Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Pink Floyd Photo:www.retna.co.uk

Classic '60s British spook-rock reissued

Sep 4, 2007
13 Comments
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If you saw Pink Floyd at Live8 and wondered what all the fuss was about, then your instincts were right. Pink Floyd are one of those bands that even their fans have to make excuses for. Pompous, self-important, joyless and big-selling, they’ve become shorthand for grumpy middle-aged bank manager rock. Most famous for ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ – a record about half as clever as it likes to think it is – Pink Floyd’s career is built on kiddy choirs, 30-year rows, giant polystyrene walls, inflatable pigs, interminable guitar solos and being Very Serious Indeed. It’s been successful – they’ve sold 150 million albums – but no person in their right mind would ever want to listen to one of those albums all the way through, especially if there are kitchen knives or open windows nearby.
Except this one. If you like the inflatable-pigs Floyd, then you’re probably reading the wrong magazine. But if you fancy the idea of four young men making super-spooked-sounding music about space and creepy lullabies about sad scarecrows on recordings so raw that you can hear the strings buzzing and their breath on the microphones, then you’re going to spend the rest of the year playing Pink Floyd’s first album over and over again.

‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ has inspired plenty of people – Blur, The Coral, Klaxons, The Horrors, Devendra Banhart, pretty much every Home Counties art-school band ever – which makes it all the more ironic that one of the few bands that haven’t copied it is Pink Floyd themselves. It’s down to one man, of course: before he lost his mind, Pink Floyd’s main songwriter was Syd Barrett, a sensitive, good-looking middle-class art student from Cambridge. His songs on ‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ assemble a cast of cats, silver shoes, unicorns, mice called Gerald, bikes, gnomes and the I Ching, and put them to some of the most inventive and surprising psychedelic music ever recorded.
Some people find Barrett tunes like ‘Bike’ (on which he trills “I’ve got a bike/You can ride it if you like”) insufferably twee, but even these whimsical moments are undercut with menace, while the camper songs are tempered by a genuinely spooked-sounding sensibility: fittingly for an album recorded late into the night and fixated with stargazing, its jumble of voices and sound effects only begins to stop being a jumble at about three in the morning.

This re-release, a 40th anniversary 3-CD set, comes with both mono and stereo versions of the album and the requisite rag-bag of alternate takes, but it also features two Barrett-penned singles not on the original album: ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ are as good as anything The Beatles recorded, while ‘…Layne’ even caused a furore when it was banned from the radio for lyrics about a transvestite stealing clothes from washing lines.

The story, as we know, does not end particularly happily. By the end of 1967, Syd had become catatonic after daily LSD use – a situation exacerbated by a tour of working men’s clubs on which, by all accounts, Pink Floyd’s extreme volume, retina-melting lightshow and satin blouses caused enraged audiences of people that are probably now their fans to shower them with pint pots every night. In early 1968, Syd left Pink Floyd, making them a band for whom it’s easy to rapidly become acquainted with the highlights of their catalogue: buy this album and forget that they ever made any others while you’re being sucked into its wild little world.

9 out of 10

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Comments (13)

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highanddryman99

Feb 24, 2008

Whoever wrote the above review is so full of shit. "The Dark Side Of The Moon' - a record about half as clever as it likes to think it is." You haven't got a clue.

d4nnyb0y

Sep 6, 2007

So a name like "Pink Floyd"? But black-as-night albums such as "The Wall" and "Dark Side of the Moon"? "The Piper.." shows the true colours of the band, with its fanciful howlings and LSD-inspired auras, the legendary Syd Barrett may be gone, but we should thank God that some 21st Century yob had stolen his “Bike”.

Dan Jones, 15.

the_likely_lads

Sep 8, 2007

You gave this album the same rating as the Klaxons album? Insult

Papa Lazarou

Sep 10, 2007

even if it was made 22 years before i was born, Piper At The Gates... is one of my all time favourite albums. Syd Barrett is a complete hero and this album shows that he was a genius. Also it shows that the band even then was a complete unit and capable of writing some of the greatest ever songs.

Forget 'Dark Side Of The Moon' this is Pink Floyds greatest achievment

AnthonyThornton

Sep 10, 2007

It's a fantastic album. Probably one of my favourite albums. From Astronomy Domine onwards (Take Up Thy Stethoscope aside) it's a brilliant work. It's probably the best psychadelic album ever.

carlohagan

Sep 11, 2007

Good album with some great songs (Astronomy Domine and Interstallar Overdrive) . However
has some pretty basic songs that sound more like nursery ryhmes than anything else which deny this album top rating. Like most people much prefer later Pink Floyd (from the great Dark Side on) but theres no denying this album was the beginning of something special.

boharwood

Sep 12, 2007

Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a pretty sweet album. my personal joint favourite along with 'Wish You Were Here'.

HOW ON EARTH CAN YOU GIVE THE KLAXONS THE SAME RATING AS THIS?!

unbelievable!

jman2k

Sep 16, 2007

The writer of this article should be shot in the back of the head without a right to be judged by his peers.
You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!!!!
British rock owes a lot to Pink Floyd, it's no surprise that they and Zep are considered the best rock bands of all time, all over the world, everywhere you go.
Piper is the beginning of it all, and we fans should be extremely grateful for it.

beeritis

Sep 16, 2007

kienton

Sep 16, 2007

Who are Klaxon?

kienton

Feb 24, 2008

Who are Klaxon

radiowaves!

Sep 17, 2007

This Album is not the best. But you do have a point about their later albums. I got into pink floyd because of the wall and animals. But I can't listen to them now. I can't get any later then darkside. But interms of quality Rick Wright was the most talented of them all. If you can get past sysifus part 2, then ummagumma is amazing. Meddle is great, the song echoes is by far their best. Then there are other great songs from everything. But on darkside the only part I don't like is money. I happen to have a huge floyd collection and I would recommend this album highly. Though its not one of their best, its better then then the final cut, or roger's radio kaos. Its just so different. Its fantastic. I love sauserfull though. Its the best. A sauserful of secrets is like piper 2.0. Then they start to change their style every album and thats just fantastic.

jimmy2000

Sep 19, 2007

The writer of this article should learn a lesson, I doubt he will but he should . When I was a kid I liked punk and fell for the hype, but as you mature you tastes should and I realised that there is an enduring quality that is quite unique in Floyd music. Quality will always last and thrive.

Music journalist don;t like Floyd because there is no fashion attached to them. That would make the journalist redundant, mainly because they are not music journalist really they are fashion journalist, who hype things up because they are of the moment.

Even your readers who I presume are young can see through you. they know that this album although good is full of basic simple tunes unlike the epic albums that followed.

Quality always wins in the end., There is a reason why each new generation loves the Floyd, it;s called startlingly original music , which is played to absolute perfection. Only a philistine could fail to see this.