Apparently, Vegetable Man was the last song Syd Barrett wrote for the Pink Floyd.
I read somewhere in a magazine that Barrett, in an altered state, came up with the song when the band was short of material for the second album. However, the song wasn't included on that album, nor has it ever been released officially.
It's only ever been available on bootlegs and when Wouldn't you miss me?, a Barrett compilation album came out last year it included the previously unreleased (but fairly minor) track Bob Dylan Blues, but omitted Vegetable Man. It's no doubt something to do with recording rights.

The song can be considered as a kind of piss take of the vacuity of the whole hippie scene. It's strange that Barrett should have chose to sing about a "vegetable man". It's not that he became a vegetable in later years, but apparently his faculties are seriously diminished.

It's also strange to consider the fate of the band, Pink Floyd, that went on, minus Barrett, to become one of the mega-bands, branded as "dinosaurs" by the punks of the late seventies.

It's strange to think that mental health is at the centre of the themes of later Pink Floyd work, notably Roger Waters' The Wall, a concept album where the main character loses it. That's a difficult one, that, analysing The Wall and the forces behind it...

In a way, Barrett was British Psychedelia. There was a childlike quality to his songs, a kind of "fairy tale" dimension. At the same time there was something very english about it all.
This was the first album. The one he made with Pink Floyd.

My favourites, though, are the ones he made after that titled The Madcap Laughs and Barrett.

It's difficult to describe The Madcap Laughs. On it, you can hear a man in the process of coming part, someone on another planet entirely.
And you can ask yourself the question, is it fair to listen, for pleasure, to the recording of a man who is visibly losing it?
But it's a beautiful album. There is nothing else quite like it.
It's as if he's gone that much further than in his earlier work.
Take, for example, Octopus, one of the best songs on the album.
It's hard to make head or tale of the lyrics. I certainly can't. Even when I discovered the lyrics faithfully transcribed on some fan's site. It's impossible to stick a particular meaning on Octopus. But it's not nonsense, far from it. Rather it's a poetic kind of writing that conjures up all sorts of images and moods. And it's not pretentious or over literary: the lyrics fit the music perfectly.
One fan wrote "Barrett is capable of strumming two plain chords and making you feel that there is a chasm between them". That just about sums it up. Barrett's music is powerful, difficult to explain but you know it's unique and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. It leaves you feeling sorry for the loss, sorry that Barrett retracted into himself after these two initial solo albums.
 

How I missed getting into Barrett in the mid-eighties before getting a second chance in the early nineties

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