Another interesting insight from Simon Reynolds and Joy Press- some already obvious and some intriguing and informing. I have often wondered how repeated listening to Barrett/Pink Floyd has shaped my views on nostalgia. Maybe its like a mantra – listen to him 5 times a day and you'll believe totally in his fantasy world.
Candy Shops YAY
reality-principal BOO. (and non existent)
Anyway to enlighten you all with a quote or three from the book.
All of which may explain the Barrett Era Pink Floyd's idealisation of childhood. Their early single “See Emily Play” is a chaste rapturous vision of floating on a river for ever; Barrett's fey, nursery rhyme intonation is a startling break with manly white blues... In Matilda Mother', Barrett is a child imploring his mother to read another chapter of his bedtime fairy tale. The mothers voice turns the scribbley lines into magic, unlocking the door into a mystic wonderland where 'everything shines'. Children become nostalgic at a surprisingly early age: their fantasies of the olden days conceal a yearning to go back to that fantastical no-place from which we have all been banished by the reality-principal. So Barrett renounces realism and longs for fairy tales. In Flaming, Barrett plays the part of a sprite or wood nymph, an invisible creature with magical powers of deportation. Elsewhere on the album there is a dream of pure love untarnished by sexuality in Bike where Barrett, with the boundless generosity of a child, offers to give his sweetheart 'anything, everything' and makes friends with a mouse called Gerald.
…
Barrett carried on in this vein midway between twee and psychotic, sickly and sicko, in his erratic solo career. His 1970 albums are full of chaste childlike love songs all honey and cream and 'Baby Lemonade”; love here is closer to the toddlers fantasy of owning a sweet shop than the carnality of adult desire.
(of course later in the book we are told how...) Waters shifted the bands orientation from Barretts Dionysian intensity towards an Apollonian placidity with Icarus complex songs....(Mmmm interesting, I for one can say quite honestly I never thought of it in those terms.) (who of us would?)
The world of books indeed. The alternate psychedelic trip.