Pink Floyd
The Piper At Gates Of Down

Fantasy exploded in English youth culture in the form of colorful cards and sugar cubes consumed indiscriminately and without rules.

The Pink Floyd were part of that dreamy and unconventional youth, and in the annus mirabilis 1967, they released their first album, "The Piper At The Gates of Dawn", with a title taken from a children's storybook, a title that emerged from the childlike and twisted mind of Syd Barrett, the kaleidoscopic soul of the group, the principal author of almost all the songs.

This album held crucial importance in the English market because it sold well and was released a few months after the great "Sgt. Pepper"—it was the first great masterpiece of the Underground across the Channel that convinced young generations to daydream, challenging the utopias of the "unhealthy and conformist" reality.

Songs like Astronomy Domine provide hints to barely understanding Barrett's mental state, directed into universes known only to his mind, but it's also a galactic example of great psychedelic lyricism.
Interstellar Overdrive, a long suite, is considered the album's masterpiece by critics, a fusion of instruments in trance, a music that sweeps away the stylistic preconceptions of the normal song. An example of free and strange form that sinks into jazz latitudes acid-like.

Songs like The Gnome, Chapter 24, Scarecrow are classic hallucinatory nursery rhymes to sing to young "freak" English children and to future generations like mine; they seem like pieces from a pictorial collection in the unruly sonic landscapes of Barrett's mind. Concluding the album is Bike, one of the group's most original songs where being quirky is a free form, and Barrett was just that at the time, free to wander in uncharted lands with the deceptive and propulsive thrust typical of sixties' lysergic experiences; the song magnificently closes one of the most important albums in rock music, where the cohesion between life and sonic experiences gives life to a significant manifesto in the musical and cultural evolution of the period.

The almost entire credit goes to Syd Barrett, who, thanks to his perceptions and his eccentric musician's qualities, earned a place among the greats of rock, and with a one-way ticket, he got lost in the psychedelic labyrinths of his mind.

And he never recovered.