1) Terrapin; 2) Gigolo Aunt; 3) Baby Lemonade; 4)
Effervescing Elephant; 5) Two Of A Kind; 6) Baby Lemonade; 7) Dominoes; 8) Love
Song.
General verdict: The real symbol and star of this «live album»
is its brevity — one song for each year of the artistʼs musical career.
This album was actually first released way
back in 1987 on John Peelʼs Strange Fruit label, as part of a large series of
radio recordings salvaged from Peelʼs archives — under the title The Peel Session, since, true enough, it
contained all the five songs that Syd performed in person on the Top Gear show on February 24, 1970,
amounting to a whoppinʼ 13 minutes worth of music. In 2004, the album was
re-released as The Radio One Sessions
after somebody scooped up three more performances from Bob Harrisʼ Sounds Of The Seventies, broadcast on February
16, 1971; terrible audience bootleg-level sound quality, but hey, when youʼre
pining for live solo Syd Barrett, you just donʼt get to be picky, and at least
you have the legitimate right to call the expanded, almost 20-minute long (!) album
The Radio Sessions, with a plural -s, instead of The Radio Session, which is just so humiliating and depressing.
You cannot and should not expect any particular
greatness or huge surprises from these sessions, for which (the first one at
least) Syd found himself propped and backed by Gilmour on bass and keyboards, and
Jerry Shirley on percussion. All the songs are significantly truncated, usually
about one third to one half shorter than the studio versions, as if Syd had
trouble performing them in full; he probably had, but he is in pretty decent
form anyway — the singing and acoustic rhythm playing are in perfect order
throughout, and if you didnʼt know the details, youʼd very likely just assume
this was supposed to be a nice and relaxed «unplugged» interpretation of the
more heavily and densely arranged studio originals.
The only new song is ʽTwo Of A Kindʼ, a very
cute and «normal» bouncy Brit-pop number that might as well be mistaken for a Small
Faces song — ironically, its authorship remains disputed between Barrett and Rick
Wright, and since both are dead now, we shall never know the truth anyway, so I
will just assume it was really written by Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane
instead. Had the song been included on The
Madcap Laughs, as Syd allegedly intended, it would have been the most instantly
accessible song there... perhaps this is why it was not, after all. But it is
always a pleasure to hear Syd sing sweet innocent Brit-pop in that gorgeous
voice of his.
As for the three songs from 1971, it is hard
to evaluate the quality of the performance just because the sound is so abysmal
— hard to tell if the guitar is really
so much out of key or if it is merely the effect of chewn tape. Its real
historical value is that this is the last ever performance by Syd Barrett, the
solo artist (he did have a couple quickly botched attempts to start up a new
band in the next couple of years), so you can take the awful quality symbolically,
as a metaphor for artistic evaporation, and leave it at that.
On the whole, as far as desperately salvaged
scraps are concerned, Iʼm sure we have all heard much worse than this — and,
after all, Syd Barrett is perfectly legit as somebody who deserves a cult
following, and any cult following deserves to have desperately salvaged scraps,
so I am definitely more glad that this little piece is on the market than, say,
the umpteenth edition of Dylanʼs Bootleg
Series or another from-the-vault Prince or Frank Zappa release. And any
excuse to take a second to look back upon the short-lived genius of this man,
another member of the «27 club» in all but number, is welcome, as long as it
actually involves listening to his music rather than digging into the dark
druggy details of the last years of his musical career.
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