The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
It was on a ‘package tour’ that I first saw them. In the 60’s there were lots of ‘package tours’, featuring some of the unlikeliest combinations of acts you could ever imagine. The Beatles found themselves on some pretty strange ones in their early days, but then the world turned and ‘package tours’ were a thing of the past, as outdated as radiograms and the Hit Parade.
Anyway, this particular package tour featured the Amen Corner as the headline act. Fronted by the evergreen Andy Fairweather - Low, they had a couple of poppy hits and so were deemed justified to headline a line up featuring (wait for it) the Move at their T.V. - smashing finest, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Nice and the Pink Floyd. The Bournemouth Pavilion has probably never seen a night like it, all for about the same price as a packet of crisps nowadays!
Of course, memory being what it is (or more probably isn’t) total recall of that night in 1967 remains unachievable. However, what does remains memorable is the amazing moment when you hear something you have never heard before, something that does not appear to come from any known musical form you have ever come across. This was the night that the Pink Floyd blew my mind. This was the night that Syd prowled the stage in a long Afghan coat and made the goddamn strangest noises with his guitar I had ever heard in my life.
A few weeks later I bought their debut album ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and listened to it in stoned amazement. Where had this noise come from? Outer Space? Inner Space? There was simply nothing to compare it with, no trajectory of music that had somehow led to this. It just stood alone, perhaps the only musical artefact worthy to truly deserve the name ‘psychedelic’. As the Grateful Dead were also attempting to do with their extended jamming, this was the creation of a music intended to take the listener somewhere else, somewhere beyond music.
In the spring of 1967 the Beatles were at Abbey Road studios recording their ‘psychedelic’ masterpiece ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ along with George Martin, orchestras, a lavish budget, the latest state of the art recording equipment and a later album cover designed by a real ‘artist’. At the same time, in a small studio in the same building, on a four track recording machine, the Pink Floyd were recording their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The Beatles actually came into their studio and Paul McCartney was very complimentary on what they were trying to do.
So, what were they trying to do? The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were originally called, had been together for a couple of years. Like most British bands who were later to change the sound of the sixties, they began as an r ‘n b band playing covers of the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley etc. Again, like with most British bands of the time, L.S.D. appeared and people’s musical aspirations began to widen. Syd Barrett, the youngest member of the band, took a lot of L.S.D. and became interested in the sounds you could actually produce with an electric guitar, continually experimenting with sound effects, feedback, distortion and improvisation. (Of course, Syd wasn’t alone in this - just listen to Pete Townsend breaking the sound barrier in records such as ‘Anyhow, Anyway, Anywhere’ and ‘My Generation’.) The rest of the group took this up enthusiastically and were soon playing their increasingly free form music at Happenings with light shows and films being projected on to the stage. This was ‘Swinging London’, the ‘alternative’ culture, a social divide defined largely by clothes, music and especially drug use. The Pink Floyd were at the centre of this scene and beginning to define their new experimental ‘psychedelic’ sound, an ‘English’ sound now totally removed from the Black American blues scales and structures that still informed the work of other British groups no matter how ‘alternative’ they were becoming.
I had already bought their first singles ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ and seen the band on Top of the Pops but was in no way prepared for the weirdness of their live performance or the symphony to LSD presented in the grooves of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. From the opening chanted mantra from outer space of ‘Astronomy Domine’ to the disturbing yet hilarious ‘Bike’ ending with the ominous sound of the closing of the door of Syd’s ‘roomful of musical tunes’ which contains the very sounds of insanity itself, this album defies any form of categorisation and stands alone as a masterpiece. Even though the song are Syd’s, the whole band give their all in terms of not just playing, but continually inventing, experimenting, coming up with sounds to add to those pouring out of Syd’s tormented telecaster.
The opening space chant of ‘Astronomy Domine’ gives way to throbbing bass, crashing drums and a four note riff that just explodes into a million pieces. Noises come at you from everywhere, vocal and instrumental. This is the antithesis of the cold, lonely silence of space. It is a voyage that annihilates silence, fills it up to bursting point with noise as the song swoops and dives and races through it all. Then it’s back to the riff and the return of the chant, but where have you been in the meantime? Another strong, taut, riff introduces ‘Lucifer Sam’, immersed in washes of sound accompanied by strong, taut, drumming. It’s the noises again, everywhere, filling up every available space. Then on to ‘Matilda Mother’, a fractured fairy story in which the story itself gives way to the image of the child listening, screaming for its mother, wanting more but left alone, ‘hanging in my infant chair, waiting’ - a chilling image of the formative years. ‘Flaming’ could almost be a bit of 60’s U.S./’garage’ psychedelia before it detonates into an organ led maelstrom of sound that batters you senseless. As in the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’, the bass kicks in and normal service is resumed just at the moment you think the whole thing is driving you crazy. ‘Pow R Toc H’ is Dudley Moore on acid playing to the inmates of Bedlam, as the cool jazz piano gives way to a nightmare of insane laughter, screaming and guitar pyrotechnics and booming drums. The underrated Roger Waters song ‘Take up thy Stethoscope and Walk’ is next, short stacatto vocals and guitar playing slash through the weirdness and the organ solo rises above the madness thumping away in the background. There is an indescribable energy to the whole thing as it builds up faster and faster to end with the lyrics ‘Music seems to help the pain, seems to motivate the brain’. Wow!
Throughout the album, the ensemble playing of the band has been brilliant, but reaches its peak on the majestic ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, the schizophrenic centrepiece of the album. A crashing proto metal riff dissolves into the floating, fleeting, meandering tides of the unconscious until finally the riff returns, more majestic than ever, to blow away everything. It is only nine minutes long but seems like an eternity spent somewhere else. Suddenly the madness, the noise, disappears and it’s straight into the English, folksy eccentricity of ‘Gnome’, the subtle eastern mysticism of the I Ching set to music in ‘Chapter 24’, a rural hymn of childlike simplicity sung over a plaintive organ sound in ‘Scarecrow’, and ending with the strange catchy comedic quirkiness of ‘Bike’ which dissolves into the sounds of clockwork,chiming clocks and quacking ducks, Syd reminding us here of his quest to experiment with noise itself as an ingredient in his music - to him, these unsettling, jarring sounds are a ‘roomful of musical tunes’. 42 minutes and it’s all over. The strangest trip you have ever been on. Just four blokes, a four track recording machine, and the imagination of Syd Barrett driving everything, making everyone pull out all the stops. The Pink Floyd would never again play at this frenetic pace, would never again be as driven to produce something as breathtakingly new.
This is Syd Barrett’s album, like a comet from the depths of outer space it briefly shines on to our world before disappearing forever back into those very same depths. Just like Syd himself. The album is a record of that moment, a moment the like of which we have never experienced before or since. Syd does stay around a little longer, contributing the beautifully melancholic ‘Jugband Blues’ to Saucerful of Secrets, the band’s second album, and then recording a couple of solo albums which we all like to think are good but are in fact rubbish compared to what he presented us with on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Even before the second album was relased, a year after the first one, in August 1968, Syd Barrett had been replaced by Dave Gilmour in the band. Something deep within Syd had broken, perhaps prematurely brought on by an LSD infused lifestyle. His increasingly erratic behaviour both on and off stage meant the band could really no longer function. At gigs he would sometimes just stand and stare at the audience, not even playing the telecaster that hung round his neck. The instrument out of which he had wrung so many extraordinary sounds had become, like its owner, silent, lifeless, unplugged. By the age of 22, Syd Barrett had, to all intents and purpose, ceased to exist in the ‘real’ world. The dazzling psychedelic sounds he created for the band, played in front of swirling , mesmerising light shows, for the colourful, strangely garbed ‘beautiful people’ of London and their ‘alternative’ culture remain as the soundtrack of a brief period in time in which ‘mind expanding’ drugs such as LSD seemed to create an endless now in which anything was possible and paradise could be regained. It was not long before reality returned and with it the realisation that a glimpse of Heaven for many was achieved at a very high price. As Philip K. Dick states in his author’s note to his novel ‘A Scanner Darkly’, “This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street, they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were happy for a while, sitting round not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terribly brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it”.
Syd Barrett’s influences remain and can be found in music as disparate as the ‘space rock’ of Hawkwind and the progressive posturings of Yes to the English eccentricity of Pulp and early Blur. The Pink Floyd have become one of the most popular, best selling bands ever yet I would bet the majority of their modern fans have never even heard of Syd Barrett. Although obviously indebted to Syd, the remaining members of the band have ended up ploughing a furrow of well produced safe, corporate, plodding , melodic dirges and finely crafted spectacles for an audience content to settle for that, to sit and be cozily entertained. The adventure, the experimentation, have long gone, along with most of their hair and Roger Waters. What would it have been like if Syd were still there? Perhaps the same as it is now, no one will ever know. The absent Syd is enough of a blank canvas nowadays for anyone to paint their own picture on. Like Dorian Gray, the dead and damaged rock stars are forever young and talented, forever will be. They did not grow old, run out of inspiration, come to make the same pragmatic decisions we have all had to make in the face of our ‘ideological’ belief. Age has not withered them, they shall all remain heroes forever. Perhaps The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the best that he could do. How do you follow that? Perhaps a realisation of that was just as much a part of his illness as the more lurid acid casualty/ romantic genius accounts that sell books and somehow put peoples’ minds at rest, wrap things up nicely, help us to explain the ‘real’ to ourselves.