(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 19 October 2025 19:00, UK
There’s a good chance that the Pink Floyd we know today wouldn’t have existed without Roger Waters. After the band started to cave in on itself due to the downfall of Syd Barrett, it was Waters who picked up the pieces and brought them into the next phase of their career, creating songs that would become anthems of the prog-rock scene on tracks like ‘Money’ and ‘Time’. Although Waters has a high opinion on many parts of Floyd’s career, he feels this era doesn’t deserve to be remembered.
In 1967, as acid-rock began to hit the streets of London, Pink Floyd were the one band who were seemingly soundtracking the new revolution. The band quickly became the sound of a new movement and started to construct the foundations of psychedelic prog-rock almost immediately.
One caveat we must add is that, thanks to the unique way Pink Floyd constructed and textured their songs, there is almost certainly always somebody who has found happiness in their more obscure songs. The band prided themselves on being mercurial, and they certainly lived up to that ethos, even from the very beginning.
Before becoming the band’s de facto leader, Waters had no desire to be in the role of the frontman. Since Barrett was the one who wrote most of the material, Waters was more than happy to fade into the background, offering up the occasional song and watching the band try their hand at psychedelic rock on albums like The Piper at The Gates of Dawn.
Some of the songs are on the sillier side, but the youthful exuberance and enthusiasm that emanate from the album are beguiling. A debut record is your only shot at a first impression, and Pink Floyd made sure they wouldn’t be forgotten in a hurry. More to the point, they represented the moving mind of Barrett. More than anything else, this was his album.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Credit: Pink Floyd)
Although Waters would regret what happened to Barrett, he understood that specific mindset when the band became famous. Looking to document the kind of behaviour that he was seeing from the fans and the industry, albums like Wish You Were Here and The Wall were comprehensive studies of what the music business can do to someone.
After scaling new heights with the band, though, Waters would start to have disdain for how they started. When looking back on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the bassist would say that the band didn’t grasp what they were trying to do most of the time, often trying anything they could in the studio and hoping for something to stick.
Compared to the songs they would create later, Waters still thinks this period is amateurish, telling Q Magazine, “I don’t want to go back to those times at all. There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’”.
While Waters may not have felt as strongly about it, this would be Barrett’s magnum opus. Taking the building blocks of psychedelic rock and incorporating bits of whimsy into the mix, Barrett struck the perfect balance between baroque pop and the beginnings of space-age rock and roll on tracks like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’.
Then again, half of the band’s power tended to come out during the live show than their studio recordings, with fantastic light shows that would become a spectacle to behold once the band began touring behind albums like Dark Side of the Moon. The seeds were being planted for the future, but Waters knew there was something more mind-expanding than what Barrett was getting at.
Even though Waters may not have admitted it, some of the band’s experimental songs, like ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, were indebted to what they did in their early years, creating vast landscapes through music that no one was thinking of at the time. Waters may have sour feelings about revisiting the early days of Floyd’s career, but the only way to create something as sprawling as The Wall is for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to come before it.
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