Everything Under the Sun E-Book

Mike Cormack

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 968

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Pink Floyd are one of the most iconic and influential rock bands in the world: their sonic ambition, lyrical dexterity and structural ability are unparalleled in rock music. Since their formation in 1965, they have released 15 studio albums and sold over 250 million records. Their eighth album, Dark Side of the Moon, is one of the highest-selling British albums in the world. Mike Cormack takes a deep dive into the music of Pink Floyd, resulting in the first serious appraisal of the band's immense achievements, whilst also giving an overview of the UK's concurrent social and political history as seen through the prism of the band. In addition to a song-by-song analysis, Mike also shares exclusive band interviews, a full chronology and gig guide, and a full bootleg guide. Everything Under the Sun is the definitive account of the career of rock's most devastatingly emotional and articulate band.

Leseprobe

EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Mike Cormack, 2024

The right of Mike Cormack to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 536 6

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

‘The only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not’

Roger Waters

‘All we’ve been trying to do is make music that will move people’

David Gilmour

Dedicated to George Smith and Bill Cormack, who shine on, and to my father, who started it all

With thanks to Darren Mackay, Thomas Ulrik Larsen, Wang Huihua and Jenny Cormack

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Songs

I

Explorations 1967–72

II

Exaltations 1973–79

III

Echoes 1982–2022

Chapter 2: Chronology

Chapter 3: Bootleg Guide

Chapter 4: Interviews

Guy Pratt

James Guthrie

Steve Mac

PREFACE

Pink Floyd have always been a part of my life. I’m a second-generation fan: my dad and uncles were always playing the albums, and I was lucky enough, or simply predisposed, to inherit their taste. Though Pink Floyd are sometimes dismissed as a nice middle-class band expressing middle-class anxieties,1 my male relatives were working-class guys who had gone to sea at a young age (Dad and George in the fishing, and Billy in the Merchant Navy). That’s what you did in our neck of the woods in northern Scotland. All three were all practical guys, dismissive of anything pretentious, but passionate about art and culture – though they’d hate it to be put that way. They loved big solid entertaining books, like those by Stephen King, James Clavell and J.R.R. Tolkien. Musically they were prog rockers who still liked a good tune; they all liked, say, Mike Oldfield, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and The Doors, more than they liked Van Der Graaf Generator or King Crimson, though they were also fans of Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart and Jethro Tull. They had interesting diversions into areas such as classical (Billy liked Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rossini), the blues (George explored this deeply, enthused by The Blues Brothers), and ambient music (Dad liked Brian Eno and The Orb, though neither George nor Billy ever really made the leap to electronic music beyond Kraftwerk). They all despised jazz and detested punk – a trendy spasm to them – while the odd folky album could be found in their collections, Christy Moore or Nick Drake rather than Donovan (the Led Zeppelin III influence, probably).

This all filtered down to me. It was naturally strongest from my dad, though the route was circuitous. My parents split up when I was 6, my dad lived here and there, then returned and married again, when I was about 11, making a living as a low-end hash dealer. There is an etiquette about buying hash: you’re supposed to be sociable with it – like, we’re all on the same level, man, have a toke and mellow out, man. So when I visited he would always have music on rather than the TV, as people would come round to buy their scores and half-scores of resin and share a joint or two. There was nothing glamorous or Scarface in any of this. Being the child of a perennial pot-head is nothing like as bad as being the child of an alcoholic, but you get a bit frustrated at everyone sitting about doing nothing and constantly having to make tea or coffee for everyone because they are too gouchy to move. However, Dad always wanted me to visit, and I felt obliged. And this all took place in a nondescript two-bedroom council house in a small town in northern Scotland. It was all ordinary, mundane.

As a peripatetic guy, Dad had a huge range of pirated C90 tapes, carefully labelled – he was the kind of guy who would visit friends with a bunch of blank cassettes in case they had anything good, whereas George and Billy, as more settled family men, had major vinyl collections and quality Hi-Fis. So I absorbed a great deal when visiting him in those days. I had started to develop my own music collection by then (first album: Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction, on my 9th birthday), but was always willing to listen, and anyway he, of course, had control of the stereo. So I picked up everything from Pink Floyd to Can to Peter Tosh to the Velvet Underground to AC/DC to Tangerine Dream to Brian Eno to Kraftwerk to Queen to The Doors to Genesis to Nick Drake to Hawkwind to dub poet Mikey Smith2 to Captain Beefheart to Black Sabbath to Marillion to Rush to Dianno-era Iron Maiden.3 It might not have been the typical childhood, but as a musical education it was absolutely first class.

Although basically a pot-head allergic to work and responsibility, Dad always made it his mission to convert the people around him to what he liked: Gandalf with a spliff instead of a staff. The underground music that he venerated was completely absent from mainstream TV and radio, and so was passed around by word of mouth and through the connections they raised. For example, Led Zeppelin opened the door to Lord of the Rings, then still a cult, underground book; Iron Maiden led to Frank Herbert’s Dune; the Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol, pop art and Nico; and Roxy Music and Brian Eno led to ambient music. That’s how it was for working-class guys with intellectual interests. This was their higher education, sitting getting stoned and enjoying something a bit deeper than the Top 40. These were people for whom Glastonbury (before it became mainstream and corporate) was Mecca, John Peel their patron saint.

Pink Floyd were always the favourite band of my relatives by some considerable margin. Why? They were all intelligent and they responded to music that had depth but didn’t go overboard in asserting its musical ability (only Billy was into Rick Wakeman, for example). Pink Floyd were nice middle-class boys and so never needed to justify themselves as artists – the fatal error of many a once-hungry rock band. The Wall in particular seized the imagination. It was high art for people who didn’t like anything fancy. It had a complex psychological narrative, and crushing riffs, soaring solos and highly literate lyrics. It was nightmarishly dark, but said at the end if we all came together and were nice to each other that things would be better. It mocked authority figures from schoolteachers to doctors to tour managers. It evoked the dribbling lust of a young man, and said women could tear you apart. It was everything for an angry young man. Dark Side was more a sonic journey; Wish You Were Here was melancholy waves of sound; Piper was gaily frivolous (perfect for mushroom season, though Billy had never even taken a puff of a joint). Pink Floyd perfectly suited them and they were hopelessly, passionately devoted fans of the group. George to this day pretty much always wears jeans and Pink Floyd T-shirts, though he’s comfortably retired after a successful career in the oil industry.

So I was lucky: I had ingested all this before I was even in my teens. My own Pink Floyd journey began with The Wall. George had the VHS cassette (as well as Live At Pompeii) and sometimes I’d watch it, when about 9 years old. It was staggering. There was no text on the back of the VHS box so I could barely make head nor tail of it, simply enjoying the animation and feeling the horror of Pink’s decline into madness and fascism. Later, when I was maybe 11, the local John Menzies had what must have been a re-release, with some explanation actually on the cassette box. I was a tremendous shop-browser in those days, since I never had any money, and studied the box every time I visited, which was every weekend. Things started to click, and when I watched it subsequently, I started to understand the metaphorical point of the scenes and so the lyrics took on greater meaning.

The great leap came when I was 15, when I borrowed practically every album and worked my way through them. Animals swiftly became my favourite, an opinion I’ve rarely changed. The live side of Ummagumma has moved up in recent years; Obscured by Clouds gets more listens than it used to; The Final Cut I respect rather than enjoy, although some people whose musical taste I value rate it highly; The Division Bell rises and falls; I still think Wish You Were Here is slightly overrated, though clearly I’m in the minority here. And ever since then Pink Floyd have featured very heavily on my musical playlist. I own most of the albums on vinyl, have seen David Gilmour and Roger Waters play live, and read whatever books or magazines I can on the group.

All of which is to say that Pink Floyd have always been a huge part of my life. Their sonic ambition, lyrical dexterity, and structural ability are unparalleled in rock music. They inspire emotions that only religion once described – the sense of the numinous in ‘Comfortably Numb’, the transcendence of ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Eclipse’, the desperate isolation of ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ and ‘Nobody Home’, the mystery and majesty of ‘Echoes’, the bittersweet nostalgia of ‘Fat Old Sun’, the feeling of rebirth in ‘Coming Back to Life’. I simply cannot tire of their music – even after writing this book. They astonish and intrigue and move you like no other group.

Shine on.

___________

1   For example – ‘Having grown up listening to Radiohead, I never quite saw the point of Pink Floyd. It was enough to have one group of upper-middle-class glum-wits, stooped over their guitars, telling us how awful the world is – and it’s all the fault of those bloody humans! – without having another, older, even more ponderous version darkening my stereo … Pink Floyd seemed the ultimate bloke’s band: alienated, moody, so pathologically averse to the life-affirming pleasure of a simple pop song that they’d long disappeared up their own dark side.’ (Lynsey Hanley, ‘Posh Rock’, New Statesman, 7 November 2005).

2   John Peel played poems from Smith’s Mi Cyaan Believe It (1982) album in his BBC Radio 1 show.

3   The gaps interest me now: no David Bowie? No Television? No Joy Division or The Smiths or The Cure? No Beatles or Rolling Stones?

INTRODUCTION

No rock group has ever seized the imagination like Pink Floyd. In a field normally primarily concerned with sex, relationships, war and aggression, the self and others, Pink Floyd have explored space, psychosis, pastoralism, isolation, absence, business ethics, transcendence, death, madness, empathy, inertia, communication difficulties, war and the psychology of fascism. They have done so with a range of music perhaps surpassing anyone in the rock canon, from folky acoustic rural homages to ambient rhythms to orchestral grandiosity to ass-kicking hard rock. Yet there is something we can call ‘Floydian’: moderately-paced, spacious, repetitively melodic, coloured by the Farsifa keyboard, with lyrics of unusual verbal felicity about the human condition. This is not to say that Pink Floyd were formulaic: few bands have stretched themselves and worked so hard to improve their recorded output and their live performances. Many rock bands are spent creative forces after a few albums; Pink Floyd did not hit their golden period until their eighth album, sustaining it across three further works which remain among the highest-selling and most critically esteemed records ever made.

The context is important in understanding Pink Floyd. In the mid-1960s, rock ’n’ roll was a juvenile art, but groups like The Beatles and The Who worked to develop it into a more mature artform, with increasing musical, recording and lyrical sophistication. The distance from The Beatles’ album closers ‘Twist And Shout’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was just three years, demonstrating the incredible rate at which the genre was developing. The Who, similarly, moved the album towards a symphonic piece with Tommy (1969), inaugurating the concept album as full thematically and musically integrated work (The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper, often considered the first rock concept album, is not unified lyrically, instead really only having an overture and a curtain-closer). However, in the jazz world, Miles Davis had moved the album from being a disparate collection of individual tracks to a thematic whole, as on the acclaimed albums Kind of Blue (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960). The LP, in rock as in jazz, was moving closer to becoming an integrated artistic unity, like a classical music symphony.

In this context Pink Floyd began in 1965. Starting as an R&B cover band based in London, and taking their name from two Piedmont blues musicians, the group developed rapidly during 1966 residencies at the Marquee club (in Wardour Street, Soho) and UFO (at Tottenham Court Road). Early bootlegs4 show setlists of basic R&B and Bo Diddley-style rock, with Barrett singing in an American style very far from his English manner on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. However, they had artistic and musical backgrounds exceeding these floundering derivative efforts. Barrett was an art student coming from an intellectual middle-class family (his father was a noted doctor). Wright was privately educated, had learned the trumpet and trombone as well as guitar and piano while still a schoolboy, and was steeped in jazz rather than R&B. Waters’ parents were teachers and left-wing political activists. So while their first steps were naturally rudimentary, it was equally unsurprising that their subsequent efforts should have greater artistic ambitions.

Yet while their first album is a very singular psychedelic masterpiece, the group’s subsequent efforts demonstrate the balkanisation of rock music that had occurred in the late 1960s: towards a populist singalong style that eventually became glam rock; the electric thunder that became heavy metal; and the experimental progressive rock of groups like Yes, Genesis, Rush and King Crimson, as well, of course, as Pink Floyd. For a time it was perfectly acceptable to have twenty-minute multi-sectional epics and choirs and orchestras and lyrical themes drawn from any manner of esoteric philosophies. The more far out the better, man. Given this room to grow, and initially touring very hard too,5 Pink Floyd gradually developed songwriting chops, an astonishing lyrical facility, and a jaw-dropping live spectacle. The integration of guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour didn’t really occur until three years into his career in the band, with 1971’s Meddle album. But that heralded one of the greatest streaks of creativity in rock history, easily comparable with The Beatles’ Revolver–Sgt Pepper–White Album–Abbey Road and The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet–Let It Bleed–Sticky Fingers–Exile on Main Street sequences.6 Once the group had truly found their voice, the albums Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979) display some of the most profound and moving writing in rock music as well as some of the most dazzlingly creative music. Perhaps more than any other albums in rock music, these four integrate lyrical depth with verbal dexterity and musically visionary songs, creating integrated artistic unities that retain the power to enthral and deeply move the listener fifty years on.

But career peaks do not last, and as intra-band relationships fragmented then collapsed during and following The Wall,7 so the work too declined. The Final Cut (1983), A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994) and The Endless River (2014): all have their moments, all have their fans, all have sold millions around the world. Yet I think there is a clear arc to the career of Pink Floyd, as I shall argue in the song analyses that follow. But then, quite understandably, some fans are most passionate about the fervent creativity of the group’s early years, while others adore the brilliant savaging of Thatcherite Britain and lament for those traumatised by war in The Final Cut, or fondly recall discovering the group from A Momentary Lapse of Reason, or are hardcore Syd Barrett devotees. There are many paths to Pink Floyd. So here, across 187 recorded tracks and fifteen albums, across 1,160 gigs from New Zealand to Canada, from 1967 to 2022, is the career of rock’s most devastatingly emotional and articulate band.

Note on the Selection

For this book I have chosen to only record and critique the canonical songs from official albums, singles and various stray tracks. These comprise:

•    the singles: ‘Arnold Layne’ b/w ‘Candy and a Currant Bun’ (1967), ‘See Emily Play’ b/w ‘Scarecrow’ (1967), ‘Apples and Oranges’ b/w ‘Paint Box’ (1967), ‘It Would Be So Nice’ b/w ‘Julia Dream’ (1968), ‘Point Me at the Sky’ b/w ‘Careful with that Axe, Eugene’ (1968), ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ (1982), and ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ (2022)

•    the official albums: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), Ummagumma (1969), Atom Heart Mother (1970), Meddle (1971), The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), The Final Cut (1983), A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (2014)

•    the soundtrack albums: More (1969) and Obscured by Clouds (1972)

•    stray tracks which appeared on official releases: Zabriskie Point (1970) and Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air (1970)

This means I have not considered the other official live albums Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988), Pulse (1995), and Is There Anybody Out There? (2000). None of these contain unreleased tracks (with the exception of ‘The Last Few Bricks’, an instrumental in The Wall tour which filled time allowing roadies to almost complete the construction of the wall) or a substantially different version of previously released songs (beyond extended guitar solos, though the Pulse version of COMFORTABLY NUMB does have dark grungy verses, just as Gilmour always wanted). The four live tracks on Ummagumma, however, do present significantly improved versions over the studio releases, demonstrating the band’s rapidly developing mastery of dynamics and structure. The re-recordings in A Collection of Great Dance Songs (1981) I have likewise left alone, for similar reasons. Nor have I described the demos, live sessions and early alternate versions the Immersion Editions of Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, or on the Early Years (2016) and Later Years (2019) box sets, though I do refer to them when considering the completed studio tracks. There is a great deal of musical and historical interest there, of course, but these remain fragments, sketches, and ephemeral performances. And finally, I have not included the six new tracks composed for the La Carrera Panamericana documentary on the eponymous 1991 car race in Mexico, in which David Gilmour, Nick Mason and band manager Steve O’Rourke all participated. These tracks have never been officially released and the video has only ever been released on VHS format. This book is an analysis of the official canon, of all tracks formally recorded and released, and examines how the studio output of Pink Floyd developed, peaked, declined, and returned in lesser if still considerable form. This is a story told in three movements: Explorations (1967–72), Exaltations (1973–79) and Echoes (1982–2022).

Note on the Research

While The Beatles’ recording career can be quite precisely mapped, the same is not true for Pink Floyd. Albums recorded in their own Britannia Row studio or on Gilmour’s Astoria houseboat were essentially free from label oversight and, while they could record or compose there as they pleased, consequently there aren’t records detailing precise dates, who played what, or what production techniques were used. (Engineer Andy Jackson confirmed this by email on 8 November 2023.) Similarly, Château d’Hérouville, where Obscured By Clouds was recorded, shut down and was abandoned in 1985, Super Bear studio (where much of The Wall was recorded) burned down in 1986, and the group had kicked their EMI producer Norman Smith upstairs by the time of Atom Heart Mother.

Hence the recording dates and personnel lists playing on each track are (especially on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which used many session musicians) somewhat proximate and vary according to which source you read. The only people who could really possibly fill in the details are David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, but even then the human memory is highly fallible, as we’ll see when it comes to disputes over songwriting and production credits (as with BREATHE and ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL PART 2 for example). But perhaps – and this might shock some members of the band – credits aren’t that important. The main thing is how Pink Floyd move you as a listener, how they nourish the emotions and the soul, and somehow keep doing so through the decades of being a fan – and this I have always kept in mind when discussing each song.

___________

4   Partially reproduced on disc 1 of the Early Years 1965-72 boxset. It includes ‘I’m A King Bee’, the sole cover on any music officially released by Pink Floyd.

5   See Chronology. The group performed 183 concerts in 1967, including three in one day on 25 March.

6   As well as, say, Radioactivity-Trans Europe Express-The Man Machine-Computer World by Kraftwerk, or In A Silent Way-Bitches Brew-A Tribute To Jack Johnson-Live/Evil (amongst others) by Miles Davis, if you want to go beyond rock music.

7   I have no intention of recounting the various ongoing tiffs between Waters and Gilmour, or Waters’ political opinions except as they pertain to the song being discussed.

CHAPTER 1

THE SONGS

I.

EXPLORATIONS (1967–72)

ARNOLD LAYNE (Barrett)

Length: 2.57

Vocals: Syd Barrett Guitars: Syd Barrett Bass: Roger Waters Farsifa organ: Rick Wright

Drums: Nick Mason Backing vocals: Rick Wright

Recorded: 29 January 1967, Sound Techniques, London

Producer: Joe Boyd

First released: 11 March 1967 (UK a/side single)

Rating: 8/10

Having signed with EMI in February 1967 after building an audience in the UFO and Marquee clubs throughout 1966, Pink Floyd’s choice of first single is a daring excursion in whimsical pop. It is worth noting, too, that the choice was theirs. Unlike most bands, Pink Floyd established a degree of artistic autonomy from their record label from the outset. Built around a descending riff (slightly reminiscent of, if less dramatic than, the introduction to INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE) in the verse which leaps into a singalong chorus (‘Oh Arnold Layne … it’s not the same’), ARNOLD LAYNE is musically notable for the low verse which rises to a peak just as the chorus starts, suggesting excitement at Arnold’s butterfly-like transformation.

With the subject matter of the pop single radically expanding in the mid-1960s, rock music was swiftly moving from being an adolescent expression to a genuine artform. The Beatles’ Revolver, released on 5 August 1966, led the way, with songs less concerned with romance, consumerism or autonomy than with mysticism, spiritual disorientation, community dislocation, and the LSD experience. Though not as startlingly groundbreaking, ARNOLD LAYNE similarly advances rock’s thematic concerns with its uncensorious take on the eponymous character’s ‘strange hobby’,8 telling a complete story as it does so. Barrett’s voice takes on a sneer at the end of the chorus when he sings ‘Why can’t you see?’, condemning the uptight straights for their lack of understanding of this (allegedly) harmless pursuit. Radio stations, as gatekeepers to the nation’s musical consumption, were less understanding, with the BBC, Radio Caroline and Radio London amongst those banning the song. (Underwear seemed to preoccupy radio managers. The BBC banned The Beatles’ ‘I am the Walrus’, released that November, apparently for its use of the word ‘knickers’).

While ARNOLD LAYNE was cleverly calculated to be a hit single,9 it was hardly representative of Pink Floyd’s live efforts in early 1967. The song was condensed from its ten-to-fifteen-minute length when played live, being seen as the most likely to be successful when compressed into the regular sub-three-minute pop single. Already, it’s worth noting, Pink Floyd’s real track lengths were customarily far in excess of the usual pop track.10 In early 1967, however, they were fresh and keen to play the pop game (this would change). The shortened time span of the pop single does not, however, mean diminished room for creativity. On the contrary, the most successful singles crammed as much sensation and surprise as they could into their brief spin. ARNOLD LAYNE follows this edict with flair if not, as yet, their distinctive genius. That would come.

CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN (Barrett)

Length: 2.38

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Drums: Mason

Backing vocals: Wright, Waters, Mason

Recorded: 29 January 1967, Sound Techniques, London

Producer: Joe Boyd

First released: 11 March 1967 (UK b/side single)

Rating: 5/10

Seen in retrospect, CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN sends out alarming signs of a writer revelling in self-indulgence. Famously rewritten from its initial title ‘Let’s Roll Another One’, the song retains its subject matter of drugs and casual sex, but does so on a nod and a wink (‘Tastes good if you eat it soon’). Musically it moves on dark waves of sound through the verse, before obscuring Barrett’s vocal in the chorus as he half-mutters, half-grimaces his way through the words. This concealment meant that Barrett could sneak in an expletive, no doubt irritated at being censored (‘Oooh, don’t talk to me / Please, just fuck with me’),11 but the opacity also gives the impression of him losing his identity through greedy self-indulgence. Such murkiness makes CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN sinister rather than playful: not for nothing does it also contain the first instance of the patented Roger Waters scream.12 The only genuine human note (or perhaps foreshadowing) comes at the end of each verse: ‘Please – I’m feeling frail.’

Using exotic-sounding melisma, cooing backing vocals and a Farsifa organ solo, the track sounds preposterously 1967, and is the only example of lewdness in the entire Pink Floyd canon.13 It also predates both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in their own periods of 1967 excess (as exemplified by ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man’ and the entire Their Satanic Majesties Request album, respectively). The famous Chelsea-King’s Road-Indica bookshop-LSD nexus was clearly in full swing by January of that year (Sgt. Pepper was released in June, Satanic Majesties in December).

Because CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN was left off Relics in 1971 (the group likely seeking to move away from their previous drug-oriented image), it developed a mystique and has been absurdly overpraised by some. Creem writer Dave Marsh wrote that it ‘send chills runnin’ up and down your spine, and make you listen time and time again’.14 But the truth is more prosaic: CANDY AND A CURRANT BUN might perhaps exemplify the drug-oriented culture of the period, but this is not necessarily a good thing; and it’s simply not much of a song. The most relevant aspect is its darkness: perhaps even Barrett could tell that self-indulgence was not the road to the palace of wisdom.

SEE EMILY PLAY (Barrett)

Length: 2.53

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Drums: Mason

Piano: Wright Electric harpsichord: Wright Backing vocals: Wright, Waters

Recorded: 23 May 1967 at Sound Techniques, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 16 June 1967 (UK a/side single)

Rating: 10/10

Barrett’s pop masterpiece SEE EMILY PLAY cast a long shadow over both him and the group. It hit #4 in the UK singles charts,15 leading the industry to instantly demand more such masterpieces from him. (None of the other group members were anywhere near ready to offer material of such quality.) While Barrett was the creative force of early Pink Floyd, he was also far more free-spirited (or less disciplined) than Waters, Wright or Mason. Noted by bandmates as having been friendly and approachable in comparison to the fashionable insouciance of the time,16 Barrett lacked the defences essential for someone who had become instantly famous. This made him highly attractive as a person (Syd always had the best-looking girlfriends), but it augured badly for his ability to handle industry pressures. But all of this still lay ahead.

The remarkable thing is how easy SEE EMILY PLAY sounds, gliding on a cloud of sheer beatific euphoria – little wonder then it was the sound of the summer of 1967. As Iain MacDonald has noted, the hippy dream was one of a frictionless takeover ‘in which anything involving struggle, conflict or difficulty seemed laughably unenlightened’. Or as Hunter S. Thompson put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, ‘Our energy would simply prevail.’ The notions of ‘play’ (also suggested in its original title, ‘Games for May’) is also highly apposite. The hippy movement rejected both the conservative-authoritarian model (as passed down by the Church, where ‘The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / God made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate’),17 as well as the traditional leftist veneration of work and workers. Tapping into these ideas and concerns gives SEE EMILY PLAY a depth of meaning beyond its gaiety and wonder, and reinforce its aptness for the moment.

After headlining, at dawn, the ‘14 Hour Technicolour Dream’ at Alexandra Palace on 29 April 1967, Pink Floyd were the darlings of the moment, their abstract explorations the perfect sound for the acid-dropping attendees. (Their setlist for that show comprised just four tracks: ASTRONOMY DOMINE, ARNOLD LAYNE, INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE, and ‘Nick’s Boogie’, which was never officially released by the group).18 Yet the track remains far from their live sound, refining the example of ARNOLD LAYNE to even greater effect. This is a surprising bifurcation for a band just starting out, but it demonstrates how the group strictly adhered to the edicts of what comprised a 7” single. They wanted to be pop stars, although their sense of musical possibility soared far beyond.

Densely packed with hooks and earworm moments, SEE EMILY PLAY shows how hard Barrett and the rest of the group (as guided by producer Norman Smith) worked to maximise the song. The obvious model is The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ – the supreme exemplar of cramming every moment of a sub-three-minute pop single with surprise and delight. From the off, SEE EMILY PLAY pricks the ears: it starts with a plastic ruler being used as a slide up the guitar strings, giving a unique, alien sound, swiftly followed by a short bass pedal point by Waters, then a tom-tom roll and a Farsifa organ comment, thus giving all four members a short showpiece in the first ten seconds. The first line of each verse adds an ‘Aah-ooh’ at the end, and the second line, after Mason brings the track to a halt, springs straight into the delightful singalong chorus. Wright also adds a brief deft comment on piano at the end of each choral line, and each of the three choruses leads to an instrumental break – two bars on the electric harpsichord after the first, the instrumental middle eight after the second, then the fade-out (dominated by Waters’ bass) after the third. While the song sticks firmly to the classic pop single formula (Intro–Verse–Chorus–Verse–Chorus–Middle-Eight–Verse–Solo–Chorus–Outro, a pop single methodology perhaps best mastered by UK hitmakers Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the 1980s), there is something fresh happening at almost every moment, and SEE EMILY PLAY remains an utter joy more than fifty years after.

The Floyd now being EMI artists as of 28 February, recording was first attempted at EMI Studios in Abbey Road, though, as Mason noted, ‘We just could not reproduce the sound of “Arnold Layne”, so we all trooped back to Sound Techniques to recreate the magic formula, which gave Joe Boyd a certain wry pleasure.’19 The legend of EMI Studios rather precedes it: in 1967 it still only had four-track recording facilities, and many studios were more advanced. This was perhaps an unusual amount of leeway20 for a new band, though pop and rock acts were gaining more say over their work as sales increased exponentially during the 1960s,21 and as they came to be considered artists rather than entertainers. The group’s interest in sonic experimentation, while here structured within the highly structured format of the 7” single, finds its first expression here. As the band moved from pop singles to rock albums, so their room for experimentation grew and pop discipline declined. But here, SEE EMILY PLAY is an astonishingly vivid piece of music making – so merry, so exuberant, so thrillingly alive. It only makes the tragedy of Barrett’s subsequent mental collapse ever more poignant.

SCARECROW (Barrett)

Length: 2.11

Vocals: Barrett Electric guitars: Barrett Acoustic guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters

Farsifa organ: Wright Backing vocals: Waters, Wright Flute: Wright Cello: Wright

Slide whistle: Waters Temple blocks: Mason Metal cups: Mason

Recorded: 22 March 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 16 June 1967 (UK b/side single)

Rating: 7/10

A charming piece of pastoral whimsy, SCARECROW is one of the most distinctive Barrett-era songs. Though rock ’n’ roll and R&B were mostly regarded as urban music (which essentially meant for black people), the influence of Bob Dylan and British folkies like The Incredible String Band and Donovan brought a rich strain to the English pop (and later rock)22 scenes. But rather than a stark arrangement with acoustic guitar and little else, SCARECROW is a colourful rural evocation, with the multi-tracked temple blocks and metal cups suggesting equine clip-clops, and the Farsifa organ leading the whimsical melody that somehow suggests Bill and Ben and sunflowers.

The chorus/refrain ‘He stood in a field / Where barley grows’ follows each of the three verses, as though in a nursery rhyme. In the third chorus Barrett elongates the vowels (‘He stoooood in a fieeeeeeld / Where baaaarley groooows’), after which the arrangement thickens and slightly darker tints emerge, as suggested by the cello (played by Wright) and electric guitars. This might suggest the Scarecrow’s redundancy when night comes, or could be an acknowledgement that passivity in the face of life’s unpredictable fortunes (‘when the wind cut up rough’) isn’t always effective. Either way, the darkness lifts a little as the song fades out at about 1.45, leavened with glints of guitar arpeggios. For a short and seemingly simple track, SCARECROW is cunningly produced and has more than a hint of sly wit, as with much of Barrett’s work. A skein of darkness and unease runs through a good portion of Piper, undercutting the whimsy and giving it bite. Flowers can have thorns.

ASTRONOMY DOMINE (Barrett)

Length: 4.12

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Drums: Mason

Backing vocals: Wright Vocalisation: Peter Jenner

Recorded: 11, 12, 17 April 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 1)

Rating: 9/10

The opening song to Pink Floyd’s debut album establishes many of the characteristics they would come to be known by – a space theme, musique concrete, a refusal to stick to adolescent love topics, and unusual, sometimes dissonant chords. This was art rock, with ambitions far beyond the dancefloor or teenage bedroom. Besides the Floyd’s familiar territory, ASTRONOMY DOMINE also has some very smart wordplay from Barrett (‘Floating down, the sound resounds / Around the icy waters underground’), although the lyric as a whole does not mean anything in particular, being instead a string of space-related words and images. (The word ‘Domine’ in the title has nothing to do with domination, but is Latin for ‘Lord’ – Barrett probably put it there because it sort of rhymed with ‘Astronomy’.)

The song opens with then-manager Peter Jenner on a megaphone reciting random space-related phrases, though because it fades in and then Barrett’s guitar immediately plays over it, it is impossible to hear exactly what’s being said.23 Barrett’s guitar is loud, assertive and fantastically resonant, though playing an overture rather than setting up the melody for the rest of the song, while Mason enjoys himself on the introduction, each tom-tom fill unveiling the next section. Then the verse sees Barrett and Wright harmonising excitingly on vocals while Waters, Barrett and Wright play busy notes, keeping the energy high and the tension rising. This peaks at the end of each verse, leading to two descents (originally sung by Barrett, as can be seen on live videos, but here initially played by Wright on the Farsifa organ and then doubled by Barrett on the guitar). The end of every verse couplet has an instrumental fill (the first one brief, the second one longer), keeping the listener’s ears constantly at attention – exactly the way SEE EMILY PLAY had sustained attention over every moment. (It’s odd that Waters or Wright didn’t pick up this technique until much later.) This then leads to a rather noodling guitar solo and instrumental section, over which Jenner’s megaphoned voice briefly appears, and then we’re back for another two repeats of the first verse, as the drums and vocals – but no guitar now – build to a climactic peak.

This is far from the twelve-bar blues and American R&B that inspired so much of the Merseybeat and British Invasion bands, showing both unusual imagination and expert craftsmanship. ASTRONOMY DOMINE is also especially well produced, with the tom-toms really resounding, the guitar nice and aggressive, Waters’ bass bubbling away manically, and the multiple layers of sound during the instrumental break (such as Barrett on slide guitar) handled superbly. As an opening album track, ASTRONOMY DOMINE is a staggering success: bold, authoritative, instantly recognisable, and highly memorable. Here indeed was a completely original and compelling voice in rock music. (It remained in the group’s setlist until 1971, then was resuscitated for the group’s 1994 Division Bell tour and Gilmour’s subsequent solo tours.)

LUCIFER SAM (Barrett)

Length: 3.07

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Bowed bass: Waters Farsifa organ:

Wright Drums: Mason Backing vocals: Wright Percussion: Mason

Recorded: 12, 13, 17, 18 April, 12, 27 June, 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 2)

Rating: 7/10

Opening with a Barrett delay-processed riff complemented by the Farsifa organ by Wright, LUCIFER SAM is a song with no great meaning or importance, but it’s great fun, and sung and played with great verve. It’s simply about Barrett’s cat, as the first line makes clear (‘Lucifer Sam, Siam cat’), though the reference to ‘a hip cat’ caused debate on whether it referred to some scene hipster. (The fact that the song was initially titled ‘Percy the Rat Catcher’ during recording seems to outline its feline character.)

Each verse only has three lines and immediately alternates with the refrain: ‘That cat’s something I can’t explain!’ The repeated assonance (‘that’, ‘cat’ and ‘can’t’) gives Mason a great beat to play off, while the elongated ‘explain’ is strung out with melisma (‘explay-ay-ayn’). Barrett’s ability to create and release tension are remarkably advanced for a first album, making LUCIFER SAM (and Piper as a whole) rather better than it first appears to be. Similarly, the increase in animation as the song progresses provides a sense of narrative, which is helpful as neither the lyrics nor the song structure do. By the final verse, after a second bridge led by Wright’s Farsifa, the melody has disappeared completely, replaced by strummed chords and a manic vocal from Barrett, with the lyrics’ excellent syllabics letting him build up the tension through repetition: ‘Hiding around on the ground / He’ll be found when you’re around’. It all builds to a wonderful peak, even if you’re not quite sure what the point is. Musically, LUCIFER SAM is most interesting for the group’s murky comments on the main musical text, such as is just audible after ‘Siam Cat’ at 0.32, or indeed the (slightly campy) Hammer Horror-style bowed bass attributed to Waters, though Wright is a more likely contender for this instrument, from 1.31 and throughout the first bridge. With the melody a simplistic four chords, this leaves the group space to comment on and undercut what’s being played, by overdubbing Barrett’s guitar with large amounts of echo, as well as Wright’s various keyboards.24

LUCIFER SAM is fundamentally a minor track, but it must count as one of the first rock songs about a pet25 and is made striking by the dazzling exuberance Barrett brings to his vocals in particular. It’s also a remarkable piece of studio trickery and colouring, which no doubt made approximating it live rather difficult (it was never played after 1967). With songs of this quality as album tracks, Piper is an astonishingly accomplished debut.

MATILDA MOTHER (Barrett)

Length: 3.08

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright

Hammond organ: Wright Drums: Mason Backing vocals: Waters, Wright

Recorded: 21 February 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 3)

Rating: 8/10

It is remarkable that at the time when The Beatles were recording their own odes to childhood (John Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and Paul McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’), Pink Floyd were recording their own tribute to Barrett’s wandering spirit of Edenic childhood. There must have been something in the cultural air. This may well have been LSD, a drug which removes adult preconceptions and lets users see the world afresh, recapturing the child’s lost perspective. Then again, Barrett’s art26 had taken childhood as its subject before: in 1965, aged 19, he had created an art project titled, rather childishly, ‘Fart Enjoy’, which comprised cut-ups taken from sources like the Bible, teen pop and fashion magazines, a wild flower guide, and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher, as well as ‘two pages of cut-up nursery rhymes’.27 The conflation of high and popular art,28 and radical juxtapositions of childhood, religion, nature and science, seem to have been on Barrett’s mind from his earliest days as an artist.

Rock ’n’ roll may have started out as teenage music, but the expansion of its language and emotional range during the mid-1960s was remarkable, with an ever-increasing vocabulary, complexity and ambition. Whereas R&B was traditionally pithy and streetwise, adopting the vocabulary of the English nursery allowed pop’s lexicon to become florid and whimsical.29 Instead of tough, spartan Roundheads, pop groups could be Cavaliers – longhaired, sensual, artistic, sensitive, and flowery. (Though, of course, this was adopted by many merely as a fashion. Roger Daltrey was never convincing in a silk cravat.) Through Barrett’s songs and fashion sense, Pink Floyd help to create an entire pop sensibility that filtered down through David Bowie, Roxy Music, Marc Bolan, XTC and so on throughout the culture, even to post-millennial bands like Animal Collective. This new style might attest to the rapidly expanding audience for pop music, but it also demonstrates, in the days before professional A&R men and costume designers, a distinct originality and keen sense of marketability. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had come along and changed fashions completely; now the onus was on new bands to find their own look, their favourite satin shirt, Gohill boots and all.

However, that was still in front of them. In February 1967, MATILDA MOTHER was recorded twice: first using a lyric taken from three poems from Cautionary Tales for Children by the Edwardian writer Hilaire Belloc, published in 1907. Barrett took a verse from each poem, introducing a new character in each: a boy named Jim, whose ‘friends, they were very good to him’; Henry King, whose ‘chief defect’ was ‘chewing little bits of string’; and finally an unnamed character ‘who summoned the immediate aid / of London’s noble Fire Brigade’. (This last verse is taken from ‘Matilda, Who told lies, and was Burned to Death’.) All of Belloc’s poems are in iambic tetrameter, so they all fit snugly into Barrett’s lyric. But when permission to use Belloc’s words was refused, another version was swiftly put together, Barrett writing a mostly new set of lyrics, changing the verses but keeping the refrains and bridge as they were.

Unusually for Piper, Barrett takes a back seat on the vocals, leaving the verses to Richard Wright and only harmonising on the refrains. Wright’s singing is as English as Barrett’s – no mid-Atlantic accents here – but less nasal and more emotive. Musically, MATILDA MOTHER conjures an otherworldly dreamscape, from its opening gently descending bassline and Barrett’s elongated vowels, to the sparkling guitar arpeggios during the first verse to the deep-pile harmonies (‘Ohhh, mother’) and falsettos in the bridge, to the exotic strangeness of Wright’s Farsifa organ as he takes a solo. There’s also judicious amounts of echo and reverb from Norman Smith and engineer Peter Brown to make it sound unique and ethereal. The deeply insular and hallucinogenic combination of nursery-rhyme lyrics and shimmering fantastical music combine to make MATILDA MOTHER one of the key songs on the album, and the main track to squarely address the theme of childhood and imagination so prevalent throughout Piper.

The alternate version was first made available on the 40th anniversary special edition re-release of Piper. This may be down to its greater familiarity, but the second version is superior. This was partly down to a smart arrangement by Norman Smith: the original has a second bridge after the instrumental interlude, with a lyric concerning Matilda’s pyromaniacal tendencies – it has a ‘Nine-nine-nine!’ shrieked backing vocal (where the remake has ‘Waiting!’), which sounds dreadful to those unfamiliar with it. However, it’s fascinating to hear how well the words fit – though Barrett’s rewritten piece, with images of ‘silver eyes’, ‘thousand misty riders’, and ‘doll’s house, darkness, old perfume’, is remarkable. It’s not merely that Barrett is singing about childhood: it feels like he has a direct path to the inchoate consciousness of a child and can take you there with him. This is artistry of the very highest order.

FLAMING (Barrett)

Length: 2.46

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Hammond organ:

Wright Piano: Wright Lowrey organ: Wright Drums: Mason Finger cymbals: Mason

Slide whistle: Waters Backing vocals: Waters, Wright

Recorded: 16 March 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 4)

Rating: 7/10

The found and imported sounds that colour Pink Floyd’s discography to such great effect find further expression here, in Barrett’s ode to both childhood hide-and-seek and (drug-stimulated) imagination. One of the most whimsical tracks on Piper, FLAMING brilliantly conveys the child’s perspective both lyrically and musically, with Barrett’s lyric both charmingly guileless and quite openly allusive, while the music uses diverse instrumentation like wind-up toys, slide whistles and a tack piano to effectively convey a dreamy, hallucinogenic innocence.

Opening with a dark cluster on the Lowrey organ augmented by some high-pitched vocalising, the song immediately goes into the first verse with its sing-song Farsifa organ and delicious feather-light bass from Waters. The double-tracked vocal from Barrett is front and centre, conveying a childlike delight at the world, or more precisely the world he has created in this song. His poeticisms and syllabics are wonderful, in phrases like ‘Watching buttercups cup the light’ and ‘Screaming through the starlit sky’. After the fourth verse there’s an instrumental break, introduced by the winking phrase ‘Ever so high …’, at which point the wind-up toys reappear, drifting clouds of Wright’s organ playing shimmer, Waters plays a repeated seven-note motif, Wright plays a solo on the tack piano, Barrett strums a twelve-string guitar and it all threatens to drift apart aimlessly – until Waters’ bass reintroduces the first verse, this time playing with more urgency (with a more audible guitar from Barrett); after which it does indeed all drift off into the ether, as Barrett’s voice elongates with echo and Mason’s finger cymbals chiming the song to an end like a thumbs-up from some blissed-out benevolent minor deity.

Though the soundscape of FLAMING is highly effective in creating a whimsical soundworld, the song consists of only four verses, with the first repeated. With no middle eight or chorus, the song doesn’t develop, and simply exists as its own charming little bubble. This sense of stasis might be a comment on the insularity and solipsism of the young child, or it might be that Barrett was satisfied with a unified ethereal creation. Whatever the reason, FLAMING is more of a soundworld than an effective song, thus relegating it behind MATILDA MOTHER and BIKE as strong album tracks.30 It’s both enjoyable and effective, but Barrett’s songcraft was remarkably already so much stronger in other songs on Piper.

Released as the a-side of a US-only single three months after Piper (with THE GNOME as the b-side), FLAMING was hardly the best song from the album,31 and it failed to chart.32 Yet the band seem to have had some affection for the song, with it staying in their live setlist until around November 1968, and Gilmour taking Barrett’s vocal after his departure.33 Perhaps it was more of a spotlight for Wright, who plays some outstanding colourful organ and piano throughout. Although Barrett dominates the song, Wright’s musicianship makes FLAMING what it is.

POW R. TOC H. (Barrett, Waters, Wright, Mason)

Length: 4.26

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Piano: Wright

Drums: Mason Percussion: Mason Backing vocals: Waters, Wright

Recorded: 21 March 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 5)

Rating: 6/10

Perhaps the least consequential song on Piper, POW R. TOC H. is descended from the atonal freakouts of Frank Zappa, its piano instrumental an echo of The Mothers of Invention’s ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ and the screeches at the end suggesting ‘Help I’m A Rock’.34 But rather than simply plagiarising, the group deftly make something of their own through plosive mouth sounds, gull-like squawks, Waters’ patented scream, echoing guitar sounds, resounding drums by Mason, and a tea-room orchestra piano solo by Wright. Although the ingredients are unusual, it all hangs together probably through Barrett’s sense pop-craft, or on Norman Smith’s insistence – there’s a sense of arc and trajectory, of opening and closure, which helps guide the listener even when the music feels at its most freeform. However, it is far from matching the synaesthetic majesty of INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE, feeling far more arbitrary, more of a thrown-together jam than its fellow instrumental. Randomness was in the cultural mix by the mid-1960s35 – Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was released in 1961, allowing each member of a double quartet to improvise against the current soloist, while avant-garde composers like Stockhausen introduced aleatory techniques into classical music in an effort to deconstruct36 the underpinnings of the canon. Free jazz and avant-garde classical music however were far more niche, elite music forms, whereas rock music is inherently populist; and marrying structure and randomness into cohesive, marketable four-minute chunks was beyond even Pink Floyd. Like ASTRONOMY DOMINE and FLAMING, POW R. TOC H. shows the band from the outset ready to go far beyond the manual in the search for the sounds to create something new in music – but although it’s interesting enough while playing, it doesn’t quite add up to anything.37

TAKE UP THY STETHOSCOPE AND WALK (Waters)

Length: 3.05

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Farsifa organ: Wright Piano: Wright

Drums: Mason Timpani: Mason Backing vocals: Waters, Wright

Recorded: 20 March 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 6)

Rating: 6/10

Roger Waters might well be the finest post-war English songwriter after John Lennon,38 but it took time for his talents to mature. The first recorded track solely written by him is at best embryonic. It does have numerous interesting points: an arresting staccato drum opening, unusual vocal scatting (‘Doctor doctor!’ sung breathily, in the exact manner of POW R. TOC H.), a lengthy jammed instrumental section and a lyric concerning a physician, harking all the way to COMFORTABLY NUMB – though with none of that track’s poetic feeling or verbal ability. None of its components really gel, leaving TAKE UP THY STETHOSCOPE AND WALK feeling lumpy and underdeveloped, especially in comparison to the remarkable union of vision and method which Barrett’s tracks demonstrate. It’s energetic and rather fun, however, and the lyric concerns life and its painful realities (in this case, being bedridden with a cold or the flu), which Waters would make his own as time went by. Here, though, it’s little more than an acknowledgement that being ill is unpleasant – though the terse three-syllable lines (‘I’m in bed! Aching head! Gold is lead! Choke on bread! Underfed!’) are quite the contrast from Barrett’s more florid poeticisms.

TAKE UP THY STETHOSCOPE AND WALK is at least played with considerable vigour. By far the most interesting section is the instrumental break with Barrett yelping enthusiastically and Wright matching him with a highly excited polytonal accompaniment, and Waters’ bass also played unusually prominently for the time. The free-jazz stylings effectively suggest the delirium of the patient in bed awaiting healing from the doctor.39 The call-and-response style of the verse also hark back to jazz, which often features these phon-antiphon structures between the bandleader and backing group. The ending builds up superbly to a musical peak, with the three-times-and-you’re-out repetition of ‘Realise!’ – though there’s no corresponding climax from the lyrics, which just about manage to maintain the rhyme scheme but little more (‘Doctor, kindly tell your wife / That I’m alive / Flowers thrive / Realise’). But while there’s considerable enthusiasm in the performance, the elements do not form a coherent whole. Waters – an extremely tenacious man – would work hard to make amends.

INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE (Barrett, Waters, Wright, Mason)

Length: 9.43

Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Organ: Wright Drums: Mason Drum roll: Norman Smith

Recorded: 16 March, 5, 27 June 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 7)

Rating: 10/10

The centrepiece of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE is a stunning evocation of the dynamics of outer space, of drifting galaxies and colliding nebulae, cycling from big bang to emptiness and back again. The introductory/closing riff is based on Heart’s cover of ‘My Little Red Book’, which manager Peter Jenner whistled tunelessly to Barrett. Mangled into a simple-to-play theme, and played aggressively by Barrett, it is immediately arresting, and when doubled by Waters’ bass, both instantly memorable and muscularly powerful. Though early Pink Floyd could be fey and mannered – a trait that would continue until Meddle, in tracks such as GREEN IS THE COLOUR and A PILLOW OF WINDS – here they show substantial force generating the initial kinetic energy the track spends most of its time unravelling. The track immediately expands to become a freeform exploration of effects suggestive of outer space, with huge amounts of echo, reverb and effects magnificently heightening the atmosphere. (Producer Norman Smith was concurrently engineering Sgt. Pepper, for which he won a Grammy.)

As all four members spontaneously jam with each other, intermeshing wonderfully, the tempo gradually winds down, giving the impression of drifting galaxies and cooling primordial energies. It’s not, of course, just random freeform spontaneity: each musician plays several recurring figures, such as Barrett’s recurring ‘ping’ from 2.20 and Waters’ three-note bass motif from 4.43. Eventually (around 6.05), Wright’s detached organ-playing (with longer, sustained notes) gives the impression of drifting off into almost empty space, as the bass and guitar settle down into quiet notes rather than brash chords, and Mason moves from the snare and bass drum to shivering around the cymbals. Once it has settled down at 6.58, almost imperceptibly, the tension starts to rise once more. It builds and builds, until the dam bursts with a drum roll,40 after which the main riff returns, this time disorientated with fierce stereo panning (and a distinctively high run up the fretboard by Waters), and then collapses into itself with huge echo, like a dying star – suggesting the whole thing might repeat again. (Waters would remember this trick.)41

The freeform freak-outs of live 1967 Pink Floyd were key to their early success. The abstract content and unstructured arrangements were memorably described by Waters as:

totally anarchistic, cooperative anarchy. A complete realisation of aims of psychedelia. If you take LSD, what you experience depends entirely on whom you are. Our music may give you the screaming horrors or throw you into screaming ecstasy. Mostly the latter. We find our audiences stop dancing, standing there totally grooved with mouths open.42

This perfectly suited the tripping audience at UFO. As with freeform jazz performed by, say, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman,43 the music appeared released from the confines of normal melody and rhythm to become a sonic wash, waves of pure energy randomly colliding, cohering and falling apart. Combined with an equally innovative light show, which used paint on slides to create random oscillating brightly coloured projections, the live performances were seen as heralding a new wave of British music. EMI’s press release on the signing of Pink Floyd boldly stated that the group were ‘musical spokesmen for a new movement which involves experimentation in all the arts’. (This implied the synaesthetic effects of psychedelic music.)

The sole representative of their 1966–67 live performances on Piper, INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE uses the sonic imagery of space travel to imply inner exploration. (To ‘take a trip’, gettit?) LSD associations permeated the early Floyd, sometimes deliberately (as with this song), sometimes unintentionally (Piper takes its name from the seventh chapter of The Wind in the Willows), and sometimes tragically (through the mental collapse of Syd Barrett). Yet the remaining members of Pink Floyd, while partial to marijuana,44 were deeply ambivalent about the whole UFO/International Times/Chelsea drug scenes that absorbed the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Too cynical (or wise) for glib hipness and belief in instant enlightenment, they never assimilated fully into the scene, maintaining a certain crucial distance. Barrett, on the other hand, with his childlike openness, was drawn helplessly into the darker aspects of the drug culture. While Pink Floyd’s association with the UFO scene lingered on for several years,45 by 1968 they had outgrown it. (By that time, too, the social elite had reacted against the Cavalier fripperies of that time anyway, with Roundhead severity becoming fashionable, as exemplified by John Lennon’s proletarian denim and heavy blues in the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus film of December ’68.)46 Their cynical feelings about the scene and distance from it (see PAINTBOX) were on the whole wise. In retrospect, that space was crucial in letting them grow and develop.

THE GNOME (Barrett)

Length: 2.13

Vocals: Barrett Guitars: Barrett Bass: Waters Celesta: Wright Vibraphone: Wright

Percussion: Mason Backing vocals: Waters

Recorded: 20 March 1967, EMI Studios, London

Producer: Norman Smith

First released: 5 August 1967 (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn track 8)

Rating: 7/10

THE GNOME is the most whimsical of all the tracks on Piper, with its sing-song melody and eponymous character47 straight from L. Frank Baum, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or indeed The Flower Pot Men, rather than J.R.R. Tolkien.48 Coming straight after the intensity of INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE