I was standing on an escalator in London, riding down into the Underground with a copy of Rolling Stone magazine. It was late 1971 and I was not happy. Life had rolled easily for me at school: out in the world I was foundering. A junkie girl – another lost middle-class kid like myself, only further adrift – tried to talk to me, her fingers yellow with tobacco smoke as they clawed at the handrail. I glared at her in self-protection. “My god”, she said: “Why are you staring daggers at me like that?” She moseyed away and I stalked off down towards the deep gun-barrel horror of the Northern Line.

 

But my mind was elsewhere already. On an inside page of Rolling Stone I had seen a headline: ‘The Madcap Who Named Pink Floyd’ and beneath it a striking photo of the saturnine, spooked Syd Barrett. “According to who you speak to, Syd Barrett is either dead, in jail or a vegetable. In fact he’s alive, and as confusing as ever…” the article began. I read on, transfixed. I knew who Barrett was, of course, or had been – his music with Pink Floyd was my favourite part of them: but I’d never thought to follow him beyond that. Word from my groovier friends was that Syd’s solo records were ‘disappointing’.

 

I stood by the entrance to the platform and sank my attention further into the article. It depicted a bright, successful young man who had run out of momentum and was back in his mother’s house in suburban Cambridge, emerging from the cellar where he now lived for the interview (which turned out to be the last he ever gave). I didn’t know yet any of the details of his breakdown, his ejection from Pink Floyd, or his slide into inertia. His turn of phrase was striking: “I’m treading the backward path…full of dust and guitars”…”I walk a lot – 8 miles a day: it’s bound to show  but I don’t know how.” Barrett spoke in illuminating fragments. “Look at those roses…of course, once you’re into something…” The writer talked about Syd’s ghostly, poetic beauty; and then described how, in a burst of enthusiasm, the ghostly poet showed him a neatly typed manuscript of his lyrics. Syd’s favourite, apparently, was ‘Wolfpack’ from his second (and last) solo album. My train pulled into the tube station and pulled out again. The junkie girl moved up and down the platform, working the passengers. I read on, magnetised:

 

“Beyond the bar winds 

Of the reflecting electricity eyes, tears 

Life that was ours grows sharper and stronger away and beyond;

Short wheeling, fresh spring 

Gripped with blanched bones 

Moaned, magnesium proverbs and sobs.

 

Howling the pack in formation appear

Diamonds and Clubs, light misted fog of the dead 

Waving us back in formation the pack 

In formation.”

 

I was hooked. This was it. To me, Syd Barrett made a trifecta with Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart. This was what rock lyrics were all about: could be all about, taken to the furthest extreme. The way Barrett conflated wolves with playing cards was neat enough; but the surge, the mania, the sheer demolition in the whole song was beyond magic: it echoed how I was feeling as I headed for 19 years of age. 

 

Before long I’d bought the “Barrett” album with Syd’s drawing of insects on the cover, and I’d disappeared into it. Whether I ever came out of it fully again is questionable. Just as I had absorbed Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ on entering my teens, I exited them by virtually becoming ‘Wolfpack’. There should be more songs like this, I thought, and I tried my utmost to write them. 

 

But I can only express me – though I can *inhabit* Syd’s songs easily enough – and I have, thankfully, never lived through a psychotic breakdown. At a guess, this song seems like one of the last that he managed to write, or at least to finish. As with ‘Visions Of Johanna’, the surreal intensity of ‘Wolfpack’ chimed with what was already inside me; it also set the bar high, gave me something to aim for – and miss, of course.

There’s a truth in there that is conjured by words but lies beyond them. 

 

“All-enmeshing, hovering” –  indeed. Thank you Mr B, wherever you went…

by Robyn Hitchcock

With a career now spanning six decades, Robyn Hitchcock remains a truly one-of-a-kind artist –surrealist rock ’n’ roller, iconic troubadour, guitarist, poet, painter, performer.

  “No Good Trying” is one of those very rare songs that I can remember the first time I heard it. In the early 1990s, I had moved to London from Brighton and managed to find myself a ridiculously cheap studio underneath the Museum Book Shop opposite the British Museum. Effectively the bookshop owner, Ashley Jones, was subletting storage space. It was no frills but a lick of gloss yellow paint around the fireplace and a brick-red floor soon made it more cheerful. That was in the room I shared with Jet Boy (Patrick Welch) who introduced me to a whole swathe of music I had previously only encountered from afar like the cool kids at the school disco seen across the floor of the church hall. Patrick had a patience and determination about him that allowed us to immerse ourselves in music that might, on the surface seem unrewarding to the casual listener. In order to keep the rent as cheap as possible, I had to find another artist or illustrator to take the space in the room next to ours. This was a tricky task as although the room was larger there was no natural light just buzzing strip lights. The windows were there but boarded up and had you un-boarded them the view would have been underneath the road of Great Russell Street. Enter Steve (Major Talent) Fishman a towering bass player from LA with a CV that included playing bass for Paul McCartney, Roy Orbison and as part of the house band on The Jonathan Ross Show. Steve loved English music and although I was still really planning to become an illustrator at this point he soon began to encourage me in my music making, which had found a new lease of life through a certain feeling of Englishness that permeated the air around the band I was in, David Devant and his Spirit Wife. I think Steve’s American otherness and enthusiasm for the lyrical absurdism in both my art and music, made me more aware of how important this specifically English way of creating was.

I’ve had hearing loss all my life and so to really hear music I need time and space. It was in Steve’s basement studio (pictured on the inside of the DD&HSW LP Power Words for better Living) that I managed to listen to The Madcap Laughs at sufficient volume for it to trigger felt intensities. Going into Steve’s room was a bit like going into your parents’ bedroom complete with stumbling across bumper packs of multi-coloured condoms under a desk. The floor was freshly carpeted with a giant roll of red paisley carpet Steve had salvaged from The Dominion Theatre around the corner and the walls were entirely covered with shiny silver mirror tape. It was in this underworld realm of grimy otherness that the rug was pulled from under my feet by “It’s No Good Trying“. Syd’s painted floorboards on the cover of the album entangled with the temporal substance of Steve’s customised and somewhat seedy chamber of wonder. Whilst this may all seem to be a rambling unnecessary digression I suppose this is the point. I have come to feel like Syd Barrett’s music helped me place myself in the realm of wonder that is a digression, which honours the specificity of real-life emergence. So my real experience of the music in an actual place is part of the song’s cosmic entanglement. Although taxonomies and ratified theories around music can be engaging there really is no truth other than the actual occasion. This is why I believe that album felt like a shudder from the realm of felt intensities. “No Good Trying” is perhaps the song I associate most strongly with my extra-embodied feeling of bafflement through encountering music that was instantly engaging but at the same time completely sidestepped the rules about what made something that one could judge as being of a good pop standard. Syd’s region of temporal substance is still the creative space I value above all others. It has taken me a lifetime to recognise how the separation of real-life encounters from the conceptual ideas of things is not where I want to place reality. A cut-up vernacular is what I associate with that peculiar Englishness Syd’s music transmitted. It’s not a jingoistic conceptualised idea of national identity but instead the real of an organism taking everything in the region and making it matter for expression. Syd’s use of childhood rhymes and snippets in his art and music has this sense of material agency that I crave. Rather than making a semiotic puzzle, it’s more like how a hoarder is attuned to the non-linguistic frequencies of objects. I can’t help but relate this entangled sense of material agency to Syd’s suggestion that he felt he didn’t need to paint because his neighbour was having success with painting. It’s a whole other discussion to speculate about how the music industry encourages a competing separation that requires confidence to survive if you wish to maintain creativity as something emergent and entangled.

So when I heard the song loud enough to feel it through the large speakers in Steve’s basement studio, there was this sense that it felt completely other and yet completely of my world. This confused me and my cognitive brain started to ask questions like, is this cool to like? Is this deliberately weird? Is it the work of a madman as the title suggests? I mean, I knew “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Lane” and although there is a feeling of the weird within these songs, they have a much more easily located sense of pop. There was a disruption of normal ways of perceiving that some might connect to drug use but I prefer to experience it as an intuitive understanding of life as felt intensities. So whilst other avant-garde music may interrupt habitual cliché with a more strategic form of disruption and cut-up this only creates an opening onto the cosmos of feeling that Syd was operating inside. In this place, the pleasure of melody and word as vital matter is fully activated in much the same way that Bob Dylan, an artist Syd Barrett greatly admired, transmits the meaning inside the event of the song. I can’t think of any other music that has had this trance-formative effect on me. For a start, I could hear exactly what was happening in the record instrumentally but it still seemed to be from somewhere apart that was inside that basement room.

So even though Syd Barrett’s contingent approach to sound has become influential the wonder was not a technically innovative thing. Very soon after hearing the song, I wrote “I Think About You”. It seems strange that this found its way onto our first album because it was so different to how I had been making songs up until then. In the end, the swagger of “I Think About You” sounds a far cry from the gently unsettling swoon of “No Good Trying” but years later I read how Syd had been into Bo Diddley and this Diddley rhythm was always the reference point Foz, our guitarist, would use to keep us in time. Strangely enough, this elastic temporal approach in Syd’s music is something I enjoy but is not easily assimilated into “professional” ideas of making music. Quite a famous producer who is now sadly dead asked me if the demo I sent him was a joke because I had played the drum machine by hand in a fluctuating beat. The producer was from an esteemed avant-garde group and yet he wanted something in time – this schism in approaches stayed with me. Now I think I’m happy valuing the entangled experience of temporal substance* in specific personal experience above the convenience of communicated ideas. “No Good Trying” – I’m not even gonna try?

* temporal substance: a merging of memory, event, matter, location, time, space, potential and felt intensities in a cosmos of material agency.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Musician and artist Mikey Georgeson is perhaps best known for his time in the late ’90s and early ’00s as the frontman of art rock band David Devant & His Spirit Wife. Georgeson performs as The Vessel, through which English stage magician David Devant would supposedly express himself. The Vessel told Brighton’s Punter magazine: “It’s quite simple really, as a magician Devant didn’t really fulfil himself so he said ‘I shall walk down the corridors of contemporary music’, so he chose us. I am his vessel.” As The Vessel, Mikey was once sawn in half by spectral roadies and on another occasion fired from a cannon, appearing at the opposite end of the Duke of York’s cinema, clothes tattered, and face blackened from the explosion. Mikey is a Doctor in Fine art and has recently developed a line in performative keynote speeches as a mythopoeic figure Professor Kimey Peckpo. The latest David Devant and his Spirit Wife Lp is at www.cutoutandkeepme.com and his new solo LP is at www.mrmikey.net

 

 

I Never Lied to You is by no means Syd Barrett’s best-known song, nor is it his most fully-developed. I’d even argue that the instrumentally fleshed-up ‘official’ album version of the track lacks the drama and affect of Syd’s first recorded pass at the piece. And it’s this first take – featuring only his audibly heartfelt vocal against a strummed acoustic guitar – that I’ll be discussing here.

Usually I find myself responding more to the sound of Syd – his voice, his melodies, the enveloping textures of his songs – rather than to his lyrics. But with I Never Lied to You, I’ve always felt he really wants the listener to be paying close attention, to be taking note of what he’s saying.

And what does he say, exactly? There are minor lyrical differences between the first take and the album version, and further discrepancies between what I hear myself and transcriptions of the lyric on the internet. For what it’s worth, the version on this page is my own take on Syd’s first take.

Now as a younger man, I guess I felt Syd had to be opening up his heart to a girl here, a lover who’d gone out of his life. (Been so hard to bear with you not there…) But as time went on, that reading came to seem less plausible.

I may then have gone through a phase when I wondered if Syd was perhaps addressing himself in the song; that this was a stark testimony to his own well-chronicled ambiguities, not to mention his ambivalence about his brief career in the public eye (Everything to you was never easy, so I went ahead around my world. I saw the things you do, arriving by your side to see you looking too…).

But I kept coming back to those opening lines: the freighted way in which Syd sings – as I hear it – about a future reconciliation with someone. So what is going to happen then? There will be shoulder-pressing in the hall could be an image from an Anglo-Saxon epic poem. Wine and drinking in the yard sounds like it should be fun, yet why does the prospect sound quite so eerie?

The personal interpretation which I now find difficult to resist first suggested itself very early in this millennium, before Syd’s death in 2006, but around the time in 2003 when I lost my father. I believe something half-remembered from the Aeneid may then have resurfaced for me: the episode when Aeneas encounters his dead father among a host of other spirits in the underworld, and although they speak together they can no longer touch each other.

The poignancy of this scene returned to me whenever I listened to those mournful lines of Syd’s. And around that time, too, I belatedly began to read books about Syd’s life as well as listen to his music.

It was then that I learned what a challenge it had been for Syd in his mid-teens to adjust to losing his own father. I later dared to speculate upon his loss in my novel The Ballad of Syd & Morgan (Propolis, 2018), suggesting that Syd ‘went ahead’ into his musical world, at least initially, in the forlorn hope of somehow reconnecting with his musically-talented father. Been so hard to bear with you not there still sounds to me as frank as anything in Syd’s repertoire; but it’s the lines just beforehand – It’s been just like you’re gone for just one day for so long – which cut me to the quick: the way this wound remains fresh; somewhere up ahead there may be another girl, there won’t be another father.

I wouldn’t dream of claiming this to be the song’s ‘correct’ reading. I aim only to show how Syd the gifted songwriter in this instance overlays and underpins my personal experience, allowing me to turn what he says to my own emotional ends. It does interest me, however, that on the ‘Barrett’ album the song which segues into I Never Lied to You is Waving My Arms in the Air, another short opaque piece which peaks with the animated, twice-sung cry: You shouldn’t try to be what you can’t be!

On both these tracks Syd seems so intent on establishing his own credentials as a straight-dealer that I’ve often wondered why he felt so obliged to stress his integrity, and which person in particular he needed to convince. Sometimes my own fancy then nudges me into thinking of George Washington, who as a boy famously declared he ‘could not tell a lie’ when owning up to cutting down a cherry tree – and who did he say this to? Yes: his father. Or rather, the boy Washington might well have said it, had the tale not been entirely apocryphal!

But that’s the beauty of words, written or sung, when plucked with seemingly casual finesse out of the ether by an artist of Syd’s calibre: they can carry their own independent forms of truth and meaning. Whatever I Never Lied to You really is about (and only Syd could say), it speaks to me currently in the way I’ve just outlined, offering at its close a faint but real possibility of resolution, in which being both alone and still ‘with’ the lost loved one – albeit now only in spirit – can ultimately take its place within the natural order of things.

Haydn Middleton 4 January 2019

More about the author:

HAYDN MIDDLETON lives in rural Oxfordshire with his partner, Decca Warrington.  Between them they have six children.  For well over forty years he has loved and been lifted by the work of Syd Barrett and E. M. Forster.  For information on his work, please see www.haydnmiddleton.com.

For more featured songs, please visit our Story Behind the Songs pages

The song Bob Dylan Blues is a very early song by Syd Barrett, written early in 1965 but not recorded until during the February 1970 sessions for the album ‘Barrett’. It was thought lost until it turned up after 30 years in a tape collection at home by David Gilmour, and was released on ‘The Best of Syd Barrett’ in 2001. The song is similar to ‘Effervescing Elephant’ in that it reflects the creativity of a young Syd Barrett with its humour and word play.

Girl friend Libby Gausden remembers how, as a birthday present, she was taken to see Bob Dylan with Syd in May 1964, in London. ‘We arrived at the South Bank and he said, “Look, it’ s the me and you from every town.” Each town sent one Syd Barrett, the first time I’d seen people like him,’ recalled Libby. Three years later, this is the location where Syd would triumph in ‘Games for May’– little did he know…

‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ was released in USA in May 1963, but in UK only in November. Soon Freewheelin’ sat at Number One in the charts, and during 1964 ‘The Times They Are A’ Changin’ followed with, in November that year, ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’. That last album contains the song ‘ I Shall Be Free #10’ and the lyric, ‘ I’m a poet; I know it, hope I don’ t blow it.’ Syd, as always a clever collage artist, picked bits and pieces from all these albums to write a very personal parody of, and in the style of, Bob Dylan.

The music itself is in the style of waltz tempo ‘Chimes of Freedom’ featuring similar chords. The song title is akin to what was used on ‘Freewheelin’, with Dylan’ s own name in not one but two song titles of the album – quite an achievement for a new artist: ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’and ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream.’ When Syd sings “the wind you can blow it” it is a common reference from several of Dylan’s songs, as are the shoes and the hat references. The rhyming of “dreams” and “seems” occurs in ‘Talking World War III Blues’ and “war in the cold” comes from ‘Masters Of War.’

This is a photo of his then girl friend Jenny Spires, taken by Syd himself. Jenny comments:“this pic Syd took of me in v. early 67.  the jacket was cool…  the satin trousers from Granny’s, where else? at that time.  But def.  The Bob Dylan Cut.”
The letter (right), from Syd to Jenny, documents the origins of Bob Dylan Blues:”I have written a song about Bob Dylan. Yeh! Yeh! Soul, God, etc. It starts off “I got the Bob Dylan blues and the Bob Dylan shoes and my hair an’ my clothes in a mess but you know I just couldn’t care less”. In fact a bit satirical and humorous. Ho! Ha! Hee! Tee! for Syd.”

Jenny tells us this fascinating story about the background and the letter:“By 1965 Syd or ‘Rog’, as he’d sign himself, was writing to me two or three times a week. He was at Camberwell Art School and now that he had settled into Stanhope Gardens, he wanted to take some of his paintings there. This letter came late January/early February 1965.

Before I knew Syd, I had been listening to Dylan and a range of folk, blues and rock which we discovered we were both into. So, when he sent me this verse it didn’t seem that unusual at the first. Typically, it just made me laugh.

Like him, it’s full of humour, ‘a bit satirical’ , he writes, ‘ Quiet while I make like cat’ , ‘ my gut and my wallet are fat’ , ‘ buy all my discs and a hat’ , hilarious. It’ s also a homage to ‘ Dylan’ , who Syd identifies himself with, ‘ Cause I’m Mr. Dylan the King’. It’ s ingenious. Syd, with his painterly eye, could always transcend. In the simplest terms we learn that Dylan the King sings ‘ bout God and my girl’ , ‘ bout what’ s right and what’ s wrong’ , about ‘ dreams’ and what ‘ seems’ . And, he could ‘ prophesy all kinds of things’.

For me, at this time, the song was about that ‘Freewheelin’, carefree concept we got into. It’ s a move towards a freer and better world away from the one we see in ‘ Song To Woody’ , ‘ A Man of Constant Sorrow’ , ‘Hard Rains’ and ‘ Don’ t Think Twice’ . Dylan was a huge influence on us all at the time. His songs were our protest.

So, that weekend, as we were driving to London, cruising down the A1, as much as one can in a blue Austin A30 with the indicator switch on the dashboard, I learnt the rest of the song. Syd had several little songs on the go that we sang to … and I was used to hearing him play acoustic guitar, but this song played with all its Dylanesque resonance, is beautiful.

At the time, seeing Syd full throttle in a band came as no surprise to me. He was good. The old T Set/Floyd blues band doing ‘King Bee’ and his songs ‘Lucy Leave’ and ‘Double O’ Bo’ was exciting. Syd’ s development as a song writer took hold rapidly. Within a year the band was moving into, what we called, ‘free’ improvisation, and with the free flow of Syd’ s lyrics, in songs like ‘Astonomy Domine’ and ‘Chapter 24’, he became a considerable influence.”

Bob Dylan was of course a phenomenal influence on many people. In the case of Pink Floyd, even though it is not obviously reflected in their music, Dylan was a hero for all their main three creative leaders. Syd wrote a song in his honour. Roger Waters often refers to Dylan as an inspiration and he has, in later days, become something of the protest singer Dylan started out as. David Gilmour received Dylan’s début album from his parents in the USA long before it was released in UK.

Two years after Syd’s song, Bob Dylan had grown in importance and after his motorcycle accident and disappearance in mid 1966, to almost mythical levels, affecting many parts of the culture. Roger Waters, in one of his songs on ‘The Wall’, sings of the “obligatory Hendrix perm”; something which Jimi Hendrix in fact had adopted from Bob Dylan in his admiration of him. So in reality it was a “Dylan perm” – and for some people more than others.
Jenny remembers:-“Over the Christmas holiday of 1966, Syd played me an acoustic version of his song Arnold Layne; deep down a protest song. The Floyd were to record and release it as a single in the New Year. In the meantime, Peter Whitehead had shown me the rushes for his film, ‘ Tonite Let’ s all Make Love in London’ but he was agonising over a soundtrack. I suggested he use the Floyd’ s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and luckily, after hearing them, he agreed. Within a week Peter booked Sound Techniques and we went in to film them just before the Arnold Layne sessions.

Before my return to London after the holiday, I had my hair bubbled. When Syd saw it his eyes literally shone. There were several people on the scene who had this wonderful, if strange, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’ hair style. Some of them naturally, and others following, but initially it was done in that image of Dylan on the cover of ‘Blonde on Blonde’, which we had endlessly listened to, and identified with, the previous year. Quite soon, that hairstyle also became associated with Hendrix too. There was a buzz growing about him in London and, in the event, I did meet him before I saw him play at The Saville Theatre for the first time.”

For Jenny then, this is certainly a very special song, close to her heart. When the song was rediscovered and released in 2001, it was a surprise and a gift to many of us.
Jenny remembers:-“When I heard ‘The Bob Dylan Blues’ again, after all those years, I was amazed and marvelled at it all over again. It took me right back to the time when Syd was joyful about everything. I really think people love that song now. I hope Dylan does too. I won’t forget it again and am so grateful to Malcolm Jones and David Gilmour for having recorded it and kept it safe and unadulterated over the years because it’s quintessentially, impeccable Barrett.” 

David Gilmour commented about the song, which must have been dear to him also: “Bob Dylan Blues is a bit of fun. He was quite a Dylan fan, though there was a bit of jealousy there, too. If a tribute, then a mocking one!”

(Very many thanks to Jenny for permission to publish these personal mementos and her reminiscences)