In 1967, Pink Floyd released their first album and the standard size of that psychedelic rock so tied to the time. Syd Barrett is the great guru of this first Floyd draft and he will create the original Pink Floyd style based on space wandering and baby rhymes. Everyone drowned in a large pot of LSD. Pink Floyd has just been born, Sid is already dead.
It’s college history, high school history. History, like many others, began. The action takes place in Cambridge, but could be anywhere.
Almost everywhere!
It had to happen in England anyway. On this island in full swing, where future boomers have not yet renounced their creative freedom in favor of lazy activities in some Rican pension fund. Where the youth of Great Britain molded this blessed furnace of the gods, this witch’s cauldron, in which a thousand influences boiled and with which they would water the whole planet.
In this strange time when the High Schools of treacherous Albion have become a pop culture ferment in construction, where The Beatles forever changed the status of pop music, turning it into a great art with more and more complex titles, more and more chiselled in the smoky Abbey Road studios.
Therefore, it is in Cambridge that this story will take place, or rather the genesis of this story. This city north of London, which, along with Oxford, leads the British university elite, a bourgeois city, proud of itself and its superiority, recycled from generation to generation among the nobility and the yellow-toothed bourgeoisie.
It is in this stronghold of English seriousness that for generations Roger Keith Barrett in 1946. The son of a doctor, the ideal prototype of the booming British middle class, striving for social emancipation, Young Roger Barrett shows early interest in music and the language of instruments. Ukulele, banjo, acoustic guitar and finally an electric guitar for his 15th birthday – for which he will make the amplification system himself – who is now called Sid drinks from this new generation of musicians who squat on the BBC’s airwaves reproducing American rock and roll standards and little pop gems The Beatles.
The 60s spare no one. this wind of freedom will be able to penetrate even into the narrow cracks of a hundred-year-old boulder of a prestigious university. Cambridge really sees its kids changing shape. Shirts are dyed, hair is getting longer and skirts are getting shorter. Students are more interested in electric guitar than rowing competitions; The art classes are always full and surpass the classic undergraduate liberal arts.
It was here, in this closed universe with its still very Victorian rigidity, precisely in these very British schools, whose Jansenist polish began to crumble under the blows of rebellious youth, but whose teachers still retained iron discipline. It’s there Syd Barrett to meet with David Gilmour and a little later Roger Waters.
Sid begins to write songs, cover standards, performs on small stages – often in an acoustic duet with Gilmour – and starts scratching in local bars, playing his chords, working with his harmonies, on the wise advice of a friend Gilmour.
At 19, tired of Cambridge austerity, Sid Pack your bags and take the express train to the capital: bustling London City. He joins his old friend Roger Waters who studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic school of architecture, where he is very bored. When Sid arrives Rogerthis one has already made friends and created a small group – Sigma 6 – which is already prowling the pubs in the city.
The current passes instantly among these music enthusiasts, Sid then join the group Roger and two of his friends: Richard Wright AND Nick Mason.
Abdabs, The Meggadeaths (yes, yes!) or The Tea Set are the names of the bands of four friends that we will see in the next couple of years on concert hall billboards. This Sid who will come to put an end to this difficult choice of the name of the group, mixing the names of two blues musicians whom he appreciated, Pink Anderson AND Floyd’s advicewhich will initially The sound of Pink Floydit’s just Pink Floyd.
The name is found and this is a revelation!
The band continues to roam the halls of the city, starting out on larger stages (notably The Marquee Club and Roundhouse) and in just a few months becoming the forefront of London’s psychedelic scene.
precisely at these concerts at the Marquee club, at these concerts, which still roughly consist of covers kinks or more The Beatles or stuttering of the original works, whether or not they noticed Peter Jenner AND Andrew King. Then two producers/managers will bet on the band and this emerging psychedelic vogue.
Arnold Layne and See Emily Play will see the light of day at 45rpm and get some immediate on-air success despite the censorship of a very young Radio London who will punish Arnold Layne for being too closed to his listeners.
The concerts are now sold out, and the singles, despite the weirdness we attribute to Psyché’s style, have allowed the band to become recognizable, tearing it out of the confidential counterculture and placing it under the burning spotlight.
45 rpm worked correctly on Breton Island, jennifer AND King rock their colt in the deep end. They offer the kids the essentials for their first album. It’s at Abbey Road Studios. Pink Floyd going to record this strange first album. It’s next to The Beatles – then in the middle of recording Sgt Pepper Lonely Heart’s Club Band – with ears wide open for new sounds and Beatle experiments, our four friends will record eleven songs Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
This Sid who writes, he also composes (10 titles out of 11 contained on the disc) and inspires the special tone of the album. But the man in the shadows is watching.
This Norman Smith former sound engineer The Beatles who will be taping and framing these kids, who are still new to recording techniques and the necessary and lifesaving difference between a written song and the tailless, headless psychedelic nonsense they chained on university stages. A true apprenticeship in the craft and instruments that we know will captivate the band and keep them at the forefront of musical technology for years to come.
This unsettling journey begins, a strange and surreal takeoff on a rocking rocket that takes us into agonizing space. Astronomy Domine opens the album with a sort of crescendo that never ends, a takeoff that never ends. a work in perfect imbalance that finally announces from the very beginning the essential essence of the album and its main architect. Because Sidfirst out of curiosity, then out of a game, and now it seems out of necessity that he is slowly sinking into the hell of mind-altering drugs.
Lucifer Sam, a satanic and mocking cat, paves the way to the gates of a poisonous hell in which Sid will throw out. A work in the spirit of the time, in the spirit of this new British pop music. Funny pop all the same; destabilized and destabilizing pop that would swallow WHO Where kinks to duplicate an acidified and brittle version such as crystal.
This special sound that directly hooks the ear and keeps it awake at all times. This style is so exciting that we take it as a clear sign of the still young psychedelic rock … and if not only that!
Listening to the record, we seem to see, almost come into contact with the wavering psyche of its author.
Behind the angry guitars of Interstellar Overdrive there is some fragility, some awkwardness. Space Challenge in the house Sid not the magical conquest that newspapers sell to bewildered peoples, but a frightening immensity, a painful nothingness, the chaos of every moment.
Sid continues – with Astronomy Domine – the exploration of this dark space, his own space. An agonizing, oppressive universe; a pessimistic vision of the interstellar unknown. Returning to earth Sid find a kind of peace. Cool feet on an English lawn, serenity Sid turns out to be just bait. This serenity seems to exist outside of reality. Sid closes in his childhood. As if it was necessary to exorcise, to forget this terrible vision of the cosmos, this reflection in the mirror; he will dig, he will dig for the already forgotten England: the England of his childhood.
Rediscover your childhood, immerse yourself in your memories to avoid a hazy future. Immerse yourself in these old-fashioned tales, so comforting not to return on this wobbly rocket towards your dimensional hell.
Dive into this 7th chapter of The Winds in the Willows Kenneth Grahamfind that piper at the gates of dawn, that piper at the gates of dawn from his childhood, so reassuring, so familiar.
Flaming, Matilda Mother, Scarecrow or The Gnome, real little gems of pop music, call out to these nursery rhymes, these stories that were told to put children to sleep, drowning these children’s melodies in psychedelic pop delirium. But Floyd create different, original pop music with sounds from another world, from another century. Folklore pop music that seems to compress the ancestral soul of England frozen in time and, alas, its author.
The first album is like a goddamn pagan rite. An invocation to the past, the future, the old gods and the new world around a boiling cauldron of LSD, Sid fills the glasses of the guests, leaving, unfortunately, the best part.
We are witnessing the struggle of man with himself. The internal struggle of the mind with the poisonous microbes of madness. Sid fights, he fights with himself. He struggles with this cosmos, with this spatial nothing that wants to devour him. He pleads for help from the heroes of his childhood, these green landscapes and these soothing stories, trying in vain to anesthetize this fear that torments him, this madness that invades the depths of his soul; push back as far as possible the hour of departure of this fucking rickety rocket to no longer luminous stars.
Too late. Have a good trip Sid !
Renault ZBN