![]() Love You is a sweet, fun and very together romper featuring the same backing band. No easy feat, because the backing band was added afterward to the Barrett guitar/vocal bed track. The band in this case is fellow Cambridge pals The Soft Machine. No Good Trying is perhaps the best example of a rarer kind of Barrett song - the band-backed rocker. It has all the hallmarks - audible pick strums, creative, endearing and original lyrics which have lines of child-like simplicity and others which are syncopated and psychedelic, sometimes sounding quite fragile, not terribly well-rehearsed and difficult to follow. It’s the song I would show anyone who was curious about what Barrett’s solo material sounds like. The Madcap Laughs begins with Terrapin, a song I’m reminded of every time I see a GMC Terrain in traffic. ![]() And then I’ll do something fun - reimagine the 1969-’70 Floyd albums as though Syd were still contributing to the band. Thirty years on, I intend to go through Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett’s two stark, beautiful solo albums with more sophisticated ears, a lot of life experience and heaps of perspective. This, therefore, could make the title of the album The Madcap Laughs – which Gilmour shares was his not Barrett’s idea – somewhat incorrect.Here are two albums I desperately wanted to define me at 17. The Pink Floyd guitarist even goes as far as to suggest that long-running fan theory that Barrett actually sings “mad cat” and not “madcap” in ‘Octopus’ may be true. “ It’s extremely hard to get them correct,” Gilmour shares of Syd Barrett’s idiosyncratic performance and lyrical style. In addition to performing the two covers, Gilmour also relates how the task of going through Syd Barrett’s original master tapes to discern the precise meaning of his words has been challenging. (The book has yet to receive a title or release date.) Gilmour’s newly rediscovered fascination with these songs comes from proofreading a forthcoming book of Syd Barrett’s lyrics. “ It sounds like a lockdown song,” Gilmour shares of the second cover. Later in the video, at 35-minutes, Gilmour performs ‘ Dominoes‘ from Syd’s 1970 album Barrett. It’s like a fool-proof combination of lyrics, really, and then the chorus comes in and changes the tempo but holds the whole thing together.” The idea was like those number songs like ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’ where you have, say, twelve lines each related to the next and an overall theme. “ I carried that about in my head for about six months before I actually wrote it,” Barrett shared of ‘Octopus’ in one 1970 interview, “ so maybe that’s why it came out so well. The first is ‘ Octopus‘ which Gilmour performs around the 20-minute mark. More than 52 years since Gilmour first assisted Barrett in recording his post-Pink Floyd solo debut The Madcap Laughs he again reprises one of Barrett’s original compositions. (Barrett was famously ejected from the group in 1968 after becoming increasingly erratic on and off stage.) “ We played 5 university dates, which were pretty strange! And then the band decided was more of a liability than it was worth.” “We were very briefly, for five gigs only in January 1968, in the band together,” Gilmour adds. Somehow, very, very sadly, he lost his mind.” “ Syd Barrett started Pink Floyd,” Gilmour recounts, “ he was its original leader… He was a couple of years younger than all the other guys but he was very bright. ![]() David Gilmour has covered Syd Barrett‘s ‘Octopus’ and ‘Dominoes’ in a new livestream.
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