Storia dei Pink Floyd: gli esordi e la nascita dello Space Rock

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.