Leaving the band in a haze of mental health issues in early 1968, Barrett’s legend would loom over the quartet for years. “Along with Anthony Newley, he was the first guy I’d heard to sing pop or rock with a British accent,” David Bowie would say of Barrett, a madcap permission-granter for a new generation of British musicians less beholden to imitating their American heroes. Though not particularly competent or interesting R&B players, as demonstrated by their cover of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” just as much as an untitled 1968 “Blues Jam” on a later disc, it’s fascinating to hear Barrett’s already distinctly bent rhythm guitar as filtered through the Bo Diddley beat of “Double O Bo.” Unheard before being released in 2015 as a double 7" for Record Store Day, the 1965 sessions also highlight the first fruits of Barrett’s songwriting, the playfulness of “Butterfly” displaying the stylist and singer he already was. It shows an astonishing capacity to turn corners and evolve, a long arc that might give hope to every band jamming away in its practice space in search of a voice.īeginning as a blues combo with the perfectly British drug-punning name the Tea Set (“tea” being slang for weed, maaaan), the band rechristened themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound by the time of the 1965 demo sessions that open the box’s first disc. Charting the band’s progression from the wig-flipping baroque psychedelia of Syd Barrett’s songwriting through their wooliest jams and into the new space beyond, The Early Years doesn’t follow a straight path. The Early Years tells the remarkable story of Pink Floyd’s career up through the moment they became part of yesterday’s underground and today’s mainstream, stopping just before the writing and recording of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon.
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