VIDEO: Psychedelic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Early Days with Syd Barrett, 1967

by Mike Springer, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/psychedelic-scenes-of-pink-floyds-early-days-with-syd-barrett-1967.html


Roger Waters of Pink Floyd turns 70 years old today.

Waters was the principal songwriter and dominant creative force during the band’s famous 1970s period, when it released a string of popular and influential concept albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

But today we thought it would be interesting to take you all the way back to 1967, when Waters was 23 years old and the band was led by his childhood friend Syd Barrett.

The video above is from a May 14, 1967 broadcast of the BBC program The Look of the Week.

Pink Floyd hadn’t released an album yet. Only two nights earlier the band had staged its attention-getting “Games for May” concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

In the TV broadcast, Pink Floyd plays its early favorite “Astronomy Domine” before Waters and Barrett sit down for a rather tense interview with the classically trained musician and critic Hans Keller.

It’s amusing to watch Keller’s face as he expresses his extreme irritation at the band’s loud, strange music. “My verdict is that its a little bit of a regression to childhood,” he says with a grimace. “But after all, why not?”

Waters and Barrett manage to hold their own during the interview. Barrett comes across as lucid and well-spoken, despite the fact that his heavy LSD use and mental instability would soon make him unable to function within the band.

By December of 1967, Pink Floyd would add guitarist David Gilmour to the lineup to compensate for Barrett’s erratic behavior. By March of 1968 - only 10 months after the BBC broadcast - Barrett would quit the group.

We’ll close with an even earlier video of Pink Floyd performing at the legendary UFO club in London.

Filmed on January 27, 1967, the clip is from the February 7, 1967 Granada TV documentary on British youth culture, So Far Out It’s Straight Down. Pink Floyd plays another major song from it’s psychedelic era, “Interstellar Overdrive.”