Radio One Sessions

Syd Barrett:
Radio One Sessions

[Strange Fruit; 2004]
Rating: 6.3
To keep this "fair and balanced," let's look at two different bios of Roger "Syd" Barrett:

  • Adoration. Barrett's innocently brilliant psych-folk first set Pink Floyd in motion; when he left the band after one record, too erratic from drugs or mental illness to keep up with its growing fame, the Floyd lost the bright wit of his songwriting and started its slide to light-show-dominated arena-rock. Barrett cut a couple albums as a solo artist before giving up music and retreating from the world, and his legacy is colored by his audible struggle to keep it together in the studio. Hearing this witty, charming performer disintegrate in front of you evokes nothing less than the tragic destruction of innocence.

  • Backlash. Though talented, Barrett influenced more great post-psych songs than he ever wrote himself, and he would have gone down as a few-hit wonder if not for his legend, which was built more than anything by the melodrama of Pink Floyd. The band that let him go repeatedly paid him tribute, from the slick classic rock touchstone Wish You Were Here to the blood-curdling shrieks on The Wall, where ego-maestro Roger Waters tried to have it both ways by imitating Barrett's madness while holding on to his own stores of wealth and ass. Barrett's mythologists have ruined his catalog by combing through every line and every mistake for signs of his deterioration, and even that may have been overplayed: While Barrett suffered tragically, plenty of artists saw worse fates, including Nick Drake, Phil Ochs, Gary Glitter, or heck, Richard Wright, who had to keep working with Waters for a whole 'nother decade.

    Wherever you stand on Barrett, his legacy regularly buries everything that was great about his tiny catalog: two proper (but shaky) solo records, some outtakes and bootlegs, and these two sessions for the BBC. The supply-and-demand also explains why the 20 minutes of music on The Radio One Sessions will run you $20, and why the fans who already own the first half will still buy this for the three new tracks, taken from a session that the BBC lost but that someone had taped off the radio, probably on equipment that the Germans dropped on them in the war.

    The album starts with the five tracks from Barrett's 1970 Peel Session, which were already available on a separate release. Joined by David Gilmour on guitar and Humble Pie's Jerry Shirley on bongos, Barrett performs a set of his best songs. The hilarious "Effervescing Elephant" sounds more spontaneous, and "Gigolo Aunt" and "Baby Lemonade" are easy-going complements to the studio versions. But you also get "Two of a Kind", a song that's so clumsy and devoid of imagery that some critics doubt Barrett even wrote it; some blame Richard Wright, but he won't confirm it.

    The second session, from 1971, includes the Barrett tracks "Baby Lemonade", "Dominoes" and "Love Song". The sound quality of these, unfortunately, is garbled and sub-bootleg, and what's worse, the distant, distorted recording plays up the most patronizing stereotypes about Barrett: that you can hear him slip away from us, and that the dark recording quality suggests the end of his career. If you're one of the people who gets off on that, you'll wet yourself over the fade-out.

    But even if this is a lousy value, The Radio One Sessions has one major strength: Barrett. Listening to him strum out these songs with these guys, you can hear everything that's charming about his voice. It's a comfortable session, and Gilmour also shows how much warmer his early, Zabriskie Point-era guitar sounded than his later, studio-perfected leads. Not unlike Pink Floyd's contemporaneous Atom Heart Mother, this is engrossingly mellow music, perfect for the heat of late summer and sprawling in a meadow. Once you've gotten your pulse to slow far enough, think about Barrett: Don't dwell on the fame that ruined him or the legacy that he ran from, or any other kind of "big picture." Just dig how much fun he's having making this music with his friends.

    • - Chris Dahlen, May 19, 2004