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Fact #105442

When:

Short story:

Pink Floyd release their debut album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Full article:

Vinyl Icon : Pink Floyd - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

By Johnny Black, first published in Hi-Fi News And Record Review, September 2010

IT'S WRIT large in pop history that The Beatles spent the spring of 1967 recording their classic Sgt Pepper album in EMI's Abbey Road Studio 2.

It's less well-documented, but arguably more remarkable, that The Pretty Things were simultaneously in the same building recording the first rock opera, S.F.Sorrow, while the Pink Floyd were just along the corridor creating the first masterpiece of British psychedelia, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Having started out as The Pink Floyd Blues Band, this unassuming Cambridge quartet had been turned on to the potential of psychedelic music by their manager, Peter Jenner, who had spent time in San Francisco grooving (as one did in those days) to The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Jenner came back to England and famously told Pink Floyd's leader Syd Barrett about 'My Little Red Book', a song played by Los Angeles cult band Love. "I just hummed the main riff. Syd picked up his guitar and followed what I was humming, chord-wise." By trying to imitate this strange music which he had never heard, Barrett inadvertently created the first uniquely Floydian classic. "That chord pattern," says Jenner, "became his main riff for 'Interstellar Overdrive'."

A sprawling spacey instrumental with a mesmeric descending chord structure, 'Interstellar Overdrive' would ultimately become the centrepiece of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.

Barrett, whose typical day in early 1967 started with LSD-laced coffee, went on to write almost the entire album in this revolutionary style before his chemical enhancements rendered him, in bassist Roger Waters' words, "murder to live and work with."

Work on tracks for the album started on February 21, with producer Joe Boyd at Sound Techniques Studio, Chelsea, London. The first song recorded was 'Matilda Mother', whose lyrics Barrett 'borrowed' from three of the poems in Hilaire Belloc's 1907 volume Cautionary Tales for Children. However, when Belloc's estate was asked for permission to re-use his words, it was refused. Barrett ended up re-writing the lyric and re-recording 'Matilda Mother' at Abbey Road on June 7. Even then, though, the song wasn't complete. On June 29, 1967, EMI's in-house producer Norman Smith decided that the song's instrumental section was too long so he chopped out 50 seconds, a cut which remains plainly audible at 1m 59s into the track. Not surprising, perhaps, when we remember that editing in those days was executed with brass scissors, to ensure that magnetism did not affect the recordings on the tape.

On February 27 they laid down a version of the aforementioned 'Interstellar Overdrive' in Sound Techniques with Joe Boyd at the controls. The next day, however, they signed to EMI for a £5000 advance. "EMI was a very conservative, old-fashioned company," remembers Boyd, "and they wanted their groups to record in their studios with their in-house producers."

Sure enough, Boyd was unceremoniously dumped. Andrew King, the band's co-manager has admitted, "The alacrity with which Peter (Peter Jenner) and I left Joe standing was shameless."

By March 15, Pink Floyd and EMI's Norman Smith were in Abbey Road, working on a shorter version of 'Interstellar Overdrive' and 'Chapter 24', a Barrett song with words derived directly from Chapter 24 of the 5,000 year old Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching. (No copyright problems there, then.)

However unhinged Barrett was becoming, the album was already shaping up to be a milestone in rock history. "What stunned me most," remembers King, "was that on stage the Floyd were very rambling and shambolic but, in the studio, Syd constructed things like 'Chapter 24' which was not just beautifully shaped and elegant but also startlingly original."

Abbey Road staff engineer Peter Bown remembers his shock at hearing the ear-bending volume at which they rehearsed 'Interstellar Overdrive'. "I thought, 'How the f**k are we going to get this on tape?' I had certainly never heard anything quite like it and I don't think I ever did again. It was very exciting."

Speaking of this track, Jenner has said, "They played it twice, one version recorded straight on top of the other. They double-tracked the whole track. Why? Well it sounds pretty f**king weird doesn't it? That big sound and all those hammering drums."

Barrett at this point was intensively creative, the undeniable leader of Pink Floyd, but his immersion in acid-culture was already damaging his relationships in the real world. "Working with Syd was sheer hell," remembered Norman Smith. "I don't think I left a single Floyd session without a splitting headache. Syd never seemed to have any enthusiasm for anything. He would be singing a song and I'd call him into the control room to give a few instructions, then he'd go back out and not even sing the first part the same, let alone the bit I'd been talking about."

Nor was Smith, it seems, particularly impressed by rest of the band. "Waters wasn't a great bass player but learnt fast enough. Wright was quietly arrogant and believed he was a better organist than he actually was. Mason was just along for the ride, waiting for the money to roll in so he could go off and play with his beloved motor cars."

Nevertheless, March 20 seems to have been a productive day, with work going ahead on bassist Roger Waters' first recorded composition, the abrasive 'Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk', the decidedly jazzy group-composed instrumental 'Pow R Toc H', plus two more Barrett originals, 'The Gnome' (based on Frodo's journey in Lord Of the Rings) and 'The Scarecrow' (possibly inspired by June Wilson's children's book of the same title). Once again, though, Norman Smith later took issue with Waters' 'Stethoscope' and hacked out part of the freaky instrumental.

The following day, Bown took the Floyd to meet The Beatles in Studio 2. "McCartney said he liked what he'd heard of the band," remembers Bown, "and thought they were doing something interesting and creative."

All through the this period, Pink Floyd continued to plays live gigs around the country but they were back in Abbey Road on April 11, starting work on 'Astronomy Domine' and 'Percy the Ratcatcher', later re-named 'Lucifer Sam'. The distorted voice heard at the start of 'Astronomy Domine' is Peter Jenner, reading astrological star signs and astronomical facts from an astronomy atlas, through a megaphone. 'Lucifer Sam', it appears, was Barrett's Siamese cat.

After a few more live gigs, one of Barrett's most enduringly charming and bizarre creations, 'Bike', was started on April 18. The nearest thing to a love song he ever wrote, Bike is said to be addressed to his girlfriend Jenny Spires, and finds him offering to share his most precious possessions – a bike, a cloak and pet mouse - with her.

'Flaming', another of Syd's evocations of a seemingly golden childhood, written before the band was even formed, was started on June 7 and completed during final mixing sessions on the 29th, more or less completing the album.

The usurped Joe Boyd ran into Barrett at the UFO club around this time. Boyd had always been struck by the glint in Syd's eye, an impish twinkle that spoke of a mind ever alert, always agile. That night, however, "I looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle. No glint. It was like somebody had pulled the blinds, you know? Nobody home."

Tragically, Syd never quite returned to normality and had to quit Pink Floyd soon after, incapable of functioning properly as a band member. After a failed attempt to establish a solo career, he returned home to Cambridge and lived out of the public eye, dying peacefully in 2006.

The final master tape of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, its name drawn from Kenneth Graham's The Wind In the Willows, was delivered to EMI Records on July 18, and hit the shops on August 5.

The album that launched Pink Floyd's career peaked at No6 in the UK and made no impact whatsoever in America but is now recognised as a breakthrough, with Barrett's quintessentially English songs peopled by dwarves, scarecrows, fairies and weird felines, drifting through fantastical landscapes conjured up by a veritable sonic kaleidoscope of strange electronic noises, stuttering guitar rhythms and curiously looping drum patterns.

"If ever there was a record that marks a period of music history, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, with Syd's songs, is absolutely part of it," reckons Nick Mason. "It's something that we never discovered again."

PINK FLOYD – PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
PRODUCTION NOTES

Work on Piper At The Gates Of Dawn started in Sound Techniques, Old Church Street, Chelsea. One of the first independent recording studios in the UK, it had been opened in December 1964 by a brace of experienced sound engineers, Geoff Frost and John Wood. Despite years of experience at Decca and Levy Studios, their funds were minimal, so much of their recording equipment, including the four-track recorder used by Pink Floyd, was built from scratch or scavenged from pre-existing parts. What little cash they did have went towards buying an EMI limiter, two Altec compressors and several high-end microphones including Neumann 67s, KM56s, KM54s, AKG D19s and an RCA ribbon.

In his book Inside Out (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004) Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason recalls the veneered walnut finish and "incredible bass punch" of its five foot high "state of the art Tannoy Red speakers. Mason also recalls, "We recorded bass and drums on one track, guitar and the trembly Farfisa Duo keyboard on two other tracks." Effects were added "as these three tracks were bumped down onto a fourth", leaving guitar and vocals to be added as overdubs before the final mix was put down onto a mono master tape.

Good as Sound Techniques was, Abbey Road's Studio 3, where most of the album was completed, was significantly better.

EMI engineer Peter Bown, more used to musicians with rather more finesse, recalls that, "Syd's guitar was always a problem because he would not keep still and was always fiddling with his sound. He used to go and kick his echo box every now and then, just because he liked the sound it made. We wrecked four very expensive microphones that first night. They got louder and louder until everything was overloading and the mics just gave up the ghost."

This was also an era in which pop music was clearly regarded as inferior to classical. The Floyd's co-manager, Andrew King, has revealed, for example, that Studio 3's 4-track recorder, "had this knob on one side which you pushed one way and it said 'Pop'. You pushed it the other way, it said 'Classical'. What it did was alter the logarithmic curve on the faders, so that you could do more subtle changes of level if it was set on 'Classical' than you could on 'Pop'."

© Johnny Black, 2010

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AND A LITTLE MORE FOR GOOD MEASURE...
David Gilmour, guitarist for locally popular Cambridge band Joker's Wild, was in London during May of 1967. Knowing that his friends from another Cambridge outfit, Pink Floyd, were recording their second single at Sound Techniques in Chelsea, he dropped in to hang out with them.

Even though the single, See Emily Play, sounded astonishing, Gilmour sensed immediately that something was wrong in the band. Although they were friends of long standing, Floyd's guitarist Syd Barrett, "just looked straight through me, barely acknowledged that I was there." Gilmour didn't know it, but Barrett's controls were already set for the outer limits.

Having moved to London to pursue their career, the Floyd had also moved into the vanguard of biochemical research. Barrett in particular was consuming prodigious quantities of that summer's psychedelic of choice, LSD, and almost as quickly, it was consuming him.

Superficially though, everything seemed to be going to plan. See Emily Play was a resounding hit and the band moved into Studio 3 at Abbey Road to work on their debut album. Like almost everyone close to the band, their co-manager, Andrew King was so dazzled by Barrett's acid-enhanced musical quantum leaps that he ignored the danger signs. "It was the most intensely creative time of Syd's life. He was not like a dominant band leader so much as he was the Hale-Bopp comet and they were dragged along in the tail. I remember watching him mixing on a four-track desk and he played it like it was an instrument."

EMI's engineer Norman Smith, however, was not so impressed by the rest of the band's abilities. "Waters wasn't a great bass player but learnt fast enough. Wright was quietly arrogant and believed he was a better organist than he actually was. Mason was just along for the ride, waiting for the money to roll in so he could go off and play with his beloved motor cars."