From Robyn on Patreon in 2022
Hearing this song in 1972 tipped me over from being a Syd Barrett fan into a worshipper. The illogical chords, the dysfunctional imagery, the doomy vocal - the whole picture: that was me at 19, that was how I felt. Nothing about contemporary life was making me race towards it - after a sheltered childhood and hothouse adolescence the prospect of 1970s reality made me want to crawl away and die. At the heart of it all was the bleak dawn of the decade - all my heroes were climbing down from their perches. Barrett more or less fell off his.

But his despair was coated in beauty. The cold iron hands, the clock going through a washing machine, the semi-tonal chord shifts: it was vital in a way that nothing else seemed to be. Skip forward 50 years and here I am with another Syd-lover, Davey Lane, lurching through the song in glorious disbelief: does it really go like this? Well, almost…