Speaking of Syd Barrett , as I was, here's what I think is probably Syd's cleverest and most revealing song, and certainly one of his most popular - Bike . It's the last song on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and it appears on virtually every Pink Floyd compilation you could lay your hands on. Written at the latest in early 1967, it also sheds some very disturbing light on Barrett's state of mind well before any obvious symptoms of mental illness started to appear. Perhaps the closest comparison to this song among Pink Floyd's contemporaries is The Beatles' Can't Buy Me Love , written mostly by Paul McCartney and recorded in 1964. Pink Floyd and The Beatles weren't exactly friends but there was a lot more contact between them than you might imagine. Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended early Floyd performances. Yoko Ono was a regular at the UFO Club where Floyd cut their teeth, staging semi-improvised pieces of performance art i
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson