1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 95. Pink Floyd – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

 

Seeing this coming up, I had in my head for some reason that it was Saucerful of Secrets and that Dimery was skipping the debut album, the only one to feature the ill-fated Syd Barrett. But my mistake, this is the first Pink Floyd album released, but probably not the last on the list. This early Floyd is a different animal(s) from what they will become; here the psychedelia is ramped up to full. Other albums on this list so far, especially for 1966-7, belong within the psychedelia genre, but other than a bit of backwards overdub on Sergeant Pepper, none have really come close to sounding like an acid trip. Here the Floyd take us into some very wierd soundscapes. I described the track Help I’m a Rock from the Mothers of Invention album Freak Out! as sounding like jazz if the solo instrument was animal noises; here, Pink Floyd go further with a track like Interstellar Overdrive, which starts off a bit like some Hawkwind space rock but devolves into sound effects and general strangeness.

Other tracks are odd yet playful, highlighting Barrett’s child-like lyrics that “I’ve got a bike you can ride it if you like it’s got a basket a bell that rings and things that make it look good” (He sings that the way I wrote it, without punctuation). That classic song, Bike, is actually quite lyrically clever, like a psychedelic proto-rap, about young and innocent love. Or we can sing about a little gnome called Crimble-Cromble. Chapter 24 sounds like something George Harrison might write about Indian mysticism – I'm not sure where the mantra comes from, possibly something New Agey rather than traditional thought.

The powerhouse track on the album is Astronomy Domine (despite the Barrett lyrics “Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten”), a thundering track that again evokes Hawkwind, and that still gets an outing from the surviving members of Floyd.

I don’t think anyone would ever claim this as Pink Floyd’s best album, and although it’s tragic how Barrett’s mental health crumbled under his drug use (famously just standing stock still during a live performance, or pouring gunk over his head), for the band as a whole I think it was just as well that they moved away from the utterly bonkers compositions found here. All of the hallmarks of Pink Floyd, though – unusual subjects matter, carefully contructed soundscapes, blending in of sound effects, even the live light shows, are all here already.

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