Pink Floyd
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

I must have been fourteen years old when, among my friends, Pink Floyd was all the rage, especially Ummagumma and the cow album.

At that time, no one ever talked about Syd Barrett. And "Piper" had only been heard by Orsetto, my best friend, during a summer vacation in Sardinia. He gave it an unequivocal verdict upon his return: “it is absolute rubbish.”

Orsetto was the one setting the trend and, even more importantly, being from a rather well-off family, he bought the records. We didn't go to Sardinia, oh no, definitely not. We went to Marina di Ravenna to eat fish soup on the beach. And we never bought any records. At most, just a few tapes.

Yes, Orsetto was the leader. And, in a way, he deserved it. Wasn't it him who introduced us from Celentano to the Floyd? His judgment on “Piper” was therefore not only authoritative but indisputable.

Then there was a day when chance, in the form of a ramshackle little electrical goods shop, could also have changed things. In this cramped hovel, there was, strangely enough, a music section, consisting of two boxes full of pirate audiocassettes. There, I found a mysterious relic of Floyd: “Masters of Rock,” a compilation of 45 RPM records mostly recorded during the brilliant Barrettian reign.

I rushed home to listen to the tape with my mono recorder (only Orsetto, of course, had a stereo system), and the scratchy sound that came out of it was certainly not a revelation... what were those strange lullabies, those suspended voices, those jumbled sounds? An absolute rubbish, of course. Orsetto wasn't wrong.

The epiphany came a few years later, helped by certain circumstances: the arrival of punk, the broadening of our musical tastes, with Orsetto becoming the minister of kraut rock and me smuggling in decadent rock, mainly Bowie and Velvet.

The Floyd were repudiated, except for “Ummagumma” live part, with that scream in “Careful with that axe, Eugene” and the chaos resolving into the celestial finale of “A Saucerful of Secrets.” Everything else had become fluff.

Then there was a book, read a few years earlier without understanding almost anything. It was a sort of ardent encyclopedia of alien rock, imaginative and very '70s. It was there that I first discovered certain fabulous names besides the titles of rare albums which I would only hear much later. One of the names, of course, was Barrett.

But above all, in that book, there was a quote from the lyrics of “Lucifer Sam,” with a phrase “that cat has something that I can't explain” which, for some reason, struck me deeply. Who knows, maybe there was a resonance with the early De Gregori and his Alice. Or maybe it was related to a beautiful cat-loving girl who tormented my dreams and not just mine back then.

The fact is that the phrase fought with the memory of that little tape, which had meanwhile disappeared somewhere. And in the end, the phrase won. And I bought “Piper,” starting the listening directly from track two, the one that talked, and still talks, about that blessed cat.

Have you ever loved a magical woman? And if so, have you ever seen her with a cat? And didn't they seem like the right and left sides of the mystery to you? This is what Syd talks about, adding sinister atmospheres and wordplay, spreading it over something between a driven rhythm and blues and a kids' TV show theme. Not a bad start.

But who was Syd Barrett?

I borrow three images (three flashes) from Rob Chapman's book, a distinguished Barrettologist: Syd Barrett walked with a bounce, Syd Barrett had ferret-like eyes, and, as if by magic, he appeared suddenly, as if he were a fairy-like being.

Yes, I know, we are already in the myth. And I don't mind. Because this fabulous image perfectly matches the magic of his early songs. And so I take those bounces and those eyes to start the journey.

And while I'm at it, I also take a blender and a kaleidoscope. I pass through them some nursery rhymes, some illustrations from a children's book, and much of the naivety of those years. And out come little songs that resemble those of the walrus and the strawberry fields, just a bit crazier and more spaced out. Else, what kind of songs could a fairy-like being ever write?

But besides the little songs, there was something else. Together with his squires, he was a cosmic courier and, in concerts, loved launching into long and reckless instrumental pieces that coagulated into a sound that was sometimes powerful, sometimes whimsical. Something never heard before in rock. If the little songs had a kinship with the strawberry fields and the walruses, here a completely new territory was being explored, without having either a compass or a map.

Where did that courage and attitude come from? Syd Barrett was a curious type with very sharp antennae. A painter and former art school student, he had a taste for experimentation and a kind of innate trust in instinct and spontaneity. From a certain Keith Rowe, guitarist of the free jazz ensemble AMM, he learned to move away from technique and to torture the guitar with the most diverse objects to obtain extraordinary slide effects. He fell in love with light shows and the idea that lights and music could chase each other in a sensory journey and compete freely, bowing to synesthesia. He was one of the first to use the echorec, a gadget that created echoes and reverberations, producing arabesques and spirals of sound. And then, of course, the lysergic acid, an expansive and transcendental substance.

Piper opens with a track of exceptional power, “Astronomy Domine,” where an ecstatic increasing tone is grated by Syd's derailment guitar, and the words tell, with a voice that seems light-years away, the space journey into synesthesia, where everything is confusing and seems magical, although a final call to fear is not overlooked.

There is then “Interstellar Overdrive,” which in the studio takes up the cosmic raids of the concerts, in a way inevitably a bit stifled, but still exceptional. And it's something that one can't even attempt to describe.

Then there are those songs we mentioned at the start, wonderfully fragile and spaced out, supported by a childlike experimentalism, telling of scarecrows, gnomes, cats, bicycles, nannies, lysergic trips, in such a fresh way that many years later they have lost none of their charm.

So pop grace, powerful and expansive sound, simple melodies, studio magic, cheeky boldness, enchantment, anguish: elements that hold hands, brawl, implode, explode, halfway between ring-a-ring o' roses and the little chemist. And they do it throughout the album and often even within the same song.

Take “Matilda Mother,” for example, where in the darkness of the dollhouse, among old scents, a vision unfolds. And on an enchanted melody, the little figures from Mamma Matilde's book float in the air like a fantastic compendium (kings, knights, bells, wooden shoes, scarlet eagles, silver eyes).

The song is not just sugary, as good Syd blows a cold gust of wind over this idyll. It's almost like seeing those little figures fly away. What happened? Simple. Mamma Matilde stopped telling the story. And Syd’s solemn and suspended voice memorably conveys the fear of emptiness and nothingness. “Don’t leave me waiting here, start telling me again.”

It's only a moment, but the anguish in the track remains, even as it runs parallel to the magic: it remains in the fabulous Floyd sound, which, between the pauses in the singing, takes the stage, remains in the unsettling refrain of the ending which gradually fades in a vain attempt to unload it. A lot happens in Matilda.

And a lot happens in the other songs too. Flaming is my favorite and has nursery rhyme-like words and even a wonderful “Yuppii!!!” at the start of the song. And it has bells, jingles, choirs, merry keyboards. And it tells of a strange kind of psychedelic game where you hide in the Barrettian elsewhere with the hope of being found as late as possible.

What about the melancholic delicacy of “The Scarecrow,” the crazy pop magic of “The Bike,” the cosmic folk of “Chapter 24”? Masterpieces, all masterpieces of the best Floydian youth.

Yes, Floydian. Even though I've only talked about Syd so far. And it's not strange since I'm a Barrettologist. However, even though the ideas came from our man, the Floyd sound was a matter that also concerned Mason/Gilmour/Wright.

That sound, that powerful and carefree sonic jumble I tried to describe, we will never find again. Not in Barrett's solo genius albums, not in the more conventional works of the others. A pity.