My Top 100 Albums: #75 - Pink Floyd, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’
75.
Pink Floyd, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’
Columbia, 1967
Almost all of the music for which legendary British rock band Pink Floyd have become renowned has been made since the enforced departure of the mercurial founder and creative lead Syd Barrett. While the likes of The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall are testament to the genius of Messrs Waters and Gilmour, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is Barrett’s one true Pink Floyd record, a glimpse perhaps of what could have been if only the volatile talent could have managed his destructive LSD addiction. But rather than speculating on alternate histories, it feels more productive to celebrate a great album for what it is. Unique and experimental such that the band’s label EMI were unsure what exactly to do with it, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a joyful and explosive psychedelic romp, bursting with the screaming electric guitars, trippy, reverb-heavy vocals and dense, esoteric vocals that would come to categorise the psychedelic movement within music. Add this to Barrett’s trademark irreverent, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and the final product is a weirdly wonderful acid trip of immense colour and richness. Of course, this album divides opinion in a way that the band’s magnum opuses of the 1970s seldom do, with its rougher, less-refined style, but for an album with Pink Floyd’s characteristic intuitive musicality and narrative depth, coupled with a hedonism and self-indulgence (courtesy of Barrett), look no further than Piper.
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