“Trolley buses were silent they were electric, so this light would come toward you out of the fog, and then it would disappear away again into the fog. “You’d stand there in the fog and you couldn’t see anything,” Jenner says. Today, Jenner says that working with Syd reminded him of the electric trolleys he encountered as a child in postwar London. But early recording sessions with Jenner producing yielded little suitable for release the producer would later admit that he had underestimated the difficulty of working with Barrett in his current state. “It wasn’t what the record company wanted.” An attempt was made to get Syd – now a solo artist – into the studio. “As his songwriting became more interesting, it also became more sort of weird and psychotic,” Jenner says. Jenner had seen potential in the few songs Syd had written near the end of his time with Pink Floyd, though he was fully aware that the material was not of an especially commercial nature. “Believe me,” Wright told interviewer Mark Blake, “I would have left with him like a shot if I had thought Syd could do it.” But by most accounts, Barrett could not. That January, Wright and Barrett were sharing a flat in southwest London. “If we said, ‘let’s have some backing vocals,’ he would be the one who would get the notes together for them.” He was always the one who set the harmonies and things in the studio,” Jenner recalls. “Rick could read music he knew what chords were. He had observed Wright’s strengths within the context of Pink Floyd. “I doubt if Syd could read music,” Jenner says. In a 1996 interview, Rick Wright recalled that the band’s managers “thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a breakaway band, to try and hold Syd together.” Barrett’s managers thought that his unschooled approach would combine effectively with Wright’s more traditional musical foundation. Upon Barrett’s exit from Pink Floyd, Jenner and King had cast their lot with Barrett, believing that the prime architect of Pink Floyd – and its primary songwriter – had the better potential for ongoing creative and commercial success. Some how that makes it timeless.In early 1968, mere months after Syd Barrett left (or was dismissed from) Pink Floyd, his management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew King encouraged him to begin work on a solo album and the way you kiss will always be a very special thing to me is one the most pathetic yet earnest lyrics ever put to tape. And how Late Night picks up off the gleeful idiocy with simmering symbols and chiming guitars - just as if Barrett packed a sunset into the finale of his album. I also have a great love for If It’s In You - the mistakes, the drunken stutters, the croaks and most of all those blithering rhymes: Henrietta she’s a mean go-getter got-to-write-her-a-letter is written on a post-it note somewhere in my mind. #SYD BARRETT THE MADCAP LAUGHS FULL#Terrapin has looms full of sun warped guitar and Octopus has as many shifting rhythms as hooks - yet the tricks of these songs are made to look effortless by Barrett. I can always hear the opening to Dark Globe in my head, where are you now? Pussywillow that smiled honestly nonsensical yet imbued full of meaning, Barrett’s delivery elevating nonsense to catharsis. Reminds me of skipping school and going to the gardens in the city with nothing to do and no one to see.
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