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As a good terminal Barrettian, every now and then I pick up my copy of "The Wind in the Willows" and randomly read a few lines, savoring the words thoroughly.
Then, borrowing the sleepy melody of “Terrapin” or the lively rhythm of “Octopus”, I start humming them, perhaps reworking and rhyming a bit. It’s a game my friend Edgar taught me a long time ago.
Yes, I know, the seventh chapter of that fantastic book shares the same title as the first Floyd album, but it’s always the songs from “Madcap” that come to mind.
“Madcap”… The first time I listened to it, I told myself: oh no, no, it can't be... I want to live here, in this magic bubble, in this limping and crooked grace.
And I somewhat abandoned “Piper” and the fresh and cheeky “Syd,” the one with the powerful and derailing sound and sugary melodies streaked with acid.
And I embraced that other "Syd," the sleepy one, the one that occasionally crackles like an old stove or a cough and plays guitar chords that seem like rafts always about to sink.
And I wasn’t alone in this delirium; Edgar was there too. Yes, we were really terminal. And we did crazy things, or maybe just silly ones.
For example, we imagined we were the authors of a Barrettian dictionary and invented dry definitions for the songs, like "a journey inside the bubbles just before they burst like a blues played by a lazy minstrel who doesn't even know he’s playing" (“Terrapin”); or "a fabulous and astonishing verbal tour de force on capricious and crackling music, almost like the primer of meteorological phenomena or the burning encyclopedia of jolts came to life" (“Octopus”).
Ah, sometimes we surrendered, for a track like “Long Gone” really left us speechless (and indeed what was it, blues, folk, psychedelia?), or we took notes pointing out, for example, that the organ touches in “No Good Trying” darted like little snakes.
Or we organized the champions league of “Barrett” songs, starting from the round of sixteen, making draws with slips of paper bearing the names of the songs.
Between the two of us, Edgar was definitely the more brilliant. He, passionate about folk, both English and Italian, discovered a close cousin of “Golden Hair” in a Marche serenade.
Oh my gosh, to him it was a close cousin, I wasn’t so sure about that.
“Golden Hair” (“Look out the window, golden hair”) is that wonder of wonders from “Madcap,” that solemn little thing, with night echoes and reverberations, fireflies here and there, and a voice that gives you chills.
Then Edgar kept a drawing of a trilobite in bright colors (yellow, orange, blue, and pink) like a relic, which he had stolen from his seven-year-old niece and claimed it was the caterpillar from “No Good Trying.”
And he translated the songs without knowing almost anything about English. His method wasn’t really the best, as he limited himself to cross-referencing different translations he knew, and when he could, he did it alone, risking to make monumental blunders.
For example, if I told you “she wandered over the bridge, on the water, then ceasing her slow advance, moved away from that spreading, only she intoxicated, only she hidden in the small valley of my gaze,” I should also tell you that this is “Barrett” only fifty percent, and it would be pure luck if it were more. Anyway, it didn’t matter since I didn’t know English either.
And yet this little piece of text (Edgar/Barrett) is taken from “Feel,” a highly underrated track which is actually a damn lied, a “Golden Hair” in sixteenth notes with a bit more of ramshackle imperfection, solemn certainly, but kind of offbeat, where we’re strumming and not so cool.
Here, we are in the presence of a psychic folk/blues even if it still retains a little bit of Tinker Bell's powder, and really the bare minimum, considering that with that ending (“just as I’ll be leaving on a swaying wheel they’ll strike, the strangled sob, the sound of a cursed bell”) Tinker Bell has nothing to do. It’s a magnificent text, and it even reminds me (maybe I’m exaggerating) of certain “Illuminations” by “Rimbaud.”
Edgar was fantastic and still is, even though over the years he’s gone a bit out of his mind. At home, I have a novel he wrote, something that is all over the place. But opening it at random, it still works quite well. And even those bits of wisdom/madness are excellent fish for the Barrettian melody net.
Just like that novel, “Madcap” is something enormous, “a painting as big as a wall” according to the famous definition by “Syd” himself, and without even the nails to hang it, Edgar added.
But maybe the phrase was “as big as a ceiling,” I don’t remember well.
“Madcap,” genial and whimsical, goes in all directions, allowing itself pauses in the most unexpected places, and does so by grinding genres, as each song is a genre unto itself, between vagueness and sudden sparks, between vaudeville jokes and drunken songs, between sepulchral folk and poignant nighttime ballads. Yet amid all this chaos, which was perhaps the chaos of a soul, it manages to be bare, essential, basic. Almost a low-budget film, compared to the Piperian blockbuster.
Low budget and with grainy film.
And the ancient splendor perhaps only remains in the already mentioned “Golden Hair” and in “Octopus,” which are then the two strong points of the record.
“Octopus,” the epitome of Barrettian imagery, is all about the rhythm of the words, and it gives the idea of a fantastic deck of cards, shuffled and thrown into the air. I refer to “Rob Chapman” and his “Irregular Thoughts” for an exhaustive map of the many citations of a whole series of obscure and eccentric British authors. These are pages that take your breath away, as the song does.
Yes, “Octopus” and “Golden Hair” still fly thanks to Tinker Bell’s powder, but the heart of the album lies in other songs, in those simple and touching nocturnes about absence (“Dark Globe,” “Late Night,” “Feel”), or in the lazy and hypnotic “Terrapin,” the one with the bubbles about to burst.
“Sometimes I feel so alone and unreal...” he sings in “Late Night” accompanied by a guitar sketching magic lantern light plays.
“I’ve tattooed my brain in every way, will you miss me, will you miss me a little bit?...” he sings in a raucous voice in “Dark Globe” accompanied by a tavern-like lousy guitar.
All unusually moving for someone who had been pop, magical, mysterious, and hyper-artistic. But moving, never.
The songs from “Madcap” were for me the luminous appearance of something I didn’t think existed, a stripped-down and lazy, amateurish and childlike music, capable, like few others, of caressing the heart and soul.
And I’ve always seen “Syd Barrett” as a mystical/starlit busker capable of fluttering that inner mumble destined otherwise to suffocate in dust.
Too bad it didn’t help him much.
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