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://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.