![]() ![]() By then, Barrett was being elbowed out of his own band to be replaced by the more punctual David Gilmour. By “Jugband Blues”, the only song to feature Barrett on the Floyd’s second album, he is emotionless, with a façade-like dead stare in the music video. It was considered too dark to be included on the second album. The lyrics are viewed as the culmination of his personal and artistic breakdown. When it came to writing this next pop-hit Barrett, with cynical brilliance, wrote his darkest song yet: “Vegetable Man”. Their producer Peter Jenner notes that after the single’s release “suddenly everything had to be seen in commercial terms … into a state of paranoia about having to come up with another hit single.” Commercial pressures had as much to do with Barrett’s fall as his use of psychedelic substances. “Arnold Layne”, for example, is a brilliantly campy narrative of a Cambridge crossdresser nicking knickers off washing-lines! “They suit him fine”, Barrett playfully concludes.Īs a creative individual, Barrett seems to have struggled with the Floyd’s early rise to fame following their hit-single “See Emily Play”, a Summer of Love masterpiece written by Barrett. In the future, groups have to offer a well-presented theatre show.” This is exemplified in the rendition of the reverberating ‘Astronomy Dominie’ on the BBC in 1967, another brilliant Piper track.īarrett’s subject matter was radically unconventional too, compared to the love-dribble which dominated 60s pop music. Barrett viewed this as interconnected: “we have only just started to scrape the surface of effects and ideas of lights and music combined we think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene, one enhances and adds to the other. This track is the best reflection of what the early Underground-era Floyd were playing at the UFO Club, an epicentre of the British counterculture.Īt the UFO, the Floyd would be accompanied by trippy light shows. Barrett employed radical techniques of feedback, dissonance and distortion, which would become instrumental to later generations of musicians. A bewitching, stark riff opens this instrumental which descends into ten minutes of free-form, anarchic chaos. Barrett’s musical experimentation is felt most in “Interstellar Overdrive”, the psychedelic centrepiece of Pink Floyd’s first album. Barrett the Artistīarrett was an avant-garde innovator in both his abstract paintings and his musical style. Slowly there was a pitiful recognition: this strange man was indeed their original founder.Ĭonsidering Barrett’s own words, he quips in an interview of 1971: “I’m really totally together, I even think I should be.” It’s a line which provides a rare insight into his self-conscious wicked wit around his notoriety as the head madcap of psychedelia. ![]() All his hair was shaven, including his eyebrows. In baffling synchronicity, Barrett turned up to the studio unannounced. The new Floyd were producing “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”, a song about Barrett, his crazy genius, and his legacy. ![]() Barrett had departed from the band around 1968. There was an infamous moment at the Abbey Road recording studio in 1975. He was a total original … I saw him like a soft poet, like a Baudelaire or Rimbaud” “People think he went mad, but I never did. Similarly, biographer Rob Chapman aims to demythologise the madness narrative, seeing Barrett instead as one eccentric among many in the psychedelic scene. He was a total original … I saw him like a soft poet, like a Baudelaire or Rimbaud.” Mick Rock would remain intimate with Barrett even after his ‘breakdown’. Mick Rock, who produced the iconic photographs for Madcap in 1969, in contrast claims: “People think he went mad, but I never did. Barrett’s band members see acid as instrumental and that Barrett was sadly, yet inevitably, broken by it. For others, only schizophrenia can explain the story. Vignettes of Barrett in the Underground of the late 60s filter through like photos processing producer Peter Jenner was told of acid-laced morning coffees, online threads whisper of a state-conspired lobotomy. The dominant narrative is simple: too much LSD, then madness, which at times fuelled his creativity, but eventually broke him. Madman or madcap?įierce debate around Barrett being an ‘acid casualty’ has ensued since his infamous fall from the Floyd. Now, fifty years since the album’s release, let’s dive into this trippy and kaleidoscopic rabbit-hole. Leaving the band, Barrett then produced his legendary solo album The Madcap Laughs (1970). Barrett was the co-founder and creative impetus behind Pink Floyd and their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Born in Cambridge, he attended an art school near Homerton College. Roger Keith Barrett was the quintessential figure of British 1960s psychedelia.
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