Will you please keep on the track?

Gigolo Aunt - Syd Barrett (Peel Session version)

Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett is now surely most famous for his oft-quoted drugs-related descent into madness. There are plenty of stories that have become common currency: the crushing up of mandrax pills into a paste and smearing them all over his head, the gigs at which he would stand at the front of the stage, playing a single note on his Telecaster for the whole show, the day on which the 5-man Pink Floyd became a 4-man Floyd because they simply decided not to pick him up on the way to a gig. There are plenty of echoes of Syd in ex-Libertine Pete Doherty, and I'd venture to suggest that Doherty's is a similar talent; the writing of both contains the sort of left-field, slightly fractured visions that a more sober writer would probably never come to.

A by-product of the Syd mythology is that among Pink Floyd fans he's often seen merely as "the one who went a bit mad". These are the ones that delight in the stories of a spectacularly overweight Syd turning up at the recording sessions for their 70s masterpiece Wish You Were Here to "do his bit". Ho ho, the funny mad chap has turned up again. There's a tendency to view his post-Floyd recordings as the products of a rambling nutter - entertaining, diverting, yes, but really little more than a diverting freak show.

This is terribly wrong. Malcolm Jones, the producer of Syd's first LP, The Madcap Laughs before Roger Waters and David Gilmour stepped in, has a very insightful article up on www.sydbarrett.net called "The Making of The Madcap Laughs" in which he says of the Madcap sessions "This was Syd at full tilt! At this session Syd was in great form, and very happy. No matter what people may say to the contrary, Syd was very together". Anyone who is so completely out of it as many of the myths suggest wouldn't be as creative as Barrett obviously was at this point. I'm not for one minute suggesting that he wasn't affected by his drug use... just that the category of "drug casualty" has been an easy pigeon-hole for lazy journalists and rock historians, and, dare I say it, suited the later career of the Floyd admirably.

For all the rights and wrongs though, it was touching to hear that Roger Waters had dedicated Wish You Were Here to Syd at Live 8. I'll admit to welling up a little when I heard that - and part of me wonders if, indeed, being able to do this in front of such a large audience was one of Waters' motives for getting involved. Whatever, it was a fitting nod to the man responsible for the band in the first place.

So, what of the song?

I hear the lyrics as this:

Grooving on down in a trenchoat
With the satin entrail
Seems to be all around in tin
And lead pail, we pale
Jiving on down to the beach
To see the blue and the grey
Everything's all on, it's rosy
It's a beautiful day

Will you please keep on the track?
'Cause I almost want you back
'Cause I know what you are
That you're the Gigolo Aunt

It's a wonderful child's-eye view of a middle-aged relative carrying a bucket to the sea-side. I think. I read the bit about "keep[ing] on the track" as the child (Syd?) failing to keep up with her as they go along their merry way. I particularly like the mixture of the detail in the description of the trenchcoat having a satin lining (the sort of thing kids notice because they like the feel of it) versus the abstraction of the description of the seaside itself, "the blue and the grey". It's a beautiful, uninhibited take on childhood summers, and the best thing is it happens three times.

The Peel session version here was the first piece of solo Barrett I ever heard; it was on a free Peel Sessions tape given away with either the NME or Melody Maker, and I remember it well as it was the first time I heard The Birthday Party too. I felt a bit cheated when I later heard the more finished version of the song on the Barrett LP, as it has two more verses; while they have their own moments of greatness, I actually think that the repetition of this insanely carefree single verse makes the song. I don't for one minute buy the argument that Syd had forgotten the words. He sings the word "grooving" with far too much emphasis for it to be either laziness or forgetfulness. It has to be deliberate. And it works tremendously well.

...and then there's the guitar solo. One of Barrett's amazing strengths was his guitar playing. He was no Hendrix or Clapton (thankfully) in the sense that his playing is pretty much devoid of what anyone might normally consider to be traditional technique. Moreover, the solo on Gigolo Aunt is comprised almost entirely of the sort of licks you would normally expect to find on a Buddy Holly record - there's a bit around the 1 minute 52 mark that sounds like it's come straight out of That'll Be The Day. There are things in there, though, that "normal" guitarists simply don't do. He plays quietly, for a start. Then there are the swoops up the fretboard (particularly noticeable when he reintroduces the opening figure later on at the end of the song) and the way he can land on plenty of "wrong" notes but make them sound entirely natural and deliberate. A real gift.

The other thing that disappointed me when I heard Barrett was the much more conservative playing on it - particularly the fact that it has a full drum kit. Gilmour's bass and organ playing on this version are much more wayward, but it's the bongos that make it. Bongo fury, no less!

There are so many things on this track that are ever so slightly wrong. Gilmour insists on playing a G chord on the organ while Syd is clearly playing a D9 in the verses. The co-ordination of the double tracked vocals in some places is at best fairly approximate (including minor alterations of lyrics in the choruses), and it's obvious that Dave Gilmour and Jerry Shirley are having to second guess Syd's somewhat unconventional changes from verse to chorus, or from instrumental back into the verses. It's equally obvious that there's some guesswork on Syd's part too! But that's one of the reasons I love it - it's not a well-polished and finely-cut diamond, more a piece of stained glass that's been rough-hewn from a window. It's beautiful, but all its sharp edges are still very definitely in place.

Buy the Syd Barrett radio sessions

Welcome

This opening post is really little more than a statement of intent. My name, for this purpose, is Steve Local. I live in Birmingham, England, and sing folk songs for fun. Really.

I've fancied running a blog for a while, but hadn't, until now, thought of anything I genuinely wanted to write about. Now, I don't write subjective songs about my own life, as, to be honest, singing them would bore me to death. And I came to the conclusion that writing a diary-style blog would do exactly the same thing. If something is dull to write, it's pretty certainly going to be pretty dull to read.

Then it came to me, in a burst of well-intentioned slightly half-cut pondering: I've been wanting to try and work out why I like particular songs and pieces of music for a while. I'm convinced there must be a common thread between why I like such diverse artists/composers as Napalm Death, Beethoven, Messiaen, The Fall (hence the title of the blog), girly C86 pop like The Primitives etc.

So there we are. I may or may not, depending entirely on how organised I am, end up posting example sound files up. Or I may just write and leave the great record-buying public to, er, go out and buy records. The latter seems a bit more ethical, if less convenient.