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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Summary.
One of the most luminous and idiosyncratic minds in the history of rock music,
and one of its most durable myths,
Syd Barrett
was the eccentric and idealistic soul of early
Pink Floyd.
After leaving the band, he recorded two masterpieces of psychedelic folk music,
Madcap Laughs (1970) and the even better Barrett (1970).
Barrett's ballads are inspired by (and sung in the tone of) fairy tales and
nursery rhymes, but betray paranoia and loneliness. His voice is nonchalant
to the extent that it is pointless to fight the agony.
His mind broadcasts visions of another world, and it almost sounds like
Alice In Wonderland reporting from the underworld, but this is Alice after
realizing that she can't go back anymore, Alice paralyzed by fear and
anguish.
Musically, Barrett, blessed with the gift of spontaneity, has a simple
way to organize a broad palette, that runs the gamut from
spiritual (Baby Lemonade) to ragtime (Gigolo Aunt) from
blues (Rats) to circus music and the music-hall.
His most perfect melody, Love Song, and the definitive
anthem of his naive melancholy madness, Waving My Arms In The Air soar
over the Dali-esque landscape.
Because they defined, once and for all, the relationship between the "eccentric"
and the "private" in music (in a manner similar to surrealism and
psychoanalysis), those two albums would exert an unparalleled influence on
subsequent generations of singer-songwriters.
Barrett, whose mental health was rapidly deteriorating, would never record
again. He died in 2006.
Full bio.
(Translated from my old Italian text by DommeDamian and revised by Piero Scaruffi).
One of the most superb figures and brilliant minds in the history of rock music, and one of the greatest psychedelic myths, Roger "Syd" Barrett
was the eccentric and idealistic soul of
Pink Floyd.
Unfortunately his personality as a dreamer led him to make use (and abuse) of drugs to the point of no longer being useful to the group he had contributed to creating. Unfortunately, mental health would completely abandon him and force him to one of the most sensational and painful retreats ever. Despite the absence from the scenes, his two albums will exert a colossal influence on future generations of singer-songwriters, defining once and for all the true relationship between the "eccentric" and the "private" in music.
Born in Cambridge in 1946, where he studied painting together with David Gilmour, Syd
Barrett was the eccentric junkie of Pink Floyd. He had been reduced to a state of permanent semi-catalepsy since the end of 1967, and would never recover. If at the beginning his personality had been a driving force within the group, after their first album the unruliness gradually marginalized him from the recording studios, until Gilmour was summoned to replace him. Barrett left and recorded his first solo in solitude,
Madcap Laughs (Harvest, 1970), released in January 1970.
However, good relationships existed between the Pink Floyd and Barrett, so much so that Gilmour himself helped him to record the his second solo, simply titled
Barrett (Harvest, 1970), playing on it a bit of everything, from drums to organ, and on that same album Wright gave some of his most poetic feats on "humble" keyboards.
After recording these two albums, Barrett entered a psychiatric hospital, coming out on an uncertain date to lead an even more uncertain life.
Those two solo albums depict him paranoid and poetic.
They are collections of psychedelic songs apparently much simpler than those of Pink Floyd, surreal tales crossed by an oblique melancholy that rely on very elementary harmonic constructs.
The skinny folk of
The Madcap Laughs
thrives on this anemic mood.
Starting from Terrapin, the ballads drag themselves weak and fatigued into sleepy blues chants, delivered in an almost hypnotic state.
More sinister and threatening are the songs wrapped in hard and distorted electric guitar riffs, and often perturbed by surreal keyboards, such as the Eastern-tinged No Good Trying and No Man's Land, a pounding and martial nightmare.
His fantastic passion for the musichall yields gems like the dissonant and estranged ragtime of Love You and the danceable number Here I Go.
In Dark Globe, a ramshackle but passionate folk number for vocals and guitar only, and in the even more solitary absurdist folk that haunts the second side of the LP (the emphatic and childish blues of Octopus and the other spirited delusions that follow him sinking deeper and deeper into a paranoid void)
Barrett, abandoned by everyone, plays with only the force of despair in a deserted studio, which already feels like the cell of a madhouse.
These pseudo-songs are skeletal carrions of sensations, soft flashes of a congested mind, slowed down dramatically, stripped, torn by werewolf-like spasms.
Late Night should be the epic ending, but instead takes place in a quiet whisper, lulled by waves of Hawaiian steel guitar.
Barrett dishes out catchy melodies and sings them as if suspended in a limbo that is a hybrid of lysergic hallucination, transcendent hymn and fantasmagoric dream, and peppered with a very subtle vein of sarcasm.
By mocking the musical genres in a style even reminiscent of the the Holy Modal Rounders, Barrett invented a new kind of psychedelic folk-blues, which owed a lot to the nursery rhymes of children.
The second album, Barrett, although starting from the same premises, is much more musical, mainly thanks to Wright's atmospheric organ.
The average tone of the work is well represented by the pale indolent decadence
of Baby Lemonade (a spiritual delivered in the vein of a street band) and Gigolo Aunt (with traces of ragtime and children's songs),
of Dominoes and of the slow schizoid blues Maisie.
At the same time, the dark occult dances of swamp blues permeate Rats' voodoo tribalism, while his passion for surrealist vaudeville dies out except for
Effervescing Elephant.
The melancholy refrain dominates the album, from Wined And Dined to the sweet Love Song, perhaps the most perfect melody of his career, wrapped in epic organ spirals and with a pressing piano counterpoint.
But the infinite innocent madness of Waving My Arms In The Air, chasing lysergic kites and fairy ghosts, feels like his last will.
The songs rely on guitar riffs and sentimental organ (dubbed sometimes by the harmonium), the rhythm is always simple, the melody is gentle and catchy, the vocals are a little spaced out but tenderly emotional, as if coming from a harmless psychopath rather than from a romantic songwriter.
Even the few short improvised instrumental sequences, while containing several harmonic discontinuities, are docile and meek, never bristly or brainy.
After several years of hospitalization and house confinement (entrusted to the care of the mother), in 1975 Barrett appeared for a moment, fat and bald, in the recording studio of Pink Floyd and in 1982 he released his first (and last) interview after twelve years.
Opel (Capitol, 1989) contains some valuable unreleased material. Wouldn't You Miss Me (Harvest, 2001) collects material from all three albums. Crazy Diamond (EMI, 1994) is a three-disc boxset
that contains all the material recorded by Barrett (the two official discs and
Opel)
Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in 2006, aged 60.
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