Pink Floyd Dept. - Special 18th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Of 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition!

Yes, pop music enthusiasts, it was eighteen years ago today [literally not - Ed.] that Pink Floyd released their Fortieth Anniversary Deluxe Edition of their iconic first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn! To celebrate a momentous marketing opportunity the band is re-releasing this iconic box set of just about everything you already have, remastered exactly as it was last time, housed in a sumptuous cardboard display container that will give you deep consumer satisfaction to file on your special limited edition Pink Floyd Collectors' Shelf™ (available separately)!

To save you the irksome nuisance of remembering what you're looking for while you're searching for it, here's a word-for-word replay of the hi-toned screed what I already wrote about this fine, fine album:

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 aSyd 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 aSyd 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 Rn'B 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. Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic pscythe, 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 ...

 

 

The freeload, @ an entirely unnecessary 320, includes all the art, with a reproduction of Syd's weird little book [cover at the top of this piece, sample spread below - Ed.] which is really worth having.