Robyn Hitchcock - Syd Barrett Birthday Tribute, The Chapel, San Francisco, CA, 1-6-2024

Egads! Here's something that's actually from 2024 already. (I write this in February 2024.) It's a Robyn Hitchcock concert that took place last month. This one is special, because it was a one off tribute concert for Syd Barrett, the original leader of Pink Floyd. Barrett was born on January 6, 1946, and died in 2006. He would have been 78 years old on the day of this concert had he lived longer.

Instead of mostly playing his original songs, as usual, Hitchcock stuck to singing nothing but songs written by Barrett. Barrett led Pink Floyd, but only briefly. He left the band after their first year of big success, which was 1967. Tracks 4, 15, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 37, and 39 are Pink Floyd songs from when Barrett was the lead singer and main songwriter. The rest are either banter tracks or songs from Barrett's brief solo career, which petered out around 1970.

The first six songs were done in solo acoustic style. Then other band members began to gradually join in. By the song "Dominos," the full band was on stage. It was a small band, with just three musicians supporting Hitchcock, but they rocked pretty well for the rest of the concert.

Hitchcock has been heavily, heavily influenced by Barrett for his entire career. I previously posted an entire album of him doing solo acoustic versions of Barrett's songs over the years, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/09/robyn-hitchcock-acoustic-syd-barrett.html

Furthermore, he's done previous Barrett tribute concerts. I have one from 2007 that I'll probably post here someday. But this is the most thorough tribute I've seen from him yet, with some songs that he'd never performed before.

The recording is an audience boot. That's a bit of a bummer, since those usually don't sound as good as soundboard or FM boots. But in this case, the sound quality is very nearly as good. Furthermore, for all of the talking tracks, I ran them through the audio editing program UVR5 and got rid of a lot of background noise while boosting Hitchcock's voice. After that, I think that this generally sounds just as good as typical soundboard boots. 

There was a problem with one of the talking tracks though, track nine. For the first half of three minutes of talking, it's apparent that he moved well away from the microphone, because his voice was very distant compared to everything else. So I had to do a lot of extra work on that, but in the end I think you can hear most of what he's saying. That's why that one has "[Edit]" in the title.

This album is an hour and 39 minutes long.

01 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Terrapin (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 Jugband Blues (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 Late Night (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 Dark Globe (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 If It's in You (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 talk [Edit] (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 It Is Obvious (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 Long Gone (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
13 Wined and Dined (Robyn Hitchcock)
14 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
15 Chapter 24 (Robyn Hitchcock)
16 Dominoes (Robyn Hitchcock)
17 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
18 Effervescing Elephant (Robyn Hitchcock)
19 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
20 Bike (Robyn Hitchcock)
21 Astronomy Domine (Robyn Hitchcock)
22 Lucifer Sam (Robyn Hitchcock)
23 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
24 See Emily Play (Robyn Hitchcock)
25 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
26 Vegetable Man (Robyn Hitchcock)
27 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
28 Gigolo Aunt (Robyn Hitchcock)
29 Baby Lemonade (Robyn Hitchcock)
30 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
31 Octopus (Robyn Hitchcock)
32 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
33 Rats (Robyn Hitchcock)
34 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
35 Wolfpack (Robyn Hitchcock)
36 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
37 Arnold Layne (Robyn Hitchcock)
38 talk (Robyn Hitchcock)
39 Interstellar Overdrive (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/MYfcEThF

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/eP09MwEdP8gNYEW/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/amnBG

The cover is based on a promotional poster for this exact concert. All the text and design is exactly the same as the original. However, I made one big change: I used Photoshop to reduce the entire image vertically so I could get the rectangular poster to fit in a square space. I did that for everything but the central image of Syd Barrett. I kept that unchanged, but cropped some off at the bottom so it could fit the shrunken space it was in.

Pink Floyd - Gyllene Cirkeln, Stockholm, Sweden, 9-10-1967 (WITH VOCALS!)

Here's something I'm very psyched to post. If you're a fan of early Pink Floyd music, you really need to give this a listen.

Syd Barrett was Pink Floyd's lead singer and main songwriter from the time the band formed around 1965 until he flamed out around the end of 1967. The band had a lot of critical and commercial success in 1967, but unfortunately there's no good concert recording of them from when Barrett led them, either officially released or on bootleg. "The Early Years" box set did include a complete show of about 50 minutes recorded at the Gyllene Cirkeln (Swedish for "Golden Circle") in Stockholm, Sweden. It's clearly the best Syd Barrett-era live recording in terms of the music. But there's virtually no vocals to be heard whatsoever! It basically sounds like an all-instrumental concert. 

In recent months, I've been doing a lot of audio tinkering with the programs Spleeter and X-Minus. It occurred to me I could strip the vocals from some versions of songs and add them to the Stockholm versions that were lacking vocals. Someone at a Pink Floyd forum named SydMorrison67 had already done this to one song from the concert, "See Emily Play." He did such a great job that I simply used his version. But I added the vocals for the others that needed vocals. I took the vocals from either the studio versions or the BBC versions, whichever I felt fit better.

Personally, I think the end result sounds really great! It's like finding a soundboard recording of the Barrett-era band after all these years. 

Some other changes were made too. There isn't much banter between songs, but what little there was was so quiet that it could barely be heard. I boosted the volume of that talking drastically, so you can clearly hear what's being said. Furthermore, after I finished editing the files, I handed them to my musical friend MZ. He did some things to improve the listening quality, such as filling out some under represented frequencies.

Now, as to why the recording on "The Early Years" lacked vocals in the first place, that's a bit of a mystery. Some speculate that the P.A. system at the show was badly mixed. But there are audience bootlegs of concerts from Rotterdam and Copenhagen from roughly the same time period (September and November 1967), and the vocals on those can barely be heard as well. Three shows is a pattern, not a fluke. Perhaps there was something systematically off with the band's sound set-up during those months. But another possibility is that lead vocalist Syd Barrett was singing very quietly and/or not near the microphone. By September 1967, his behavior had already gotten erratic, to the point that the band had to cancel a U.S. tour. Or it could be a combination of the two. Note that the backing vocals couldn't be heard well either.

I found this explanation on a music blog (radiodupree.blogspot.com):

"Anders Lind [the person who recorded the show] explained that there was no such thing as a PA system back in '67, and there was no one mixing the sound. The sound came from the amps on stage and the signal from the vocal microphones were sent to a couple of small vocal amps. The sound was a result of each musician handling their own amp, and during the show the vocal amps would probably not be adjusted at all. But the lack of vocals on the tape can also be a result of Syd's health and/or attitude at the time. Maybe he did not make the effort to sing out loud, by some reason."

One additional factor is that it turns out the Gyllene Cirkeln was actually a supper club! Which means that it was a restaurant with a stage, and you ate dinner during the show. That typically meant the audience was more the type of crowd who wanted to see Sammy Davis, Jr. or Englebert Humperdinck, not a psychedelic band! Furthermore, although Pink Floyd had just had a top ten hit in Sweden with "See Emily Play" the previous month (as well as it being a hit all over the world), they had the indignity of being the opening act that night for a mildly popular Swedish band called the Sleepstones. It sounds like Pink Floyd had a Spinal Tap moment that night.

I first made the cover art shown above. That uses a photo of the band lip-syncing their way through the British TV show "Top of the Pops" in mid-1967. But after I made that, I did some more research on the details of this concert and managed to find a black and white photo from the exact concert in question! So I've created an alternate cover for people who prefer accuracy over appearance, since the picture isn't as good.

As you can see from this actual, realm and strange photo, the venue was very small. Perhaps this helps explain the problem with the vocals on the recording. They might have been able to be heard to some degree without any amplification, so perhaps what the amps did didn't matter so much. 

Let me explain in more detail what I did with the vocals. For "Matilda Mother" and "Scream Thy Last Scream," it was as I described above, taking the vocals from one version and adding them to another. Everything seemed to be in pitch for all the songs, so that wasn't a problem. But I had to make lots of minor adjustments to make sure the timing matched up. "Pow R. Tok H." is basically an instrumental, but there are some vocal noises near the start. Some of these actually could be heard on the original recording, especially before the band loudly joins in. So I kept those but added in more to make sure it all could be heard. "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" is the one case where some of the original vocals could be heard over the full band. But that was only intermittent through the song, like a radio station fading in and out. I kept those vocals, and added in more. The fact there was some vocals helped me align the additions.

"Arnold Layne" actually comes from another concert. As I mentioned above, there are bootlegs from Rotterdam and Copenhagen from the same late 1967 time period. Both of those shows have the same problem of the vocals not being heard, as well as poorer sound overall. They also have pretty much the same set lists. But "Arnold Layne" was played at the Copenhagen concert, and the instrumental sound was pretty decent. So I used the same trick and added vocals to that one too. Consider it kind of a bonus track at the end.

If you hear the vocals being out of sync with the instruments at any point, please let me know. I can probably fix it. And if you have any ideas of other music that could use this sort of treatment, please let me know too.

01 talk (Pink Floyd)
02 Reaction in G [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
03 talk (Pink Floyd)
04 Matilda Mother [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
05 Pow R. Toc H. [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
06 Scream Thy Last Scream [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
07 talk (Pink Floyd)
08 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
09 See Emily Play [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
10 talk (Pink Floyd)
11 Interstellar Overdrive [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
12 Arnold Layne [Edit] (Pink Floyd)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696995/PNKFLYD1967_GyllneCirkelnStckhlmSwedn__9-10-1967_atse.zip.html

I explained what I did with the cover art up above as part of my explanation about the venue and such. The only thing I'd add is that I usually hate black and white album covers, so I tinted the alternate version to make it a little more interesting.

Robyn Hitchcock - Acoustic Syd Barrett Songs (2000-2017)

Note that this entirely contains versions of songs that I'm including on other albums that I'm posting here. I've been posting lots of albums of Robyn Hitchcock's acoustic cover versions. I have many most albums in that series to post. But I just thought it would be fun and interesting to compile all the covers of Syd Barrett songs from those albums into one album. That's what I've done here.

Hitchcock has always been a huge fan of Syd Barrett's work. I think it's safe to say that the three biggest musical influences on him have been the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Syd Barrett (both for his work as part of Pink Floyd and as a solo artist). There are zillions of other artists who have been influenced by the Beatles and Dylan, and countless thousands of cover versions of their songs. But that's not the case with Barrett. While Barrett's musical legacy has been very influential, it's also been considered too idiosyncratic for many to cover his songs.

But clearly that's not the case with Hitchcock, thus this album. It starts in 2000 and continues to 2017, with the songs arranged in chronological order. But the only reason I didn't include songs from earlier in Hitchcock's career is that I went for the versions with the best sound quality, and they often are the more recent ones. Hitchcock has been heavily influenced by Barrett since the very start of his career, for instance covering Barrett's "Vegetable Man" on a record back in 1980 when he led the band the Soft Boys. (I didn't include that here because that was done with a full band and this is only acoustic versions.)

Barrett is best known for his Pink Floyd song, despite the fact that he wasn't in that band for very long. But not in Hitchcock's world. Only four of the songs here are Pink Floyd songs ("Astronomy Domine," "Bike," "Chapter 24," and "Arnold Layne.") The rest are from Barrett's solo career. I suspect the reason there aren't more Pink Floyd songs is because most of those really need a full band to do them justice, and again, this just includes acoustic versions.

Hitchcock has done covers of other songs with a full band, such as "See Emily Play," and even had a concert in which he played all the songs from "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," the only Pink Floyd album where Barrett was a full participant. But that's the subject for music to be posted here at another time.

As for this album, I think this is a great foot in the door for people who haven't gotten into Barrett's solo work much yet.

All the songs here are officially unreleased. However, two songs can be seen on a DVD video called "The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story." Generally speaking, the sound quality for these songs is very good, though there are a few exceptions. "Astronomy Domine" has some crowd noise in the middle of the song at a few points. A couple of the other songs sound a bit muffled or distant. But I think the sound is perfectly acceptable even on those. Note that I've removed audience noise whenever possible, as I sometimes do.

The album is 45 minutes long, which is pretty much the ideal length for vinyl albums.

01 Astronomy Domine (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Dominoes (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 It Is Obvious (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 Baby Lemonade (Robyn Hitchcock)
05 Chapter 24 (Robyn Hitchcock)
06 Gigolo Aunt (Robyn Hitchcock)
07 Bike (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Terrapin (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 Waving My Arms in the Air (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 I Never Lied to You (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 Long Gone (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 Arnold Layne (Robyn Hitchcock)
13 Dark Globe (Robyn Hitchcock)
14 Wined and Dined (Robyn Hitchcock)
15 Wolfpack (Robyn Hitchcock)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697076/ROBYNHTCHCK2000-2017_AcusticSydBSngs_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I tried to do something different and creative. I found a photo of Syd Barrett (from 1967) looking straight ahead, and another one of Hitchcock doing the same (from 1986). Then I manipulated the photos so Barrett makes up half of a head and Hitchcock makes up the other half. I also colorized them, with Barrett being green and Hitchcock blue. I'm pleased at how nicely the two faces fit together.

Pink Floyd - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: 1967

I've posted two Pink Floyd albums already, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the stuff of theirs I plan on posting. However, before I post more of their stray tracks stuff, I want to post some of their BBC performances. For late 1960s and early 1970s Pink Floyd, their BBC recordings are essential, both in terms of the breath and quality of the songs performed, but also the excellent sound quality.

So here's Pink Floyd at the BBC in 1967, at a time when Syd Barrett was still a member of the group. Nearly all of these come from "The Early Years" box set. But there are a couple of things I did that are different from just making an album of all their 1967 BBC appearances.

For one thing, sadly, there are no BBC versions of their great hit "See Emily Play." In fact, no good live performances of this song by the band have been recorded at all. (They did play the song a time or two on TV, but they just mimed to the record.) However, there's one partial exception: the song was recorded well for a 1967 concert in Stockholm, Sweden, and that performance was included on "The Early Years." But unfortunately, the vocals were recorded so low that it's as if they don't exist. So consider this an instrumental version.

The original song "One in a Million" wasn't included on "The Early Years." Maybe it's a sound quality issue. The vocals are muffled and distant, making it nearly impossible to understand the words being sung. But the instrumental part sounds as good as lots of other things that made "The Early Years," and any Pink Floyd originals from 1967 should be treasured. The song is mostly an instrumental anyway, and one can treat the vocals as just another instrument.

The original instrumental "Tomorrow's World" is also on "The Early Years," but there's a big problem with it. It comes from a BBC science documentary "Tomorrow's World," and parts of the song have an announcer loudly talking over the music. So I made an edit just of the two sections without the talking and spliced them together. That makes it just over a minute long, but I considered it interesting enough for inclusion anyway.

The band did two songs for a BBC science documentary that were marred by a narrator talking over large portions of the songs. Thanks to the sound editing program X-Minus, I figured out a way to split the audio from the music. The song "Tomorrow's World" is a really nice instrumental in a longer version than before, since I could include a bit more where there had been the narration. "Green Onion" is a cover of the classic instrumental. I hadn't included it previously due to narration over the entire thing. It's not the greatest, but it does show Syd Barrett's guitar playing.

I also added "Reaction in G." I'd skipped it before because it's only 40 seconds long. (Clearly there should have been more, but the BBC only played that much, and the rest apparently has been lost.) Furthermore, the BBC DJs talked over most of that, so there wasn't much left. But now one can at least hear all of it clearly.

The total length of this album is 40 minutes, which is an ideal length for an album of the era.

01 Astronomy Domine (Pink Floyd)
02 One in a Million (Pink Floyd)
03 Matlida Mother (Pink Floyd)
04 The Gnome [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
05 The Scarecrow [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
06 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
07 Reaction in G [Instrumental] [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
08 Flaming [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
09 Tomorrow's World [Instrumental] [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
10 Green Onions [Instrumental] [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
11 Scream Thy Last Scream (Pink Floyd)
12 Vegetable Man (Pink Floyd)
13 Pow R. Toc H. (Pink Floyd)
14 Jugband Blues (Pink Floyd)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696993/PNKFLYD1967_BBSssonsVolum1_atse.zip.html

I normally detest using black and white photos for cover art if anything in color can be used instead. But in this case, I found an actual photo of Pink Floyd at the BBC in 1967. Specifically,  they're at BBC's Maida Vale Studios on October 9, 1967. I cropped the photo somewhat to focus in on the band members. From the larger photo, I gather they're listening to a playback of their BBC performance. Of course, I had to colorize the photo, because everything in psychedelic 1967 was in vivid color. ;)

Pink Floyd - See Emily Play - Non-Album Tracks (1967)

Pink Floyd is another great musical act that has a messed up discography, especially for its early years. Admittedly, the 2016 box set "The Early Years" did a great job of getting nearly all the vital early material officially released. However, it did a fairly poor job in terms of presenting the songs in a logical and most listenable order. It often seemed their main concern was cramming each CD about as full of music as they could.

That's admirable that they wanted to release so much stuff. But over the years I've come to believe that 30 to 50 minutes is a good album length. It lets the artist set a mood and make a statement (sometimes) without overstaying its welcome. When CDs became big in the 1980s, artists were freed from the maximum length vinyl could handle of about 50 minutes, and often filled up nearly all they could of the maximum 74 minute CD length. This led to a lot of bloat, with songs often going on for a minute or two longer than they should have, and other problems. Happily, in recent years, many musical artists have been going back to the earlier album lengths.

Pink Floyd's non-album tracks are better heard with that old album restriction, and with more thoughtful track selection and order. I'm planning on posting a series of albums that will do just that. I assume that anyone interested in downloading this already has "The Early Years." If you don't, go get it first!

First up is arranging Pink Floyd's early singles and related stray tracks. My challenge was to organize the 1967 material into how it might have appeared if it came out on an album in 1967 or 1968. The "problem" was "Nick's Boogie," an 11 minute instrumental. I stuck that on the end of what would be side A of the album, and then followed it up with some short poppy numbers, so one doesn't get too much instrumental weirdness all at once.

In 1965, Pink Floyd recorded a few songs that went unreleased at the time. In my opinion, some of them are underdeveloped and/or generic, and not worth repeated listens, unless you're a die-hard fan. But I liked three songs enough to include them. One song, "Butterfly," sounds exactly like a good 1967 Syd Barrett song. "Walk with Me Sydney" is the first known Roger Waters original with vocals shared between Barrett, Waters, and a girlfriend of one of the band members, while "I'm a King Bee" is a blues cover.

01 Butterfly (Pink Floyd)
02 Walk with Me Sydney (Pink Floyd with Juliette Gale)
03 I'm a King Bee (Pink Floyd)
04 Arnold Layne (Pink Floyd)
05 Candy and a Currant Bun (Pink Floyd)
06 Nick's Boogie [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
07 See Emily Play (Pink Floyd)
08 Apples and Oranges (Pink Floyd)
09 Paintbox (Pink Floyd)
10 Vegetable Man (Pink Floyd)
11 Experiment [Sunshine] [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
12 In the Beechwoods [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)
13 Scream Thy Last Scream (Pink Floyd)
14 Reaction in G [Instrumental] [Live] (Pink Floyd)

Interstellar Overdrive [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15181714/PinkF_1965-1967_SeeEmlyPlay_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I wanted to use whatever the cover for the "See Emily Play' single was. But that turned out to be surprisingly boring for a psychedelic band, especially because it was in stark black and white. So I inverted it and added some color.