Syd Barrett: The Madcap Laughs

I've never been a full member of the congregation at the Church of Syd. I saw him as a curio, as the bald uncle who disturbed the young Robyn Hitchcock with innuendo after everyone else had left the dining room.

Later I came back to him through the lens of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which achieved stunning timeliness by being a month into its run — and at the height of its media profile — when Syd died. Lucy and I saw it a month later, and Barrett's Golden Hair never sounded better than when the elfin Syd was strumming it atop a garden wall in Cambridge-on-stage.

Then there's the passage in Bill Drummond's 17:

Last night was the Syd Barrett Madcap's Last Laugh concert at the Barbican Centre in London. The one that I was asked to perform at. The one I said no, that I would do one of my pamphlets containing the Syd is Dead story and the one called Halfway Up Snowdon. And I was going to distribute these 1,000 pamphlets to the first 1,000 folk who turned up to remember and celebrate Syd. And as far as I knew the promoters of the concert were more than happy for me to to it.
…
Joe Boyd [the overall producer of the event, and one of Drummond's heroes] and I are shaking hands. I'm fully expecting him to tell me how glad he is that I am contributing to the evening's events and how cool he thought the pamphlet looked. Instead he tells me there's been a mistake, that my pamphlet is not wanted, and he talked to me like he didn't know who the fuck I was. "Of course you can hand them out to people outside, we can't stop you doing that. And hey, you can stay and watch the show if you want."

Paul and Guy went to that show, and invited me along. If I'd known Joe Boyd (one of my heroes) was running it, I might have gone. All the members of Pink Floyd played that night (not all together), though they weren't listed on the bill. But I'd been to a few too many of the Barbican's four-hour, multi-artist revue/tribute shows in the preceding four years, and, besides, I was pissed off at no longer living a five-minute walk from the Barbican. Oh, and I thought Syd was little more than a curio.

I only bought The Madcap Laughs, back in 2001, because it was a fiver from Fopp, and when I listened to it, it didn't grab me enough to make me want to listen more.

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[Jimbo]

Artist Dimthingshineon recently did a cover of Syd Barrett songs: “No Good Trying” and “Baby Lemonade” on his lastest 4 CD project called "Nostalgia" released in 2009. Check out http://www.myspace.com/dimthingshineon
or http://www.geocities.com/dimthingshineon