Anthony Flack wrote: Mon Dec 13, 2021 12:16 am
Syd left the band with two more albums worth of good material rattling around his ragged noodle; it was the others who were left stuck in a cave with the small animals and no ideas. The didn't seem like a band enjoying their artistic freedom at that time, more like lost, flailing around, not knowing what to do before they had their dadrock breakthrough.
Yeah, I don't hear this at all in "Set The Controls.." or "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" or in "Atom Heart Mother".
I also think a fair bit of the Syd stuff has been redefined by hindsight. "Syd was a genius therefore "Bike" is brilliant," etc. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of "The Madcap Laughs", and a fair bit of the Syd PF stuff, but I think this insistence that there were two sides, and one was great and the other shite, just feels invented retrospectively and reverse engineered.