Arnold Layne by The Pink Floyd (as they were originally called) was the song that opened me to the world of sixties psychedelic music way back when. However, even my introduction to that song came about from being familiarised with another song by them, "The Gnome". At the time of hearing "The Gnome", I was listening to a lot of early nineties indie and the remnants of my passion for rock and metal from that time. I was sitting in the back row of the school chapel with an old school friend and he passed over one of his ear-buds and told me to listen. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what it was that excited me so much about the sound but, retrospectively, I have the feeling that it was the melodic and lyrical innocence of the whole thing. I had, and still have,the feeling that a lot of music relies on the cool factor (image, fashion and relevance to modernity) and this bothers me somehow because if all music relied on being rated for it's coolness, there would be little worth listening to. So, when you hear something like "Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn", you are immediately thrust into a world where you don't have to feel self conscious or overly aware of your immediate surroundings; you are in a timeless universe where you are drawn into the here and now of your own consciousness and not the here and now of earthly fashions and superficial pretense (I am very much aware of the risk in using the word pretense at the end of such a sentence but any other way of saying this fails me). With reference to Arnold Layne, why should a song about a pervert who steals clothes from women's clothes-lines still sound so perfect after all these years? I can't articulate what I think I know very well so I will leave that up to you to ponder upon:
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