All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Barrett’s own suggestions hardly helped, being no more transparent than the songs’ nebulous structures. After one take, he apparently opined, ‘Perhaps we could make the middle darker and maybe the end a bit more middle-afternoonish. At the moment, it’s too windy and icy.’ Ever an artist who relied on first impressions, it seems Barrett wanted the Softs’ first impressions, too. Which, as long as one went along with his rationale, could make for the kind of rewarding experience drummer Robert Wyatt remembered it being: ‘Working with Syd Barrett’s a piece of cake. I found him courteous and friendly . . . Almost too easy . . . So easy going that you didn’t necessarily know what he wanted, or whether he was pleased with it or not, because he seemed quite pleased with what[ever] you did.’

  Among the songs the Softs worked on that May day was The Madcap Laughs’ centrepiece, ‘Clowns and Jugglers’ (a.k.a. ‘Octopus’) – one line of which, ‘The madcap laughed at the man on the border’, would give the album its title. It was a song Barrett had been working on since at least the previous July, striving to say what he wanted with a minimum of verbiage. The song even recast a line from John Clare’s ‘Fairy Things’ (‘Wineglasses . . . to the very rim / Are filled with little mystic shining seed’ he transmuted into, ‘Clover, honey pots and mystic shining feed’), suggesting he had been reading one first-rate poet who continued to produce poetry from the madhouse. ‘Clowns and Jugglers’, originally demoed with Jenner, was now recast as the syllogical extension of that ‘Jugband Blues’ mindset, its dissonant discords mirroring the thirst for life’s purpose in those madrigal lyrics:

  The winds they blew and the leaves did wag

  They’ll never put me in their bag

  The raging seas will always seep

  So high you go, so low you creep

  The wind it blows in tropical heat

  The drones they throng on mossy seats

  The squeaking door will always squeak

  Two up, two down, we’ll never meet

  Please leave us here

  Close our eyes to the octopus ride!

  Barrett had probably hoped to record a hefty chunk of the album with his old friends from the U-Fo. He would hint as much during an interview with Michael Watts in the spring of 1971, during which his disjointed conversation occasionally strayed from and returned to the same internal illogics as the Madcap songs. Thinking back to halcyon days, he responded, ‘All that time . . . you’ve just reminded me of it. I thought it was good fun. I thought the Soft Machine were good fun. They were playing on Madcap.’

  However, the Madcap EMI eventually released overlooked Syd and the Softs’ pièce de résistance, ‘Clowns and Jugglers’, for a less Barrettian recrafting. And the session that was supposed to follow the one with Soft Machine, which was scheduled for further overdubs, at the last minute became a solo session as Barrett himself decided he would put the finishing touches to three more songs – ‘Terrapin’ included. Still with a good balance of solo and band performances, he could now begin compiling the album ‘promised over a year ago’. But for some reason he didn’t do this. A rough mix tape of some eight tracks was made on 6 May, but it was clearly not an intended sequence.

  In fact, what happened next is still mired in controversy forty years later. It would appear that Syd still felt there was something missing. As he told Giovanni Dadomo on the album’s release, ‘I wanted [Madcap] to be a whole thing that people would listen to all the way through, with everything related and balanced, the tempos and moods offsetting each other.’ And though he was reluctant to use anything he’d recorded with his former band, it seems he did want some reference point that connected to those ‘tempos and moods’. As such, he decided to go see how Floyd were getting on without him, and to ask ex-Jokers Wild guitarist Dave Gilmour if he might lend a hand.

  On 30 May, Barrett thus trundled down to Croydon’s Fairfield Hall to see the 1969 Floyd. The previous month they had debuted their first post-Barrett performance-piece, the portentous The Massed Gadgets of Auximines – More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd, which was performed a couple more times over the next six months. But the show that Syd saw was a standard 1969 set, featuring just two songs from his tenure, ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.

  After the show he asked Gilmour (and possibly Waters) to help him complete his own, overdue album. Malcolm Jones, who had worked so hard to make Syd’s album a realization, insists there was no conflict of interest: ‘I never felt any sense of being ousted from my role as producer . . . When Dave came to me and said that Syd wanted him and Roger to do the remaining parts of the album, I acquiesced . . . [But] I still feel that there was enough already made to complete an album.’

  Over the years, Gilmour has repeatedly given the impression that a lot more work was required to complete The Madcap Laughs than was ever the case. The eight tracks transferred on 25 April were all but an album in the can. Barrett was looking for the icing on his individual nutcake, which his May 1969 comment to Melody Maker’s correspondent that ‘it is now almost finished’ affirms. At some point, though, Gilmour decided to assume a grander role. Perhaps he simply failed to appreciate how much worthy material was already in EMI’s London tape-vault.

  Gilmour, it seems, made only the most cursory perusal of this previous body of tapes, which is perhaps why he came to the conclusion that a whole second side was needed to bulk up the album. He later typified the result as one side that ‘was six months’ work, [while] the other tracks we did in two-and-a-half days. [But] some of those songs . . . could have really been fantastic.’ Some already were. By the 1980s, he seemed to be conflating his experience of working on both Barrett albums. Ostensibly describing The Madcap Laughs, he claimed he was ‘trying to make sense of it with varying degrees of success. At least we got the album out – EMI had spent a lot of money on something it thought wasn’t going to happen.’

  In truth, as in-house producer Malcolm Jones has confirmed, ‘There was enough already made to complete an album.’ Gilmour and Waters hijacked Barrett’s album, not just taking it away from Jones, but from Syd himself. How complicit Barrett was in this decision it is impossible to say at this distance. He did record a lot of new material at the two sessions Gilmour supervised, as well as reworking songs he already had in a releasable state (as confirmed by the ultimate inclusion of ‘Clowns and Jugglers’, ‘Swan Lee’, and the original ‘Golden Hair’ on the 1988 archival release Opel).

  In fairness to Gilmour, his first session with Barrett on 12 June, witnessed by The Pretty Things’ Phil May, can be termed a success. May, who accompanied Gilmour to the session, found it ‘exciting because Syd still had enough of the plot to be musically exciting . . . [even if] it was absolutely pointless trying to regiment him into any rehearsals or such like’. With just Gilmour there interpreting the worth of the material, Barrett spent the first part of the session reprising two songs already captured alive and kicking: ‘Clowns and Jugglers’, now trimmed of a verse and retitled ‘Octopus’, and the Joycean ‘Golden Hair’.

  Barrett then produced two new songs, both ideal additions to the album, ‘Long Gone’ and the luminous ‘Dark Globe’, the latter a perfect coda to the Jones and Jenner material. However, even after this genuinely productive session, Gilmour was still not inclined to build the album around the wealth of material already recorded, most of which he had had no hand in. Instead, he and Barrett returned to Abbey Road six weeks later for one final session. And this time Roger Waters ‘and his impenetrable leer’ were in situ, too. According to Gilmour, the co-producers’ technique that day involved ‘Roger and I [sitting] down with him, after listening to all his songs at home, and say[ing], “Syd, play this one, Syd, play that one.”’

  But on this inauspicious day Barrett was in one of his strange moods. It could well be that the presence of Waters – supposedly at his request – genuinely freaked him out. Or the well had simply run dry again. But what is sure is that Roger Waters, by turning up for a single day’s work, gaine
d a co-production credit on an album into which his creative input verged on the non-existent; and on which his one definable contribution was to ensure that, although the 26 July session was essentially a bust, of the five songs cut that day, four made it on to the album – even though Barrett self-evidently had nothing left in the tank. A retake of ‘Dark Globe’ with a double-tracked vocal that heightened Syd’s dissociative approach to vocalizing didn’t work, and was quickly scrapped in favour of the version cut at the previous session. ‘Long Gone’, a marginal improvement on the earlier version, got the nod. But the next three songs – ‘She Took a Long Cold Look’, ‘Feel’ and ‘If It’s in You’ – all recorded in quick succession, came dangerously close to sending up the whole Mr Madcap myth that was already starting to take hold. Astonishingly, Gilmour and Waters decided to use all three takes, including a painfully off-key false start to ‘Feel’ as part of some audio vérité thing they had going on in their heads – and bugger any perception of an artist careening out of control it would engender, or reinforce. Even more than three decades on, they continue to defend their original decision-making:

  Roger Waters: We wanted something real, like when Joe Cocker’s voice cracks at the end of ‘You’re So Beautiful’. It’s so full of feeling. [2002]

  Dave Gilmour: Perhaps we were trying to show what Syd was really like . . . perhaps we were trying to punish him . . . [But] I wanted him to come across as a jester, not as stark, raving mad. [2002]

  Pressed to explain himself at another juncture, Gilmour would claim that the intention all along was ‘to inject some honesty into it, to try and explain what was going on. We didn’t want to appear cruel, but . . . we were digging around for stuff to put on the album.’ Actually, we know full well that this last statement is patently untrue. The fact that neither ‘Swan Lee’ nor ‘Opel’ were shortlisted for The Madcap Laughs, yet ‘Feel’ and ‘If It’s in You’ made the cut, still beggars belief.

  Purportedly pressed for time, with EMI supposedly breathing down their necks, Gilmour and Waters proceeded to spend two-and-a-half months tinkering with songs already fit for use, ensuring the album missed its pre-Christmas slot. The result was an album that for all its intermittent brilliance lacked balance; one where ‘tempos and moods’ did not always offset each other. Neither of the other producers who had relinquished the chair thought much of the choices Gilmour and Waters made on Barrett’s behalf:

  Malcolm Jones: The false starts to the tracks that I had personally supervised were far more interesting than those left in the final album. They certainly would have been more of a candid insight to the atmosphere of the sessions and less detrimental to Syd’s abilities than the ones left in. Those left in show Syd, at best, out of tune, which he rarely was, and at worst as out of control (which, again, he never was).

  Peter Jenner: No disrespect to Dave and Roger, who were trying to do something good, but it wasn’t what I heard in the studio, and it was a shadow of the Syd I knew.

  Barrett himself simply seems to have relinquished any control over the finished product, letting his erstwhile co-workers do their worst. Malcolm Jones thinks Barrett convened with Gilmour on 6 October to approve the final running order, but even if he did – and I find it hard to believe that a compos mentis Barrett would have approved the artefact as is – the album he okayed put the 26 July three-song verité segue on side one. Only at the last minute were the sides swapped around, so that the abiding memory at record’s end, for this listener at least, became the caterwauling false start before ‘Feel’.

  It is hard not to conclude that Barrett’s one-time friends ended up amplifying his mood swings at the sessions, while placing the blame for the album’s failure squarely at Syd’s door. Even now Gilmour feels that ‘it was important that some of Syd’s state of mind should be present in the record – to be a document of Syd at that moment’. Malcolm Jones vehemently disagrees: ‘When I first heard the finished product it came as a shock. This wasn’t the Syd of two or three months ago. I felt angry. It’s like dirty linen in public and very unnecessary and unkind . . . I fail to see how the sound of pages being turned can do anything for Syd, I fail to see the point.’

  With the album’s release now delayed until the new year, November saw the release of the recast ‘Octopus’ on 45. Having hoped for an album in which ‘everything [was] related and balanced’, Barrett in interview merely expressed a ‘hope [that] that is what it sounds like’. When pushed, though, he admitted, ‘I don’t listen to it much.’ An album which had required four producers and almost a year-and-a-half of sessions, and had been recorded between the bouts of inertia that could at any time consume Barrett, was reheated in this lukewarm guise by the very folks who had driven him from ‘his band’ in the first place. And Gilmour seems to have been as compliant as Syd when it came to allowing Waters to release ‘proof that he had been right all along to push for Barrett’s removal from the band; while in the end the public got the Madcap it had been prepped to expect. In that sense, at least, Waters warranted his co-producer credit.

  *

  But then the era when producers pushed the record button, and told a band when another take was required, were long gone. The new breed of producers were determined to impose themselves on the process at almost any cost. And the producer least like a wallflower on the London scene of the late 1960s was a figure who some moons ago had made his name producing the first Pink Floyd single, ‘Arnold Layne’, and could, in December 1969, still lay claim to being the most sympathetic producer with whom Syd Barrett ever worked. Joe Boyd had abandoned psychedelia after his experience with the Floyd and the club he ran largely for their benefit, U-Fo. By the summer of 1967 he was busy assembling the finest roster of English singer-songwriters ever contained under a single management/ production roof, Witchseason. Sole proprietor, J. Boyd.

  By the time Gilmour and Waters were making a right royal mess of Syd’s solo debut, Boyd was preparing for imminent release the debut LP of another quintessentially damaged English artist, the maudlin Nick Drake. Unlike Barrett, whom Boyd knew before he started ‘jeopardizing the wires that held everything together in [his] mind’, Drake was already monosyllabic by the time the pair first met in May 1968. The statuesque Anthea Joseph, who kept the whole Witchseason operation running, remembers him arriving at the office, ‘this tall, thin, very beautiful man . . . who didn’t speak’.

  The album in question, Five Leaves Left, had taken almost as long to complete as The Madcap Laughs. Despite work starting in June 1968, the album only finally appeared in September 1969, largely because of a somewhat ad hoc approach to recording. As Boyd said in 1986, ‘I just kept throwing ideas at him or throwing him in the studio with various different people, and sometimes he would respond and sometimes he wouldn’t.’ Throughout it all, Boyd remained convinced that the Cambridge undergraduate could do for the English singer-songwriter what Leonard Cohen had recently done for the North American, creating a series of albums that would find a home in every student bedsit room in the land. His assistant at Witchseason, on the other hand, was not entirely sure album #1 would ever appear:

  Anthea Joseph: The first album took ages. Ages. It went on for months . . . What I always felt was that Nick would sort of pack up mentally, so you had to stop. There was no point in trying to push it, because you weren’t going to get any further.

  Drake, neither the most gifted songwriter (that would be Richard Thompson) nor the most gifted singer (Sandy Denny) on Boyd’s exclusive roster, certainly had a style all his own and, like Cohen, it was rolled out ready to be captured the first time he appeared at Boyd’s office with a crude reel of demos in his long-fingered, tobacco-stained hands. If it seemed as if he had come out of nowhere, in a sense he had. Drake had led a cocooned existence for almost all of his privileged life, which seemed to be heading down its preordained path – from prep school to Marlborough, and then to Cambridge – when he and a friend took time out, pre-college, to spend a heady season (or two) not so much en Enfe
r, but rather the France memorialized by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire.

  It was the spring of 1967, and Drake was learning all about the young Rimbaud, who had come to Paris a century earlier an ingénue degenerate and began almost immediately drinking absinthe and writing illuminated script. And just as the youthful Drake began an intense course of reading these French poets, he immersed himself in the blues of Robert Johnson, the great shaman of the Mississippi Delta who, legend says, sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for unearthly powers suddenly and mysteriously acquired. At the time, Drake could only dream of such things – and smoke copious amounts of ‘weed’ in the hope that it would somehow invoke some dormant Rimbaudian and/or Johnsonian self. The young female songwriter Robin Frederick, whom he met on that trip, would subsequently write about the Drake she encountered there:

  ‘When I knew him, Nick had not written a single song; he played blues guitar with exceptional fluidity, but there was nothing to indicate that he had unusually great ability or talent . . . Nick would appear at odd hours of the night at the door of my flat. I’d let him in and we’d pass the time playing songs for each other. He stared at the wall or the floor or into the fire. So did I.’

  For now, Drake was just another lovelorn soldier from the army of would-be bedsit poets for whom Leonard Cohen sang his songs. But his influences were already more eclectic than most of his cannabis-toking contemporaries, and along with the French symbolists, he was digesting Dostoevsky, Blake and the war poets, while musical influences were just as likely to be favourites of his parents (such as Bach) as those folk-rock lynch-pins Dylan, Donovan and Phil Ochs. While in Aix-en-Provence, Drake would play Bach Brandenburg concertos repeatedly on the cheap gramophone he and his friend Jeremy invested in. The same set would be on the more expensive turntable at his bedside the night he died, seven short years later.