Syd Barrett
Barrett

THE REVIEW

"Barrett" is a record wrapped in a kind of sleep, and the songs seem almost to struggle to come out. The voice, which has become even dimmer, is accompanied by gentle keyboards and tired sounds. Only occasionally does a sudden flicker, quite off-key, awaken the poor extremist Barrett fans who are always ready to fall asleep with their hero: an absurd and playful boogie, some gems of extreme avant-garde, innocent and happy/unhappy nursery rhymes occasionally poke their heads out of the aquarium.

"Barrett," of course, is also a fabulous record, with an insinuating mood that, once it grips you, won't let go, much like dreamers with their favorite daydreams, or certain children with mechanical nativity scenes or Aunt Ada's music boxes.

And speaking of music boxes and also of daydreams, I've always imagined some songs on this album—let's say the more listless, dim, and magically self-wrapped ones—like music box tunes, slightly psychedelic, or if you prefer, psychedelically minimal.

What a wonder to think of the clowns of "Baby Lemonade," the strange scarecrow of "Waving My Arms in the Air" (with its feet firmly planted on the ground and arms moving in the air), the bored couple in "Dominoes" as mechanical, unreal, spinning figurines...

And perhaps even Aunt Gigolo and those people with buckets and lead cans who look ever paler at the gray and blue. Although "Gigolo Aunt" is one of the few songs not wrapped in sleep.

And anyway, I already see myself in my old age, spending my long days building those delightful gadgets, and not only Barrettian ones, as sleepy cities and Kevin Ayers' swinging girls, "Carnival Street" by Tim Buckley, or all the madness of "I'm a Walrus" already come to mind.

"Wolfpack," however, is not a music box.

It is, in the great slumber, a powerful intrusion of terrifying and frightening reality, like a scream, like a blob of color squeezed directly onto the canvas, or of shoe polish. Or a fantastic red and blue striped toothpaste, the kind children like—you decide.

Squeezed, we were saying, Syd wasn't one to dilute, and also because of this, as Uncle Robyn said, he soon came to the end of the tube... A friend's little girl once brushed her teeth eleven times in a morning and finished the tube too, as part of a game, hidden from her parents, perhaps she liked the taste of the toothpaste they surely bought again for her.

But the Barrett toothpaste, you can't repurchase it, it's gone from the shelves... but there's hope in the fairies, they, everyone knows, brush their teeth with three different kinds of toothpaste every morning... and perhaps they can get the Barrett toothpaste by magic formula...

Yes, I'm taking the long way around; it's because I find it hard to talk about "Wolfpack," where, by the way, there's no trace of smiles, nor of fairies. "Wolfpack" means a pack of wolves.

Syd says, "the pack appears lined up and screaming" and are "diamonds and cudgels, mist-veiled light."

And again, "lined up, the dead make us sway back and call to order/lined up, the pack in formation/launched, drumming, in a group, early, with our leader at the head"...the social entrapment, in other words.

While "the life that was ours grows sharper and stronger, far away and even further, carrying for a while the tight spring held between whitened bones"...yes, "the life that was ours"...

Syd performs in his "very English" diction for a messed-up leader, the one from "Feel"...the one from "Golden Hair"… but the singing is more raucous... no intimacy here... no magic... and regarding the music, no slight alchemy... nor any bit of psychic folk dust... rather a graceless acoustic, punctuated by organ cacophonies and cascading electric... in short, a great drugged poet giving surgical verses to a terrible band... hard to ask for more.

But back to the music box...

"Waving my arms on the air" is a blob of slender innocent madness that tries to be a pop song, without obviously succeeding and thus succeeding to the highest degree. Don't be surprised, that's how extremist Barrettians reason, a current of which Edgar and I are proud to be a part...

The more a song is disliked by others, the more we like it... has not the Princess Oxana Veleska defined "Waving" as a rare gift?...praise to her then... and praise to her leopard cap... and praise to "Ultraringo" and Rebecca silky lips...not to mention, of course, Diego Santiago de La Torre...

Except for Edgar, until now, I had never mentioned any other member of my Barrettian sect. But I really need some pals to support me because maybe I would understand if here you seemed to hear only a bewildered and very little mystical stellar busker.

One does not become an extremist Barrettian in a day.

And to say that "Waving" isn't even a skeleton song or a whispered little avant-garde piece with dim and aesthetic nonchalance...nothing to do with the hopbird or the beetle for lost poets...it's just a trivial thing...like one of those caps you find on the street...I have one in my pocket for some days, and it keeps me company...and I play with it...I taste the dent...I press the small spikes against the skin...and sure, cap and song have no relation...except they both are small personal talismans... and it's beautiful the moment you understand they're close relatives.

A blob of slender innocent madness we were saying...and regressive...and childlike...especially in the voice and guitar-only version, that of the abominable and silly strummer, without Wright/Gilmour's desperate attempts to capture a pop mini-digest...but regressive and childlike is also my idea of poetry...at least sometimes...and it doesn't matter if the supreme Barrettologist says that the verses of waving are Syd's most insipid...that I like this scarecrow that comes to life, its feet firmly planted on the ground, its arms waving...I like the rainy Saturday, the dogs and cats in the street, the inevitable psychedelic girl sailing in the air, like an intern/apprentice in a sky without diamonds...and if one stands up there, you'll move those damn arms...

And anyway, there are masterpieces for the entire extended Floydian family. Quite wonderful psycho/pop trifles: "Dominoes," "Love song," "Wined and dined."

Among other things, we reluctantly admit, here the Gilmour/Wright contribution is notable.

"Dominoes": lazy and subtly emotional organ, blasé mood, listless singing, and a long musical tail, perfect in its wonderful inconclusiveness. Probably the work of the Syd/mole, live from his cellar/mausoleum/tomb "where life comes without harm"…and where "we play dominoes"...and "a lark passes by chance outside in the sky."

"Love song": innocent piano, vaguely weeping with a final hop bird bounce in a kind of nothing just barely frenzied, a perfect psychic amusement park where the shooting gallery is a blind shot because there is nothing to hit.

These are slow-motion songs, we said. To me, they seem like flowers forever captured by a fossil.

"You hear the monsters," Edgar once told me while we listened to "Dominoes"... "the monsters?"...((brief pause)... "yes, there are monsters hidden under the bed of this song, precisely because life comes without harm."

I've never been able to see those monsters, but some time ago, on a lazy afternoon like "Dominoes," while I was in an old children's bookshop (an ideal place for a terminal Barrettian like me), a lovely little book came into my hands...the story of a child who one night finally manages to see the monster living under his bed, surprising him while destroying his room...once the monster sees the child, he gets frightened because to him it's the child who is a monster "you tidy up by day what I destroy at night"...in the end, they find each other charming and reach an agreement...

Of course, I thought of Edgar...and then of Syd...who maybe also came to an agreement with the monster...or maybe not...

"Esta cancion me pone loco," said Diego Santiago de La Torre, the Hispanic Barrett fan with lively and melancholic eyes of dull ebony, once about "Wined and Dined," someone who ranted about music-box songs wrapped in a flamboyant dressing gown of a psychedelic ghost. "Those notes full of dream and sleep have such a subtle vibration."

"With the past -he added- you can at most make a house of cards, until it all collapses, everything is perfect, the loveliest cards in this song are the chalks and blue ash, therefore childhood again and always"..."melancholy is knowing that the house is about to collapse, that the small fairground organ holding it up is a trick good for three minutes."

Not bad, as you can see, hanging out with a Barrettian sect. You'll always find someone to talk to about those "chalks," that "blue ash," and that "moss-scented wind." Besides having some allies to haunt the nights of orthodox Floydians.

Outside of the melodic drawer of our Bernard White-like chest, packed between cheerful extravagance and sheer lightness, lies "Gigolo aunt," spirited, shiny pop with an almost cool groove, where the banal is redeemed by the senseless chatter of a zombie/vampire wandering around "with a trench coat leaving a satin trail"...and then "ever more pale dances jazz on the beach."

Ah, this is music for the spaced-out, a little march for the seasoned, irresistibly lodging in your head from the start, silly and brilliant together...the beat is fast and incongruous and a scholarly electric guitar implodes and booms happily in its sheer banality.

Where vaporousness reigns, or, if you prefer the unpretentious wisdom of the seasoned, even the banal takes unusual paths...and this staying only with the music, as the words are fireworks, memorabilia of poetry surfacing by chance, almost unwillingly.

Oh, even us mad ones need our pop music, to wander drunkenly from a tune that goes zum zum, dancing ever more pale on the beach, bewitched by the gigolo aunt of the song...who "is a fury" while "her male is a shell."

And "life is this love, firebird's stone that falls into me"...holy sh*t!!! It's this kind of sentence, amidst senseless mumbling, we're eager to hear in our trendy little songs.

Oh, here one feels like the king of the misfit planet, a planet where "we're all here, with buckets and lead cans, ever more pale, looking at the gray, the blue," but "everything, everything is pink on this magnificent day"...

In short, pop for rather cool misfits, a human category quite lovable.

I've already talked about "Rats" while reviewing "Opel."

I'll talk about the lemonade child when reviewing "Radio One Sessions," as the version there present is the best.

That leaves out the bull bride, effervescent elephants, and other tidbits, but I wouldn't want to stretch your patience any further.

So, I’ll bow and close.