Syd Barrett, The Madcap Laughs

I was talking about Syd Barrett last night, drinking nasty wine in a friend’s back garden. Talking about amateurism, democracy, punk, free will. Syd Barrett’s charming, sweet, interesting, fragile, but having heard what I’ve heard about him, there seems something exploitative (in some way) about these recordings…I can’t rid myself of the idea of a man going mental in the corner and some-one shoving a microphone in his face. Thinking about music therapy and the creative impulse and how they feed into one another, is therapy art? Is this therapy? Would he have gotten away with releasing songs like this if he hadn’t been so documented as “mad” or “damaged”?

Actually Sam and I were talking about drugs tonight (while we ate hot cross buns) – I’m starting reading for my next essay and encountered an unwittingly hilarious book about crack cocaine use in the University library (I mean that’s where I found it rather than where it generally occurs…don’t think the sloaney types who parade around there would fancy slumming it to that extent…). This book is wonderful, I don’t know what it’s doing in the library (although that speaks of me excitedly piling books and books into my arms and failing to check them properly before trotting down the steps with books for teenagers)…but seriously what was it doing in the library anyway? No matter – it’s wildly unscholarly, all the quotes are unreferenced (my favourite one so far is “If the Russians wanted to destroy our country from the outside in; then importing crack cocaine would be the way to do it” – published 1987. EVERYWHERE!) and there’s a wide variety of photographs of trashed people with alarming haircuts. No matter. We were munching, butter running down chins and everything and reading out sections to amuse ourselves with. We talked about space-cakes, speed, ecstasy; I remembered seeing the York/Edinburgh people on ecstasy for the first time and being so alarmed at them dancing for all that time in the living room in Stockbridge; the feeling of that instant cementing-sensation you get with space-cake, the dirtiness of it all…does one feel angry for a drugged experience? Or grateful? Interested? Like I said, although I only ever experimented with the silly drugs (and not very heavily at all, fairly standard), and by and large I had a lovely time with them, I feel a big grip of fear, the loss of control implicit in anything more than mushrooms. I don’t want to follow a hyperbolic road of DIRTY JUNKIES but it does worry me…I think I can see how people need/want escape clauses, it’s something I need to learn more about anyway…I did a display about drugs for the kids at the unit I worked at previously. My best poster I made for them had a picture of a huge fat person looking glazed and dazed at the camera and put a caption at the bottom saying “Warning: Smoking weed makes you boring and fat”. Like that “Talk to frank” government initiative that’s everywhere at the minute, not quite harm-reduction but glaring realism is probably the best way to educate people, rather than the scare-tactics that currently exist.

Would Syd Barrett be an anti or pro drugs warning? That’s my meandering question…everyone’s heard the Bill Hicks thing about “throw away all your favourite records then, because all those musicians were fucking high” and yes it’s true (as some other comedian said; Paul McCartney on drugs = helter-skelter. Paul McCartney off drugs = the fucking frog chorus) but only to a point. Some of these Syd Barrett songs are wonderful, shining and glorious. I still like the love-you-ice-cream-excuse-me song and the one Dan used to sing to me (“because of this tune, what a boon, this tune…”), and somewhere else, I swear blind I remember hearing the octopus song from my childhood, but I’ve sung it to Therese trying to trace where I know it from…I don’t know if George would have listened to Syd Barrett, but I did trace some continuity between what I vaguely remember of his music collection and Dan’s (that’s the problem with losing a parent, it’s so much more difficult to trace and find reasons, strategies, explanations and caveats for present demands and problems) or if it was ever played in Hawthorns in Bolton at an appropriate time. I suppose that creaking door will always creak. I recognised Syd Barrett as soon as I heard him for the first time, but I have no idea where it comes from.

He sets “Goldenhair” by Joyce to music. It’s very repetitive. The Divine Comedy set a poem by Wordsworth (“Lucy”) and I loved that, but both songs seem to only use one musical phrase, repeated again and again, does it suggest musical gravity, all this repetition? I was arranging archived files of mad n’ naughty kids at St Matthias when I heard he’d died and went rushing from room to room (kids at the zoo or something) trying to find some-one who cared. Surprisingly, very few people did.