The Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

6.5 - England - 1967

The metanarrative of Pink Floyd’s career is that there are actually two Pink Floyds. The Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett, started out as the thrilling vanguard of London’s late 60s psychedelic scene; however, when Barrett’s absurd LSD regimen took its toll, he was fired by the group who then settled in to making a series of overly-polished high-concept albums such as Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.

There are two problems with this metanarrative. One, it ignores the Floyd’s middle period from the firing of Barrett to the success of the post-Dark Side records – the period when the band was at their most interesting as they struggled to figure out just what they were going to without their songwriting, lynchpin frontman.  Second, it vastly overrates the status of Syd Barrett, though this is largely due to the compelling nature of Barrett’s backstory: the mercurial genius who overindulged on hallucinogens and, flying too close to the sun, completely lost his marbles.  While it is a great story, it also begs the question of whether Barrett was actually a genius to begin with.

Certainly, the post-punk revisionism of Pink Floyd’s career holds that the early Barrett era was when the group was at its best (or at its least intolerable, depending on the writer) before they devolved into making “middle-aged bank manager rock”, and their first album is generally produced as evidence.  The thing is, though, that when you strip the record of the controlling metanarrative of Barrett’s descent (or ascent?) into madness, it’s not really all that great.  There are some great moments – “Interstellar Overdrive” features a killer riff before thrashing off into the stratosphere (yeah, I know that’s a cliché, but it’s appropriate here) and “Astronomy Domine” is a decent psychedelic rocker that would become a live staple well into the post-Barrett era (for the record, though, I think the studio version is superior to the extended live version featured on Ummagumma).

However, the myth of Barrett is not just that he was a guitar wildman with a tape delay, but he was also purportedly a great songwriter who could mold psychedelic experimentation into Beatlesesque pop songs.  Though the Cult of Barrett insists upon this claim, when one examines the physical evidence, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Certainly “Astronomy Domine” and “Lucifer Sam” are fairly great and the two non-album singles “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play” are perfectly fine slices of vintage English psychedelic pop (we’ll ignore the underperforming “Apples and Oranges” for now), but after that, things get decidedly dodgy as Barrett trades in insufferable whimsy.  Viz. “The Gnome”: “I want to tell you a story / About a little man if I can. / A gnome named Grimble-Gromble / And little gnomes stay in their homes / Eating, sleeping, drinking their wine.”  Ugh.  And most of the record is more like “The Gnome” (see also the utterly tuneless “Chapter 24” or the revoltingly childish “Flaming”) than “Interstellar Overdrive”.

In a nutshell, the songs are nowhere near as interesting or entertaining as some of the schadenfreudy anecdotes surrounding Barrett.  My favourite: when he tried to teach the group a new song he’d written, but kept changing the chord progression every time he played it.  The song’s title? “Have You Got It Yet?”

See also: "On Music & Mythology" (Section III)