Storia dei Pink Floyd: gli esordi e la nascita dello Space Rock
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The history of Pink Floyd: their beginnings and the birth of Space Rock
August 5th, 1967:
while in California raged
the Summer Of Love,
in England a band
debuted with an album titled
"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn".
Anyone who buys the vinyl and puts it
on their record player can listen to
these notes
and wonder where the hell they came from.
[song]
The clear sensation is that these notes don't come from Earth,
but that they have arrived here directly from space.
And the lyrics as well, that talk about lights
that dance between the various planets
and their satellites...
It's the beginning of Space Rock,
founded by Pink Floyd.
They are the ones that created this music,
which, very probably, was born first of all in the head
of Syd Barrett, at that time the composer
of Pink Floyd, with an eccentric
mind, decidedly
obsessed with the starry spaces,
but also with the internal spaces, the
spaces of the mind. They were the years when, in fact,
men effectively traveled into space,
the years when they went to the moon,
but they were also the years when they traveled within themselves,
when certain chemical substances that were consumed,
in particular LSD,
and certain theories, psychological included,
the doors of perception,
lead them, lead the youth of that time
to try to expand
their spatial perceptions.
Syd Barrett, together with Nick Mason on drums,
Roger Waters on bass
and Richard Wright on keyboard,
created exactly these sounds that actually
don't seem to be
from Earth. Syd Barrett
traveled within himself a lot,
using a lot of these substances, and within
a year of the release of this album, in fact,
Pink Floyd found themselves forced to substitute him.
Too many times, in concert, he wasn't present
physically or mentally,
in the sense that he detached himself
completely from what the band was playing,
obsessively playing a single note or a single chord,
and with all the soul-wrenching sadness involved in confronting a friend
with whom they had begun an artistic journey,
Pink Floyd had to let him go.
And replacing Syd Barrett on guitar,
was his old friend,
David Gilmour, who had worked with him
on early related experiments,
like all the English at that time,
(in the middle of the 60's) with the blues.
But, Pink Floyd had an idea
for the transformation of the blues, different
from that which had implemented, for example,
the psychedelia in the United States, and they watched
the experiments that they were closer to instead
much more avant-guarde music,
contemporary music and also, if we want to mention it,
concrete music.
We have a clear example
in their second album, from 1968,
"A Saucerful of Secrets", of when
the song that gives the album its title
is actually a suite,
one might say a small 12-minute symphony, composed
in three movements: a first part that is decidedly
noisy,
a second part that on the other hand
we can define as percussive, then finishing
in a manner extremely lyrical
with a Gregorian chant
laid over an organ
played on all the keyboards,
which they made in one of the most
interesting peaks of experimental rock
of the 60's.
Pink Floyd were masters at this time in creating atmosphere,
and this time also the atmosphere wasn't
really terrestrial, wasn't
really, in this moment, peaceful
or radiant, and at this Floyd have always been
masters. After this first
section, I would now like you to listen to
the final part of this extraordinary song,
that arrives actually after ten minutes
of sounds and percussion
and sound experiments.
[end of "A Saucerful of Secrets"]
As you can clearly see, Pink Floyd had an idea
for rock that was very particular, it is music
which actually helped to build
situations, helped to build
sensations.
It is music that seems adapted for soundtracks,
and in fact, for example, in 1970,
none other than Antonioni used, in the final scenes of "Zabriskie Point",
one of the most famous songs of Pink Floyd,
which is found in the album
from 1969, "Ummagumma",
and which now I want you to listen to
in a passage that is what
marks the climax
of one suite,
because over a certain number of minutes, we can
always say this of suites,
it creates the clearly thriller-like sensations.
We are getting closer to something
which, I would say, we need to be careful
to wait.
[song]
We are waiting, for something sinister,
in the aria...
Careful with that axe, Eugene...
[Careful with that Axe, Eugene]
Pain, madness, whatever you want,
but the effect is absolutely devastating,
we'll say, for the listener. These were the atmospheres
which Floyd managed to create,
taking to the extreme,
their musical
experimentation of these first years.
And, with Pink Floyd, it's beyond dispute,
the English psychedelia undoubtedly reached
it's maximum.
The expansion of music times
and the transformation, sensorial,
with Pink Floyd finding their maximum
expression.
We had to wait though until 1970,
and at this point Pink Floyd took
a different route, took a route that lead us to
progressive rock
and, in some way, to the recovery of a certain
symphonic use of music
that was in the very next album.