All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Meanwhile, there was plentiful evidence that any inner disturbance was still offset by the man’s continued brilliance as a songwriter and frontman. Much of it can be found on the Top Gear radio session the Floyd recorded just two days before the Olympia extravaganza. In a single afternoon, they recorded three remarkable new Barrett originals – ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ and ‘Jugband Blues’ – plus a dramatically rearranged ‘Pow R Toch H’, from Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

  These new originals, indicative of a new direction – and, perhaps, the incipient disintegration of a fragile psyche – seem to have disturbed the other members of the Floyd far more than any of the man’s legendary onstage antics (detuning his guitar; rubbing Mandrax in his hair, &c.). Such was their distaste that they decided against including the first two on their next album, even though Barrett had effectively disowned them4 and the post-Barrett quartet was chronically short of strong original material. Roger Waters, someone ultimately unconvinced that one had to be nuts to have insights as profound as Barrett’s, was the first to push for Syd’s removal from the band:

  Roger Waters: There were a whole team of [writers] who all believed it was rather good to be mad, and it was the rest of us who were making less sense . . . In Syd’s case, you could say that it was his potential for decline into schizophrenia that gave him the talent to express mildly untouchable things. But I . . . feel that a lot less now than I may have done then. [2005]

  When 1968 dawned, two weeks after Olympia, Barrett was on borrowed time. The rest of Pink Floyd didn’t mind performing songs about closet transvestites and sexually liberated free spirits, but given a choice between the kind of improvisational ‘space age’ songs that now constituted the majority of their live set and a version of psychedelic pop that was not so much ‘head’ music as ‘in your head’ music, they were always likely to go with the former. Anyway, they weren’t sure they liked the looks Barrett kept giving them; as if he’d just heard a private joke at their expense. As co-manager Andrew King subsequently recalled, ‘Syd could be very cruel, making fun of how strait-laced they all were.’

  The others decided to cast him adrift, though not before test-running replacement guitarist Dave Gilmour for half a dozen gigs in a five-piece Floyd. Gilmour himself would later insist, ‘If [Syd] had stayed, the Floyd would have died an ignominious death . . . we had no choice’ – quite a snap judgement from someone who had enjoyed membership status for less than a fortnight when the others jettisoned Barrett. If they hoped that firing Syd might bring him to his senses, it appeared to have the opposite effect. In conversation with Melody Maker’s Michael Watts three years later, Barrett hinted that their decision actually precipitated a(nother) mental collapse: ‘We did split up, and there was a lot of trouble. I don’t think The Pink Floyd had any trouble, but I had an awful scene, probably self-inflicted, having a Mini and going all over England and things.’ His fragile self-confidence, already teetering, was shattered.

  Part of Barrett’s understandable bemusement seems to have resulted from the rest of the band not having the balls to tell him to his face that he was ousted. And so for a six-week period, from the end of January to the beginning of March, Barrett was genuinely perturbed to discover that they were recording and performing without him. In 1974 Andrew King remembered how Syd would sit, ‘with guitar in tow . . . in the reception area of Abbey Road studios for days on end while Saucerful of Secrets was being recorded, waiting to be asked to contribute’. And try as the others might to keep details of their gig schedule from him, Barrett would turn up unexpectedly (which is presumably what he meant when referring to ‘having a Mini and going all over England’). And when he did, he would stand a hair’s breadth away from Gilmour:

  Jerry Shirley [drummer]: Dave went through some real heavy stuff for the first few months [in Floyd]. Syd would turn up at [some] gigs and stand in front of the stage looking up at Dave, ‘That’s my band.’

  Emo [Floyd roadie]: You could tell Syd didn’t understand what was happening. He was standing so close to Dave he was almost an inch from his face . . . then [he] started walking around him, almost checking that Dave was a three-dimensional object.

  Matters finally came to a head during a meeting on 2 March at the management offices in Edbrooke Road. According to one account Waters gave in 1973, ‘[It] came down to me and Syd sitting in a room talking together, and I’d worked out what I thought was the only way we could carry on together, which was for him to . . . become a sort of Brian Wilson figure, if you like, write songs and come to recording sessions. And by the end of the afternoon I thought I’d convinced him that it was a good idea, and he’d agreed.’ But as Nick Mason asserts, Barrett then allowed himself to ‘be influenced by some people, who kept repeating he was the only talent in the band and should pursue a solo career’. This was a clear reference to Jenner and King, neither of whom could see how a Barrett-less Floyd would have a shelf-life not measured in months.

  And on the evidence of what Jenner and King heard coming out of EMI’s Abbey Road studios in the winter of 1968, it would be hard to challenge their assessment. Determined to use just two of the songs cut with Barrett the previous autumn – ‘Jugband Blues’ and Waters’ own ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ – the reconstituted Floyd set out to make an album that ‘has nothing to do with what Syd believed in or liked’ (Gilmour’s own 1975 description of the released artefact). The five additional songs that eked the album out to thirty-nine minutes included at least one faux-Barrett pastiche, ‘Corporal Clegg’, that was, in the words of Julian Palacios, ‘so crude an approximation of the Barrettian songwriting style as to constitute [mere] parody’ (Waters’ other contemporary stab at Barrettian whimsy, ‘Julia’s Dream’, was wisely placed as a single B-side). Even then, they had to resort to the twelve-minute title track – an indulgent recasting of the pre-Piper psychedelic jam, ‘Nick’s Boogie’ – to fill out the album. Unimpressed producer Norman Smith, still at the helm, told them, ‘I think it’s rubbish, but go ahead and do it if you want.’

  Meanwhile, Jenner and King put their faith in the erstwhile Floyd frontman, feeling that Barrett probably still had enough good days in him to complete a solo album. Jenner says that he ‘knew he had the songs . . . [and] I kept thinking if he did the right things he’d come back to join us’. And crucially, as far as he was concerned, ‘There was no indication that [Syd] didn’t want to do it any more.’ As such, in early May 1968 they began work – or so they thought – on the first Syd Barrett solo album, Jenner taking on the role of producer that Piper-producer Norman Smith, who had never been entirely at ease in Syd’s company happily relinquished.

  Sadly Jenner’s conviction that Syd ‘had the songs’ was not borne out by the eight or so recording sessions conducted at EMI over the next two-and-a-half months, only three of which produced any genuinely usable new music. In the end, the results comprised just four worthwhile songs – ‘Silas Lang’, ‘Late Nights’, ‘Golden Hair’ (a James Joyce poem set to music) and ‘Clowns and Jugglers’ (which, according to Jenner, began life as a piece of pre-Floyd whimsy). The last of these was only pulled out of Barrett’s irregular hat at the final session on 20 July, when they were supposed to be getting final mixes of the few usable songs. Jenner was already thinking of combining what little they had got with three usable Floyd leftovers: ‘Vegetable Man’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ and ‘In the Beechwoods’; Floyd having knowingly overlooked all three for the wafer-thin Saucerful of Secrets.

  But the material simply wasn’t there, and time out was called on Syd’s solo LP, even as the eight 1968 sessions set the pattern for future Barrett sessions. Some days had proven a total waste of time – such as the 14 May session, which was given over to two tedious jams, the eighteen-minute ‘Rhamadam’ and the five-minute ‘Lanky’. Other days Barrett was focused and brimming with ideas. The first proper session, on 6 May, produced two fine songs; one, ‘Silas Lang’, in a single take. But Barrett was already stru
ggling to master his demons. As what he later called ‘an awful scene’ consumed him for most of 1968 and into the following winter, Jenner and EMI began to wonder if he would ever make music again.

  And yet Jenner’s experience with Barrett failed to persuade either him or the record label to steer a wide berth around any future madcap mavericks. Barely had Jenner abandoned the Barrett sessions than he began working on an album with the almost equally eccentric Roy Harper, whose pedigree to date included a spell in Lancaster Moor Mental Institute that inspired his notorious 1966 song ‘Committed’, and a period in jail for trying to climb the clock tower of London’s St Pancras station. As Harper himself said of the songs from this period: ‘The area of discovery I’ve got going is inside my own head, and there are a lot of places I’ve not been yet . . . I’m into it as a conscious trip . . . [though] it’s probably got to stop soon – I’ve come to the realization that . . . I’ve really got to give my head a chance, not only to do something else, but to have a rest from that trip.’

  Harper was another songwriter who, to adopt Jenner’s own choice phrase, was ‘a bit crazy – like all the best people’. He was also the perfect artist for the new ‘prog’ label EMI had set up to house their weirder coves, Harvest Records. The resultant album, the appositely named Flat Baroque and Beserk (1969)5, would appear just behind Barrett’s debut LP and establish what would be a decade-long association with the new label. Harper used the album to exorcize some demons of his own, resulting from a childhood being raised by a Jehovah’s Witness stepmother and a combative Dad (as he wrote in the notes to the 1970 reissue of his 1966 debut LP, ‘My forebears . . . are actually just as mad as I am’). In ‘Feeling All the Saturday’, in particular, he embraced the madness, partly feigned, that allowed him to escape his more pious parent:

  and mum’s just bought herself a leaning-post

  made of words and pages

  it says god gives us all our daily toast

  but dad still earns the wages

  and i’ve just bought a jigsaw puzz

  it’s made of cotton wool

  and when i’ve undone every piece

  the truth will fit my skull.

  *

  The maverick clientele of Peter Jenner were not alone in scrabbling around for some way forward in the aftermath of the inevitable post-psychedelic implosion, casting its patented pall over the English pop scene through 1968. Nor was Syd Barrett the only one disposed to take a year off. The young David Bowie had also temporarily opted out of the pop world, not in homage to his idol, but because he had nowhere to run.

  Bowie himself never quite got over the impact of seeing the Floydian Syd onstage. In 1990 he described Barrett’s ‘huge influence’ thus: ‘He had this strange mystical look to him . . . He was like some figure out of an Indonesian play or something, and wasn’t altogether of this world.’ That last phrase, akin to his description of Vince Taylor, suggested Bowie had thus acquired another building-block for future use. In Bowie’s case, though, no one except his parents and his gay manager, Ken Pitt, was eagerly awaiting the imminent reinvention of David Jones of Brixton.

  Through 1966–67 Bowie had been experimenting – at his record label Deram’s expense – with a style of pop lyric that shared a kinship with the weirder ministrations of Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and New York’s own demi-monde degenerate, Lou Reed. Even on Bowie’s first eponymous album, recorded in the second half of 1966 and issued the same day as Sgt. Pepper – though destined to have a more negligible effect on pop culture – he was already writing about some seriously dysfunctional characters. ‘Uncle Arthur’ was about a thirty-something man who still ‘likes his mummy, still reads comics, [and] follows Batman’. ‘Little Bombadier’ was about a demobbed soldier who spoils children with ‘treats’, only to be warned off by a policeman. As Nicholas Pegg has observed in his all-encompassing Bowie encyclopaedia, the Deram ‘album’s motif of wartime nostalgia, its Blakean evocations of childhood innocence, and above all its rogues’ gallery of lonely misfits and social inadequates, are all very much of a piece with contemporary work by the likes of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and . . . The Beatles.’

  However, the tunes Bowie then applied to these eccentric vignettes had more in common with music hall, French chanson and stage songs than anything from contemporary pop. At the time he claimed he started out ‘by changing the words of nursery rhymes and then graduated to a more serious form of song writing’, an assertion that the best-known song from this particular learning curve, ‘The Laughing Gnome’6, would seem to affirm.

  Nor did the songs become any less peculiar through 1967, as Bowie continued his overwrought attempt to make these modern Grimm tales fit the zeitgeist, all the while (mis)reading the tea leaves of pop culture. Even he remained unsure that the world was ready for the full-on ministrations of his darkling point of view, on the evidence of one song he demoed with The Riot Squad on 5 April 1967, ‘Little Toy Soldier’ (and perhaps it still isn’t – the oft-bootlegged track was omitted from the 2010 ‘Deluxe’ two-CD reissue of the ‘complete’ Decca recordings). ‘Little Toy Soldier’ shows that he had already embraced the test-pressing of the first Velvet Underground album his manager had presented to him the previous January on returning from a trip to New York. Bowie actually nabs a couplet from ‘Venus in Furs’ (‘taste the whip in love not given lightly . . .’), as he tells the story of a girl, Sadie, who winds up a clockwork toy soldier, which then comes to life and whips her. One day she overwinds it, and the toy beats her to death. As a songwriter, already more than weird enough for Gilly.

  Although Bowie continued releasing antiseptic fare such as ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ through Decca’s hipper Deram subsidiary, ‘Little Toy Soldier’ was the first sign of him recording more sexually ambiguous material. ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’, recorded in September, was offered to Decca as a potential follow-up to ‘Love You Till Tuesday’ but was passed on, probably because they had noticed a certain metrosexual undertone in couplets such as, ‘Wear the dress your mother wore / Let me sleep beside you.’ His mother certainly expressed her disquiet, as Bowie carelessly admitted at a 1969 BBC radio session.

  In fact, Decca now began to develop something of a habit of passing on Bowie’s increasingly challenging would-be singles, turning down two more in 1968, ‘London Bye Ta-Ta’ b/w ‘In the Heat of the Morning’, and ‘Ching a Ling’ b/w ‘Back to Where You’ve Never Been’. The last of these tracks, recorded in October 1968 under the watchful eye of producer Tony Visconti, was a Tony Hill composition, and as such omitted from the 2010 ‘Deluxe’ edition of Bowie’s Deram recordings. However, one does wonder if the song has some relationship to another of Bowie’s fabled lost recordings, the song ‘Tired of My Life’, which includes the line, ‘I’m leading you away, home where you’ve never been.’

  Possible corroboration for such a thesis comes from a seemingly innocuous aside by Visconti, the producer of that 1968 session, who has stated that Bowie wrote the song ‘It’s No Game’ – the 1980s incarnation of ‘Tired of My Life’ – ‘when he was sixteen’. ‘Tired of My Life’ – which has been bootlegged extensively from an undated solo demo acetate, repeatedly credited to the Man Who Sold The World era, but without any clear basis or concrete accreditation – also includes the prescient line, ‘Put a bullet in my brain and I make the papers’, reused in ‘It’s No Game’, throughout demonstrating a world-weariness that very much anticipates the next phrase in Bowie’s work, best represented by the Space Oddity outtake, ‘Conversation Piece’, a song he (also) composed at the end of 1968.

  We do know that mortality was much on Bowie’s mind in that ‘lost’ year. One project that did not even make it to the Decca studio was a rock musical called Ernie Johnson, about a character who throws a party to mark his own intended suicide, the first time an act of suicide was the culmination of a Bowie project. A demo tape recorded in February 1968 (and subsequently sold at a pop memorabilia au
ction in London) featured some nine already-penned songs, although this was the last that was ever heard of ol’ Ernie.

  *

  Meanwhile, a quite similar idea was the centrepiece of one of the more eccentric albums released that year. ‘The Birthday’ was a Jeff Lynne song featured on Idle Race’s much-delayed The Birthday Party that October, it being told from the viewpoint of a woman who invites all her friends to a birthday party, but they ‘are too busy doing other things’ and so no one comes. The song ends with the narrator killing herself. Another song on the same quirky LP, ‘I Like My Toys’, about an adult refusing to grow up, could almost qualify as a rewrite of Bowie’s ‘Uncle Arthur’, though Lynne’s song is far funnier (‘My mum says sixteen years is a long enough rest’ being my favourite line).

  In reality, Lynne’s mentor was friend and fellow Brummie, Roy Wood, whose ‘(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree’ he had hoped to issue as Idle Race’s first single before The Move pre-empted them. Idle Race songs such as ‘The Lady Who Said She Could Fly’ and ‘Sitting in My Tree’ could have been ripped clean from Roy Wood’s private volume of ‘adult fairy stories’. Sadly for Lynne and his band, their own unique overview of English eccentricity failed to register with the very audience who had already flocked to snap up the equally eccentric album the Small Faces had issued four months earlier, the ostentatiously packaged Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake.

  This chart-topping album devoted an entire side to its very own adult fairy story, which told of Happiness Stan’s journey to discover who was stealing the moon, until finally he found himself deposited at the home of Mad John, who would ‘find . . . not only the moon itself, [for] which you looked, but the philosophy of life . . . itself’. ‘Mad John’, the song tells us, ‘had it sussed . . . yes, his bed was the cold and the damp, but the sun was his friend / he was free’. (According to Steve Marriott, the initial idea was to write a song about ‘these characters . . . that people were scared of through ignorance’.) The fact that the English pop audience embraced the Small Faces’ ersatz psychedelia but rejected other, more left-field contemporaries, was already causing concern to some fellow popsters. Townshend, talking to Rolling Stone at year’s end, offered his own explanation: