See Emily Play
Syd Barrett wrote it after Pink Floyd played Games for May. The free concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12, 1967, was the first show where the band set up a quadraphonic PA system, and the song carried that title before it had its real one. He brought it into Sound Techniques studio in London, where producer Norman Smith tried to recreate the sound of their first single, “Arnold Layne.” EMI’s own Abbey Road Studios could not reproduce it.
Nobody agrees on who Emily was. Barrett said he saw her in the woods after taking a psychedelic drug, then admitted years later he made that story up for publicity. One biography names her as the Honourable Emily Young, known at the UFO Club as the psychedelic schoolgirl. Barrett’s girlfriend at the time said Emily was simply the name they had picked for a future child. The recording is just as uncertain. Backward tape, heavy echo, a piano bridge recorded slow and sped up for the final master. The four-track tape was later wiped or misplaced, and the song has never been mixed into true stereo.
“I’ll go on record as saying, that was when he changed.”
“See Emily Play” reached number 6 on the UK chart. Pink Floyd performed it three times on Top of the Pops that July. Before the last appearance, Barrett complained that John Lennon never had to do the show, so why should he. He went on anyway, without the energy of the week before. The BBC wiped all three tapes. A damaged home recording of two of the performances surfaced in 2009, the first anyone had seen since the original broadcast.
Barrett left the band in early 1968. Rick Wright later played a fragment of this song’s vocal melody on a Minimoog at the close of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a quiet tribute on Wish You Were Here. “See Emily Play” was released June 16, 1967. Today is its 59th anniversary.