The following songs will both include Syd Barrett Era Pink Floyd material and selected songs from his short-lived solo career as well.

Pink Floyd as Syd’s baby often had a genuine immediacy that one finds in the very best of Pop songs. The successful single “See Emily Play” is both a catchy commercial jingle and strangely curious with an experimental edge. I realize that Bowie later covered this track, but with all do respect, Mr. Bowie can suckle upon my left nard. It does clarify Syd’s impressive influence on the locals when it was his Floyd that reigned supreme, T-REX’S Marc Bolan was another early convert.

On the mammoth “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, which was recorded just ‘down the hall’ from those rascally mop-tops in the Abbey Road Studio, one discovers another fine gem of a song that can rival the toe-tapping immediacy of “See Emily Play”. I am of course referring to song two (not a Blur reference) “Lucifer Sam”. I get a strong James Bond vibe from this track. There is also the slight hint of the British TV action/adventure series THE AVENGERS! “Lucifer Sam” is mysterious and incomprehensibly strange, but it’s still Pop. A genuinely English Pop sound would unfortunately be missing from any and all Post-Syd Era Pink Floyd cuts.

Looking at Syd’s solo outings, like the dirty little slut that I ultimately am. I am taken aback by the beauty and truth that is “The Madcap Laughs”. Syd is stripped to the bone and often backed with an acoustic guitar. He may perhaps be one of the founders of that most confounding genre of music known as Psyche-Folk, goddamn it. An English Alexander “Skip” Spence in this regard. It is a stroke of good luck that Syd briefly made nice with the majority of his former band mates, and however how brief it may have been, it yielded two impressive solo-outings thanks in part to their direct involvement on the recordings.

Any-hoot! My most pleasurable listen on “The Madcap Laughs” is the Psyche-Folk gem “Feel”. It’s just so goddamned scary and desperate. I envision some man somehow drowning in a shallow pond and crying out for help, but everyone in town turns out just to stare at his suffering with a cold indifference. That is how this song feels to me! It is fucked up and thoroughly cool, motherfucker!

It was later in 1970 that Syd released his final solo effort before ultimately returning home to his mother’s house for an incredibly long stay, one that did not end until 2006. This here second release went simply by “Barrett”. Syd painted the album cover. There is an intense yet lazy song on this record that goes by the name of “Love Song”. It is like a zombie trying to understand what to do with his erection. Syd vaguely sings about knowing a girl…but whoever she was, she was no doubt long gone by this point (if I may be so bold to make such an assumption?). “Love Song” is a brittle and beautiful piano ballad with a lazy dancehall vibe. Sweet and Fragile from beginning to end, and I love the long fade out.

I realize the rarities collection “Opel” exists, and I’ve certainly heard it, but none of the tracks are exactly among my favorites. Some of the cuts on “Opel” and among those on the tasty three-disc Syd Barrett box set are just alternate takes or skeletal structure versions of tunes that made up the majority of Syd’s two solo outings.

Syd Barrett was awesome, and the specific tracks I have selected mean a great deal to me.