Free games for May

Wrapping up dead songwriters week with another great one who passed on last year, Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett. Syd was the original lead singer of Pink Floyd, and even though he was only in the band at the beginning, their debut album and first few singles with Syd ended up influencing popular music at least as much as their multiplatinum releases that followed.

Tomorrow marks 40 years since Pink Floyd's legendary "Games For May" concert, which was described as "space age relaxation for the climax of spring - electronic composition, colour and image projection, girls and the Pink Floyd". It was the live debut of many songs from their debut album Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, released in the fall of 1967.

To mark the anniversary, the "Games For May" concert is being recreated at the same venue over two nights later this month (May 26th and 27th -- maybe they couldn't book the original dates) by a selection of special guest artists including Robyn Hitchcock and Graham Coxon (ex-Blur). Robyn played this week at another Barrett tribute show called "Madcap's Last Laugh" which included Roger Waters and Pink Floyd also played (albeit separately).

Here are some recent Barrett/Floyd covers by Robyn. Last December he played the whole Piper album at the 3 Kings Pub in West London. That performance is downloadable in lossless FLAC format from archive.org, probably preferable to these lossy mp3s. "Chapter 24" is from a show at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall in March 2005 (my personal stash).

Robyn Hitchcock covers Pink Floyd
(#1-3 from 3 Kings Pub, London 12/17/2006)
("Chaper 24" from Great American, SF 03/03/2005)

1. See Emily Play
2. Flaming
3. Scarecrow
4. Chapter 24

And here are a couple of Piper covers from other artists.

Bike - The Sippy Cups
The Sippy Cups are a kid friendly band from San Francisco fronted by Mark Verlander and a revolving cast of characters including two former members of the Loud Family (Alison Faith Levy and Joe Becker). Gil Ray (another former LF member) describes the Sippy Cups as "Flaming Lips for kids", and on this live album Kids Rock For Peas, they also cover the Velvets Underground ("Who Loves The Sun") and the Ramones ("I Wanna Be Elated") as well as the Floyd. A few years ago, Alison told me that "Bike " was her son's favorite song, and he liked to drum along to it. Her son was probably three or four at the time. Here's a video of the Cups jamming on "Bike" earlier this year at SXSW. They really are the Flaming Lips for kids!

Lucifer Sam - True West
True West was an early 80s Paisley Underground band from California's central valley (Sacramento/Davis). They covered "Lucifer Sam" on their 1983 debut single, with the same song backwards ("Mas Reficul") as the flipside. I'm not sure of the exact personnel who played on this single, but I think both this and the Sippy Cups track feature the drumming talents of Jozef Becker. True West reformed last year for a few shows, and youtube has videos of them playing "Lucifer Sam" both then and now.