Pink Floyd

London, 1967: San Francisco's hippy, psychedelic summer has just come to an end, and its message has spread across the world. The boundaries of mental perception are now being expanded with LSD, and the leading exponents of this new way of making music are the Doors (with their historic self-titled album), Jefferson Airplane (with "Surrealistic Pillow") and the Velvet Underground (who have already made their debut alongside Nico). The English Pink Floyd make their entrance onto the world psychedelic scene with "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", a chilling manifesto of music that is completely outside the norm, and a detailed snapshot of the era in which it was released.

In 1967 the band was a quartet, with Syd Barrett on guitar, vocals and songwriting duties, Roger Waters on bass, Richard Wright on keyboards, and Nick Mason on drums. Released after a couple of singles that caused a stir for their sonic impact, the album gathers eleven perfect songs, each with its own distinct character. That this is an inspired work is already clear from the choice of cover art, a blended overlay of the musicians' faces, awash in intensely hallucinatory colours. The opening track, "Astronomy Domine", is essentially the account of a stellar voyage undertaken by Barrett through the use of LSD (legend even has it that he carried an astronomy manual with him to find his bearings, given the lyrics' allusions to one Dan Dare, author of pamphlets on the subject). The pulsing, continuous bass represents the radio link with Earth, while the ever-present guitar, together with a stately, solemn vocal, seems to wander through a dark, shadowy cosmic landscape. The starry carpet woven by the keyboards gives the whole thing solidity. Mason's frenzied drumming completes the piece, emphasising its most dramatic passages.

This landmark track already reveals the Pink Floyd philosophy of the era: while the rest of the group (bass, keyboards and drums) built solid, compact melodic lines, Barrett was free to travel with his guitar towards places known only within his own mind. This created a division of roles between the leader, free to roam with his own imagination, and the rest of the band. The second track, "Lucifer Sam", is a kind of proto-hard rock number, with a driving riff accompanied by keyboards that seem to evoke an Eastern atmosphere. The lyrics tell of a magical cat (Lucifer) with something inexplicable about him. The atmosphere, reminiscent of Indian meditation, is nonetheless laid over an obsessive, relentless riff. On the third track, "Matilda Mother", Barrett takes on the role of minstrel (essentially anticipating the fairy-tale storytelling of progressive and romantic rock), leading us into the world of a fable that breaks off and then resumes. The solemn atmosphere built up during the tale is interrupted by a melancholy "Mother, tell me more".

"Flaming", the following track, is a collage of sounds and noises set within a dreamy, cosmic atmosphere. Utterly bizarre, with clearly hallucinated lyrics ("Only in dreams/Lying in bed I still can't get to sleep/Only in dreams"; "talk to me by telephone/I can't reach you, but later I could"), it is a snapshot of a mental journey. The following "Pow R. Toc H." consists of a simple bassline repeated ad infinitum, creating an extremely dark atmosphere. The percussion emphasises the murkiest moments and underlines the arrival of the final screams. Native American-style voices, fake choirs, solemn organ openings that lead nowhere. Just images thrown over a dense, brooding atmosphere. The next track ("Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk"), penned by Roger Waters, is an experiment built on the obsessive repetition of the words "doctor doctor", and is perhaps a testimony to returning from a trip, or possibly the state of a sick, oppressed mind. In the end, though, it resolves into a melody with a nod to beat music, complete with layered choruses.

Next comes the album's masterpiece, and also the peak of Barrett's output: "Interstellar Overdrive". It is the chronicle of a human journey through the universe. Introduced by a horror-film riff, it unfolds over eleven minutes following just one rule: at least one instrument must keep the rhythm going. And over that rhythm, taken up now by one instrument, now by another, an extremely acid-drenched jam session develops, full of speeding spaceships, colliding asteroids, aliens and alienation, walls of space, stellar storms, cosmic stillness, and glimpses of paradises that are humanly unreachable. Barrett is completely on a trip. His mind sketches out unsettling, frightening scenes, or else immerses itself in liquid universes beyond human reach. This track is also remembered for its huge live impact. Pink Floyd played it every night at the UFO Club (where they also split the takings with the great Robert Wyatt's Soft Machine), using a very particular technique known as the "light show", which involved projecting hallucinatory slides coated with ink directly onto the band. Heated by the lamp, the ink would melt and create visually striking effects. As the rhythm changed, so did the images, in a riot of visionary art. The band also introduced another live innovation: quadraphonic sound, connecting their instruments to amplifiers placed on all four sides of the venue, so that different sounds came from points scattered around the room, giving the impression that the music was enveloping the audience.

After the stellar journey, we slide towards the final part of the album, which still has one more little fable in store ("The Gnome"), lifted straight from "The Lord of the Rings", a solemn Indian-style prayer ("Chapter 24"), with dark, metaphorical lyrics, and a disorienting, melody-less track (anticipating much of '70s minimalist rock): "The Scarecrow", built on nothing more than a pair of castanets and a hallucinated vocal. The album closes with a comic gag: "Bike", in which Barrett's freak spirit comes to the fore. The lyrics allude to a girl, and the track closes with an attempt to venture into the avant-garde, with mad bells ringing from every direction, as if to say: "Wake up, the trip is over, it's time to come back down to earth."

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05/11/2006