Fabulist!

Full disclosure: My entire adult life, I have been in love with Syd Barrett. I love his paintings, I love his lyrics, I love his song titles, I love his tousled locks and tie-dyed shirts and pea coats and ties. I lose interest in Pink Floyd almost altogether after his departure. I adore him. And I adore Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

As much as I adore Pink Floyd with Syd, Hans Keller here HATES them. I have room in my heart for string quartets AND experimental/psychedelic bands; Keller does not. I would call this interview passive-aggressive but that undervalues how aggressive it is on occasion. "Pink Floyd...you are going to hear them in a moment and I don't want to prejudice you...but four quick points I want to make...continuous repetition...proportionately a bit boring...*flicks cigarette*...terribly loud...perhaps, I am a little bit too much of a musician to fully appreciate them." I can only imagine how that would have gone if Keller wanted to bias us!

That said, I find this interview fascinating, and love watching Syd and Roger field the questions. And seeing Pink Floyd performing in 1967 is an incredible glimpse back in time. And also? Reading about Hans Keller on Wikipedia is a little bit amazing: He was one of the people (along with Susan Bradshaw) behind the Piotr Zak hoax in 1961 involving the invention of a fictional Polish composer who was broadcast twice on the BBC.

"By striking randomly and with deliberate senselessness at a collection of percussion instruments, the two had produced a strenuously meaningless twelve-minute 'work' of superficially 'avant-garde' character; this was completed by the addition of a selection of human whistling sounds (evidently meant to represent the 'tape'), and with the resulting chaos being edited into some kind of whole by BBC technicians."

Which is a lengthy digression, but isn't it just lovely how learning about one thing leads to learning about another?