Pink Floyd
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

London, March 21, 1967 – Within the legendary EMI-owned studios on Abbey Road, two groups recording their respective projects at the time meet and have the chance to introduce themselves officially; nothing special, one might think: were it not for the fact that the groups in question were the Beatles and the then-debuting Pink Floyd.
And, as subsequent events will show, in the brief moments that those handshakes lasted, a sort of passing of the baton could be glimpsed.
Even then, Paul McCartney had on several occasions praised the young band and stated he was convinced that “there would be a new synthesis of electronics, studio techniques, and rock n' roll. And that it wouldn’t be exactly the Beatles who would be the vehicle for that music, but Pink Floyd.”
Who, having officially become professionals just over a month and a half prior, had released their first single just ten days earlier, a strange but captivating piece titled ‘Arnold Layne’.
The oddity of the track partly lay in its lyrics, which described the story of a man from Cambridge caught stealing and wearing lingerie from the local women's institute, and then taken to prison.

The author of this then-scandalous piece was a 21-year-old from Cambridge named Roger Keith Barrett, known to friends (and the rock world) as Syd.
The very young singer and guitarist was then the leader, the main songwriter, and the driving force of Pink Floyd, already known for incredible and innovative light shows, in which the band ventured into long sonic and noise improvisations that had very few roots in the then-dominant blues but (partly unconsciously) in the avant-garde professed by composers like Stockhausen.
Right behind him was the already significant figure of bassist Roger Waters, who had carved out a noteworthy role in the band, with the more secluded role of the shy keyboardist Richard Wright, but absolutely fundamental in constructing the group’s sound, and drummer Nick Mason, who would end up being the only Pink Floyd member to be part of every incarnation of the legendary band.
Together, in the aforementioned studios, they were working on their first LP, which, published in August, would be titled ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ (named after the seventh chapter of a children's book ‘The Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame); a few rooms away, the Beatles were shaping their ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’: and, even with a superficial listening, it’s easy to notice several resonances between the two works.
Pink Floyd, who were at that time the forerunners and the most important band of English psychedelia, produced an album whose sound, perhaps uniquely rare, would never be repeated later, not even by themselves: simply nothing published before or after it can boast a similar sound.
The tone of the tracks is changeable, ranging from noise to ethereal, from menacing to whimsical; many of the tracks have an almost childlike flavor, in line with the title and the inspiration Barrett gave to the project. Neither the aforementioned ‘Arnold Layne’ nor the second single ‘See Emily Play’, which, released in June, had managed to bring Floyd high in the UK charts (although easily accessible through the collection ‘Relics’, released in 1971), is part of it.
However, it includes several future classics of the group. The first of these is placed at the beginning: ‘Astronomy Domine’ heralds the future cosmic vein of the group and is a simply sensational track, with a dark and gloomy tone, a strange structure without a real chorus, with the harmonized voices of Barrett and Wright setting the atmosphere, and a cosmic and threatening lyric.
It would remain a live classic for the band for many years, even after Barrett's departure, and a stunning version can be found at the opening of the live section of ‘Ummagumma’, 1969).
Then comes ‘Lucifer Sam’, where very sixties, almost detective film-like sounds, act as a backdrop to Barrett's ode to a Siamese cat. The following ‘Matilda Mother’ is the first example of the already mentioned whimsical vein of the album; delicate and ever-changing atmospheres provide the soundtrack to the image of a little girl asking her mother to read her the evening fairy tale, with Barrett and Wright sharing vocal and textual parts.
Essential in this (and in various other tracks of the album) is the contribution of keyboardist Rick Wright, who with his ethereal solos and oriental-sounding modal scales directs the album’s atmospheres with great taste; unfortunately, his reserved and shy nature led him to be one of the most underrated characters in the Floydian world, but it remains true that without his contribution, the sound of this album (and of all the subsequent ones, at least until ‘Wish You Were Here’ in 1975) could not have been the same that the world has come to know and love.
Another track in line is the splendidly psychedelic 'Flaming', and the subsequent ‘Pow R. Toc H.’, a piece built on the onomatopoeic sounds that give it its title, and an improvisation based on a simple two-chord progression.
Then comes ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk’, Roger Waters' first raw songwriting attempt, a very rough and rhythmic track, in which the words are purely for nestling stiffly within the text and sounding ‘bizarre’: the tracks Waters would write later would become more and more personal and above all interesting and deep in text, and this first composition can partly be archived as an attempt to imitate Barrett's genius.
A genius that shines magically in the subsequent ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, strategically placed at the album's center.
Completely instrumental, this Floydian classic is a long instrumental improvisation that more than any other track on the record approaches the group’s live sound of those times. The four, always supported by Wright and Barrett, explore numerous different atmospheres, moving from extreme roughness to wide melodic bursts, almost like a musical ‘stream of consciousness’.
The LP then closes with four examples of Barrett's whimsical creativity; the first and most ‘literal’ is ‘The Gnome’, in which the future Madcap tells the simple story of Grimble Gromble and his gnome friends living in the woods.
‘Chapter 24’ is splendid and supported by Wright's dreamy Farfisa organ, while Barrett textually expresses his passion-obsession of those days for the Eastern philosophy of the I Ching. ‘The Scarecrow’ tells life viewed through a scarecrow’s eyes and is a very simple track, with beautiful acoustic openings at the end.
The album then closes with the ironic and almost cabaret-like ‘Bike’, with an almost non-sense lyric and a finale filled with sound effects, the sounds of machines starting, and even a flock of ducks in fade out…

Yet everything has its meaning within the album, which from a sonic point of view is, besides being the most original, also the most heterogeneous in the Floydian discography.
Produced by Norman Smith (producer of many classic pop tracks of the time and ironically nicknamed ‘Normal’ by the Beatles, to highlight his tendency not to experiment), the four Floyds are seen experimenting broadly in the studio, using all the equipment and strange instruments (gongs, harpsichords, timpani) that the Abbey Road studios then offered. Some say that if the eclectic Joe Boyd (producer of ‘Arnold Layne’, replaced by EMI in favor of Smith) had produced the album, the Floyds could have reached even higher experimental peaks. But honestly, it’s hard to imagine this album being better than it is.
At the time, it was advertised as ‘the sonic formulation of a dream’ and, for once, it seems the record label had actually realized what kind of product they had on their hands.
The story of Pink Floyd would then continue with Barrett’s well-known descents into the world of acid that would first lead to his removal from the group, then slowly from the real world itself, leaving ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ as the only complete testament of the author in full possession of his genius.
And, whatever era of Pink Floyd one might prefer, ‘Piper’ remains a unique gem in its genre, and the indisputably most original and free-from-formula album the Fab Four of the seventies produced in their incredible musical career.

Review by Alessandro Tosetti