The Opinionated Diner

moonshine / washing line / they suit him fine

It’s all over the web, the TV and the interesting media of course, but I have to have my little ten-peneth worth too. Of course I do, it was Syd, and like so many of my generation, at least those who listened, we felt we owed him a lot, and, and perhaps, some may say this was the problem but I think that’s a stretch, owned a little bit of his mind too.

He laid it so bare, it was hard not to feel somehow that you were in there with him, in that world of crazy zig zaging lights and sounds. Nothing he wrote and recorded was quite right, nothing was as it, by all reason should be. And that, not even with hindsight, it was apparent within the first thirty seconds of Bike or Arnold Layne, opened the doors to so much. The music we listen to today, the possibilities of that we call pop, or rock or house, or disco or whatever would not have seemed available to us it it hadn’t been for Syd.

Pink Floyd were, more or less, increasingly shite, after Syd, with perhaps the exception of parts of Meddle and Umma Gumma, where his ghost was still so overpoweringly part of the band. Oh and Shine On You Crazy Diamond, but we all know who that was about. But whether he was the muse or the simply the loon that pushed the buttons in the heads of the others that made them what they were, its an unassailable fact that they stumbled relentlessly into an increasingly MOR stadium pomp act after him, mostly by watering down what they had with him, and Piper at The Gates of Dawn, the tangled, confusing and mesmerising, and indeed, almost punk, thing that it still is after 39 odd years, remains their best, and most important album.

It was never the same after the madcap laughed. Goodbye Syd, although I guess we said goodbye a long time ago…

edit: check out the amazing live take of Interstellar Overdrive available at Dilated Choonz