording career and the music that made him famous [Music] amidst the advancements and turbulence of the mid-1960s british popular music was going through an important change leading bands like the beatles were starting to adapt their american r b influences and move in an entirely new musical direction as the west coast hippie movement began to take hold on youth culture a young psychedelic band led by art student sid barrett began to emerge from the london scene they became known as the pink floyd the story goes sid comes into college one day says right got a name for the band pink floyd um and supposedly this comes from an old blues lp which in the liner notes it mentioned two i think carolina blues guitarist called pink anderson floyd council [Music] sid barrett's influences are very hard to track down because he remains unique and individual as an artist but you can hear certain things there was obviously an influence from bob dylan [Music] and they were all bands that were kind of a little bit rebellious certainly characters like dylan and zappo they're people who really stand on their own um and i think you can see a lot of that in in what sid did the group had begun by playing r b covers but it was through their live performances that their sound really began to develop they were playing gigs and basically to cover their own sort of not lack of ability that's the wrong word but they found them you know they used to sort of do long weird sort of freakouts in the middle of numbers so they were doing a straightforward number like louis louis bog standard r b song and then they put this huge improvised sort of splurge in the middle basically and the psychedelic thing for pink floyd evolved out of that they became the kind of house band really for this this burgeoning counter culture drugs were part of it as well uh poetry music uh all these forms of creative expression and uh with this sort of challenge to the existing morays and conventions of the day a lot of people in the british psychedelic movement in the 60s had grown up with the r b boom with the mersey beast and so forth the sound that really defined pop at the beginning of that decade but as the decade wore on they suddenly began to realize there's more to music than just strictly three minutes happy happy verse chorus those chorus songs in the charts and once they realized that everything began to take off quickly attracting the management of pete jenner and andrew king pink floyd became increasingly successful on the new london underground there became a regular feature at the legendary ufo club on tottenham court road it was here that they met joe boyd who agreed to produce the group's first record suddenly there was a lot of interest came through very quickly people wanted to book them and you know record labels were starting to sort of approach them they had joe as a producer because they knew him he was a mate and he knew sound technique studios and so they went into sound techniques and did the did the two recordings arnold lane and candy in a current bun the story is originally it was originally recorded as a demo tape to tout around the record companies [Music] the demo tape worked and pink floyd were quickly signed to emi the boyd produced version of arnold lane was released on the 11th of march 1967. arnold lane was an interesting choice because it didn't quite have the psychedelic overtones that they had become associated with playing at clubs like ufo it didn't have all of those sort of i mean in a way perhaps it couldn't it's a three-minute single i mean the the the other side of the floyd was the the 20-minute space jams uh when everybody's high on lsd uh to compress what they do into a three-minute single um i think it's a remarkable piece of work actually arnold lane was the first hit single for the pink floyd it fitted into what was going on at the time and it didn't fit into what was going on at the time there was a certain darkness and that eeriness and eccentricity to it it had a real edge what the floyd seemed to be doing was taking the classic rock and roll or pop structure musically and playing around with it they were missing with your head by knocking it around so you ended up with something slightly skewed with but something that still had enough in there to appeal to the masses very clever balance [Music] why can't you see [Music] for a hit single in 1967 you know everyone else still singing love songs and still covering songs by american groups and then you've got this pop single that was about the guy in cambridge stealing knickers off he's made with washing mines and so it obviously a very very atypical um and very english sort of sort of subject matter for a pop song so it kind of broke the mould in that sense i mean this character arnold lane is is a totally non-threatening character okay you know he takes brass and knickers off washing lines but there's no suggestion that he's some kind of evil predator playing on young girls or anything like this there's a kind of innocence about it interestingly the story is that it's very much rooted in real experience and sid barrett's mother and i think maybe roger waters mother uh at home in cambridge let rooms to students female students at the university and so there was always this line of bras and knickers hanging in the back garden and so the seed of the song is there [Music] [Music] [Music] arnold lane became a big success reaching number 20 in the uk charts in contrast to more recent times the barrett of 1967 was every bit the pop star fronting many live performances and even appearing on television sid barrett was a pop star for a while he fronted the band that he was obviously very happy doing that you know he had real stage presence i mean i'm sure everyone's seen that bit of footage of them on on look of the week doing astronomy dominate with the sort of flailing arms and all that sort of thing you know he certainly had that side to him this sort of um limelight seeking center of attention kind of side why has it all got to be so terribly low for me frankly it's too loud i just can't beard i happen to have grown up in the string quartet which is a bit softer so uh why has it got to be so loud so amplified well i don't guess it has to be but i mean that's the way we like it and uh we didn't grow up with a string quartet and i guess that could be one of the reasons why it is loud and it doesn't sound terribly loud to us yes actually not everybody who hasn't grown up in a spring quartet turns into a loud pop group so your reason is not all together convincing but i accept that you like it what i'm saying is that if one gets immune to this kind of sound and may find it difficult to appreciate softer types of sound said yes no i don't think that's so yeah uh i mean everybody listens we don't need it very loud to be able to hear it and with some of it is very quiet right personally i like quiet music just as much as loudly we play large halls and things where obviously volume is necessary and when people dance they like volume you know comes in on its own but barrett's next composition see emily play was to further establish him as a pop star however the record did not start out with such ambitions see emily play started as a song called games for me which is a line in the song and that was written uh for an event on the south bank in london at the festival hall called games for may uh in may 1967 which was perhaps the first time the so-called underground came if not overground a little bit more into the the public focus but it was the first major sort of visible coming together of the tribes if you like that represented the the the london underground scene at that point um so that's how the song started um and then it developed from games for may into see emily play [Music] [Music] emily tries but misunderstands she's often inclined to borrow somebody's dreams till tomorrow there is no other day [Music] i suppose the height of sid barrett's um pop song writing period with with pink floyd uh it was certainly their biggest hit got number it got to number six in the charts and uh it was a real classic pop song and of course with all sid barrett songs there's always a line that kind of stands out and grabs your attention emily tries but misunderstands [Music] cma play was the biggest hit to the sid barodira floyd ever had now sid himself always maintains after a gig one night he fell asleep in the woods after a really heavy trip man woke up and saw this girl in the distance playing the emily of the song now i find it's a little hard to believe because the original title of the song was games for me so why on earth was it then changed to see emily play so it's very possible that never happened it's also possible it was a dream sequence or there's a third story which is the fact that there was someone hanging around with the floyd at the time who was very intimately involved with the band and they actually changed her name to emily to protect her [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] see only play obviously a lot more psychedelic than arnold lane um you've got the sort of wacky guitar solos all over it and the uh plastic ruler being scraped down the neck of the sort of noises and that sort of thing i suppose see emily play it's the best sort of encapsulation of what the floyd were about at that time because they have the pop song at the same time it's a bit of a soundscape much more of the the sort of psychedelic vibe that perhaps had been lacking from from the first single arnold lane and um dipping even more deeply into this english whimsy um which was very very strong and very influential at the time [Music] see emily play became a huge chart success the hype that the record created led to eager anticipation about the group's first lp however the album's title was to become somewhat of an issue the original working type of the album that's the job file was projection there's a few adverts for arnold lane which if you look in the magazines and so forth from the time they talk about the next projected sound for 67. so they were obviously you know the record company was sort of thinking along those those lines for publicity but fairly late in the day um it was peter ban said to me you know sid just came up one day and said i think we want to go we want to use this title piper at the gates of dawn which he'd got from the wind in this the odd chapter out in wind in the willows when when you read the wind in the willows there's this strange chapter which doesn't follow the narrative flow so i was thinking murmured the rat dreamful and languid dance music the lilting sword that runs on without a stop but with words in it too it passes into words and out of them again i catch them at intervals then it is dance music once more and then nothing but the reed soft thin whispering you hear better than i said the mole sadly i cannot catch the words the title very much reflects the importance of that innocent child-like vibe that flower power had you know we're talking the summer of 1967 here it was the flower power summit piper at the gates of dawn was released in august 1967 the height of the summer of love the record is one of britain's few psychedelic masterpieces and still has a resonance almost 40 years later i still find piper that goes to dawn to be very impressive creation and we're talking about a record that was made nearly 40 years ago it still stands no no question about that at all for me piper the gates of dawn remains the finest work pink floyd ever put together it's a remarkable album now i'm not knocking what they did post at barrett with dark side of the moon which you hear the wall these were wonderful magnificent pieces of work but what made piper at the gates of dawn stand apart from so much at the time was that it was eccentric it was significant it was eloquent and all these were combined through sid barrett who was a conduit for so much that was going on so much that was dark so much that was almost unnerving and a little bit difficult to comprehend the prime example to me is a song called the bike on there which seems a little bit fairytale a little bit happy go lucky a little bit watch your mother if you will but if you get deep into the roots and what you're actually hearing and listening to is a man opening up his psychosis opening up his psychology opening up his disturbed yet quite brilliant mind [Music] i've got a bike you can ride it if you like it's got a bell that rings and things to make it look good um but again i mean almost like a nursery rhyme you know so we cannot underestimate the importance of this this sort of fairy child-like world that at that time hallucinogenic drugs were associated with [Music] yes apart from being a fun quirky song bike also has this extraordinary construction so uh you get points where it seems to be slowing down at the end of each verse or the uh the lyrics and the structure of it break up in unexpected ways so you can't really predict which way sid is going to sing next but yeah it's got that kind of a bleak sort of unpredictable uh air about the whole piece which makes it all the more intriguing and more fascinating for me to listen it's almost a bit uncomfortable really i mean you've got that mad sound collage when he goes off into the room of musical tunes which is very strange and the first time i remember the first time i heard it i remember thinking you know what what's happening here you've got all these groovy uh almost pop songs and the the psychedelic stuff and then it closes the album with this in a way it's it's you've got a simple song but it's with a with an oddly nursery rhyme type subject but in a way it can be it's unsettling [Applause] [Music] [Applause] another song on the album interstellar overdrive had long been a firm live favorite of the bands and was one of the songs that had earned them their psychedelic reputation [Music] so [Music] [Music] it was of course their anthem in a way it was the piece that people went to here and play at all the underground clubs you expected to [Music] get the lights shown operating and the benson echo drive is very important on that too because that was a little device that gave sid barrett the pro echo effects on his guitar being a nine minute instrumental it gave all of the group an opportunity to improvise jam they came up with a kind of soundscape it was a painting painting with music interstellar overdrive really came out of that uh that that that need to create these these sort of improvisational experimental pieces in in that live environment in fact pete jenner tells the story that interstellar overdrive first took shape when he was humming to sid the tune of i think it was my little red book by arthur lee and love and sid picked up the guitar and started copying the the sort of descending riff as as pete was was humming it um but then from that very simple structure they created this elongated piece of of space rock as we called it [Music] an interstellar overdrive itself which is almost let's go let's just let our instrumental imagination run riot again hold your attention enraptured because it has such a fascinating pull a magnetic pull to its center you're driven towards the center of that whole journey when you stellar overdrive is a journey and at the end of it you feel drained and you feel that you're lost but somehow extraordinary exalted [Music] by the time piper at the gates of dawn was released barrett's well-documented mental problems were beginning to become a serious issue for the pink floyd sid's behavior was becoming increasingly erratic and after a disastrous american tour it was clear that something had to change however sid's condition has in recent years been the focus of some debate it's very easy to say that sid barrett was an acid casualty but on the other hand a lot of other people took lsd without having sort of psychotic breakdowns or whatever so i mean it's become pretty clear over the years that there was already a schizophrenic condition there and clearly these drugs will accentuate that um on the other hand i mean he was there's no doubt he was taking absolutely colossal quantities of of lsd the interesting thing about sid barrett is the sheer amount of things that you read about him that contradict each other he's gone down in history as this goku was sort of fried on acid the whole time but more recently these interviews have come out with people who he lived with who think that probably you could count on two hands the number of times he took acid during 1967. i mean obviously sid had his problems but i don't think it was down to that i mean he smoked uh copious amounts of weed um and i don't think the effect of that could be underestimated you know he became very paranoid and very much in his own little bubble and you know you could perhaps partly attribute it to that um he also took a lot of mandraks um which uh very very sort of powerful i suppose you could say it was a sedative what that actually was that happened to him i think it's very hard to say and i think that's why people find them so fascinating despite sid's deteriorating condition the group did manage to release a third single the barret composed apples and oranges [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] on the supermarket [Music] it's certainly a lot less carefully packaged than cm we play it was a product of months of trying to you know sort out the follow-up hit and failing um you know again i think it's an example of the the kind of pressures that that citizen that sid was under at the time it was recorded around about november 67 um which was getting towards the end of sid's time with the group anyway um and so you know they were they were scratching it they needed a single to come out there were all sorts of financial pressures on the band and you know sid was feeling the pressure perhaps not coming up with the the songwriting and the way he did before but you know they put this one together but they needed to get a record out for christmas as sid actually said in an interview you know it's a chirpy song with a touch of christmas about it as so many of his songs were actually rooted in real life and what he saw around him you know the story is he saw this girl shopping in richmond one day and he wrote this song about it and it's quite prescient because uh you know there's that line in there about she's getting everything from the supermarket so he's he's actually seeing the breakdown of that traditional english high street the butchers the bakers and the candlestick makers now it's all in the superstore the supermarket um but it's it's it's not uh it's not a great song certainly as a single and you can see why why it didn't charge sid's not eric clapton he's not one of those sort of guitar players but he's he he creates some great sounds he's like like john lennon you know what not a red-hot lead guitarist but yeah boy he could make it talk the guitar when he wanted to but i mean apples and oranges this this amazing wah-wah riff that that drives it and and it ends on this sort of feedback where and it's all all the way all the way through he's playing this this huawei guitar and and you know he's just holding back the feedback until right at the end and then it just sort of you know the song fades out on on that feedback [Music] by the tail end of 1967 sid's increasingly erratic behavior became too much of a burden for the rest of the group to bear sid status within pink floyd began to drastically alter i mean there were these stories of you know him standing on stage all night and playing one note with his back to the audience i mean you can see how it became hugely infuriating for the rest of the group and they decided that they couldn't go on like this and there had been a series of gigs where he hadn't turned up tall and davio list from the nice adept on on guitar uh something had to give and there were various plans i mean the floyd's management had one notion which was that sid could become a kind of brian wilson figure that is not go on the road with them not appear on stage with them and you know frankly [ __ ] the gig up every single night but hopefully could still provide the material write the songs in the way that brian wilson was at that stage doing with the beach boys the band wanted to keep him on board and they went through this period where i mean when david gilmore joined you know around about december 67 and you know the announcement in the press were used to help broaden their sound or take new directions though what they really needed at the time was somebody who could play guitar reliably um and do singing and stuff like that um and sid was still going to be the songwriter this this seems to be what they were saying so they ended up with this strange period for half a dozen gigs at the beginning in 1968 where you have both david gilmour and sid barrett in the band they they did try it with sid and david gilmour together but again that didn't work out and there's the famous story where they just decided for one gig while they weren't going to bother to pick him up and um that was it they went on to do all the various pink floyd things they did and but you know the the upshot of it all was yeah after january 68 sid was uh on his own after the split barrett initially retired from the public eye however there was to be a peculiar and haunting epitaph to sid's departure on pink floyd's second lp saucer full of secrets released after sid had left the group the band decided to include the barrett-composed jug band blues [Music] and i'm grateful that you threw away my old shoes and brought me here instead dressed in red [Applause] [Music] it's a song written by bloke who seems to be acknowledging what's happening to him you know i'm wondering who could be writing this song and perhaps in jug bamboos you've got a man acknowledging he's not very happy with the way things are at that particular time jeff and blues it gets held up as this sort of cast iron proof that sid was crazy i think certainly it's evidence that he he wasn't happy you know it's a very downbeat possibly slightly angry song in some ways i think it's a very um carefully worked out piece i don't think he was just making as he went along you know i mean there's um there's a version of it in circulation from the bbc session from a few months later and um it sounds exactly the same it's the exact same structure and the exact same lyrics you know so i don't think uh i don't think it was a random outpouring i i i think it is actually a very carefully constructed piece of work unhappy and perhaps it was it's obviously a fragmented track it's got all these funny little bits and pieces in it and perhaps yeah he was he was trying to that was meant to be an expression of his state of mind that he was feeling a little bit all over the place [Music] you've got this you've got salvation army band that suddenly appears out in the middle of nowhere in it which is which is great i mean they had they had good fun trying to record that apparently but the story goes you know when they came in and they they wanted to know what to play they just said we'll play anything um which sounds yeah you can go back and say whoa that's pretty spooky and psychedelic and far out but um when you think about it what he want what he what you've got he's a it's it's sort of um you've got this surreal section in the middle and it's like the band are in you know the the salvation army band are almost like suddenly flying in from another place and being in there so in that context i suppose you know if you're sid barrett and you're you're writing a you've got a song and he wasn't bothered about what they were going to play he just wanted the salvation army band playing it's a haunting song really jug band blues because that that awareness of what's happening to him is he's is quite uh quite scary in a way i mean it must have been it must have been a very hard burden to to bear to you know it's almost better if if you're cracking up you're breaking up like that it's almost better to know that it's not going on than to be so acutely aware that that you're falling apart and yet having these flashes of lucidity in which you can actually describe the process of falling apart [Music] then what exactly is a dream [Music] and what exactly after leaving pink floyd at the beginning of 1968 barrett had remained silent after some abortive recording sessions with peter jenner in may it wasn't clear if sid barrett was going to pursue a solo career at all malcolm jones who was head of harvest records at the time got a call from sid barrett one day saying he wanted to come into you know to do some more recording but sid came back in and and played a few numbers from malcolm jones and you know there were things like opal and swan lee and whatever that that you know and malcolm jones felt was it was good you know it was it was strong enough to do the album and from then on there was this fairly leisurely process where malcolm jones was producing and they they you know sid would do just very basic backing tracks with him and his uh there's the black black telecaster he had at the time and they didn't plug it in they just miked it up and he used it as like an acoustic guitar and when you look through the recording sheets there's this sort of six month period where they're fiddling with with the various songs and adding bits and pieces and just things are slowly starting to take shape during this process it was decided that several of the new recordings needed a band behind them barrett eventually approached a contemporary psychedelic group soft machine and invited them to guest on the new album we were playing in uh in the hunter club in in oxford street in london anyway after this gig outside um sid appeared he'd been in the gig and uh he knew robert and mike anyway from earlier days although i'd never met him before and he just kind of muttered you know would you like to come and play on this record i'm doing you know it's kind of very vaguely suggested so we said okay and so we it was arranged for a couple of months later sid definitely didn't want session musicians which we weren't anyway so that was not a problem um so i guess he really he'd heard something when we played live um something about i suppose the power or the sounds which i mean at that time i mean soft machine were quite weird at that time and we were doing we're doing written pieces but i mean we're doing it quite heavily and with heavy sound so i guess um he felt that you know you automatically heard something which he thought would fit his his the ambience of his music and i think that's right i mean he wasn't trying to be control freak and have everything delineated as it should be i mean or as ever anyone else would he was thinking more in terms of atmospheres i think kind of feelings so i mean the sound of soft machine probably fitted at that time fitted into his songs when we got to abbey road studios um sid had got some demos just voice and guitar which we'd never heard before and he had absolutely no suggestions for us what we should do so we had to sit down in this very expensive studio and learn these tunes as we were going and playing along with them starting again and we did our usual thing lots of fuzz plus bass fuzz organ robert thundering away on drums and uh we still we're kind of halfway to learning them because i mean they're not very easy songs i mean they oh they're not complete they're not difficult songs but they're not symmetrical so you might have four bars of this and half a beat there and three bars maybe and then it changes so we had to learn this and then after a couple of hours we'd of each song we'd we'd had a guy this and uh sid came in and said yeah that's uh that's fine yeah and that's it he was happy although we felt we hadn't even learned the songs you know he felt that something which was okay for him for his the atmosphere of the tunes so that was it i don't know whether they ran out of money or emi we're starting to question the length of time that sessions were taking but the the the generally agreed version of the story is that after this sort of leisurely six-month period of sessions where malcolm jones was producing um sid was given like two days to finish the album you had two days of recording to finish the album so there's one day and i think it it's david gilmore and sid doing octopus as we were talking about earlier plus golden hair which were tracks that sid had tried recording in 68 but it ended up the recordings from there were very very loose david gilmore got different versions from sid he pushed sid's come up with much tighter versions of both both recordings so that's one day and the second day roger waters came in as well to help us producing and it was literally said laid down half a dozen tracks dark globe and if it's in you and and numb a few like this that whole sequence on site two of madcap last where they've joined three or four songs together and you know you can hear sid chatting in the studio and he has the full starts and various bits and pieces all that was done on on one day and then there's a day when david gilbert comes in and mixes everything even all the malcolm jones ones and uh all the stuff he that he'd recorded um in the last two days then there's a day where sydney gill will decide what the track's going to be and that's it that's the album so you've got like half the albums created in this leisurely six months sort of you know very laid back atmosphere and then you've got two days of frantic activity creating the other half with the album complete emi prepared to release what became sid barrett's final ever single octopus however in recent years the lyrical content of the song has been re-examined [Music] [Music] trip to a dream dragon hide your wings [Music] when you first look at the lyrics to octopus he's like where on earth well what's he writing about here this is this is this is really wacky stuff and what it transpires what he's done he's taken a whole load of lyrics from poetry poems there's um one called the old man on the border uh which contributes a lot of the cracked by scattered needles and the old man on the border that crops up in the lyrics and there's another one about the the grasshoppers band and that's where all that grass was green herbarian band business comes from and they're they're all sort of quoted from things like uh you know things like edward leer and things like um green grow the brushes hoe and that sort of thing um the man on the border that's certainly from one of edward lee's lyric limericks i think sid just seems very comfortable with that i mean he's created a great backdrop i mean it's a really strong song octopus i mean initially when when they first put the running order together for the madcap laughs that was going to be the opening song though they later switched the sides around but it's a really strong song hence the fact it came out as a single and sid again as the songwriter he seems comfortable enough well you know i like that i like that i'll take a bit of that on and he stitches them all together in a way that just works madcap laughs was released to substantial success in january 1970. however elements of the album's production seem to be in direct contrast to what sid had done previously with pink floyd well in many respects the madcap loss i suppose was the first under produced album whereas up to that point people for example the beatles have been desperately trying to with that with the help of people like george martin were trying to produce ever more uh polished and imaginative and orchestrated and cleverly arranged albums using all the the tricks of the studio as well session musicians brought in at the drop of a hat so but what you got with the mad cat really or although there were attempts to use effects um mainly you're just getting raw sid and you're getting pauses and mistakes and fluffs it does have a very sparse sound um you know there aren't these sort of swirling psychedelic effects and that sort of thing um why is that i don't know i mean um you know sid seems to have called it a day with the sort of weird echo units and that sort of thing after after pink floyd i mean maybe what he was trying to say was that really it's the the songs that are important um i mean that was what he'd been doing before pink floyd you know he had his little folder of songs and he'd play his acoustic guitar to people at parties and that sort of thing um i think there's some interview quote where he says well yes it's just the same as it's always been it's just me and an acoustic guitar getting the songs done and perhaps it was the only way that he he could work by that stage but it is very interesting that just as uh recording is going high-tech and uh you know i mean four-track didn't come in until the kind of mid-60s and then eight-track and 16-track and 32-track and this is stripped down and raw and uh you know years before anybody had invented the term lo-fi uh or uh you know people were making records in their bedrooms or or any of that this record is pointing the way really so the way it sounds is just quite extraordinary and completely out of step with almost anything else at the time [Music] i really love you and i mean you the star above you crystal [Music] again is what we were saying before about it being a very sparse quite minimalist sound you know you've got him strumming on his uh on his telecaster with what you what we can only assume is a very thin flippy plectrum because you can hear it hitting the strings louder than you can hear the sound of the strings themselves you like this sort of sound um it's um again it's one of those songs it's got such great imagery these sort of little underwater little vignettes you know sort of a game which don't quite make sense in a literal kind of way you've got these sort of phrases sort of bumping into each other and sort of floating bumping noses dodger two for the fins aluminum [Music] [Music] when siberia did the madcap laughs i think there was a genuine feel on there that what he was doing was allowing his imagination to flow to take hold it was as if he was saying i have his imagination i don't understand whether it's a part of me or not but i'm going to let it go and the prime example for me is tear up in the opening track of the album it's got a state of real unnerving dream it's a definite dream state on the record you listen to the flow of the words and what he seems to be doing is just laying back and letting it happen he was capturing it rather like someone may fish taking it out of the water and then throwing it down on pieces of paper and then seeing what he had at the end another element of the album's production has been the cause of much debate over the years since its release on the second side of the lp several tracks contain full starts and imperfections that for many only add to the record's charm yes i'm thinking [Music] again it's no it's just the fact you know going through it i mean if you if we could cut david going to describe it at an interview he said they wanted to give an idea of what was actually going on in the studio i'm not sure quite what was going through their heads at the time but when you when you look at the recording box it's quite specific the the instructions are that it must be left like this it's not case if it was done accidentally or they didn't want to tidy it up or something it was quite specific they wanted to leave that section in as it was and and my reaction when i first heard the heard the album wasn't wow listen to all that patience this is this is strange it was just like almost like a jokey bit of fun you know he's an artist admitting he's thought you know admitting her foibles and yeah that he makes mistakes and he has trouble singing sometimes um and it and it does work as a sequence i mean yeah perhaps david gilman does regret it now i don't know but for me it's an interesting bit of bit of the almond i think it works and it and it works as a sequence there the way they have it on the album it it works and i you know i don't think there's any problem with it being included there's no doubt that the realism of the madcap last is like no other realism of the time you have to remember we were living in an era where artistic integrity overtook everything else everyone was living in an unreal world suddenly sid barrett came along it was mr unreal for so many people and did the mad cap last and what it has on the record are the four starts it has that moment so things go wrong and it says now let's start again it actually is a diary of the way the record was put together in the studio which is quite remarkable because almost any other artist would have said cut this out cut that out i don't want people to hear this what barrett said is no this is what the record is about it's about the songs but it's also about the moments when i get things wrong and what i learn through getting things wrong and remarkably it remained so underrated for several years after it came out and suddenly the punk hero came along and what happened the punk suddenly elevated sid barris to a status that his earth while bam being floyd could never achieve with them because it was real it was going straight to the heart it was still parrot a voice and a guitar saying this is who i am this is what i give you and the punks took so much on board from that with barrett doing hardly any promotion for the madcap laughs sessions for a second solo lp started almost immediately in february 1970 however these sessions were to be very different to those of the previous album well mayorcat laughs was a marginal success at least it got sid barrett back working and being showing that he really did want to create a solo career after leaving pink floyd but um i think people felt that he really needed a push to produce some work that was more um organized for the second album and this is where his old friend dave gilmore came into play involved right from the start and i think he he went for a much more structured approach um than perhaps malcolm jones had gone malcolm jones i think he'd let sid drive the product the process i think david david gilmore took a much more active producers role but again i mean they started off with just sid and his guitar and you know you talked to the engineers and it was basically recording just tracks with sid in an acoustic guitar and then they over double the instruments on top of that i think the difference this time around was that david would push sid more to try and get a best performance from it i mean you could say in a way he did you know there's there are chunks of david gilmour on that album rather than sid barrett simply because as he said you know sid had finished a number and that was it he'd stop singing and that would be he'd stop playing so you know he'd have to add to to finish his song off you'd have to add a long fade out and there's you know at least one point on that album where you know it's the you know it's david gilmore rick white and jerry shirley jamming in the studio just to finish the you know give her a reasonable fade out to something that cid had created the basic structure for even though the more rigid format of the barrett sessions ensured that the record was released a mere nine months after the madcap laughs in november 1970 it also stripped the record of some of the innovative features that had made sid's first solo effort so unique barrus is a much more lush fleshed-out sounding album i think it's uh i think dave gilmore who produced it obviously made a real effort to make it sound like a real sort of finished product i think he was maybe aware of the the flaws that madcap have um but i mean i i wonder if it went a little bit too far either way it's trying too hard to be a conventional record that you might get played on the radio that's that's the problem with it i mean there are flashes of of great songwriting in there but it does doesn't have and you have to be careful not to romanticize it and say the great thing about madcap last is because it is so mad and sid is so out there but in a way that is true and when you try and confine that uh crazy genius into a more conventional format that as i say might even get you on the radio i think you've got problems and that's what you hear on that record for me the second sid bass solo adam barrett is not really about him it's too focused too commercial too smooth yes the songs are fabulous yes it's probably better as a body of work than the madcap last however because other influences were being brought to bear outside pressures from producers like roger waters with uh with dave gilmore with uh richard wright and emi's influence was there because they were running scared as to exactly what sid barrett was going to come up with if he was allowed just to reign free as it were so they imposed and by imposing their own parameters and the parameters as musicians he worked with i think what you end up with is an album that's terribly disappointing nonetheless barrett does contain some memorable and striking songs among them baby lemonade gigolo ant and the enigmatic dominoes life that comes you and i you and i and dominos yeah it's it's melancholic but it's lovely it's and it's a great image and you and i and dominoes i don't know who is it who's he who's he talking to certainly one of the most successful pieces of that album um for my money it's it's it's such a simple song i mean i think the actual verse it's almost just all on one chord and the actual the backing you know from despite what we were saying before about you know the production maybe being a bit questionable i think it works very well on that on that particular one um again with sort of the long drony organs and the sort of weird phasing on the drums i think it's it's uh i think that's yeah very very sort of sympathetic to the song barrett was greeted with a lot less enthusiasm than the madcap laughs after the album failed to chart sid retreated to the sanctuary of his hometown of cambridge and after several aborted attempts to perform and record finally vanished from public life altogether to this day he lives a reclusive life in cambridge shunning press and having little to do with the music that made him famous however in his absence his legend has continued to grow it has been further fueled by the appearance of several compilation albums containing previously unreleased material one of the best loved of these rare tracks is opal which was made available in october 1988 a full 18 years after the release of his final album [Music] [Applause] [Music] shore the pebble that stood alone and driftwood lies half buried warm shallow water sweeps shells so the cottle shine opal is a song that i feel represents one of the finest moments in siberia's songwriting and musicianship career to call it musicianship career if you will and one of the reasons is is so um unnerving and unpredictable you never quite know what you're going to get even the title itself says nothing except here's a song just listen to it sid barrett always had that ability to let his imagination run riot and if he was allowed to do that what he ended up with was a stream of consciousness that was almost almost to the point of being completely ridiculous yet strangely was focused strangely was a raging storm with a sense of calm right at its center weird weird chords um i mean whether that's just because his guitar was somewhat out of tune that day i don't know but these um it goes into this sort of long sort of instrumental section you could almost sort of imagine a string quartet playing it you know these sort of these sort of desolate long drawn-out chords and and again sort of you know more more of more of that sort of wonderful imagery you know a dream in a mist of grey i mean it is it's an amazing song i mean the imagery on you know on a far distant shore and it's one of those where it comes up these amazing pictures he was a craftsman he was he was a he was a great craftsman as a songwriter and uh ultimately i think that's what his his legend rests on it's his songwriting you can hang all the other stuff on it as well if you want but you strip all that away and you listen to the songs and they're still great songs and and that to me is what sid barrett's about and that is why people still talk about siberia and why people still buy his recordings and still listen to them i feel that the one album that sid barrett did with pink floyd piper against the dorm plus his two solo albums really encapsulate brilliantly what that man was all about in a certain sense of his life four years three albums that's what it is but it really does still capture the imagination because this is sid barrett he was an extraordinary figure and an extraordinary songwriter who in a very brief period of time made a remarkable impact on english pop music but no answer came he looked and understood the silence with a smile of much happiness on his face and something of a listening look still lingering there the weary rat was fast asleep

Channel: Amplified - Classic Rock & Music History

Views: 353,934

Keywords: Amplified - Classic Rock & Music History, Band Documentary, Band Dynamics, Band History, Classic Albums Insights, Comfortably Numb, Guitar Legends, Influence on Music Scene, Live Music Performances, Music Influencers, Music Legends, Music Review, Nick Mason, Pink Floyd Documentary, Psychedelic Era, Psychedelic Rock, Rock Band History, Rock Origins, Sound Experience, Syd Barrett, Syd Barrett Legacy

Id: 7QrfCnN9GaI

Length: 62min 10sec (3730 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 06 2022