The piper at the gates of dawn

"If you fancy the idea of four young men making super-spooked-sounding music about space and creepy lullabies about sad scarecrows on recordings so raw that you can hear the strings buzzing and their breath on the microphones, then you're going to spend the rest of the year playing Pink Floyd's first album over and over again ... The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn has inspired plenty of people - Blur, The Coral, Klaxons, The Horrors, Devendra Banhart, pretty much every Home Counties art school-band ever - which makes it all the more ironic that one of the few bands that haven't copied it is Pink Floyd themselves ... This re-release, a 40th anniversary 3-CD set, comes with both mono and stereo versions of the album and the requisite rag-bag of alternate takes, but it also features two Barrett-penned singles not on the original album: Arnold Layne and See Emily Play are as good as anything The Beatles recorded".

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