Some electronic music is supposed to be danced to. Tangerine Dream’s 1970s albums are supposed to be anti-danced to. They are monoliths of sound and moving at all to them feels wrong: you can imagine Edgar Froese’s ghost staring in disapproval at your breath, and your heartbeat.

1976’s Stratosfear (their third major-label release on Virgin) sees the band changing. The first Tangerine Dreams were formless abyssic oceans of synthesiser noise with unusual sonic lifeforms flickering under the water (Alpha Centauri, from 1971, is the only ambient record I can think of that contains a drum solo). Once they signed to Virgin, their sound focused and tightened: Stratosfear, near the end of their classic period, has more overt melodies and rhythms. And unusually for early Dream, if you divide the running time by the number of tracks, you get a single-digit number.

“Stratosfear” is a forceful, climbing driving mini-epic, with a fun suspended/Egyptian pentatonic II melodic hook. It’s the most Vangelis-sounding track on the album. “The Big Sleep in Search of Hades” has less going on inside it, although there’s a fair amount of acoustic guitar for the prog rock fans. “3AM” has a slow-building intro that looks back to their earliest releases, though the tempo picks up soon after.

“Invisible Limits” is the longest track: 11 minutes of Pink Floyd worship with electric guitar and drumming, and a recurring pan flute motif. Tangerine Dream were the spacey, ambient wing of the German style of “krautrock”, and while some of this stuff is funky (Neu! Can, and certain Bowie songs circa 1977), Tangerine Dream is not. It cannot be emphasized enough that this music consists of bubbling 16th notes locked to a grid amid huge tidal waves of sound, and although it has some progressive rock influence (there are live examples of Edgar Froese attempting guitar solos, to dismal results), it has no groove at all. It’s what rock music would sound like if it hadn’t been influenced by jazz and RnB. The music is so white it’s #FFFFFF.

“Kosmische musik” (a term Froese coined) might seem very far removed from 80s hip hop, but they are both styles based upon a single piece of gear. For hip hop, it was the E-MU SP-12/SP-1200 sampler. For kosmische music, it was the modular synthesizer. Whether it was the Moog or the more portable EMS VCS, these synths and their sounds were everywhere in 70s rock. The sonic possibilities seemed endless. It’s not surprising that Tangerine Dream would adopt spacey-themes: synthesisers indeed seemed like a space-race breakthrough for music.

But this brought danger: were bands relying too much on (soon to be dated) technological wizardry? And yeah, a lot of early synth-powered music now provokes a reaction of “okay, there’s a delay effect on your notes. Is there anything here aside from that one trick, which can now be produced in 2 seconds with a VST and which I’ve heard a million times?” Like prog rock, it became a bloated scene, too in love with itself.

In the 80s, krautrock faded from prominence, and its ambient wing became a hundred fluttering feathers, all of them hoping to land in new markets. By the 80s, Jean-Michel Jarre was making synthpop, Vangelis was more famous for his movie soundtracks than his original albums, and Tangerine Dream were kind of playing it both ways. They toured heavily, in unconventional places. A 1974 performance at Reims cathedral (with Nico) ended in disaster. 6,000 tickets were sold for a 2,000-head venue, and hundreds of stoned hippies pissed against the historic stonework. I don’t think it’s normal for ambient musicians to get excommunicated by the Pope, but Edgar Froese managed it.

“Saintly man that he was, Father Bernard Goureau intoned more or less as follows: “It is true that the youth smoked marijuana in order to better enter into communication with Tangerine Dream’s sound and the spectacle at large; it is also true that others, to satisfy a natural obligation, urinated against the columns of the cathedral; and finally, it is again true that to combat the cold, couples were seen in kissing embraces. But it is equally true that some 6,000 young people, remaining sat upon the floor for three hours in the dark, had enjoyed the music and could have caused much more serious damage, with far less decorum.” Amen.” ^[1]https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/11/nico-tangerine-dream-feature

Ambient synth-based music existed in a cultural blind spot in the 1980s: it was seemingly everywhere, but nobody listened to it. Or rather, they watched it instead of listening to it: it was deemed worthless unless accompanied by a laser light show or Blade Runner. Few people valued it as music, in and of itself. Tangerine Dream had journeyed out into space and found it to be a lightless dead end.

Ten years later, ambient would undergo a commercial resurgence (both Enigma’s “Sadeness: Part I” and The Orb’s U.F.Orb topped their respective UK charts at the start of the 90s), but it was a hip, modern ambient based on house music and samples, not long hair and synthesizer solos. Soon the world-crushing success of Enya sucked all the air out of that scene anyway. It’s possible that A Day Without Rain shifted more units than every Tangerine Dream album combined.

Tangerine Dream now seems old and quaint, like those probes we sent out in the seventies. Nothing ages as rapidly as the future. But in a weird way, their best music has a strangeness that stands outside age. They never wanted to be the mainstream, and even when they were () it seemed like a happy accident.

They were a German, and their English song titles – like their music – is bafflingly correct yet very odd. Stratosfear continues this tradition. “The Big Sleep in Search of Hades” suggests Raymond Chandler in the Greek underworld (does Philip Marlowe get paid two drachmas a day, plus expenses?), and “3 A.M. at the Border of the Marsh From Okefenokee”…shouldn’t from be to? All the words are spelled correctly, but it’s not English.

Tangerine Dream were never a band from Earth. I don’t know where they’re actually from, but their attempts to connect with the customs of our planet have the air of a mistake-filled travel guide written by aliens. They always had at least one foot in some alien world or another. Stratosfear is an excellent example of where they were, and charts some of the places they had still to visit.

There’s an inaccessible, inhuman quality to a lot of this music. But it also challenges you to rise above your biological limits. Bigbrained people sometimes talk about “anthropomorphism”, or giving huge and mysterious concepts a human face. God is a bearded man. GPT-3 is the Terminator. The effect always diminishes whatever’s being spoken about: making the numinous and grand small and ugly. Humans are limited creatures in the end (which may be coming soon), and our horizons are very small. Tangerine Dream swaps the signified and the signifier. They dehumanize music, dehumanize space. They invite us to ponder a glowing, diaphanous eternity in which we never were.

It often takes time to “get” a band. It’s like being at a petrol station, and you’re waiting for petrol to flow through the pipe. You can’t rush it. You have to wait for that lovely moment we all enjoy, when cool, delicious petrol goes squirting into our mouth, nose, and eyes.

When I started listening to The Fall, I had my reaction planned out like a chemotherapy plan: I’d hate them at first, slowly hack away at their thirty-one-album discography, and then they’d become one of my favorite bands.

Instead, the opposite happened. I loved them at first. Then I didn’t.

The Infostainment Scam (or whatever it’s called) was a good first choice. It has several excellent songs; the disco apocalypse of “Lost in Music”, the psychotic noir prison-bar rattling of “It’s a Curse”, and the brightly Gary-Glittering stomp of “Glam-Racket”. Its aesthetic of barely-marshalled noise was exhilerating, and although Mark E Smith’s vocals sounded like a drunk co-worker overconfidently singing karaoke, surely this would prove an acquired taste.

Then I listened to more The Fall albums. They left no impression, or were memorable for bad reasons.

Hip Priest and the Kamerads sounds like slam poetry delivered over noise rock. The title track was eight minutes of blues rock choogling: annoying and borderline unlistenable. Bend Sinister is more of the same: songs that make their point after a minute and then continue for another six. Their version of “Victoria” is one of the least necessary covers I’ve ever heard. They changed nothing. Is this where post-punk was at as a genre in 1988? Reverential, straightfaced covers of boomer rock anthems?

Soon I was growing bored with The Fall. They seemed all vibes, no substance. But maybe the problem was me. After all “Lost in Music” was proof they could write great music…then I took a closer look at The Infotainment Scan’s songwriting credits, and said “ok then.”

Then there’s Mark E Smith, the band’s alleged singer.

Rock journalists love guys like Mark. He’s a walking cliche and is very easy to write about. Just arrange “consummate perfectionist”, “complex personality”, “troubled genius”, “enfant terrible”, “provocateur”, “outsider artist”, “incendiary maverick”, “Janus-faced,” “checkered career” in some order like fridge magnets, and you’ve written your own MES bio.

But there was a man beneath the cliches, a man who’s troubling to come to terms with. Here‘s guitarist Ben Pritchard, who got to know the “troubled genius” firsthand.

Physical violent attacks are not we should have to deal with on a daily basis. […] We shouldn’t have to be worried that the singer’s going to attack us again before the gig because we’ve stopped off for a hotdog at the service station. Like we’re wasting time… fucking hell we can’t do anything. You can’t eat, if you went for a meal even on your day off, you’d come back and he’d be waiting for you ‘What you fucking doing? What you fucking doing, eating? Fucking useless cunts.’ What? I’ve gotta eat, me. He puts you down for getting hungry!

[…] when we went to America it just got worse. […] we can only rely on each other to get ourselves out of the shit. Cos Mark could fucking leave us – and he did on the tour in America with the broken leg, he left us with no fucking money, no flight tickets home, he just fucking left us. We had to start getting deposits back for the hire vehicles, we had to get money together for our flights to Chicago. Our flight to Chicago was a non-refundable ticket that wasn’t due for two weeks. He didn’t care, he had all the money from all the gigs. He had Ed Blaney with him, he had his wife, they got home fine, no problem.

It’s obvious by now that the UK music press will excuse obnoxious or abusive behavior if it makes a good story. They were happy to interpret MES’s abhorrent personal behavior as something romantic: a striving toward perfection, marred by silly foolish humans like Pritchard who are the sand in MES’s gears.

“Talented asshole” is a more fitting descriptor, particularly with the first part spoken in a sarcastic voice. Most such assholes aren’t talented, we just pretend they are, because how else to justify the position we’ve given them in our culture? The hardest person to talk out of a scam is the person who’s just been rooked by one, and MES spent decades running a scam on the British press.

Quoting Wikipedia: “Smith’s approach to music was unconventional and he did not have high regard for musicianship, stating that ‘rock & roll isn’t even music really. It’s a mistreating of instruments to get feelings over’.” That sounds like a clever defense for not understanding music. But it gets recontextualized as “unconventional”.

Or witness this desperate attempt by Spin to recast MES as a modern Oscar Wilde, full of cutting put-downs and scathing one-liners. He thought Telly Savalas was “a twat”! He thought new bands were a bunch of “ass lickers”! Oh, and wait until you hear what he did to Mumford & Sons. Ready? He threw a bottle at them, the absolute lunatic! If you or I did something like that, we’d be on r/madlads getting ridiculed.

Ben Pritchard’s interview goes on and on, listing all kinds of grubby, exploitative nonsense. But even that could be excusable if MES was a brilliant talent. After all, David Bowie was occasionally given to sharp business practices.

But here’s the part that made me decide not to bother with Mark E Smith or his music.

I’d only been playing the guitar for about two years. It was the day after I’d bought my Stratocaster that was. So that was like the first time I put it on and played it properly and plugged it in was in front of [Mark] in the studio, listening to the backing track of Dr Buck’s Letter. He says, “Go on, cock. Just fookin play something, I’m going to the pub.” And that was it…

“Just fookin play something, I’m going to the pub.” That seems to be the Rosetta stone of MES: sneering, lazy disinterest. Yeah, who cares. Just play something. Rock music is for idiots. Have contempt for your bandmates, and contempt for your fans.

MES wasn’t a consummate perfectionist, slaving to reach some Promethean ideal. He was a jerk who threw together careless, slapdash music with whoever was willing to tolerate him. Or so it seems to me.

Sometimes The Fall could be good. Perhaps they were often good – there are big parts of their discography I haven’t touched. But I am sure that while they were being good, MES was getting drunk at the pub.

MES could write some obtuse and weird lyrics, and I enjoy his song titles. They’re kind of broken and not-quite-right, like a cracked plate. “Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room”. That’s a great title. But it’s all just alcohol-inspired brilliance: random, loose puns, joined together in disorder by misfiring dendrites. I was once at a Tab in Sydney, and heard a man order a Sprite. When asked to justify himself by his mates (who were all several pints in on VB and Carlton Dry), he sagely said “Sprite makes right.” That man is 3 IQ points from writing The Fall lyrics.

MES is not a treasured national resource for supplying us with beermat philosophy. You can find people who think and act like him down at the local pub. They exist in huge quantities.

In fact, I don’t see any sign that MES had any worthwhile qualities. Yes, occasionally, he could be nice to his bandmates. You could call this “complex”, or you could realize that if he was nasty all the time, nobody would work with him.

MES didn’t write music, couldn’t play an instrument, “sang” only in the loosest of terms, and fuck knows he wasn’t pretty to look at. What is this violent alcoholic retard good for?

British artist Bryan Charnley suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and in 1991 he painted a series of seventeen self-portraits while on reduced dosages of antipsychotic medication.

The paintings start out normal but soon become weird; broken eggs, free-floating eyes, red throats yawning in foreheads, twitching spiders’ legs, and so on. Frantic pulses of paint irrigate the canvas like blood from a hummingbird’s slit throat, and the final painting is just a collapsed, anguished vortex of color. Charnley’s notes range from calm descriptions of his methods, to rants about “negroes” disrespecting him and TV broadcasts beamed into his mind, to nothing. He committed suicide later that year.

It comes back to one question: what’s it like to be mad? Is there some way that sane people can understand? You can ask a mad person, but can you trust their answer? Maybe not, because their condition might distort how they express themselves. Think of that American POW in that VC propaganda broadcast, claiming he was being treated well by his captors…with his eyes blinking out T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code.

Maybe art is the answer. A recurrent motif in Charnley’s self-portraits is that his lips are nailed shut: he can’t express himself using words, but could use paint instead. Syd Barrett’s 1970 album (created as he was plunging down the slope of his own mental decline) seems like a fascinating example of “mad” art. What can we learn from him?

Well, apparently here’s what being insane is like:

1. You will play boring Beatles-sounding skiffle rock.
2. Your lyrics will be Dr Seuss rhymes about girls and being in love, or random eructations of nonsense. “Honey love you, honey little / honey funny sunny morning / love you more funny love in the skyline baby / ice-cream ‘scuse me / I’ve seen you looking good the other evening.” And ad nauseaum in that vein.
3. You won’t be sure of what key you’re in. “Terrapin” cycles from E major to G major chords. Which is the tonic?  If it’s E major, the second chord should be G# major. if it’s G major, the first chord should be E minor. They don’t fit together, and the song flip-flops around without a tonal center.
4. The performances will be loose, and not well-recorded. In some songs the main thing audible is Syd’s plectrum. This album apparently took a year to record. It sounds like it was recorded in an afternoon.
5. Your album will be padded with stops and starts and count-ins and rambling. Such “authenticity” would become a feature of troubled rock and roll legends, sometimes reaching tragicomic levels, like Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, or Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings (which has tracks of Kurt Cobain burping, making fart noises, and doing a Donald Duck impression). Here, it comes off as mere filler.
6. Your mind will shrink, becoming incapable of anything except melodic and lyrical cliches. Madness finally stands revealed not as liberty but as chains.

The most interesting song is “Octopus”. When Syd yawps “Close our eyes to the octopus ride!” he sounds awake and part of the music, instead of (say) like a man groggily trying to put his socks on over his shoes after a three-day Quaalude binge. The Madcap Laughs is otherwise very basic, and it’s almost incidental that Syd Barrett is on it. It doesn’t offer a window into his troubled soul, or a window into anywhere.

The album’s reputation as an oddball masterpiece preceded it, making me look for depths when there weren’t any there. I misheard “Here I Go’s” as “So now I got all I need / She and I are in love with her greed.” That line caught my ear. Why are you in love with her greed? What does that mean? Then I looked up a lyrics sheet: it’s actually “She and I are in love, it’s agreed.” Even my mondegreens are more interesting than the album.

It’s sad what happened to Syd, and I don’t doubt that this album is all he was capable of, but that doesn’t make it good. It’s just skiffle rock mixed with badly played psychedelia. Unlike the work of The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, or the Shaggs, it wouldn’t be remembered at all if a famous person hadn’t played on it.

We need to rethink the cultural idea that crazy people are gifted or special. The Madcap Laughs makes a compelling (rhetorical, not musical) counterpoint: insanity is just flat-out bad. Maybe you can shine on as a crazy diamond, but you can shine far longer and brighter as a sane one. Sometimes life takes things from us, and gives nothing back.

Robin Williams once said “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” He was speaking about creative madness: not literal madness. In fact, actual insanity is one of the biggest roadblocks imaginable to getting stuff done. It’s horrible, what happened to Syd, and that medical science wasn’t able to stop it. This album is one of the lesser horrors.