Laughing Madcaps Syd Barrett Group Membership Passes 5,000 and Receives Coveted Link on Official Website

The world's oldest and largest Syd Barrett fan group, the Laughing Madcaps, recently achieved a Membership Milestone of five thousand Members. Additionally, the group was recognized by the Syd Barrett Estate and receiving a coveted link on the Official Syd Barrett Website. The Laughing Madcaps Syd Barrett Facebook Group is the continuation of the original Syd Barrett Yahoo group from 1997. End Quote

(1888PressRelease) January 17, 2016 - The world's oldest and largest Syd Barrett fan group, the Laughing Madcaps, recently achieved a Membership Milestone of five thousand Members. This is concurrent with the group being recognized by the Syd Barrett Estate and receiving a coveted link on the Official Syd Barrett Website.

Syd Barrett, the first creative force and Guitarist for the English super group - Pink Floyd, has always been something of an enigma. He was one of the inventors of British psychedelic music and darling of the Underground. Soon after, he had one of the epic breakdowns in rock music; retiring back to his beloved Cambridge and becoming the poster boy for "Reclusive Genius" or "Acid Burnout". Then, he became the muse of his old band who used his story as inspiration to sell tens of millions of records and play to stadiums of adoring fans.

Throughout it all, Syd Barrett has maintained a fervent fan base. First, there were the spectators at clubs like UFO and Middle Earth who ingested psychedelic substances and used Syd's flights on the guitar to transport them elsewhere. Then there was the first Fan Group of Syd Barrett, run by Bernard White, and anchored by the Terrapin fanzine. With the packaging and sale of Barrett's solo albums in the USA in the Seventies and Eighties, his fan base grew ever more.

Laughing Madcaps Owner, Kiloh Smith, says, "With the advent of the Internet things took another turn. The first social networking anything was a company called eGroups and the first Laughing Madcaps group was started on there. We were not the first Syd Group; that distinction belongs to JugBand News. They were a little Syd group and I joined them and didn't like the scene. I was too much like a clique. Anyway, I left there and started the Laughing Madcaps group. Within a few weeks we had overtaken JugBand News in memberships and were the #1 Internet Syd group in the world."

See the Laughing Madcaps Group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/laughingmadcaps

Mr. Smith continues, "Soon after, eGroups was bought out by Yahoo and became Yahoogroups. We flourished in Yahoo, and hit 4,000 Members, until it became obvious that Facebook was the new interface and the future beckoning. Some years ago, we made the switch to Facebook and came with nothing but our reputation. We started over on there and soon became the #1 Syd Barrett Fan Group in the world. Last year, we passed the old Yahoogroup in membership and early this year hit 5,000 Members."

The Laughing Madcaps was also the first fan group to begin the daunting task of organizing all of the extant information about Syd Barrett out on the Internet and it was a lot. They began collecting and cataloging written accounts. They interviewed participants and made those interactions available to the fans. They debunked and cataloged hoax tracks purporting to have Syd Barrett on them, and even more. All of this work was undertaken for free for the benefit of the fans.

But a Pillar of the group's work in this regard was the cataloging of every Syd Barrett image known by Laughing Madcaps Moderator - Mark Jones. Over a period of almost fifteen years, Mr. Jones has painstakingly gathered all of the extant Syd Barrett photographic images in the best quality and assembled them into specific folders. These folders were then burned to a DVR that was made available to the fans for free download. With the advent of Facebook, the contents of Mark's folders have been transferred to folders on Laughing Madcaps for free examination by all.

Mark Jones' work has achieved a kind of legendary status among Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd fans. He has been consulted by all of the Biographers, David Gilmour and Pink Floyd themselves. Of late, he has been working with the Syd Barrett Estate on the building of the new Syd Barrett Website. Mark's expertise in the images was utilized to provide the fans with some tasty tidbits. As a nod to Mark's good work, the Laughing Madcaps group received a coveted link on the Official Syd Barrett Website.

Laughing Madcaps Owner, Kiloh Smith, says, "Here at Laughing Madcaps, we have always known that Mark's work was groundbreaking and important. With the link on the Official Syd Barrett site, in my opinion, it's recognition of almost twenty years of work cataloging the information and giving the fans a place to congregate."

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