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Listen To Syd Barrett's Best Tracks!

4:03 PM GMT 25/01/2010

Syd Barrett, from the Madcap Laughs cover shoot.

AS PROMISED IN the latest issue of MOJO, here's a playlist of our favourite Syd Barrett performances. Consider it a companion piece to our Making Of The Madcap Laughs cover feature.

In the article in the latest MOJO, Madcap sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson reveals the secrets of the album's iconic cover and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour admits that he still toys with the idea of polishing up a selection of Syd outtakes for release.

"These days, you can take bits of each and seam them together invisibly, and make something that's still Syd but a little bit prettier," Gilmour tells MOJO's Pat Gilbert. "It's one of those things I'm tempted to look at, but I suspect your ardent Syd fans would go, 'That's terrible, sacrilege!'"... But it's important that the world is reminded what a total genius he was."

And it is in that spirit that we humbly offer our Top 20 Syd tunes, encompassing songs recorded with Pink Floyd and as a solo artist...




And yet the legend of Barrett has partly hinged on the music that never quite made it onto an official release. The following three tunes have attracted more than their proportionate share of mystique and no Floyd or Barret fan should be unfamiliar with them...

Pink Floyd - Lucy Leave

Terrific 1965 demo: taut R&B with Syd's dragging vocal already suggestive of lysergic torpor and a guitar solo that predicts The Velvet Underground.

Pink Floyd - Scream Thy Last Scream

Typically wrong-headed attempt to write a "single" to follow See Emily Play, which, if actually released, might have killed the summer of love stone dead, what with its 'orrible/brilliant pile-up of speeded-up goblin vox, instrumental über-freakout from 2 mins and a sinister witchy lyric: "Scream thy last scream, old woman with a casket"

Pink Floyd - Vegetable Man

Another putative "single" from the last knockings of Syd's Floyd tenure, this filmed for the BBC in December, 1967. Running out of lucidity, Barrett wrote a song describing the clothes he was wearing at the time. Yet it's the inner Syd's identity crisis that shines through: "It's what I wear, it's what you see / It must be me, it's what I am / Vegetable man..."

WIN A BAG OF SYD! Featuring Piper, Madcap, Barrett and Opel!

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 4:03 PM GMT 25/01/2010

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  • Ha! Vegetable Man is plenty lucid - and it's about much more than Syd's outfit.

    Posted by Jeremy at 1:07 AM GMT 28/01/2010 Report Abuse

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  • Vegetable Man, Scream Thy Last Scream, Lucy Leave etc. should be released officially - they have been on bootlegs for years. What are they waiting for?

    Posted by Filthy McNasty at 7:51 AM GMT 28/01/2010 Report Abuse

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  • In the MOJO radio advert plugging this issue, what is the name of the pink floyd song being played in the background?

    Thanks!
    Camel

    Posted by Camel at 11:27 PM GMT 28/01/2010 Report Abuse

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