Reinventing Pink Floyd

by Bill Kopp

  The haunting “Dark Globe” employs Barrett’s signature unconventional compositional approach, and the solo performance would appear unadorned on the record. “Long Gone” features Barrett’s overdubbed vocal harmonies and a sympathetic organ part supporting his acoustic guitar melody; it features one of Barrett’s strongest lyrics and an unusually disciplined musical approach.

  The very brief “She Took a Long Cold Look” finds Barrett wedding a simple folk-style acoustic guitar part to his typically stream-of-consciousness lyrics; the take threatens to break down at the halfway point, but Barrett catches himself and continues. The song ends suddenly, to the sound of Barrett flipping the pages of a notebook. After a message from the control room (“‘Feel,’ take one”), Barrett delivers a disjointed tune featuring oblique lyrics and seemingly random chord sequences. “If It’s in You” is even less disciplined; it’s barely a song, and sports an odd vocal melody; the recording includes a snippet of Barrett speaking, expressing frustration at the manner in which the session is progressing.

  The pair of tracks noted as Barrett–Gilmour productions (“Octopus” and “Golden Hair”) are the product of a more conventionally fruitful session several weeks earlier, in mid-June 1969. Though additional “Golden Hair” musicians aren’t listed on the album sleeve, it’s possible that an uncredited Rick Wright provides a vibraphone accompaniment that doubles the song’s melodic line. Otherwise the recording features only Barrett. On “Octopus,” Barrett plays both acoustic and electric guitars, and the song is closer in style and structure to the songs he had written for Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn two years earlier. David Gilmour adds basic drum and bass guitar parts, likely overdubbed after the guitar and vocals were cut, in reversal of the customary studio overdub procedure. Barrett’s meter is erratic as ever; Gilmour would have faced a challenge following it, but the experience may have helped prepare him for his next album project with Barrett.

  Syd Barrett spoke to Melody Maker’s Chris Welch about the album in January 1970, days after its release. Welch prefaced his printed interview with a disclaimer of sorts: “It was not always so easy to understand his erratic train of thought,” he wrote, adding, that in his estimation, Syd was “only as confused as he wanted to be.”

  Referring to “Octopus,” a song chosen off The Madcap Laughs for release as a single, Barrett said, “I like to have really exciting, colorful songs. I can’t really sing. But I enjoy it and I enjoy writing from experiences. Some are so powerful they are ridiculous.” Perhaps responding to the solo acoustic nature of the Gilmour–Waters-produced tracks on the LP, he noted, “When I was with the Floyd . . . the volume [they] used inclined to push me a little.”

  Likely owing at least in part to the romanticizing of Syd Barrett’s legend in the years to come, The Madcap Laughs—which had received mixed reviews on its original issue—would be lauded in some quarters as a cracked classic, even a work of genius. A more measured perspective could be found in Allan Orski’s brief Syd Barrett entry in the weighty tome MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Characterizing a 1994 compilation that collected all officially available Syd Barrett solo recordings, the reviewer described The Madcap Laughs as “a harrowing set of rough sonic quality, full of false starts and half-finished compositions that harshly illuminate the muse of a bright talent.” Other modern-day reviewers were wholly unmoved. In a 1994 review in MOJO Tom Hibbert described the song “No Good Trying” as “a song less than pleasant to listen to,” and suggested that its title “seemed to sum the whole matter up.”

  In a 2003 interview with Record Collector’s Daryl Easlea, Gilmour recalled the sessions for The Madcap Laughs as “pretty tortuous and very rushed.” Describing Barrett as “very difficult,” Gilmour found himself quite frustrated. Barrett, on the other hand, seemed unfazed and blissfully unaware of any problems with the sessions. “I want to record my next LP before I go on to anything else,” he told a Beat Instrumental reporter in March 1970. “And I’m writing for that at the moment.”

  And despite the challenges of The Madcap Laughs sessions, Gilmour would return to help Barrett a few months later—this time in a more hands-on manner—as both producer and sideman for Syd’s second solo album, Barrett.

  Chapter 16

  Birth to a Smile

  In January 1970, Roger Waters would embark on a brief project that was equal parts new and familiar. The songwriter would begin work on another film soundtrack, but this time he would work with someone outside the band. And in that way characteristic of Pink Floyd projects, there would be a direct conceptual line from Music from The Body to not one but two subsequent album projects.

  Documentary film director Roy Battersby produced a 1970 motion picture called The Body. Narrated by actors Frank Finlay and Vanessa Redgrave, The Body explored human biology. Battersby decided his idiosyncratic ninety-three-minute film required a musical soundtrack, so he asked producer Tony Garnett for advice. Garnett in turn asked radio deejay John Peel for ideas; Peel recommended avant-garde Scottish composer-musician Ron Geesin.

  At this stage, Geesin had one album to his credit, 1967’s A Raise of Eyebrows. That record is a characteristically odd—and wholly uncommercial—collection of spoken word, vocalizing, avant-garde banjo instrumentals, trad-jazz (known in the US as Dixieland), and audio experiments. Its title track was likely an influence upon Roger Waters’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” on 1969’s Ummagumma. Geesin’s brand of music—often made without the use of conventional instruments—was just strange enough for The Body.

  But it was felt that the film needed actual songs as well. “I recommended Roger because he did songs and I did not,” Geesin recalls. “That’s not to say I couldn’t do a song,” he hastens to add, “but I just didn’t think I was going to.” For the most part, Geesin and Waters worked separately on their respective compositions for the film. Their approach for creating music to accompany the onscreen images was nearly as primitive as the 1968 Pink Floyd sessions for The Committee. As Geesin recalls, the filmmakers would make a “reduction copy” of The Body for Waters and Geesin. But he says that he doesn’t think Waters had access to the required 16mm film projector, “so it may be that he just worked the timings,” using a stopwatch as a guide to crafting music to fit a specific length of time. “We’d go through it about the right length,” he says. “And if we needed to adjust the length, we’d do it either a bit slower or a bit faster.”

  Geesin says that Waters “wrote the songs and then recorded them in his little studio in the area of Islington in London. And all the other stuff—the funny, organized noisy sounds and music sequences and twitterings and body sounds and all that—I did in my studio across the west side of London in the Notting Hill Gate area.” Ron Geesin’s works would receive suitably odd, descriptive titles such as “More Than Seven Dwarves in Penis-Land” and “Dance of the Red Corpuscles.”

  Toward the end of the project, Geesin worked directly in the motion picture editing suite, adding sounds to the final dub. Meanwhile, he says that Waters finished his own compositions quite quickly, as Pink Floyd had a steady schedule of live dates both in England and on the Continent during this time. “And he wasn’t the greatest of singers,” says Geesin, “so [the songs] were pretty rough by modern-day standards. But they worked all right on the film.”

  Months after work had finished on the actual film music, Waters would return to Island Studios in London, where he would record new versions of much of his tracks for the soundtrack album Music from The Body; this time he took more time and created more finished-sounding tunes. Geesin says that the differences between the original and later recordings are significant. Waters “re-made them all with better instrumentation and more in-tune singing,” Geesin explains.

  And at the very end of the project, Waters and Geesin would finally collaborate directly. “We made new pieces that were nothing to do with the film, far more to do with the body,” he
says. In addition to the re-recorded versions of Waters’s tunes, the pair recorded two songs that—while thematically relevant to the film’s subject matter—were not part of the film itself.

  “Our Song” features Geesin on tape-editing and piano. “All that Roger contributed to that was some teeth grinding and armpits squeaking, and a couple of moans,” Geesin says with a chuckle. He describes the other track, “Body Transport,” as “us with two microphones doing a mini drama of moving a body from one room to another. It’s a proper joke,” he explains.

  Roger Waters’s “Sea Shell and Stone” features a beach sound effect that leads into a plaintive solo piece with voice, picked acoustic guitar, and a quiet bass guitar overdub. Its breezy lyrics initially center upon of sunrise and breezes, but near its end—accompanied by the sound of massed cellos—the lyrics speak of loneliness and isolation, a favorite Waters theme. Later on the record, “Sea Shell and Soft Stone” presents a reprise of Roger Waters’s earlier tune, with a more fully developed cello melody composed by Ron Geesin.

  “Chain of Life” finds Waters singing of “holidays and happy days” along to a gently picked melody; he would use a similar instrumental approach—applied to far more melancholy lyrics—on “If,” a song that would feature on Pink Floyd’s next album, Atom Heart Mother. Many years later, The Wall’s “Mother” would be based upon a similar acoustic guitar ambience. Credited to Geesin and Waters, “The Womb Bit” is an atmospheric bit of audio that—except for its chirping sounds—would have fit neatly into A Saucerful of Secrets. Waters plays a short lick high on the neck of his acoustic guitar.

  “Breathe” uses the same melody as “Sea Shell and Stone,” but presents different lyrics. Its opening phrase, “Breathe in the air,” remained in Waters’s mind; he would use those same words as the opening lyrics on another song called “Breathe,” the first vocal number on 1973’s monumental release, The Dark Side of the Moon.

  For “Give Birth to a Smile,” Waters and Geesin work together as well, enlisting the musical talents of David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason. Once again using the simple melody that serves as the basis for “Sea Shell and Stone” and two other tracks on Music from The Body, this tune features upbeat, hopeful lyrics. The closing moments of The Body feature Pink Floyd—plus Geesin on piano—playing and singing the song’s title phrase, but in a clear foreshadowing of The Dark Side of the Moon, Waters’s remake for the LP employs a soulful (albeit uncredited) chorus of female vocalists. For the first—but certainly not the last—time on record, Waters would enlist the talents of outside singers to help deliver his lyrics in the most effective manner possible.

  Geesin says that he and Waters could have gone on to do more projects as a duo. “We were great friends and we were getting on great,” he says, noting that they could have developed further musical ideas together. “But there was no need or desire for [Roger] to continue that. The Floyd were becoming a total entity, and from that period up to and beyond The Dark Side of the Moon, I think he used the Floyd to speak many of his ideas.”

  Yet at the time of its recording, both Waters and Geesin enjoyed the experience of making a soundtrack for The Body; that project laid the groundwork for a much more consequential and high-profile collaboration. Geesin’s involvement with Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother would commence even before Music from The Body was completed.

  Chapter 17

  Please Keep on the Track

  Amid a busy schedule of concert dates and Pink Floyd recording commitments—sessions for Atom Heart Mother would begin at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on March 1, 1970—David Gilmour began producing a follow-up to Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs. Simply titled Barrett, the second album from Syd would enjoy a far more disciplined approach than did its predecessor. Taking a page from Pink Floyd’s own highly organized and methodical working methods, Gilmour and co-producer Richard Wright scheduled sessions that they hoped would provide the structure Syd Barrett needed to complete a cohesive album of songs.

  “Dave always had a flair for the production and engineering side of a studio,” says Jerry Shirley. “After all, 90 percent of a great production is how the record’s engineered. Then the rest of it is just how you place the condiments on top, so to speak. And Dave was brilliant at that from as long as I can remember.”

  In addition to producing Barrett, Gilmour and Wright played on nearly all of its twelve songs, joined on various tracks by two veterans of The Madcap Laughs sessions, drummers Jerry Shirley and John “Willie” Wilson. The combination of a consistent lineup of musicians, a single production team, and that team’s eye toward discipline would result in Barrett emerging as a more cohesive album than its predecessor. Moreover, the material recorded included songs that—by Syd Barrett’s standards, in any event—were more conventional and fully formed than the songs that appeared on The Madcap Laughs. Of course, no one involved could have known that the sessions for Barrett would be the final studio efforts of consequence for Syd, who was only twenty-four years old when recording was completed.

  Two days before recording for the album began, Syd Barrett made a rare radio appearance, performing four songs on John Peel’s Top Gear radio program. The band—Barrett on guitar and vocals, David Gilmour on bass guitar, and Jerry Shirley on percussion—played “Terrapin” from The Madcap Laughs as well as an unreleased Rick Wright tune called “Two of a Kind” (“Syd . . . thought it was his,” Gilmour told Barrett biographers Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson). They also performed three new originals. All three would be recorded for Barrett.

  Only a few tracks from the Barrett sessions would be recorded with all the musicians playing together in real time. Jerry Shirley recalls those session vividly. “That was myself on drums, Dave Gilmour on bass, Rick Wright on keyboards, and Syd Barrett on guitar.” Though “Gigolo Aunt” came out quite well, Shirley says that the session was “pretty shambolic, because you never knew which way Syd was turning.”

  As with Willie Wilson on The Madcap Laughs, Barrett didn’t provide much musical direction for Shirley on the tracks recorded together live in the studio. “The guidance I remember from Syd were things like, ‘It sounds a bit cold,’ or, ‘I’d like it a little windy,’ or, ‘Maybe it could be kind of shiny over here and purple over there,’” Shirley says. “He talked in abstracts, in comparisons that weren’t musical.”

  “Gigolo Aunt” is one of the album’s most effective tracks, capturing the essence of Syd Barrett’s songwriting and delivery within the full-band context for what would be the last time. For the remaining songs, it was clear that another approach would be necessary.

  Gilmour realized that the best—and perhaps only—method to capture Barrett’s mercurial presence on magnetic tape would be to reverse a traditional studio method. While countless recordings have been made via overdubbing or layering, the customary procedure is first to record a “basic track.” This often includes bass, drums, some guitar, and a “scratch” vocal for reference. Once the basic track is complete, musicians generally replace the guitar part, add additional instrumentation as needed, and record a more refined vocal track.

  Such an approach was largely impractical for a producer working with Syd Barrett in 1970. Instead, Gilmour rolled tape while Syd played and sang multiple takes of a dozen or so songs, later reviewing the recordings and selecting the most usable versions.

  Shirley says that approach yielded some quality material. Citing “Effervescing Elephant” as an example, he says, “That was one of the several songs that Syd wrote as a schoolboy. They all used to sit around and idolize him before he was famous, because he had this knack of writing songs that nobody else had. ‘Effervescing Elephant’ was one of those that Dave reminded him of and, sure enough, he went right to it, reverted to type, and just played it.”

  At his best—as on the nearly minute-long introduction to “Baby Lemonade”—Barrett seems in nearly complete control of his faculties, peeling off an impressive blues guitar solo. But such moments would be rare d
uring the Barrett sessions.

  For most of the songs, Gilmour, Wright, and Shirley would undertake the arduous task of playing along with Barrett’s previously recorded guitar and voice, doing their best to match his often wavering tempo and always unconventional musical phrasing. Richard Wright’s part in this was perhaps the easiest: mostly playing organ, Wright simply holds down a chord corresponding to whatever Barrett had played, following the changes regardless of meter. For the rhythm section of Gilmour and Shirley or Wilson, the work was far more daunting: the musicians had to apply a consistent beat to material that often resisted any such regimented approach.

  “Syd was all over the place,” says Shirley. “So Dave sort of charted it and remembered all the rhythmic foibles—where Syd would speed up, where he’d slow down, where he would do something different that you couldn’t possibly follow—and he conducted me. We got through it.”

  Shirley believes that David Gilmour deserves a great deal of credit for the cohesiveness of the Barrett album. He recalls that Gilmour instituted a set of “rules” for the sessions, and that structure helped give the sessions a shape they would otherwise have lacked. “Dave insisted that Syd had to play all the guitars: rhythm and lead. Dave would not pick up the guitar. He made sure that Syd did it all.”

  As he had done on his own “The Narrow Way” on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, Gilmour would play drums on Barrett’s “Dominoes.” Shirley recalls, “They got this beautiful, ethereal backing track with Dave overdubbing some lovely drums, and it just sounded great. But Syd could not get a good guitar solo going over it.” But then Gilmour had a moment of Syd-style inspiration. “Out of nowhere, Dave says, ‘Turn the tape backwards. Play it to him backwards,’” Shirley says, marveling at the memory. “And then Syd played to it, so that when you turn it back around, the guitar is backward. And he did it perfectly, first take. That was Syd for you.”