ALL THE MADMEN
Also by Clinton Heylin
So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan vol. 2 (1974–2008)
Revolution In The Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan vol. 1 (1957–73)
The Act You’ve Known For All These Years:
A Year In The Life of Sgt. Pepper and Friends
Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge
From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk
All Yesterdays’ Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print 1966–71 [editor]
Despite The System: Orson Welles versus The Hollywood Studios
Bootleg – The Rise & Fall of the Secret Recording Industry
Can You Feel The Silence? – Van Morrison: A New Biography
No More Sad Refrains: The Life & Times of Sandy Denny
Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades – Take Two
Dylan’s Daemon Lover: The Tangled Tale of a 450-Year-Old Pop Ballad
Dylan Day By Day: A Life In Stolen Moments
Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960–94
The Great White Wonders: A History of Rock Bootlegs
The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing [editor]
Gypsy Love Songs & Sad Refrains:
The Recordings of Sandy Denny & Richard Thompson
Rise/Fall: The Story of Public Image Limited Joy Division: Form & Substance [with Craig Wood]
For Scott, a true custodian of the vocal era.
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Clinton Heylin, 2012
The right of Clinton Heylin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All lyrics and secondary material is quoted for study review or critical purposes.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84901-880-7
eISBN: 978-1-78033-078-5
Printed and bound in the UK
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Contents
Preface: ‘Whom The Gods Destroy . . .’
1: 1965–68: Here Comes That Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown
Village Green Preservation Society; Saucerful of Secrets; Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake; David Bowie; Face to Face; Something Else; Move; Flat Baroque & Beserk; The Birthday Party; Sell Out
2: 1969: Something In The Water
Tommy; Arthur; Space Oddity; The Madcap Laughs; Five Leaves Left; S.F. Sorrow; Jackson Frank; Astral Weeks
3: 1970–71: There’s More Out Than In
Mr Wonderful; Then Play On; Barrett; Bryter Layter; The Man Who Sold the World; Fleetwood Mac; Pious Bird of Ill Omen; Atomic Rooster
4: 1971–72: Half In Love With Easeful Death
Who’s Next; Muswell Hillbillies; Hunky Dory; Pink Moon; Whistle Rymes; Lola Versus Powerman; Solid Air
5: 1971–72: Nowt Strange As Folk
Dark Side of the Moon; Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust; Thick as a Brick; Close to the Edge; Foxtrot; Obscured by Clouds
6: 1972–73: The Reclaiming Of America
Everybody’s in Showbiz; Aladdin Sane; Dark Side of the Moon; Quadrophenia; Pin Ups
7: 1974–75: The Act Of (Self-)Preservation
Preservation Act 1; The Who by Numbers; Diamond Dogs; Time of No Reply; Wish You Were Here; David Live; Young Americans; The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Afterword: ‘. . . They First Make Mad’
Notes
Appendix: ‘A Fast Rewind Through 400 Years Of The English Malady’
Bibliography & Selected Discography
Acknowledgements
Index
Preface: ‘Whom The Gods Destroy . . .’
The frequency in the modern world of works of art that explode out of madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of that world, about the meaning of such works, or even about the relations formed and broken between the real world and the artists who produced such work. And yet this frequency must be taken seriously . . .
– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1967
The acid brought out his latent madness. I’m sure it was the latent madness which gave him his creativity. The acid brought out the creativity, but more important it brought out the madness.
– Peter Jenner, talking about Syd Barrett, A Day in the Life, 1988
The Sixties has been defined by any number of those ‘so-and-so met whatsisname’ moments: the day John met Paul; the night Dylan turned The Beatles on; the evening Kennedy purportedly trounced Nixon on the presidential TV debate. But perhaps the strangest of strange meetings was the day in late 1967 when (anti-)psychiatrist R.D. Laing encountered Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett, an event so unlikely that no one can agree on what or whether it happened.
Dave Gilmour has claimed it never did, but then he wasn’t even in Pink Floyd at the time1. Drummer Nick Mason, in his own memoir, wrote that Barrett refused to go in to see Laing, sitting in the car instead. But manager Peter Jenner, whose idea it was and who perhaps has less of an axe to grind, insists that Syd and Laing did talk. Jenner had become convinced that Syd was showing worrying signs of schizophrenia, and Laing was someone he personally knew (he had played a minor role in the establishment of the London Free School in the summer of 1966, where Floyd first developed their psychedelic show at a weekly residency Jenner organized). It was both a collision of pop culture with academia and the summation of a particular 1960s sensibility, as the ley lines of psychiatry and psychedelia crossed for the first and last time.
Syd’s slip into said mental state had been as sudden as it was unexpected. In the summer of 1967, the season of Love, sitting high in the charts with the Floyd’s otherworldly second single, ‘See Emily Play’ (hard on the heels of the knicker-nicking ‘Arnold Layne’), and awaiting the imminent release of their inspirational debut LP, Piper at the Gates of Dawn – fittingly named after a chapter in The Wind in the Willows – Barrett had the whole wide world at his feet. But his own inner world was closing in. In a single weekend at the end of July, so the story goes, he went from been the pied piper of English pop to Mr Madcap.
Earlier in the week he had turned up to mime along to ‘See Emily Play’ on Top of the Pops, and for the first time he appeared both dishevelled and distracted to the rest of the band, if not of another world. Then on the Friday, scheduled to record an all-important Saturday Club radio session, again for the BBC, he turned up in body but not in mind and, as the studio manager complained to Jenner, ‘left the studio without [even] completing the recording of the first number.’ This simply wasn’t done. Later the same day he arrived at a jam-packed UFO (pronounced ‘U-Fo’) for the closing night of the original underground club, where a harassed Joe Boyd, the club founder, looked into his friend’s eyes and saw ‘black holes’ (an image Roger Waters would later appropriate for his own eulogy to Barrett, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’). As Boyd recently noted, he was not wholly surprised, having realized for some time ‘that if you did [LSD] every day, you were jeopardizing the wires that held everything toget
her in your mind’.
Throughout that night’s performance, according to drummer Nick Mason, Syd stood with ‘his arms hung by his side . . . occasional[ly] strumming’. Keyboardist Rick Wright recalled things slightly differently, but with the same outcome: ‘He went missing for the whole weekend and when he reappeared again . . . he was a totally different person.’ A week later, the whole band assembled at Abbey Road to record a third single to consolidate the success of ‘See Emily Play’, and they were relying on Syd to deliver the goods again. The song he arrived with, a little burnt-out but ready to record, was the prophetic ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’: ‘Fling your arms madly, old lady with a daughter / . . . Flitting and hitting and fitting, quack quack.’ Gone for good were the adult fairy stories and space-age explorations of yore, replaced by such cerebral ministrations.
At a session in September, Barrett delivered his next song, which was stranger still. ‘Vegetable Man’ seemed almost like a celebration of catatonia (‘It’s what I wear it’s what you see / It must be me, it’s what I am / Vegetable man’). As Jenner recalls: ‘He sat there and just described himself.’ The band were now really starting to worry. Had they given up lucrative careers as architects for this?! Or was the ever-playful Syd just messing with their minds? It certainly seemed that way when he proceeded to teach them his most dissociated song to date, ‘Jugband Blues’, which he wanted to record with a bridge that incorporated a brass section playing completely at random, before everything was washed away, leaving just a single guitar strumming and the following sung queries: ‘What exactly is a dream? / And what exactly is a joke . . . ?’
No wonder the band wanted someone to give Syd the once over, wave his magic wand and restore their friend to his former productive, radio-friendly self. And as Peter Sedgwick points out in Laing and Anti-Psychiatry (1971), Laing was the trend-meister when it came to treating this particular strain of madness ‘not as a psychiatric disability, but as one stage in a natural psychic healing process, containing the possibility of entry into a realm of “hyper-sanity”’.
Laing had come to public prominence – amid the predictable opprobrium from psychiatric circles for breaking ranks – with the Pelican mass-market paperback edition of his 1960 tome, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, published in this form in 1965. It was a copy of the Pelican paperback that a young art-school student called Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett symbolically cut up into quotes, which he pasted into a twelve-page art-collage he was preparing called Fart Enjoy.
The Divided Self was a serious-minded study, designed (or so Laing claimed) ‘to make madness and the process of going mad comprehensible’. It was followed by two further speculative shots across the bows of Freudians and Jungians alike, The Self and Others (1961) and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). But by 1965 there had been a dramatic shift in Laing’s thinking. Ironically, it was while reviewing interviews conducted with so-called normal families for the follow-up volume to Sanity, Madness and the Family that he began to formulate a view that they were at least as disturbed as the dysfunctional families depicted in his 1964 tome. He recalled the moment in a conversation shortly before his death:
These families of normals were like gas chambers: the reciprocal effect of deadening. Every member of the families totally fitted – getting up and going to work and going to school and coming back and watching television and doing nothing and going to bed. Nothing to say really. To get them to say anything about anything was almost impossible. They thought about nothing, they said nothing very much, they were just fucking dead and there was no edge or no sharpness or no challenge . . . Just fuck all, an endless drone, about nothing . . . and these were the people we were going to study, who were not in despair.
This epiphany would have profound consequences for Laing’s worldview, leading inextricably to a key shift in his theoretical position. The sea-change was signalled in a new preface he added to the Pelican Divided Self, the publication of which was a notable step on the road to ‘anti-psychiatry’, and which reflected Laing’s cultural position at the time he met Barrett: ‘In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of references are ambiguous and equivocal . . . Our “normal”, “adjusted” state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities, [for] many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities.’
It was a position he had been edging towards ever since he wrote in The Divided Self: ‘The man who is said to be deluded may be in his delusion telling me the truth, and this in no equivocal or metaphorical sense, but quite literally . . . The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed.’
Laing’s fiercest critics were quick to point out that he was creating a dangerous precedent by treating some very disturbed persons not as medical patients but as ‘individuals who due to the strength of their inner perceptions and experiences, are exceptionally eloquent critics of society’. In fact, such an idea was at least fifty years old. Arch-cynic and professional curmudgeon Ambrose Bierce had defined the adjective ‘mad’ in his infamous 1911 Devil’s Dictionary thus: ‘Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual.’ And it had been further developed in the 1940s by French critic Antonin Artaud, fresh from the asylum himself, who laid the groundwork for the next generation of psychiatric iconoclasts with his own vivid portrait of ‘modern medicine, in collusion with the most sinister and debauched magic, subject[ing] its [inmates] to electric shock or insulin therapy so that every day it may drain its stud farms of men of their selves, and may present them thus empty’. Laing, taking his lead from a later French thinker, Foucault, unequivocally sided with Artaud.
A larger problem, at least as far as the wider psychiatric community was concerned, was the language with which Laing – and that other attention-seeking anti-psychiatric advocate, David Cooper – were polemicizing the grand experiment. They seemed to be suggesting that introducing the psychedelic experience of LSD under scientific conditions might actually benefit some already very disturbed people. How else could one explain a passage like the one in Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967), which argued: ‘Madness need not be all breakdown . . . It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death . . . [What is needed is] an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back.’
In 1965, Laing set up Kingsley Hall – a ‘therapeutic community’ he hoped would ‘provide a sympathetic setting for the completion of the schizophrenic’s cyclical voyage’. Although hallucinogenic drugs were never part of the Kingsley therapy, Laing did subsequently admit: ‘We were trying to find out what are the chemical things that change mental functions, like perception and memory, and . . . which drugs induce something comparable to a psychosis, produced hallucinations and different other shifts . . . There was a lot to think about . . . [regarding] the altered states of mind that acid put you into, and the way that people got confused and lost and shipwrecked in psychotic states of misery.’
Two years later the already notorious Laing would be introduced to Syd Barrett, perhaps the most famous pop figure to be ‘shipwrecked in [this] psychotic state of misery’. According to the attending Jenner, though, the meeting wholly failed to stem the tide in Syd’s own sea of madness. There was no great meeting of minds, as he explained to Jonathon Green: ‘We took him to R.D. Laing. Laing didn’t say much. We tried to take what he said literally, we tried to use the inner meaning of what he was saying, we tried to change the objective situations. We moved him out of [his flat in] Cromwell Road but . . . it was too late.’
Nick Mason, how
ever, paints a far more bizarre picture in Inside Out (2004), suggesting that Barrett steadfastly refused to cross Laing’s threshold, ‘so Laing didn’t have much to go on. But he did make one challenging observation: yes, Syd might be disturbed, or even mad. But maybe it was the rest of us who were causing the problem, by pursuing our desire to succeed, and forcing Syd to go along with our ambitions. Maybe Syd was actually surrounded by mad people’. If Laing gleaned all this from a conversation with bassist Roger Walters, who according to Mason, drove Syd up to North London for the consultation then he really did have a gift for reading people.
One thing is certain: by the end of 1967 Barrett was hardly alone, inside or outside ‘his band’, in his struggle to retain both his creativity and his sanity. A whole generation of English singer-songwriters were wrestling with their inner demons, usually – though not necessarily – let out of the bottle by the LSD genie. For now, the catch-all phrase for the happening scene was psychedelia, and great things were expected of this incipient movement. Even three of Laing’s fiercest critics – Drs Siegler, Osmond and Mann – considered the worlds of psychedelia and psychosis to be contradistinct. The trio wrote in a 1969 article for the British Journal of Psychiatry of how ‘the psychedelic world has provided new music, new fashions in clothing and the decorative arts, new vocabulary, new life-styles, and a new inter-generational dialogue. But not a single new art form has come out of the mental hospital.’
The next five years would prove the trio to be wrong on both counts. Awaiting the emergence of an ‘inter-generational dialogue’ they missed an art-form emerging from the nuthouse. Between 1967 and 1973, at an unprecedented height of international influence for English song, its songwriters addressed (usually from direct personal experience) the subject of madness in their disordered droves. What began as the occasional B-side or album filler as young would-be bards scrambled around for any subject matter that seemed slightly psychedelic, by the end of 1971 became a central theme in English rock, dominating writers’ song-ideas and forming the thematic core of a series of important albums released in a steady drip-feed from this eclectic Eden.
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