Album title: The Madcap Laughs
Artiste: Syd Barrett
Nationality: English
Label: Harvest
Year: 1970
Grade: C
Previous Experience of this Artiste: Only via the first two Floyd albums
The Trollheart Factor: 3
Landmark value: 5
Tracklisting: Terrapin/No Good Trying/Love You/No Mans Land/Dark Globe/Here I Go/Octopus/Golden Hair/Long Gone/She Took a Long Cold Look/Feel/If It’s in You/Late Night
Comments: Although we’re only beginning the seventies here, Barrett’s music always seems to me to have been firmly rooted in the sixties, with no intention of or willingness to come into the new decade. This has flower power written all over it. The opening track is whimsical and limp, played seemingly mostly on an acoustic guitar, while there’s a certain sense of Floydesque feedback on “No Good Trying to Love You” (perhaps a synonym for how the band felt about him before dismissing him?) and “Love You” sounds like a rushed version of a Beatles/Kinks crossover, though it does have some nice piano in it.
Interesting to see that the man who would replace him in Floyd, Dave Gilmour plays bass here. Perhaps he felt he owed something to the man whose job he was taking? “No Mans Land” features a kind of muttered laconic vocal in the lead-out, which probably best represents Barrett’s approach to music, almost a motif for his way of working in the studio. Apparently he often responded to requests as to what key a song was in from other musicians working with him with a non-committal “Yeah”. Must have been hard to work with the guy. “Dark Globe” almost sounds like Waters is singing, but no it’s Syd of course, again acoustic guitar driven, and you can hear the kind of confused, chaotic way he’s playing. “Here I Go” is another sixties pastiche, then “Octopus” is regarded as the best track on the album, but really that’s not saying much. Sort of puts me in mind of “I Am the Walrus”...
It sounds all very derivative to me, like he’s copying the Beatles really, but it’s not terrible. Definitely not prog though, in any way, shape or form, and had I not heard the first two albums I would never have linked him to Pink Floyd. “Golden Hair” has something about it, a kind of dark menace with tinkling piano like bells and a slow, laconic guitar with a sort of fractured vocal. Despite the fact that it’s a mere two minutes long it says this was the eleventh take! I suppose that just underlines how difficult a person he was to work with. “Long Gone” is another acoustic ballad, but with the rising powerful organ line it’s the closest I see this coming to any sort of Floyd tune.
“She Took a Long Cold Look”, on the other hand, passes by without making any impression on me, while “Feel” sounds like it could have had something but Syd doesn’t seem interested, and the production (or his vocal) keeps coming and going, fading in and out. I also don’t think much of the stop/start instructions and chatter going on during the beginning of “If It’s In You” - if this is intended, a way of showing the usually-shut-out public how things can go on in the studio, a kind of backstage pass to the recording process, then fine. But this is not what it is: this seems to have been the best take the producer could get from Syd, and in a sort of resigned way it was left in. The song, by the way, is fu
cking awful, Syd howling like a wolf, often not in tune. Worst of the bunch by a long long way. At least it’s short.
Which leaves us with “Late Night”, which is a lot better, with what I think is the first proper electric guitar riff; I would have said Gilmour but he’s shown only as playing bass and acoustic guitar, so I guess it’s Syd, so props to him for that. But it’s too little too late, and can’t rescue what is kind of a train wreck of an album, that didn’t need to be. There are some good ideas in there, he just doesn’t seem to have known how to use them properly or mould them into songs.
The Madcap may have laughed, but he didn’t have the last laugh.
Favourite track(s): Dark Globe, Octopus, Golden Hair, Long Gone
Least favourite track(s): If It’s In You
Overall impression: Not a terrible album but, made by anyone else, this would have sunk without a trace. As it kind of did, but it got special attention due to being made by an ex-member of Pink Floyd. All I can say is I’m glad he did leave, as I’d hate to have seen him drag the others in this weird, return-to-the-past direction he seemed determined to head. Look, maybe Barrett was a misunderstood genius, or a genius who was unable to communicate his ideas to others in order to have them properly executed, or maybe he was just a musician who thought he was better than he was. Maybe, had his mental state been better, this might have been a better album. But I’m reminded of a scene from the series
Red Dwarf that perhaps illustrates the problem.
Lister: “The last time you sat your engineer’s exam, you wrote
I am a fish a hundred times on the paper, did a funny little dance, and fainted.”
Rimmer: “If you must know, Lister, what I did was write a thesis on porous circuitry that was so different, so ground-breaking, so ahead of its time that nobody could appreciate it.”
Lister: “Yeah. You said you were a fish.”
If we use this as an analogy for Syd Barrett, I believe that what he did here was write
I am a fish all over this album, then perhaps not fainted but certainly passed out, out of the possibility of ever being a true rock star. Maybe that’s not what he wanted, which is just as well, as it’s not what he got.
Personal Rating: 
Legacy Rating: 
Final Rating: 