I bought my first iPod in April 2003, only for Apple to announce a smarter, slimmer version with more storage at a cheaper price about three weeks later. That kind of pain stays with you for a long time, and has put me off buying gadgets massively since then. (When that first iPod suffered a hard disk failure in 2005, I replaced with a 500 MB iPod Shuffle, and have never looked back: lightweight trumps complex functionality eight times out of ten.) Anyway, I didn't go gung-ho for filling the iPod's 10 GB capacity straight away, but, for some long-forgotten reason, I decided to rip my copy of Piper at the Gates of Dawn and load it up. Walking the streets of London, the whimsy of these songs only half worked.
Sometimes you can listen to an album ten times without it sounding at all special, then suddenly it all clicks into place. That doesn't happen very often when I'm listening at my computer, but it did the other day, when I played Piper at my desk. All the energy and wit suddenly came throbbing out at me, as though I'd dropped some acid (no, never have — but I read that Aldous Huxley book and started a Carlos Castaneda, but couldn't get on with it). It was really very good. Last night, I tried it again, on headphones this time. It was still fun, but not quite as remarkable. Syd's words are better if you don't listen to them too closely. Though I've always thought that The Gnome would be a good song to play to a child — and I'll be able to test this out before long.
For a long time, more than a decade, this was the only Pink Floyd album I owned. I bought it on CD from Record Collector in the late '80s.
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