Barrett enlisted the help of friend Willie Wilson from Jokers Wild, David Gilmour’s old band.ĪUDIO: Jokers Wild “Don’t Ask Me What I Say” Sessions with Jones producing took place in April 1969, focusing on both new recordings and overdubs and edits to the 1968 tapes.

The project was handed off to Malcolm Jones, the head of Harvest Records, EMI’s progressive subsidiary label. And then the next time he came out of the fog, it was something different.” Shortly after those abortive May 1968 sessions, Barrett returned to Cambridge and went under psychiatric care.īy the end of the year, Syd seemed well enough to return to work on recording his debut album. Something would emerge from what he was doing, and we’d say, ‘Oh, that’s good! Can we get more of that, please? Can you do that again?’ And then he would go back into the fog. And I always thought that that’s what had happened to Syd in the studio. “Trolley buses were silent they were electric, so this light would come toward you out of the fog, and then it would disappear away again into the fog. “You’d stand there in the fog and you couldn’t see anything,” Jenner says. Today, Jenner says that working with Syd reminded him of the electric trolleys he encountered as a child in postwar London. But early recording sessions with Jenner producing yielded little suitable for release the producer would later admit that he had underestimated the difficulty of working with Barrett in his current state. “It wasn’t what the record company wanted.” An attempt was made to get Syd – now a solo artist – into the studio. “As his songwriting became more interesting, it also became more sort of weird and psychotic,” Jenner says. Jenner had seen potential in the few songs Syd had written near the end of his time with Pink Floyd, though he was fully aware that the material was not of an especially commercial nature. “Believe me,” Wright told interviewer Mark Blake, “I would have left with him like a shot if I had thought Syd could do it.” But by most accounts, Barrett could not. That January, Wright and Barrett were sharing a flat in southwest London. “If we said, ‘let’s have some backing vocals,’ he would be the one who would get the notes together for them.” He was always the one who set the harmonies and things in the studio,” Jenner recalls. “Rick could read music he knew what chords were. He had observed Wright’s strengths within the context of Pink Floyd. “I doubt if Syd could read music,” Jenner says. In a 1996 interview, Rick Wright recalled that the band’s managers “thought Syd and I were the musical brains of the group, and that we should form a breakaway band, to try and hold Syd together.” Barrett’s managers thought that his unschooled approach would combine effectively with Wright’s more traditional musical foundation. Upon Barrett’s exit from Pink Floyd, Jenner and King had cast their lot with Barrett, believing that the prime architect of Pink Floyd – and its primary songwriter – had the better potential for ongoing creative and commercial success.

In early 1968, mere months after Syd Barrett left (or was dismissed from) Pink Floyd, his management team of Peter Jenner and Andrew King encouraged him to begin work on a solo album

Syd barrett the madcap laughs