However, most of Piper’s 11 tracks were recorded in a day each, with Smith and Bown sometimes letting the Floyd man the mixing desk, charmingly equipped with an EQ dial that alternated between ‘Pop’ and ‘Classical’. “They had been some weeks in the studio,” says Andrew King, “and I remember Syd mixed ‘Chapter 24’ – it was just him with his fingers on the faders. He mixed it beautifully, just like that. That’s when I thought, ‘That’s what a genius is,’ because he could do things that there was no way for him to know how to do.”

While Floyd were recording Barrett’s shorter, more melodic songs for Piper, it was the group’s instrumental improvisations, such as “Reaction In G” and “Interstellar Overdrive”, that were their strongest cards live. As heard on the restored Live In Stockholm 1967 recording featured on The Early Years – believed to be the only full Barrett-era set to exist – the Floyd were on sensational form, alternately ethereal and crystalline, as on “Matilda Mother” and “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”, and raging and aggressive, as on “Reaction In G” and “Pow R Toc H”.

Although Barrett and the band were managing to incorporate the experimental techniques they loved – from John Cage’s tape compositions to the abstract improv of London’s AMM – into the more commercial music they were recording, outside of the capital, audiences hoping to see the latest pop sensation were shocked and appalled by their freeform sonic explorations. “They hated us!” laughs Mason. “The audience would come expecting a band who would have a repertoire that had some link to Top Of The Pops. Of course, what they got was the full psychedelia, and they generally hated it. We were playing the Top Rank Ballrooms circuit, and the other band on would almost certainly be a soul band. When we played the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall in Spalding [on May 29, 1967], we were at the bottom of the bill. Cream were there as was Jimi Hendrix, but Geno Washington And The Ram Jam Band were headlining.”

Andrew King recalls pennies being thrown at the band by hostile provincial crowds, while Aubrey Powell remembers one disastrous performance at Portsmouth’s Birdcage club, aptly on April Fool’s Day, 1967. “It was a mod club. There was someone like Sam & Dave playing, you know, then the Pink Floyd went on. There were about 10 mods there, all looking at this band thinking, ‘Who the fuck are these people?’ There wasn’t a single clap, there wasn’t a single cheer, there was nothing. It was just dead space, because they were making this extraordinary sound.”

“There were basically two types of venue they could play,” says their co-manager Peter Jenner. “Blues venues, where there’d be John Mayall and all those sorts of bands, or else there were the pop clubs where you would go and do your hits in a 20-minute set. The Floyd didn’t really fit into either of those, but they were a happening band, so people would turn up – although there’d be a certain amount of tension out of town.”

“At that point,” explains Mason, “we were probably playing live on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, having Sunday off, then going back in the studio on Monday, and doing London shows at night.”

The dynamic “See Emily Play”, written for the Floyd’s hip Games For May concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12, 1967, was recorded as the band’s second single. As it rose up the charts, the Floyd appeared on Top Of The Pops three times in July. Sharing a half-hour with Lulu and Sandie Shaw was clearly not one of Syd Barrett’s ambitions, but he gamely mimed through their July 6 appearance, and returned a week later to do the same with slightly less enthusiasm. “Top Of The Pops particularly upset him,” recalls Mason. “John Lennon said he wouldn’t have been seen dead on it, and I think Syd would have gone, ‘If John said that, that’s probably right.’”

“The third week he didn’t show up,” says Andrew King. “Can you imagine? We’re panicking, running around London, and eventually we found him, and he appeared not his normal self, not in a good way. I don’t want to speculate on what Syd was thinking and feeling. Some people have said it was a turning point. I think it was probably more of a slide than a turning. Ever since that Top Of The Pops performance, the band’s relationship with Syd, and Syd’s relationship with what you might call ‘the process’, was getting very damaged. It was all getting very difficult, more and more difficult all the time.”

The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn was released on August 5, 1967, and reached No 6 in the UK. Some of London’s underground heads were disappointed by the commercial nature of some of the material, though, and Norman Smith’s more refined production touches, so different from the group’s sets at UFO and Middle Earth. For a man such as Barrett, interested in free jazz, art and Edwardian literature, the epithet printed on the back cover of Piper, ‘File Under POPULAR: Pop Groups’, would have been dispiriting. What’s more, EMI desperately needed a third hit single.

“There was still a belief that the single was the way forward,” says Nick Mason. “That continued for us until, well, certainly until I’d say ’68, ’69. We only decided it wasn’t important later when we couldn’t achieve it, a perfectly good reason to say, ‘We don’t really do singles.’ We still had our sights set on Top Of The Pops, still worrying about whether our photographs made us look as though we’re interested in a wardrobe!”

“The business was doing live gigs,” says Peter Jenner, “and that was driven by the singles. If you didn’t have a chart record your live money wouldn’t go up, and live money was what we all lived on. The records were something that you used to help sell your live gigs.”

Barrett didn’t have a single, though. EMI and Norman Smith were pushing for one, and Mason admits that the band were similarly keen for a swift follow-up to ‘See Emily Play’. “Were we desperately in need of a single? We’ve always been desperately in need of a single!” he laughs. “We all ascribed to it, that was the belief. I think we assumed that [getting a hit] was what we needed to do.”