, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; onstage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, child-like wonder. The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, "Arnold Layne," a sympathetic, comic song about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic "See Emily Play," made the Top Ten. Their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album ever. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming funhouse of driving, mysterious rockers, odd character sketches, childhood flashbacks, and freaky pieces with lengthy instrumental passages that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and light-hearted than those of their subsequent epics. The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarm signs of mental instability. Syd would go catatonic onstage; playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was finding him impossible to work with, in concert or in the studio. Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a f...
