THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
2,086) Pink Floyd — “Bike”
The closing track on Pink Floyd’s [see #13, 38, 87, 315, 360, 922, 1,949] Piper at the Gates of Dawn is Syd Barrett [see #87, 315, 922] through and through. “Barrett’s music is so eccentric, captivating, pleasant, and unsettling all at the same time.” (hamburger-o7q, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POlaR26dD1Y) Johnreynolds3d writes:
The child-like wonder, awe, and fascination that Syd expresses here give me goosebumps that actually hurt. That a obviously brilliant adult still had access to that level of emotion should have led his friends to seek help when it could have made a difference. So profoundly beautiful and sad in equal measure.
Yes, “the unutterably manic closing track . . . hinted at a deeper psychosis that had thus far lain beneath the surface” (David Wells, Record Collector: 100 Greatest Psychedelic Records: High Times an Strange Tales from Rock’s Most Mind-Blowing Era), yes “nobody will ever record anything creepier and more unhinged”. (nathanten, https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/pink-floyd/the-piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn/reviews/19/) Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews goes so far as to write:
There are clues to Barrett’s looming mental disintegration all over the album in the sort of bizarre phrases that pop out of nowhere, the inconsistent cadences that have him singing along at a leisurely pace then suddenly rushing his vocals like he’s running down a hill, and the odd and bizarre ideas that pop out of nowhere into the songs sometimes. If I didn’t already know how the story ends, because I know a little bit about what the onset of schizophrenia does to a person’s thought processes, I would already think there was a strong possibility that we were dealing with someone who was already a ways down that road. “Bike” is another example of this. . . . [M]any of the lyrics reflect the kind of disordered thinking I’m talking about. . . . It isn’t just that the song is weird and all over the place – I find it unsettling. The kind of disordered thinking on display here shouldn’t be seen as entertainment.
But as Stewart Mason writes:
The closing track on Piper at the Gates of Dawn, “Bike” is widely seen by Pink Floyd fans as early evidence of Syd Barrett’s impending mental breakdown. While it’s true that this is quite possibly the weirdest song on the album, the elements that people point to as indicative of Barrett’s fragile state of mind don’t always stand up to scrutiny. It’s true that the verses don’t follow a consistent rhyme scheme or rhythm, but their structure is consistent with a tradition of music hall-derived comic patter songs; it’s not at all a stretch to think that the young Roger Barrett might have been a fan of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan’s novelty songs in the ’50s and early ’60s. Similarly, the song’s oddball subject matter (a bike, a homeless mouse, a cloak, gingerbread men, clockwork music boxes, etc.) and goofy flourishes of arrangement (the increasingly florid timpani rolls at the beginning of every verse) are completely in keeping with the subset of childlike U.K. psychedelia that Pink Floyd helped pioneer, which has latterly been dubbed “toytown psych” in some quarters. Finally, although the song’s 90-second sound-effects coda does cross the line from seriously trippy into actually kinda creepy (pretty much exactly at the point where those weird honking sounds that sound like the laughs of clinically insane mallard ducks in an echo chamber enter the mix of music boxes and percussion), it’s not the out-of-nowhere lunacy that many consider it; the coda is set up with the lyrics of the last verse. There’s no question that Syd Barrett was on his way to a complete breakdown, but “Bike” is greater evidence of the childlike whimsy that was part of his musical persona all along.
Syd, shine on.
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