100 Greatest songs of the 60’s #31 Pink Floyd – See Emily Play

Released: 1967

Conformity – belonging if you want to use the nicer metaphor – is an ingrained aspect of the human condition. Our tendency for pack behaviour demands a system of mutually accepted norms, societal guard rails that if crossed usually have negative consequences for the transgressor.

Syd Barrett had been a teenage fan of Bo Diddley, moved from Cambridge to London in 1964 and what became known as Pink Floyd almost immediately began to coalesce. Barrett would become their chief songwriter, but just as importantly experimented with numerous guitar effects and styles; whilst he was in possession of all his faculties the band’s producer Norman Smith compared him as a talent to John Lennon.

His themes were whimsical – the group’s first single Arnold Layne was about a man who stole women’s underwear – but increasing use of LSD rapidly took its toll. So swift in fact was the decline that during the recording of it’s follow up band mate David Gilmour found himself in the studio with what he felt was an almost entirely different person. The real identity of the song’s subject is still disputed, but Emily’s shedding of her orthodoxy, whilst playfully described, to an extent mirrored the singer’s own.

Such was this personality shift that Barrett left the group in early 1968, at first pursuing an eccentric solo career then eventually moving home to live as a recluse with his mother ten years later. These actions might seem odd to us, but to him it must have seemed perfectly sensible according to whatever his principles were. A complicated genius who answered only to himself, latterly we’re in no position to judge him, only his talent.