Syd Barrett Madcap Laughs rare LP 1969 Pink Floyd psych folk pop sike acid rock

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Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs LP - rare black label Harvest vinyl issue of this cool album.  recorded post Floyd in 1968 and 1969, and released in 1970.  in gatefold sleeve -  hard-to-find and collectible.

"Having left Pink Floyd in 1968 after a daily LSD habit had taken its toll, Syd Barrett's first solo album finally appeared two years later with ex-Floyd sidekicks David Gilmour and Richard Wright riding shotgun with him in the studio. The Madcap Laughs is a brilliant but brittle album, with every strum of the electric guitar seeming to take its toll on Barrett's increasingly frayed nerve strings. On songs such as "Love You," his state of mind is well concealed beneath the sort of jolly jangle-pop Blur would later indulge in. On "Dark Globe," however, the strain is palpable: "Please lend a hand ... won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all?" he pleads, ominously. The best tracks are "Octopus," which possesses all the controlled mania of early Floyd, and "Golden Hair," a still moment of musical rapture whose lyric is taken from a James Joyce poem. --David Stubbs"

"The Madcap Laughs is the debut solo album by British singer-songwriter Syd Barrett, released in January 1970. It was recorded after Barrett had been replaced in the band Pink Floyd by his old school friend David Gilmour. The album had a chequered recording history, with work beginning in mid 1968 but the bulk of the sessions taking place between April and July 1969, for which five different producers were credited ? including Barrett, Gilmour and fellow Pink Floyd member Roger Waters. Among the guest musicians are Robert Wyatt of the band Soft Machine. The Madcap Laughs enjoyed minimal commercial success on release, reaching number 40 on the UK's official albums chart.

In the second half of 1967 and through to early 1968, Syd Barrett's behaviour became increasingly erratic and unpredictable, partly as a result of his alleged heavy use of psychedelic drugs. Many report having seen him on stage with the group during this period, strumming on one chord through an entire concert or not playing at all. At a show at The Fillmore in San Francisco, during a performance of "Interstellar Overdrive", Barrett slowly detuned his guitar; the audience seemed to enjoy such antics, unaware of the rest of the band's consternation. In August 1967, Pink Floyd were forced to cancel their appearance at the prestigious National Jazz and Blues Festival, informing the music press that Barrett was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Band manager Peter Jenner and Roger Waters arranged for Barrett to see a psychiatrist (an appointment he failed to attend), while a stay on the Spanish island of Formentera with Sam Hutt, a doctor well established in the underground music scene, led to no visible improvement in Barrett's behaviour. A few dates in September were followed by the band's first tour of the United States.[3] At this point, Barrett's condition grew steadily worse. Around Christmas 1967, David Gilmour was asked by the other members of Pink Floyd to join as a second guitarist, to cover for Barrett, whose unpredictable behaviour prevented him from performing. For several shows Gilmour sang and played while Barrett wandered around on stage, every now and then deciding to join in playing. Waters and fellow band members Richard Wright and Nick Mason soon grew weary of Barrett's on-stage antics and, on 26 January 1968, when Waters was driving his bandmates from London to a show at Southampton University, they all agreed to go without Barrett: according to Gilmour's recollection, one person asked, "Shall we pick Syd up?" and another said, "Let's not bother." Since Barrett had written all but one song on their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, as well as the band's three singles up to this point, originally the plan was to keep him in the group as a non-touring member ? in a similar arrangement to what The Beach Boys had done with Brian Wilson ? but this soon proved to be unworkable. On 6 April, the group officially announced that Barrett was no longer a member of Pink Floyd."

"Syd Barrett was a poet and genius of the highest order. Fragmented and tattered, the songs on this album lay it all out on the table. This is the reflection of a man who was dying on the inside and who's reality was slipping away literally as he sang.

Songs like the opening Terrapin and the closing masterpiece Late Night seem to speak volumes of the feeling of disassociation he must have felt in his life at the time. And, the truth is, every song in between the two are more than worth the their weight in gold. Jaunty tunes, such as Love You, Here I Go and Octopus, mingle with material that is, for a lack of better words, absolutely soul crushing.

The production is fittingly sparse -- some songs are literally just Syd and his acoustic (Dark Globe, Feel, If It's In You), while many others are filled with small psychedelic flourishes that keep the ambience intact. The only low point on the album exists in the admittedly weak She Took A Long Cold Look. This song would have found a better home on the B-sides collection Opel (ironically, the song Opel would have been a perfect fit). Long Gone is a darkly chilling highlight -- chromatic acoustic scalings, thick harmonies, and dynamically interesting organs make for a particularly sinister song.

Syd's voice is often broken and fragile. On songs like Dark Globe, it is on the verge of sounding tortured. This IS NOT a pop album and it IS NOT an extension of his more whimsical Piper At The Gates Of Dawn album. Be forewarned: this is an album that will haunt you for years to come.

-This review was written in his honor. We will miss you." DEWitmeyer

"There is no question that Syd cuts a fascinating figure, full of loss and mystery. But, set the personality stuff aside - something you should do with everything you listen to - and pay attention to the music.

First and foremost, intentionally or not, Syd's lyrics are high art. Not self-conscious, referential and elitist nonsense. These lyrics are poetry, and poetry can only result from experience. We don't need to know or speculate about that experience, we need only comprehend that it somehow resulted in some amazing work.

The music is the perfect match for the words. The feeling of accident, of the joy of finding the right note and the frustration of being just sharp or just flat, a split-second early or a half-second late, is all there to hear. It brings a remarkable one-to-one feel to the music, somewhere between the rehearsed and the improvised, and it never comes off as self-conscious or calculated.

What are the influences? I can't detect any -- short of the James Joyce poem made into the song "Golden Hair". Has anyone else ever given us this specific combination of intent and accident? None that I'm aware of. The Madcap Laughs and Barrett both work because the artist we're listening to is a natural at what he does. Whether the drugs heightened his ability or killed it hardly matters now. The work is still here, still with us and like all lasting art, it resists classification and interpretation. Let's just say that whatever life brought to Syd, his particular nervous system had a singular way of transforming it into the transparent and immediate experience of a music all his own" -KLeimer

" Syd Barrett's first solo album is the work of a man completely falling apart. As the founder of Pink Floyd, Barrett ingested enough LSD to drive a medium sized country mad, and by 1968 and 1969 (when this album was recorded) his mental state was very schizophrenic. Even with these problematic mental disorders (or maybe becasue of), Barrett managed to create a classic.

Following Barrett's dismissal from Pink Floyd in early 1968, the band's managers followed Barrett, assuming that the band could not survive without their creative light (oops). While time has obviously proved them wrong, they soon set Barrett to work with producer Malcomb Jones and the trippy combo The Soft Machine to create a pop album. Barrett's performances soon proved to be erratic and strange, and it was soon apparent that the music was not going to set the teen scene on fire. The sessions were shelved (although temporarily as many tracks are included on the album) and "Octopus" was unleashed as a single. It unsurprisingly did not go far.

Cut forward a few months and former bandmate Roger Waters and Syd's own replacement David Gilmour wheel Barrett back into the studio for some more fun and games. These sessions were acoustically based, and allowed Barrett to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, even if it was endlessly strange.

The final album is a somewhat daunting listen, but quite phenomenal if you can get your mind into Syd's world, where things like rhythm are rather amorphous. "No Good Trying," "No Man's Land," "Octopus," and "Late Night" are strange but amazing masterpieces of psychedelic rock. On the first two especially, the backing musicians sound like they're furiously trying to keep up with Syd (no good trying?) and the music is always on the verge of flying apart at the seams in a wonderful and interesting sort of way. "Terrapin," "Dark Globe," and "Golden Hair" are the more acoustic classics." -MComegys

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