Ineluctable Audacity Dept. - The Great God Pan At The Gates Of Dawn

Hard now to appreciate just how wildly experimental and startling that first Pink Floyd album was. It's either patronised as charming but hopelessly dated, or revered as the kaleidoscopic flowering of a madcap minstrel's cracked genius (an a-Syd album). That's two blind grabs at the elephant in a dark room.

Pan, yesterday

Start with the title: it's not on the front cover, it's not the name of a song, nor is it referenced in a lyric. It's a quote from The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the handful of children's classics adopted by the hippies as holy texts. The Piper is Pan, the horned goat-god, bestial, wildly sexual. Pagan. We're not talking Disney here, kiddies.

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Meeting Pan is the culmination of the trip back to nature, to the source of magic, to the gates of dawn, or the Doors Of Perception - Heaven And Hell, the Magic Theatre. All this buried in the title to a pop album? Not for everybody - if you knew, you knew. Certainly it was deemed too arcane for the American market - Tower just stripped it right out.

In a radical break from EMI art department policy, the cover shot was lensed [oh very good - Ed.] by fashion photographer Vic Singh, using a prism given to him by George Harrison. No stylists, no special effects other than the lens, and the band in their work clothes - a kaleidoscopic moment captured forever. Today, it seems like just another generic psychedelic cover, but back then it was saturated with a-Syd intensity.

The music, for a start, owes nothing to The Beatles, who are widely credited with the invention of the sixties. Mostly composed by Barrett, it was a revolutionary clash of fairytale whimsy and cosmic soundscapes, much of it instrumental. Not instrumental as in surf music or The Shadows or RnB or jazz or anything else current at the time. Indescribably far out and mind-blowing, it was music of the spheres teetering on the brink of collapse but always underpinned by structure and order, prefiguring Kraut Rock. It's what you might expect when three formalist architectural students get inspired by a whirling dervish shaman. Nick Mason's drumming is supernaturally right, at once powerful and retrained, a tribal metronomic. Roger Waters' bass has that freakbeat power and pulse. Rick Wright is feeling his way, but never hits a wrong note, adding color and depth. And Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic scythe, a slashing blade. And his lyrics are frequently sublime:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten ...

I was listening to this while chowing down on my gha-pow moo today, washed down by an icy tin of Kirin. In The Wind In The Willows, Pan grants his worshippers forgetfulness of their meeting, so their lives will not seem smaller in comparison. I was trying to remember seeing the Floyd in '67. It's all gone. Just memories of memories, ripples flattening from that original splash. False memory foam, froth on the daydream. But the music - my song-dream - is still as startling, all there at the tap of my phone, worlds and lifetimes colliding, as ineluctably audacious as ever.

Saucerful Of Secrets

I've forgotten the derivation of the title - I think it's another literary reference. The cover (the band's first by Hipgnosis) features what looks like a light show - much of it from a Strange Tales page. Doctor Strange is clearly visible on the original Tower release [above, at right - Ed.], but almost totally obscured on the U.K. edition. Strange! Other elements come from alchemical texts. Because 1968.

Generally perceived as a "transitional album", Easy-going Rog nixed Barrett's Scream Thy Last Scream and Vegetable Man, replacing them with his execrable Corporal Clegg. My version redresses this calumny, and incorporates contemporary singles in a reshuffled sequence you may find mildly satisfying. Oh - it's all in stereo, as the baby Jesus intended. To claim the mono version (which was the only one I had for many years) is in any way better is just perverse. Stereo was arguably part of the composing process - the band and Norman Smith knew what they were doing - widening heads, not narrowing focus. Loaddown in comments. Gee - is it ever swell!