A megaphone, then Barrett’s Esquire
Astronomy Domine opens The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, recorded at Abbey Road on 11 April 1967 with Syd Barrett on the low vocal and Rick Wright on the high one. Norman Smith produced the session on four-track. Barrett also plays slide guitar on a Fender Esquire. Wright plays a Farfisa organ. Roger Waters plays bass. Nick Mason plays drums. EMI Columbia released the album in Britain on 5 August 1967. The song is the first thing on the record.
Peter Jenner, the band’s co-manager, speaks the introduction through a megaphone. He reads a list: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Oberon, Miranda, Titania, Titan. Under the organ, barely in the mix, he adds that Pluto was not discovered till 1930. Barrett wrote the song. The two voices stay far apart. Wright holds the high line. Barrett sings underneath, and the Esquire answers in the breaks. It is a short pop song with a spoken planet list bolted to the front, not a long jam.
People later called the album the start of space-rock. Waters has rejected that. He has said Barrett had one song that had anything to do with space, and that this is the one. Interstellar Overdrive, on the same album, was only a title. The recording to keep in mind is the 11 April take: megaphone, Farfisa, Esquire, four-track, Smith in the control room. The lyric names moons and planets. The arrangement is two voices and a slide guitar.
All that stuff about Syd starting the space-rock thing is just so much fucking nonsense. Syd had one song that had anything to do with space, Astronomy Domine, that’s all. Interstellar Overdrive, that’s just the title.
(Roger Waters)
On 14 May 1967 the band played the song on BBC television, on The Look of the Week, in a pair with Pow R. Toc H. The host, Hans Keller, asked them why it had to be so terribly loud. The studio recording was already finished. The television performance is still Barrett’s group, a month before the album came out. Wright’s Farfisa and Barrett’s Esquire are the two sounds you hear first, under Jenner’s list.
The song stayed in the live set after Barrett left. A live recording from the Ummagumma era, with David Gilmour singing, later replaced the studio version on some pressings of the compilation A Nice Pair. That is a different performance. The Piper track is the April 1967 take: four-track, megaphone, slide guitar, and the two voices split high and low. The planets are in the lyric. The record is a pop song that happens to open the album. The studio take runs a little over four minutes. Jenner’s megaphone is his only part on the album. Barrett sings the verses low, almost spoken, and Wright’s high harmony carries the title line. Barrett’s slide on the Esquire answers the Farfisa rather than doubling the vocal. Smith recorded it on 11 April and the band left it as the opener.
