MUSIC/SONGS

Lupus Music Ltd.

Baby Lemonade

Clowns and Jugglers

Dark Globe

Dominoes

Effervescing Elephant

Feel

Gigolo Aunt

Here I Go

I Never Lied To You

If It’s In You

It Is Obvious

Late Night

Long Gone

Love you

Love Song

Maisie

No Good Trying

No Man’s Land

Octopus

Rats

She Took A Long Cold Look

Swan Lee (Silas Lang)

Terrapin

Waving My Arms In The Air

Wined And Dined

Wolfpack

Another song, Golden Hair, had the lyrics written by James Joyce.

Westminster Music Ltd.

Apples And Oranges

Astronomy Domine

Bike

Chapter 24

Flaming

Jugband Blues

Lucifer Sam

Matilda Mother

Scream Thy Last Scream

See Emily Play

The Gnome

The Scarecrow

Vegetable Man

Other two songs, the instrumentals Interstellar Overdrive and Pow R. Toc H., were co-written with Pink Floyd (Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason).

All songs later published also by Magdalene Music Ltd.

Dunmo Music Publishing Company Ltd.

Arnold Layne

Candy And A Currant Bun

Note: All the songs in this column are Pink Floyd songs.

Rock Music Company Ltd. (now administered by BMG)

A Last Recording

A Rooftop In A Thunderstorm

Birdie Hop

Bob Dylan Blues

Butterfly

Dolly Rocker

Double O Bo

Early Morning Henry *

I Get Stoned (Stoned Alone)

In The Beechwoods

Intremental *

Lanky (Part 1)

Let’s Split

Lucy Leave

Milky Way

Opel

Reaction In G

Remember Me

Rhamadam

She Was A Millionaire *

Two Of A Kind

Untitled

Word Song

* No known recordings exist

It's unclear if the song "Two of a Kind" was possibly written by Richard Wright.

You can count 64 Syd Barrett's own compositions, plus 3 co-written ones, although the instrumental Rhamadam is considered very similar to Lanky (in this way "Clown and Jugglers" and "Octopus" would be the same song, since only the lyrics changed, as it happened to "Matilda Mother") and it's considered doubtful if Syd actually wrote Two of a Kind instead of Richard Wright. Also, A Rooftop In A Thunderstorm should be a poem never set to music, and someone thinks it was not even written by Syd. Of course, there are other theories about the most unknown songs.

If you like to know about song details by searching around recordings, master tapes, reissued records and remastered releases, then you should go to the SYD'S RECORDINGS sub-section.

Instead, if you prefer to see an overview of the songs released through his musical career, you should go back to the main MUSIC section, which begins with three introductory links to pages where the main releases are shown splitted in three parts. You can also click below to start with the first part:

By the way, on the bottom of second part it can be shown a reduced version of the detailed list below (which here includes some songs not actually written by Syd Barrett):

LIST OF ALL SONGS WRITTEN OR RECORDED BY SYD BARRETT Where it is not specified Syd Barrett performed vocals and guitar. If a song was not written nor co-written by Syd Barrett, the original title and the publisher are left blank and the title is in grey.

All information taken from David Parker's book Random Precision: Recording the Music of Syd Barrett 1965-1974, and according to Syd Barret Estate manager Paul Loasby.

Each publisher is a private company limited by shares (Ltd.). Rock Music Company Ltd. is administered by BMG.

To know more about the songs not written by Syd Barrett, but that he performed with Pink Floyd or with others, go to this page:

However, those were just a few songs written by Roger Waters or Richard Wright that Syd played with Pink Floyd, while his total guest appearances would have been even less in number: we have to add some of the covers he played live in the early years to have no more than 34 songs, as you can see in the list below (the songs added are in grey).

The remaining unreleased songs may need to be treated as a separate group, also because of the legends surrounding them... (it's enough that the master tapes of 3 songs were erased or lost and the lyrics of 2 songs are unknown). They consist of at least 10 songs. Below is the link to the related page and a short list to see what songs they are.

The fresh irony in "Bob Dylan Blues" might hide serious consideration for the songwriting: Syd Barrett was very fond of all of his lyrics — and not merely because in a 1970 interview he replied "very important" to the interviewer's question "How important are the lyrics?". For what was his last proper interview, he said to Mick Rock, who went to visit him at his home in Cambridge, and Mick then wrote: It's unclear if the publishing companies still have exactly the lyrics Syd had in his hands: there are still doubts about some words, like the now popular doubt about "Octopus" if the word in a line was "madcap" and not "mad cat", and now the only surviving lyric sheet is that one for "It Is Obvious", which at least shows how he used to edit his typed lyrics, even counting beats and lengths.

Possibly at a much younger age Syd was already checking the different rhyme schemes for his later songs, writing some of the lines, with the great care that a 16 years old passionate boy can have in reading things like Lear and Carroll and writing as a short poem for his girlfriend Libby in a love letter with things like "Equation: Lib's lips less love = sad Syd." Perhaps his subsequent girlfriend Jenny Spires would confirm she heard all of his compositions before he turned 21: Peter Jenner, his first manager, told "He did write incredibly quickly. All those songs were... all done by about June of '67". Much later, no longer involved in music, Syd admitted himself unable to write songs since the '70s. Again Peter Jenner: "I think you have to feel that he did a lifetime's work in a year".

In the first lines of "See Emily Play" you might find reminiscences from his youth: Perhaps, even in the big amount of thoughts he used to write in his diaries, far to be songs, it would have been possible to find clues about his lyrics, but he burnt them shortly after his mom's death in 1991. Nobody seems to know much about what he was writing then, as in his later years, other than that he was writing much about painting.

You can find much about Syd's songwriting in the REVIEWS sub-section, as well as on the books and on the other articles in the ABOUT SYD section. Here we'll try to make an overview in order to compare all of the songs of his entire career. A rather commercial point of view would suggest to compare his songs by splitting his songwriting career with Pink Floyd songs and solo songs, that's a thought subtly denied by Syd's words in one of his last interviews, written by Steve Turner: Whatever was the way he wrote songs, it didn't change very much, and also the subjects may have been his early ones, if not in his later ruminations on being a pop star or about his relationship with Lindsay Corner. The Pink Floyd thing is explained by Peter Jenner: "A lot of old songs were considered a bit too child-like and not sort of serious enough for this heavy psychedelic band."

Julian Palacios, author of one of the best biographical books on Syd Barrett, described very well and in detail the techniques Syd used on his songwriting on an essay on the internet. In introducing the essay, it's useful to read an excerpt from his book:

The essay is listed on the REVIEWS sub-section too, but you can see it by clicking below:

The excerpt below is followed by two older quotes from two great guitarists, Fred Frith and Jimmy Page: The two guitarists rightly compared Syd to other great musicians to describe his songwriting:

Fred Frith: "Both Beefheart and Syd Barrett have in the past exerted this powerful questioning force by redefining the medium in which they operated."

Jimmy Page: "Both he and Jimi Hendrix had a futuristic vision in a sense."

If we argue that the more a comparison is objective the more it makes sense, we should expect that David Gilmour's description of Syd as "one of the three or four greats, along with Bob Dylan" will be explained at least as well as the other two comparisons above.

Having seen how Syd Barrett's songwriting is worth some analysis much more than the standards, with still much space to explore, it may be interesting to compare the 60 and more songs of his repertoire under various aspects, not only about those techniques which led to pleasure and admiration, but also about what was behind his creative process. This is hardly possible, but only on an accurate retrospect. The good thing should be that the infinite possible cross-references are limited within his own repertoire. A basic first step could be to search any sort of recurrence in his songs, starting from the words used, then the sentences, the types of rhyme and assonance, and so on, as well as starting from the occurrences of the chord sequences, then the techniques of guitar-playing and recording, and so on. Completing this would help to search what occurrences are the most significant to study them individually or for the totality of the work of the songwriter, trying to embrace it as a whole.

Would you ever discuss musical theory with Syd Barrett? Fred Frith's reply: "It would have been nice. But his compositional ideas tend to shine through his compositions, which is the way it should be."