I was a huge Pink Floyd fan as a teenager. My introduction to rock music. Weirdly, via a teacher. A young, hippy sort of English teacher who played us Pink Floyd in lessons. Stuff from Meddle.
I'm still not sure how this worked. But Pink Floyd was somehow fixed in my head. And when we went to stay with Aunt Nell in Brum, we were in a record shop. And, having heard of Pink Floyd, we bought one of their albums. Me and my brother I mean by we. And Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the album.
It was the start of my love of music. Syd Barrett my hero.
Astronomy Domine. Great chord sequence and in three four time. Learning to play it, taught me just how wonderful it was. A Syd song. But not the Floyd song that's stuck weirdly in my head.
Brass. I love the sound of brass instruments. I played around with brass sounds in my own crappy tracks. Piss me off and I'll make you listen to them. But there was always one example of brass in rock. One I loved. But hadn't heard for a decade or three.
Atom Heart Mother.
Tears flow so easily in my dotage.
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I went to a Stockport comprehensive in the eighties, and while there was a lot wrong with it (violent, lazy and incompetent teachers, cheap, stodgy food, low academic standards) one highlight was the school librarian, the epitome of a sixties hippy, who took us for General Studies and played lots of his favourite music to us in lessons: Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Son House. All that, good and bad, has now been swept away by the National Curriculum, league tables, SATs and Ofsted.
Much of what we covered in General Studies as current affairs is now taught in History - as distant from kids today as we were from the Second World War.
You can thank Ron Geesin for the brass (and most of the rest of the tune) . Atom Heart Mother remains my favourite Floyd track. Rarely listen to the rest of the album
My exposure to Pink Floyd came only from what was played on underground FM radio... similar I suppose to Pirate radio that you are familiar with in the UK. I had a similar situation with a "hippy" shop teacher who played the Beatles White Album nearly every day in class. Being a double album he only played one side per class so it would be most of a week before we heard all four sides.
My father who still lives in the same town bumped in to that teacher not long ago and told him how much his appreciation of the Beatles shaped my love for the group too and he replied that he only played that album day after day because I seemed to dig it so much. I guess sometimes kids are impacting those grown ups who are at the same time impacting us.
Piper at the Gates of Dawn was taken from the chapter title in The Wind in the Willows. And of course The Wind in the Willows had a mention of Old Burton, as noted here by Martyn Cornell.
https://zythophile.co.uk/2013/02/21/twenty-beer-quotes-that-deserve-to-be-better-known/
That build up to "silence in the studio" still make every hair on my body stand up.
In the early 1970s when I was in my 20s living in Cardiff my best mate Ian and I used to go round to his bedsit and listen to Pink Floyd - he had a brilliant stereo system for that era. Wish You Were Here, Ummagumma, then finally the new The Dark Side of the Moon, all well mulled up on SA Brains Draught Dark from the plastic 5 gallon barrel that Brains used to deliver around city suburbs in a brewery van.
Rather than psycho rock my favourite still remains Grantchester Meadows.
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