Vegetable Man - Syd Barrett's last Floyd recordings

(NOTE: Since I wrote this, it has been announced that a new boxed set of early Floyd material is being made available, including Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream. All you need is a spare $550!) Oh yes, and the links I've provided to those songs on youtube have had to be removed. Read on...

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In this age when any well-known artist's every last demo and throw-away has been dredged up for completist fans to pore over, it remains astonishing to me that there was never an official release, even as bonus tracks, of Syd Barrett's last recordings as the leader of Pink Floyd.

Many Floyd fans may have heard the names of the songs (LINKS REMOVED!) few will have heard them. My every attempt to load them on Youtube over the years has resulted in the posts having their audio removed by the copyright holder. Just recently this post has been taken down twice by the service provider under threat of copyright infringement. 

After all this time, if you are not going to release them on anything other than a $500 boxset, why not let those fans who might be interested have a listen?

As anyone who has heard them will probably agree, they are raw and somewhat unhinged, but so is 'I Am The Walrus' and several other examples from that trippy period. They are, nonetheless, an important part of the Pink Floyd story, illustrating Syd’s state of mind, as his excessive LSD intake tipped him towards insanity.

The songs could only have been written by Barrett. Like his earlier material, they reflect a peculiar attitude to the craft of songwriting. Having seen that he could get away with writing a song about a transvestite whose strange hobby is stealing women's clothes (LINKS REMOVED!) from washing lines, he let his imagination run riot. 

He was the leader of the band, the principal songwriter and the band and management put pressure on Syd to come up with more hit singles, after the success of See Emily Play (LINKS REMOVED!) in 1967.

But Syd already had a warped perspective and so his idea of what would make a single was a little challenging for his band mates; even moreso for the record company.

Spiced with generous helpings of LSD, his lyrics became even weirder. 

In yellow shoes I get the blues
Though I walk the streets with my plastic feet
With my blue velvet trousers, make me feel pink
There's a kind of stink about blue velvet trousers
In my paisley shirt I look a jerk
And my turquoise waistcoat is quite out of sight
But oh oh my haircut looks so bad
Vegetable man where are you?

So I've changed my dear, and I find my knees,
And I covered them up with the latest cut,
And my pants and socks all point in a box,
They don't make long of my nylon socks,
The watch, black watch
My watch with a black face
And a big pin, a little hole,
And all the lot is what I got,
It's what I wear, it's what you see,
It must be me, it's what I am,
Vegetable man

Even without the drugs, his songs were oddly formed, typically combining nursery rhyme lyrics, the 'psychedelic' sounds of the time, odd noises, studio trickery and added bars where the lyrics didn't scan properly.

It worked - on that first album at least - because the band believed in Syd and forced the studio engineers and producer Norman Smith to deliver on Syd's Edward Lear-on-acid vision. Meanwhile, The Beatles were in the studio next door recording their own psychedelic masterpiece, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (LINKS REMOVED!) .

But Syd's increasingly erratic LSD-fuelled behaviour became intolerable for the rest of group. Joe Boyd, who produced their first single, Arnold Layne, told how Syd passed him on the way into the UFO club one night, and how his eyes were like impenetrable pools of blackness, a sign of just how far gone he was.

You can see the difference in his appearance in the second part of the See Emily Play clip, where they are playing Apples and Oranges on the Dick Clark Show in the US. So the story goes, he refused to move his mouth when they were taping one TV show on the US tour.

The writing was on the wall for the end of Syd's tenure, when EMI declined to release Vegetable Man or Scream Thy Last Scream as a single. It must have been clear to the band they could not carry on as they were.

Syd and the Floyd with Hendrix and The Move

They claim they didn't actually fire Syd and that bringing in Dave Gilmour wasn't an attempt to force him out. But after yet another night when he was unable or unwilling to perform, they just decided not to pick him up on the way to the next gig, and that was the end of it.

And they moved on; so it's understandable that the other members of Pink Floyd did not want to see these songs released. They are a document of one very talented man's descent into madness - as Gilmour said "never to return".

You can understand why the record company rejected the songs and maybe there's an element of not wanting to exploit Syd by releasing them subsequently.

On the other hand, if it's acceptable to dredge up those last desperate recordings of Nick Drake, to reveal the dark despair of a song like Black-Eyed Dog, then I think it's equally valid for the world to hear Syd's last recordings with the Floyd, tracks that reveal not just his mental state, but the culmination of a musical journey.

For me anyway, there was an artistic statement being made here by Syd, however perverse. The band must have been in on it too, because both these tracks are essentially finished items. Acetates were made ready for the single's release. They also recorded a version of Vegetable Man for a BBC session (LINKS REMOVED!) in December 1967.

Syd post-Floyd, couldn't sustain his musical talent

There's no mistaking the psychotic whimsy at work on 'Scream Thy Last Scream' (LINKS REMOVED!) - it's the work of a man on the edge of madness; completely uncommercial and obviously for those close to Syd, too raw to be released, ever.

That's the strangest thing, though, for me. After all this time, when compilation after compilation was released, at great expense for the completists, the release of these tracks was never considered.

Really, no history of Pink Floyd could ever be complete until Vegetable Man and Scream Thy Last Scream take their rightful place in the collected works.


Psychedelic Light Show at UFO, 1967 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwly9QdzOSY&feature=emb_logo

Also On This Blog:

Pink Floyd On Tour - 1974 and 1977

Reviewing Pink Floyd at the V&A: Their Mortal Remains

March 1973 - 'Dark Side of the Moon' enters the charts

LIFE Magazine reports on the 'New Far-Out Beatles' - June 1967