Syd Barrett
The Madcap Laughs

THE REVIEW

Welcome to Planet Barrett! Outside, the elements rage on—cold, meteors, snow—we are under Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, a slow planet with an ashen light... And whose melancholic rings have spun a bit too much around Syd's mind, giving him the aura of an Indian Guru without a crown, sinking him into an ever darker introspection. The madcap wants to return from the astral planets he has explored, he's ready to leap, just look at the cover, there's even a beautiful and round groupie/model waiting to be painted... But the yearning remains choked at the starting blocks.

Here there are no psycho-landings as with the Piper with the Floyds, who anyway participate with Gilmour and Wright like never before so sober—and we orbit around the room in a stripped and unhealthy circle, laced with psychotropic drugs soothing bad trips—and only those who have been through it can understand when peace is elusive at night. We are talking about an ex-Pink, we are talking primarily about sounds: let's say it's an ominous album, well played, despite false starts and anarchies, very "stereophonic", with warm, rounded psychedelic folk sounds that still speak of sun-dripping and putrefying sound carcasses, of seasoned marine wood used to make drums, timpani, guitars, and basses for Soft Machine. Opening those guitars and drums today, we might perhaps count the rings in the wood and be amazed at their antiquity.

Syd's songs as a solitary hermit are there, hanging like so many moons between an essential fuzzy guitar and less of a hippie one and a voice "I sing-you-in the bathroom in the morning" however it comes. Songs, indeed: now you find a SydBarrett naive, absent-minded, ultimately happy and even in love with his more or less real women swimming joyfully like iridescent fish in a padded sound aquarium of Mandrax  (Terrapin, Here I go, She Took A Long Cold Look, Love You, Golden Hair); more often he is Dylan-like, lifeless on the floor with black globes in the sky, Eskimo chains tattooed on his head, lost in thought for her in front of a window, or breathing like the water above him(?!) (Dark Globe,  If It's In You, Feel, Long Gone); our hero returns to being a delighted child in the dark and threatening luna park of an octopus-shaped carousel (Octopus); to become enigmatic again - on the edge of the ufological (heavily Spaced!!) - in No Man's Land and No Good Trying, two flashbacks of old Pink's returns.

The de-semantization of Barrett's popular music from his time and youth (folk, beat, soul, surf, rock, psychedelia) and thus of the 20th century, reaches here those extreme consequences that the de-structured Jugband Blues foreshadowed, which is... MADNESS! So mental alienation in a freaked-out game of distorting mirrors—but what did he mean by that? . Madcap Laughs is the psychotic diary of an artist on a no-return journey within himself, where by chance you encounter phosphorescent carcasses of songs, skeletal...

The sea breezes and the Santo&Johnny slides at the intimate finale of Late Night, in which Syd softly speaks words finally wise and calm, only serve to accentuate the sense of alienation of the entire album and its author, who in the chorus confirms feeling alone and unreal. To be listened to in all its genuine madness on foggy and gloomy days, hoping for a sunny dawn to dispel the ghosts.

P.S.: What would an imploded Barrett do today? Maybe he'd be a dark and loco D.J. in some nostalgic little place, or disco pub, would no longer want to know about confused guitars, the '60s, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council: which in a sense he did, closing himself with his records in a hotel room. But that's a whole other trip...