In November 1967, Pink Floyd toured America for the first time, to promote their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In the first week of their visit, the English band were invited to play ABC Television’s prestigious American Bandstand show, hosted by Dick Clark, to mime to their recently-recorded third single Apples And Oranges. Now a Swedish artist known as Artist On The Border has painstakingly colorised the archive performance, frame-by-frame, bringing new life to the group’s mannered performance.
“I started the project in February 2021,” he reveals. “It ended on the 30th of December 2021. I'm not doing this again, like this.”
Offering a new view of classic archive footage, his work can be seen below:
While in Los Angeles, Floyd were invited to stay with the Alice Cooper Band, in the group’s shared apartment on Beethoven Street in Venice Beach.
“The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was already a mainstay of our listening,” Cooper told this writer in 2020. “We totally got it, because it was like us, so weird and left-field – we didn’t think anyone else knew who they were. I remember that Glenn Buxton, our guitar player, really bonded with Syd Barrett, because they both used to play guitar through an Echoplex unit: they’d sit in Glenn’s room and get high and play guitar together all night.”
As Cooper recalls, it soon became apparent to all that Syd Barrett was having some mental health issues, which would ultimately cost him his place in the band.
“Syd was in a different headspace,” he recalls. “One night he got onstage, strummed one single chord, and got a shock from his guitar and mic: he stood there like a statue for an hour while the other guys just played around him.”
“I remember one morning I walked into the kitchen and Syd was sitting with a box of cornflakes in front of him, laughing, and he goes, ‘This is really cool, watch them!’” Cooper continues. “I’d no idea what he was talking about, there was nothing to see, but he was so high that he thought that the cornflakes were putting on a little show for him, singing and dancing, and he was having the best time watching them, he thought it was the most entertaining thing on the planet. I left the room and I could hear him laughing to himself for ages. At that point, I kinda had the feeling that he may be on the way to losing his mind…”
