#0089: Pink Floyd - A Piper At The Gates Of Dawn [****]

To me, Pink Floyd are Schrodinger's Band.  And in more than one way.  The music is both awe-inspiring genius and whimsical drug-addled shite. The men are both the elder statesmen of psychedelic rock and a clutch of bickering teenage girls. The moment I discovered them was both in my childhood and my decadent 20s.

When I was around 9 or 10, I suppose, I found my brother's cassette copy of Dark Side Of The Moon. It had fallen down the back.of.the MFI unit where our parents kept their "music centre". The labels had been torn off both sides so I didnt know what it was.  I didnt say anything to my brother about it. I'd found another tape back there some months previously - Tubular Bells - and had been listening to.it.regularly.  I don't wanna get into it but he didn't take kindly to.my.finders keepers approach to.the situation.  The tape had been.lost.for.years.  It was.covered.in dust when I found it.  Anyway, that was the possibly the first time I'd heard Pink Floyd.

I've wanted to point this out for quite some considerable time but I decided to wait until now cuz I suspect Floyd are the first band most people would name in connection with Psychedelic Rock.  The word psychedelic, actually means "to manifest the soul".  Yet, if you had asked me a week or two ago to define it, I would've said "to dress, draw or play music that makes people think you're on drugs, even if you're not."

I discovered the definition in an article I read recently.  The article was about a scientist - Dr something (that oughta narrow your list of scientists down) - who is conducting LSD trials for the first time in decades as a possible treatment for schizophrenia, depression, anxiety etc.  Some would argue using LSD to solve mental health problems is like fixing an ingrowing toenail by cutting one's leg off.  But I digress.

This is the first album by one of my favourite bands of all time.  I wanna be able to bestow upon it glory and honour, endow it with healing and magical powers.  I want to. But for all my ageing hippy bluster, my taste just isn't that psychedelic.  So, remember that.

Astronomy Domine is one of those tracks that gets[1] trotted out to please the Syd Barrett devotees and perpetuate this loyalty to their fallen comrade.  A mate of mine thinks it's all a fallacy that Syd did too much acid, spun out and lived out his days as a basket case in his mum's basement.  This report was perhaps exaggerated but he was a recluse and he did live with his mum and sure as hell consumed a metric fuck tonne of lysergic acid diethylamide during his comparatively brief time with the band.

He had a definite penchant for chromatic chord changes that slide eerily along and together with his distinctive English singing accent, he created an undeniably unique sound.  To be singing about star formations and planets and tying those in with emotional themes is certainly something I've not heard while listening to these albums.  The melodies are beautiful and the lyrics interesting but the extended space sequences even in a tiny song like Flaming lose me completely.  

On Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk we've got a much more rock-centred piece, which contains a keyboard solo of sorts.  Richard Wright, not a fancy player by any stretch of the imagination was perhaps ill advised to go for the Jon Lord (and those of his ilk) runs but perhaps he was not aware of his strengths at this point.  It would be several years before Dark Side of the Moon would give him one of the most iconic piano introductions in the history of Rock.

Interstellar Overdrive is another that stayed in the band's set right up to their last tour.  It's the epic of the album; a 9 minute holocaust[2] of chaotic discord.  Most of it you can shove up your arse as far as I'm concerned.  It is the most unequivocally shit thing I have ever had the good fortune to fall asleep in.  But the main theme, once again built on a chromatic descent, is extraordinarily powerful.  If you can imagine yourself going on a journey through space - like when they go thru the wormhole in the film, Interstellar[3] - you are voyaging through the unknown and many strange things will occur and at the end you would not be the same.  Cleverly, when the theme returns at the end of this albeit deliberately cacophonous wank, it is itself twisted somewhat - revealing, perhaps, the intended narrative. 

There are a few more great ideas in The Gnome and Chapter 24, cluttered by the bloody bonkers sound effects but thankfully the songs are short enough that not much perseverance is required to get to the ingenious harmony work that climaxes on Scarecrow.  I'd say this song was the album's peak for me but it can't be.

It can't be because this album closes with Bike.  Bike is silly.  Bike is innocent.  Bike is eccentric in tune and lyric.  Bike is anthemic with its rallentando and recovery after the change.  When I first heard this knowing I was listening to Pink Floyd, I nearly cried.  I had been singing this song from when I was a small boy, thinking it was one of the many daft things my brother had made up to entertain me, the small, pink, bull-in-a-china-shop who came into his life when he was half way to his ninth birthday.  It seems, I'd found his tape of Dark Side of the Moon but never his tape of Relics, a compilation that included this song, released shortly before the stunning Meddle in 1971.  So, it appears the first Pink Floyd I ever heard wasn't DSOTM but Bike. 

Much of the album sounds like a collection of kitchen hardware going round in a cement mixer.  It has merits, but these can't lift it any further than 3 for me.  Nevertheless, Bike is a big emotional trigger for me so I have to give it one more.  Just for my ridiculous big brother.


[1] - should be past tense.  I don't see Floyd touring again.
[2] - oh fuck off.  holocaust - noun:  an act of great destruction and loss of life.
[3] - why didn't they use this in the soundtrack?