Syd Barrett - vocals and guitars
Richard Wright - keyboards
Roger Waters - bass guitar
Nick Mason - drums
Perhaps a good place to start would be a short snippet from a television show called Look of the Week. There, the show host first warns his viewers that the group about to perform is an almost unbearably loud one. Then, Pink Floyd gets to perform the opening track of their debut album called Astronomy Domine, and finally the obviously prejudiced host interviews Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. The guys actually have to defend themselves! Why on earth are they so loud and uninteresting, particularly to someone who has grown up listening to string quartets?!
On the album, Astronomy Domine sounds much better than it does here. It has of course been recorded in stereo and played way more accurately. We are not in the more challenging parts of 1967 psychedelia yet, loud or not. The track list continues with songs Lucifer Sam and Matilda Mother, which really introduce the listener to Syd Barrett's songwriting style - although Wright is credited as a co-writer on the latter song. Barrett is the master of naivety: half the time you have the feeling that you are listening to a recording intended for children. Yet many of the songs have and oddly ominous feel, and the instrumentation is not what you'd expect from a collection of kiddie songs.
Although all songs so far have been good, the fourth track is the best one yet. Flaming was later released as the group's third single. This took place several months after the album was released, on 2 November. Let's take a moment to enjoy this minor classic.
Flaming is followed by the album's two weakest tracks, after which it is time to flip the vinyl disc and start listening to side two. Its opening track is what Pink Floyd of the time was all about and must have left many others besides myself - at age four - dumbfounded and possibly even in a state of minor shock. Nothing, and I do mean nothing that had been released before in the history of rock music could possibly have prepared the occasional listener to the next masterpiece that was called Interstellar Overdrive.
Guitar driven rock and roll was certainly the order of the decade, yes, but not in quite this bold a format. Fairly obviously inspired by certain illegal substances, this instrumental runs nearly ten minutes on the album, and it is not hard for me to imagine that it has probably run for up to half an hour when played live. There are no lyrics. There is no traditional song structure. There is only one single repeated sequence played at the beginning, then again at the end, and a lengthy piece of total madness in between.
At the end of Interstellar Overdrive, the sixties listener must have been exhausted, so it comes as a relief that the next track is way easier on the ear. The Gnome is easily the best of the Barrett children's songs, and was quite rightly chosen as the B side of Flaming the single in November.
There are no weak or even average songs on the B side, everything is good. And the most impressive feat comes last. What balls one must have had to close a new rock group's first album with a track like Bike, in a decade when the absolute majority of guitar rock songs were straightforward. While in London this was a summer of sex, drugs and rock'n roll, I was only four years old and living in Kuopio, Finland, learning to ride my bike. This insane song became the soundtrack of that effort.
Bike begins like another one of Barrett's children's songs, but there is an abrupt change after the halfway point. What follows is the crowning achievement of Pink Floyd, as we enter a bicycle related sound effects sequence that cannot have been followed by anything but a dumbfounded silence back in 1967. At age four, I was of course stunned and perhaps many older listeners were as well. Apologies for being able to embed only the mono version from Spotify. This is due to some obscure EMI policy.
For myself, it is particularly moving to know that this masterful song was recorded on 21 May, my fourth birthday. However, for Pink Floyd things weren't going as well as you might have thought based on their successful debut album. The band leader Syd Barrett's LSD use was starting to spin out of control already when recording, and he was starting to look not too well already in early summer, well before the first album was even released.
Eventually, this led to Barrett's departure from Pink Floyd. This, in turn, caused The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to forever remain as one of its kind. When Pink Floyd's second album came out the following year, it sounded very different. The lineup had changed, leaving Barrett to appear only on that album's closing track, saying his goodbyes.
It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I'm most obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti