This was also nailed very quickly with the third

Love YouAs the title suggests, it’s a love song.The recording of Love You makes a mockery of those tales of Syd being too disorganized and out of key to get tracks down. It was completed in just four attempts.The first was too fast; the second too slow; the third was a false start; and the fourth was the one added to the album and released to the public. No problem at all.There’s not much else to say about this. It’s patently a love song, but Syd had so many girlfriends that it could have been about any one of them. It might even just be about love itself. It’s poppy, upbeat and reminiscent of Pink Floyd era Syd.I’ve heard of no anecdotes which would render this anything but a light-hearted homily to a lady. It might be someone in particular, or it might be about the condition of being in love itself.

Love You No Good TryingLove song or a snipe at Roger Waters? Or both of these things and neither of these things?"There is no use trying," said Alice, "one can’t believe impossible things.""I dare say you haven’t had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland After the aforementioned four takes of Love You, Syd and Malcolm moved straight onto No Good Trying. This was also nailed very quickly with the third take being the one on the album.So what was it all about? We should all beware trying to read too much into Syd’s lyrics at times. He didn’t always write them to make sense.One girlfriend told how she watched him creating lyrics on a beach in Formantera, Ibiza. Syd asked her to give him three letters. He then thought of three favorite words for each letter, wrote them on pieces of paper and threw them into the air.One by one the nine words became, in the order that they fell, his lyrics. There was no more meaning than that. Other times, the lyricism was word association or simply words which sounded good. Or free borrowing from classic literature, often children’s stories and poems.And sometimes the words had a deeper meaning. Often all of the above applied within the same song. But then Syd openly said that he liked songs to have multiple meanings.Two themes ran through No Good Trying. There was some Alice in Wonderland imagery, which bounced off references to the fairground.

No Good Trying The words ’hand’, ’love’ and ’sequin fan’ have led some people to interpret this as a love song too. There’s a lady who is trying to break up with Syd, but he’s patronizingly informing her that she’s still in love with him.However, there are many more who see Syd lashing at out his former bandmates, and Roger Waters in particular, in this song instead. It’s all in the poetry.The opening isn’t ’it’s no use trying’, because that would create too much sibilance in the opening lines. Syd uses his sibilance with random precision.With Syd Barrett at the helm, Pink Floyd had been the vanguard of the whole psychedelic movement in Britain. Now he was gone and four architecture students were attempting to lead that charge. They had lost the person who actually lived and breathed it.Roger Waters has decided that he is going to lead the band into Wonderland. Syd subtly counters with ’you haven’t had much practice’. Now use the fairground motif as an analogy of the whole psychedelic world. And you’re rocking me backwards - rock in the rock’n’roll sense, i.e. you kicked me out of the band. And you’re rocking towards the red and yellow mane of a stallion horse - and your music is supposed to be psychedelic!