‘Vegetable Man’: Hear The Jesus and Mary Chain cover Pink Floyd
Initially led by Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd emerged as one of the major proponents of London’s psychedelic rock movement. In 1967, the band enjoyed nationwide popularity with their first singles ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’. International acclaim soon followed, thanks to an appearance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops and the seminal debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.
On the surface, Pink Floyd appeared ready to take on the global arena, but sadly, Barrett’s mental state had been deteriorating rapidly over the summer of ’67 due to his heavy use of psychedelic drugs. By the end of the year, the band was forced to bring in guitarist David Gilmour, who gradually took the reins as Barrett became increasingly estranged and unreliable.
LSD had a pivotal impact on Barrett’s psychedelic lyricism, as it had for The Beatles during their concurrent embrace of abstract pop music. From his troubled, spiralling mind came some particularly eccentric and inspired musical ideas, including the rarity ‘Vegetable Man’. Pink Floyd recorded the song on August 9th, 1967, as a follow-up to ‘See Emily Play’. It was also earmarked for inclusion on the band’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets; however, it was ultimately omitted from both.
Following Barrett’s departure from Pink Floyd in 1968, ‘Vegetable Man’ became popular among fans as a low-quality bootleg. It wouldn’t receive an official release until the arrival of the compilation album, The Early Years 1965-1972, in 2016.
The title, ‘Vegetable Man’, was ostensibly a reference to the psychedelic paintings of the early Italian surrealist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, famed for painting the human countenance using a mosaic of fruits and vegetables. Meanwhile, Barrett’s outfit on the day of writing inspired his obscure lyrics.
“In yellow shoes, I get the blues / Though I walk the streets with my plastic feet / With my blue velvet trousers, make me feel pink / There’s a kind of stink about blue velvet trousers / In my paisley shirt I look a jerk / And my turquoise waistcoat is quite out of sight,” he sings.
Speaking to Uncut in 2016, Pink Floyd’s early manager, Peter Jenner, remembered the day Barrett penned the song. “Syd wrote it in my flat,” he said. “He was there prior to going to the studio. It was like, ‘Hey, we’ve got a session booked, so we’ve got to have a song,’ so he wrote that. It was a description of himself. Maybe you could see it as a call for help.”
“Syd had an indelible sense of humour, even in his darkest moments,” co-manager Andrew King added. “Everyone really wanted ‘Vegetable Man’ to be a commercially feasible track, you can hear everybody under the sun singing in the chorus at the end. But nothing happened. It just disappeared into the archives.”
Although ‘Vegetable Man’ received due attention in 2016, it had circulated among ardent Pink Floyd fans for five decades. Among these fans were Jim and William Reid, the co-founding brothers of the Scottish alt-rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain. The band brought ‘Vegetable Man’ to a new generation in 1984 when they released a noise rock cover as the B-side to their debut single, ‘Upside Down’. The single was an early release for Alan McGee’s famous Creation label, with McGee producing the A-side and Joe Foster producing ‘Vegetable Man’.
Listen to Pink Floyd’s ‘Vegetable Man’ and its 1984 noise rock cover below.
