Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine (1969)

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For nine months I had been listening to tracks from Pink Floyd's first two albums, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets, courtesy largely of Toronto's CHUM FM radio (and recordings I made from the station on reel-to-reel). When WYSL became an all-night underground FM radio station I found pretty much the same tracks being played ... until November and the release of Ummagumma. The first track that received a lot of air time and became a station favorite was "The Grand Vizier's Garden Party." No doubt this was because it was the most highly experimental of all the album's tracks. A month later the live version of "A Saucerful Of Secrets" was added to the station's playlist of favorites off Ummagumma. This version was enough to wipe me out so completely I just HAD to buy the album.

In January 1970, Ummagumma became my first Pink Floyd album purchase. The first track on the double album, the live version of "Astronomy Domine," was the first song by Pink Floyd I ever heard that I had not previously listened to being played on FM radio. In fact I never would hear this track played on either CHUM or WYSL at a later time, for whatever reason. I also had not yet heard the Syd Barrett version from The Piper album.

The acoustics on the live disk are so incredible that one is left feeling the tracks were recorded in a studio. There is only the slightest hint when Wright's Farfisa organ begins of some almost inaudible sounds from the audience, the sort of hushed atmosphere one may hear from a large planetarium audience as the lights dim to darkness or in a huge observatory as the ceiling slowly opens until the entire sky is visible. My mind played with the song, from the perspective of outer space exploration on one hand, and oddly enough, from a mythological perspective on the other. Suddenly it was not an observatory we were sitting in looking outwards into the heavens but the Coliseum in Rome and as the planets and moons danced before me, so too did the dreadful and beautiful apparitions of the gods of ancient Rome and Greece. (Hidden within the ranks of these deities, however, as moons of Uranus, were three of Shakespeare's supernatural characters: Oberon, Titania, and Miranda. Barrett had made them part of his own personal Pantheon of the Gods it would seem. I would not know this for some years until I watched the 1935 film, A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the first time.)

In any event, this video replicates my early imaginings that came with listening to this live version of "Astronomy Domine" ... mixing astronomy with mythology, turning the Coliseum into a huge outdoor observatory, and, yes, turning Shakespeare's characters into seemingly mythological ones. Some dancing Pink Floyd fans and the band playing this song live are also included in parts of the video.