♥Shine on you crazy diamond♥

Matilda Mother is pivotal when considering Syd’s vision of childhood.  Any notion of fey whimsy is constantly undercut by unsettling images which constantly rock the song out of its kindergarten complacency.  In Syd’s child-world, security always comes with conditions attached, certainly is juxtaposed with poignancy.  The gestation of the song was simple enough.  LikeLet’s Roll Another One, the lyrics of Matilda Mother were hastily amended at the last minute.  Syd simply replaced Hilaire Belloc’s words with his own and submitted them to the same metrical beat as the Cautionary Tales, even here though he still retained an element of mimicry.  For the song’s opening line he minimally adapted the children’s poem ‘When Good King Arthur Ruled the Land’ to read ‘There was a king who ruled the land’.

What is original about the song is not the verses, which are largely drawn from the common stock of fairy-tale imagery, but the sudden urgent interjection of the chorus where Syd steps out his myth-world to plead, ‘Why d’yer have to leave me there, hanging in my infant air | waiting’, and then attempts, not wholly successfully, to resolve this air of restlessness with the reassuring and placatory, ‘You only have to read the lines of scribbly black and everything shines’.  The song’s opening verse is sung by Rick Wright, and Syd comes in for the chorus with that unnervingly strangulated plea.  Wright sings the second chorus, the ambiguous ‘Wondering and dreaming | the words had different meaning’, which leaves the listener pondering whether Syd means that the words had different meaning when he was a child, or different meaning when transformed by the sensory bombardment of LSD.

What takes the song entirely out of its realm is Syd’s astonishing denouement in the final verse. ‘For all that time spent in that room’ shocks the listener out of reverie and transports us to somewhere more sinister and unsettling.  The next line, ‘The doll’s house darkness | old perfume’ is without precedent in English pop song.  We are invited, Alice in Wonderland-style, to peer in through tiny windows, to see beyond the props and into the shadow world.  It evokes the synesthesia of scent memory and maternal warmth, the stale lingering perfume of lily-of-the-valley and maiden aunts.  

“you were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom blown on, the steel breeze come on, you target for faraway laughter come on, you stranger, you legend you martyr, and shine!”

Happy Birthday to our beloved musician Roger Keith “Syd” Barrett !