‘The Madcap laughs’

It was not a big difference for those who saw Pink Floyd in England from the middle of the sixties. Also then the ‘big audience’ was not quite used to the psychedelic compositions, the hefty performances and for many people it was too much of a thing. But hey: they were used to listening to the music of Herman Hermits and Engelbert Humperdinck.

Set up in 1965 by one of the greatest geniuses, topers and drug users that rock & roll ever brought to live, Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, Pink Floyd grew into a huge monster that could not carry the sweet and bitter burdens of stardom and collapsed under it’s own weight. Just like Barrett, who won with ease during a contest – according to the tradition – from another collector of forbidden stimulants, Jimi Hendrix, when they swallowed LSD and Acid during an English tour. Poor Jimi. Poor Syd.

No wonder that Barrett had to leave the band after the first Pink Floyd album, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, named after Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book ‘The Wind in the Willows’, because he became just as unmanageable as his American equivalent, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. ‘The Piper’ became next to ‘Revolver’, ‘Pet Sounds’, ‘Are you experienced?’and ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ one of the highlights of the experimental sixties pop.

‘The Piper’ and the two solo ‘folk’ albums that Barrett made afterwards: ‘The Madcap Laughs’ (1969) and ‘Barrett’ (1970), can still be seen as remarkable and surprisingly fresh. The special and genius of Barrett’s music lies in the contrasting and complex arrangements, bizarre breaks and rhythms that were combined with a naive, playful, childish and sweet world vision. The first singles of Pink Floyd, ‘Arnold Layne’ (about a transvestite and thus forbidden by the BBC), ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’ had already announced this strange combination. ‘And what exactly is a joke? And what exactly is a dream?’ is typical Barrett.

His ghost kept haunting Pink Floyd; they adored him like in ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975). During the recording Barrett showed up unexpectedly in the Abbey Road Studio’s, not even aware that this record was a tribute to him. His old band members David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright, didn’t even recognize him; bold, fat and puffy as he had become. The ‘Crazy Diamond’, ‘The Piper’, had ‘Black Holes in the Sky’ and was at sea.

‘Sisyphus’

Pink Floyd, gigged in 1966 at the London underground club UFO (Underground Freak Out club), went out into space when you look at the title and cover of their second album from 1968 ‘A saucerful of secrets’ on which they played ‘Set the controls for the Heart of the Sun’. Barrett was replaced by David Gilmour, a friend, who played guitar in such way that Eric ‘Slow Hand’ Clapton looked like Speedy Gonzales. ‘Live’ the band was a sensation. They were the first rock band with a vast light-, movie- en slide show and they experimented quite loudly with quadraphonic sound, electronics, synthesizers and daily sounds. The force in this is obviously quite good on the ’69 double album ‘Umma Gumma’, one of the most experimental records of the sixties.

On this album extreme loud, chaotic psychedelic rock music was alternated with long, almost silent pieces, classical piano themes by eastern mystics. A swan lifts his wings and gets out of the water. One moment you think you are in a church, then you are at the Grand Vizier’s Garden Party in Persia, then in paradise and not much later someone is running upstairs out of a cellar to kill a fly. It had not much to do with rock or pop; Pink Floyd had become a genre at itself.

Their music already exceeded boundaries, but they added even more expressions of art. They worked with film director Michelangelo Antonioni in ‘Zabriskie Point’ (1969), choreographer Roland Petit and the determining composer of Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett, the bass guitarist Roger Waters, made together with sound artist Ronald Geesin ‘Music for The Body’. The movie ‘More’ (1969) from the Iranian – Swiss director Barbet Schoeder made clear that the experiment with multimedia was successful; that image and sound complemented each other perfectly.

In 1970 they released ‘Atom Heart Mother’. They tried to build a bridge between pop and classical music with the support of a brass band and choir. With this album the ‘symphonic’ road was confirmed definitely, although composer and conductor Leonard ‘West Side Story’ Bernstein – when he was at a performance of ‘AHM’ – did not like it at all from a symphonic point of view. He was, however, quite impressed by the other work of the band. Titles like ‘Funky Dung’ and ‘Mother Fore’ confirmed the humor of the band, like they already proved in 1969 in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, where during the announcement of the concert the audience was asked not to smoke (!). During the concert with the title ‘The Massed Gadgets of Auximines’ there was sawing and plumbing on the stage, people drank a cup of tea en a bit later someone fell asleep. The audience, they say, stayed awake.

Also funny was ‘AHM’’s cover with cow of the graphic duo Hipgnosis, who designed almost all of their albums. Later other famous and surreal designs followed like the one with the flying pig, the business man that shakes hands with the other business man who’s on fire (‘why didn’t the first one get a bucket of water?’, you ask immediately) and the black cover with the magic prism was also made by Hipgnosis. TotalArt was the big word and that was it from the start for Pink Floyd.

The already mentioned urge to integrate or imitate (un)usual, daily sounds, dominated their records until the end. Singing birds, grunting and screeching pigs, to bake an egg, ticking clocks, a heartbeat, a jubilating stadium, bleating sheep, a crashing plane, a crying baby, barking dogs; it is only a grasping out of the collection of sounds they used.

On the legendary ‘Echoes’ from the album ‘Meddle’, with the ‘Das Boot’ (echo sounder) piano and the guitar solo that sounded more like the shrieking of an albatross than like the sound of a Fender Stratocaster, this known fact was worked out purely instrumental. The album with the working title ‘Household Objects’ (1974) on which only daily, non-instrumental sounds had to be used; they never worked it out. Months of work in the studio had given them a few minutes of music. Had they worked in the same pace, then this pioneering album would have been released in 1980. Even Sisyphus (a composition of keyboard player Richard Wright on Umma Gumma; named after the mythological Greek founder and King of Korinth) would have been collapsed under this heavy workload.

The time (1968-1973) that passed by between the departure of Barrett and the huge success of the follow-up of ‘Meddle’, ‘DSOTM’, was their most experimental. The band had lost his leader and identity; something they relieved to search for different, not yet explored, roads. A song like ‘Corrosion in the Pink Room’ belongs, according to my opinion, to their most interesting compositions. Strangely this one is never released on a regular studio album. Out of this era springs also the movie of a gig in the classic Roman amphitheatre of Pompei and the music for the movie ‘La Vallee’ of Barbet Schoeder, which was released under the title ‘Obscured by Clouds’ (1972).

‘The Dark Side of Floyd’

Well… many albums, touring and months in the studio; the big masses didn’t have a lot of interest for it. It wasn’t commercial, too difficult, no hit singles and easy tunes and melodies. To much of a thing for John Smith and his wife Joan with an Apron (that is a real Dutchy). It was much of a surprise that with their most ambitious and dark records they won over huge audiences and the world fell at their feet.

‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973) became their big breakthrough. A concept album about living in the spotlights, money, lunacy, time, fame, death, god, love and homecoming. Universal themes that always lead to inspiration. The Greeks already proved that. Few were as effective in this like Pink Floyd and musically as well as lyrically it was a big yummy feast. Waters had grown into a very critical, sharp and engaged lyricist. People that do not get the chills when they hear ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ of the under estimated and somewhat shy Wright, are emotionless.

The already mentioned and melancholic ‘Wish You Were Here’, the favorite album of Gilmour and Wright, sold very good as well and 1977 en 1979 gave us successively ‘Animals’, based on George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Wall’. All masterpieces and million sellers, although the mood became more and more dark and pessimistic.

‘WYWH’ was the first record I ever bought and is their most atmospheric album with ambient-like elements. Richard Wright is playing a key-role; the jazzy outtro of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, their last composition as a group, belongs to my favorite pieces. As if the spirit of Barrett is flying away in the wind to never return again.

‘Animals’, with the famous cover of a drawn-in flying pig between the towers of the London Battersea electricity factory, is their most virulent production, that dwarfs even Johnny Rotten in punk year 1977. Humanity exists out of three types: the ‘Dogs’ are the pragmatic business men that do anything for cash, the ‘Pigs (Three different Ones)’ are the rulers, the tyrants with their so-called morality and the ‘Sheep’ are the proletariat, the flock, the herd. The tone is bitter, the sounds are alienated and deformed.

The under-estimated ‘The Final Cut – A Requiem for the Post War Dream’ (1982) was their eulogy and an indictment against Thatchers’ Falkland War, but it was in fact a solo album of Waters. He stepped out of Pink Floyd, or Pink Floyd stepped out of Waters. Who knows & who cares? Afterwards there were only lawsuits, tours that brought in even more money. The albums that the three other members of the band; guitar player Gilmour, piano player Wright and drummer Mason released afterwards, didn’t have the ‘touch’ that brought the band a world famous reputation. The accompanying tours made the money flow all over the already filled-up cash register. The inspiration had gone.

‘Outside ‘The Wall’

However: during the few concerts of ‘The Wall’ (1980-1981), before ‘The Final Cut’, all came together. The alienation of the pop star, the worship of the golden calf on the stage, the insanity of modern age, the cool and the perfection of the electronics, the criticism against society, the play, the dance, the movies: the wall we build up against everything we are afraid of. The razor sharp spirit of Waters’ background as a war orphan (his father, a pilot at the RAF, crashed in 1944); ‘Pink’s’ fascistic paranoid thinking became in combination with Barrett’s craziness the apotheosis and most compelling what the band would bring ‘live’ on stage. The character ‘Pink’ protects himself against the angry outsiders by building a wall between himself and the audience. At the end of the first part of the concert the wall is totally erected; ‘Pink’ has disappeared. The contact with the audience is broken and he shelters ‘Comfortably Numb’ in his self chosen isolation, instead of being on stage in the spotlights.

Finally, at the end of this rock opera, after the decision of the judge that the wall has to be broken down, when it is completely blown up, after it breaks apart and ‘Another bricks in the wall’ fly round (the only hit single they had worldwide and forbidden by – because it undermined the authorities – South African’s Apartheid Regime), the band performs on stage with only acoustic instruments, between the debris. They sing ‘Outside the Wall’:

‘All alone, or in twos.
The ones who really love you.
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand.
Some gathering together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and the artists.
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all.
Some stagger and fall.
After all it is not easy.
Banging your heart against some mad buggers’ wall.’

Such was the way ‘Pink’ had always wanted it to be. But is was too much, the electronics, the hunt for stardom, the loud guitars; the expectations of the big masses. Waters longed for, just like Barrett before, rest, freedom, peace, for singing birds while gardening perhaps. Just like the people from Berlin at the end of the eighties and the Palestine people, the Israelis, the Tibetans and give ’em a name these days.

And Syd himself? Apparently he is still living in the house of his parents, he is having a bicycle with a basket and a bell that rings and makes him look good, he paints, works in the garden and wants to be left at peace. In the domain of pop music no-one ever heard from him again.

He reached for the secret too soon.

For those who still didn’t get it: Pink Floyd was about ‘inner space’. Not ‘outer space’.

NB: one more time the four members Gilmour, Mason, Waters en Wright would share the stage. This happened during the Live Aid 8 festival in London 2005. Syd Barrett died at July 7, 2007; Richard Wright at September 15, 2008.