You often have to sit and wonder what could have been if Pink Floyd had kept hold of Syd Barrett, or even if they had never recruited David Gilmour to assist the band as a fifth member while Barrett’s mental health was on the decline.
The band may not have lasted, or Barrett could have overcome his issues to an extent with the help of his bandmates in order to steer them in exciting new directions, but the question doesn’t bear thinking about, because it’s not the reality that we live in.
His departure from the band after A Saucerful of Secrets was always somewhat inevitable due to the rapid descent into battling his demons, and when Gilmour did eventually take his place on a full-time basis, Barrett understandably felt betrayed by the rest of the group. However, while one person may have seen this as a signal to give up all hope, Barrett initially saw it as a motivation to pursue a solo career, and there wasn’t a great deal of time wasted before he released his first two releases under his own name.
The thing is, his mental fragility meant that these two albums, both released in 1970, were his only two albums, and the content heard on both of them is indicative of the troubles he was facing as an individual at this time. Both records have a manic edge to them, eschewing conventionality in ways that the two Pink Floyd albums he contributed to didn’t even manage, and there are plenty of songs that are enveloped by a darkness which reflected his psyche at the time.
If the departure from Pink Floyd should have indicated anything about Barrett’s lack of capability to carry on, then The Madcap Laughs was almost a confirmation that things were more precarious than ever. It was a signal that the end of his career was fast approaching, and as much as he may have been proud of the result and seen it as a means of drawing a line under his time with the band, it was far stranger and more impenetrable than anything he’d done before.
During an interview with Beat Instrumental Magazine in 1970, he spoke about his debut album in complete contradictions. One minute, he’d express how pleased he was to have made his return to music, and the next second, he’d adopt a defeatist stance where he seemingly couldn’t care whether the album succeeded or failed.
“It’s quite nice,” Barrett claimed, “But I’d be very surprised if it did anything if I were to drop dead. I don’t think it would stand to be accepted as my last statement. I want to record my next LP before I go on to anything else.”
It’s quite a negative way to look at your own debut release, but true to his word, he chose to continue by recording a follow-up, Barrett, soon after. While The Madcap Laughs had achieved some chart success, the second release struggled to have the same impact, potentially due to how polarising the first record had been, and while Barrett spoke to journalists as though things were looking bright for him, he had already regressed into a further depression, losing a lot of his touch with reality.
There were botched attempts at a return to music, such as his catastrophic and brief involvement with Stars in 1972, but Barrett didn’t make any more records or conduct any further interviews with the press from this moment onwards. It’s tough, because Barrett clearly didn’t want The Madcap Laughs to be the album people remembered him for, but it was also clearly a record that he completed while running close to his own capacity, and that he’d sadly never be able to repeat.
