Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs

THE REVIEW

"I'm only a person whose armbands beat on his hand, hang tall".

This phrase, taken from the song "Dark Globe", succinctly explains what "The Madcap Laughs" represents. Even before being an album, this work is a photo, an instant snapshot of the artist that Barrett was. Unlike his former bandmates, Syd was not an aesthete; for him, an album didn't have to be a collection of perfectly performed songs, but rather a photograph of a given moment and a certain state of consciousness. The songs on "The Madcap Laughs" are in continuous evolution, suspended in a dimension accessible only to Barrett, they are not based on formal structures, it is a continuous change in rhythms, chords, moods that reflect the restlessness and complexity of the soul of the founder of Pink Floyd.

Indeed, all the people who played on this LP, and we are talking about folks like the Soft Machine, recount the difficulties they encountered while recording with Barrett. Hugh Hopper said, "His music was not very regular, you had to pay a lot of attention to it, and then it changed suddenly". In fact, the sensation when listening to the album is exactly this, the musicians struggle to follow the irregularities of the music, they are almost always playing catch up and to get an idea of this, just listen to "No Good Trying" or "Octopus". In this record, Syd Barrett abandons the experimentation, the noise, and the freaky excesses of the debut album of "his" Pink Floyd and bares himself.

The album starts with "Terrapin", a dreamy love song, ethereal, made magical by his singing and the soft electric guitar arrangement. But even if the theme is love, it doesn't fall into banality; in the chorus, Syd gifts us yet another surreal gem by singing about luminous fins that bite a clown. The moment in which the essence of this artist is truly captured is when he sits alone in front of the microphone with his guitar and his fears as in "Dark Globe", where, in a poignant and extremely sincere manner, he sings the malaise of his soul, launching a desperate cry for help. This same malaise is also perceptible in "If It's In You", which with its false start shows us the true Barrett, a man, perhaps a genius, trying not to be crushed by his own spirit.

However, imagining only a depressed and insane artist would be completely wrong, as Barrett still managed to gift us with flashes of his irony and youthful spirit, as in the clumsy pop of "Love You", which with its saloon-like atmosphere, mocks the most saccharine and hackneyed clichés of love songs, or in "Here I Go" where over a quirky boogie, a bizarre love story with a happy ending is told. The album concludes with "Late Night", which with its dreamy slide guitar and its melancholically romantic lyrics, in which Barrett defines himself as lonely and unreal, gives us a glimmer of hope in which he perhaps still believed, gifting us not an album but rather a piece of himself, a snapshot of his life.