Roger Waters vs Syd Barrett

[Rit]

I suggest listening to the following broad range of Syd Barrett songs (both, with the Pink Floyd and without), and then trying to sputter up a defence of your famous Pink Floyd cliches and hackneyed shenanigans. This comp is more or less in chronological order, and it takes in at least one song from every thing Barrett ever released.
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50 minute Syd Barrett compilation, titled A Visionary Company

01. King Bee (early demo)
02. Lucy Leave (early demo)
03. Arnold Layne
04. See Emily Play
05. Apples and Oranges
06. Matilda Mother
07. Scarecrow
08. Jugband Blues
09. Golden Hair
10. No Man's Land
11. No Good Trying
12. Swan Lee (Silas Lang)
13. Here I Go
14. Love Song
15. Waving My Arms In The Air
16. I Never Lied To You
17. Wined & Dined
18. Effervescing Elephant
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go on, i dare you to. you know that Barrett's work is way more inventive, captivating, and charming, and hardly the work of some mere lunatic.

[maarts]

No Bike? That was my fave....

[Rit]

Indeed, i love "Bike".
i wanted to put Bike on, but it doesn't flow too well on the mix as a whole, stuck in the middle. Mostly because of that extended outro. I didn't want to fuck too much with the flow motion of the compilation as a whole, y'see...

[Rit]

Here is a quote out of the mouth of Roger Waters directly. This is what he thought of y'all, all y'all that bought Animals in 1977, and who came to the related concert tour:

"Some crazed teenage fan.. began clawing his way up the storm netting... I spat in his face... I had a vivid image of an audience being bombed - of bombs being lobbed from the stage - and a sense that those people getting blown to bits would go absolutely wild with glee at being at the center of all the action."

hey, i'm just sayin', that's all...

[Rit]

....and it came to pass that the Syd Barrett Group became the Roger Waters Quartet, who became the David Gilmour Trio. And many various were the evils that befell them upon the highway.....
- Mojo Magazine caption 1994

[Rit]

Roger Waters recalling the importance of Syd in a 1994 print interview:

"The most telling evidence of the enduring power of Barrett's charsimatic talent and personality lies in the intense respect he still inspires in his childhood friend, Roger Waters. "Syd was the only person I know who Roger has ever really liked and looked up to," says Peter Jenner. Long after Waters had stopped talking to the others, and was attempting to claim the credit for most of what Pink Floyd accomplished in the '70s, he was unstinting in his praise for Barrett. "I could never aspire to Syd's crazed insights and perceptions," he told Q in 1987. "In fact for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. I'll always credit Syd with the connection he made between his personal unconscious and the collective group unconscious. It's taken me fifteen years to get anywhere near there. Even though he was clearly out of control when making his two solo albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. It's the humanity of it all that's so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs. Maybe that's what Dark Side Of The Moon was aspiring to. A similar feeling."

[Rit]

also, the misconception seems to be that Syd was a space-rocker, acid cosmic guru, or something. That's a pastiche, and a lazy way of looking at him. The quality of the lyrics is strong, in fact. They have an inner integrity, and they have his lyrical, wide-eyed reverence for the inner spark of things, whether objects from nature or relationships between people. I think it's pretty important to realize that Syd's lyrics never dealt with cold psychology readings in any way, like many rockers tend to do when they get poignant. Syd merely picked up on colours, impressions, and associations. There are no archetypal tropes in his work, or cliched images.

Roger Waters, again: All that stuff about Syd starting the space-rock thing is just so much fucking nonsense. He was completely into Hilaire Belloc, and all his stuff was kind of whimsical, all fairly heavy rooted in English literature. I think Syd had one song that had anything to do with space, 'Astronomy Domine', that's all. That's the sum total of all Syd's writing about space and yet there's this whole fucking mystique about how he was the father of it all. It's just a load of old bollocks, it all happened afterwards. There's an instrumental track which we came up with together on the first album, 'Interstellar Overdrive', thats just the title, you see, it's actually an abstract piece with an interstellar attachment in terms of its name.

[Rit]

Note, i don't actively hate the Pink Floyd at all. In fact, in good faith, i'll post up a fitting compilation of the Pink Floyd sound as i see it, drawn from their whole career, opting to pick out where the best of it lies. When they were on, intermittantly, they were one of the greatest bands of the rock era, bold, imaginative, inventive:

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The Pink Floyd 50 minute compilation, a supplementary to A Visionary Company

01. Remember A Day
02. Careful With That Axe, Eugene
03. Crumbling Land
04. Up The Khyber (Juke Box)
05. Cirrus Minor
06. Time
07. Fearless
08. The Narrow Way, pt. 3
09. Wot's.. Uh, The Deal?
10. Party Sequence
11. Free Four
12. Obscured By Clouds
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[Rit]

hmmm...

then again, it's hard to deny that Syd got barking fucking mad eventually, isn't it?

here's a reminiscence from his friend Mick Rock, who wrote this piece in 1971:

Syd is 25 now, and worried about getting old. 'I wasn't always this introverted,' he says, 'I think young people should have a lot of fun. But I never seem to have any.' Suddenly he points out the window. 'Have you seen the roses? There's a whole lot of colours.' Syd says he doesn't take acid anymore, but he doesn't want to talk about it... 'There's really nothing to say.' He goes into the garden and stretches out on an old wooden seat. 'Once you're into something...' he says, looking very puzzled. He stops. 'I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway.'

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Sad, really.

[ScottsyII]

Like Maart's Gabriel / Collins era Genesis parallel... I think it's kinda unfair to say that either the "Barrett" era or the "Waters" era was a better era for the band, when both really made massive contributions to the band in big ways... that being said, most of my Floyd collection consists of the stuff with Waters and Gilmour at the fore... I think the band moved into a style of music I appreciated more, enjoyed more and connected with more in it's post Syd Barrett days... that isn't to put down Barrett's contribution.

Maybe without Barrett the band may not have garnered the notoriety it did early in the piece... in the same way that Peter Gabriel's antics on stage and oddball performances garnered plenty of support for Genesis... maybe without that, Genesis would never have moved on to bigger audiences under Phil Collins...

Really, I think both artists were instrumental in the rise of the Floyd, but I have to say my personal preferences are for what Roger Waters contributed to the band... before he became a megalomaniac and completely ruined the entire band for a while, that is...

[Thorngrub]

ritalinpants said:

Here is a quote out of the mouth of Roger Waters directly. This is what he thought of y'all, all y'all that bought Animals in 1977, and who came to the related concert tour:

"Some crazed teenage fan.. began clawing his way up the storm netting... I spat in his face... I had a vivid image of an audience being bombed - of bombs being lobbed from the stage - and a sense that those people getting blown to bits would go absolutely wild with glee at being at the center of all the action."

hey, i'm just sayin', that's all...

No; you're just taking something out of context to further your own personal agenda.

[Rit]

perhaps

[Rit]

i still stand by my interpretation though. It's definitive.

[Thorngrub]

It's what he thought of that one bloke.

In other news:

It seems as if Roger Waters can now officially claim to have risen from the lowly rank & file of plain "rockers" and up into the established company of classical composers:




Out now on Sony Classical label

[Rit]

it's finally out? i've been waiting for that thing since 1999.