The song that inspired Pink Floyd’s entire prog-rock direction: “A catalyst”
The exact pivot between Pink Floyd’s lysergic garage attack toward cosmic wanderings across prog-rock’s outer reaches isn’t easy to definitively glean.
Catching the band during their Mk I heyday was a wholly different beast from the quartet that stormed the charts and sold-out arenas six years later.
Founded with Syd Barrett as their creative captain, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn LP and their UFO Club live residencies were infinitely more tethered to an acid-rock conjuring of the day, replete with Barrett’s lyrical fancies for Anglo-eccentric surrealism and a view of the world through his child-like lens. With much of their set within the pop realm, only ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ touches on progressive rock with its nearly ten-minute engulfment.
As we all know, Barrett became encumbered with mental health issues, and his erratic behaviour forced a transition away from Pink Floyd and led to David Gilmour’s official admittance. From then on, a string of semi-interesting albums hinting at future greatness amid its mushy conceptual ideas and unfocused compositions was still miles above much of the emerging prog that was considered their so-called peers.
By 1973, Pink Floyd were unleashing mammoth LPs like The Dark Side of the Moon, kicking off their golden album run for the rest of the decade and standing as one of the most commercially successful artists of the day.
It turns out, however, that one key number may have pointed the path toward prog earlier than even Pink Floyd’s first album. Harkening back to the zenith of the UK’s 1960s swing, psychedelic folkster Donovan stood as a central figure of the British invasion, serving as a key collaborator and/or influence on some of the biggest names of the day across The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Jeff Beck Group, and future Led Zeppelin members during their session player days.
Possessing a humble attitude toward his legacy, Donovan expressed a Zen analysis of his creative imprint on the era’s counterculture. “Being a catalyst, I’ve helped multiple possible changes for various important artists in the world, but it’s best to go, ‘Ssh, I didn’t do it, you guys did it,’” he revealed to The New Cue. “But some of them have to come to me and tell me, ‘You were my catalyst.’”
One such fan who owed a debt to Donovan was Gilmour, who was so enamoured with Donovan’s work that it even inspired a choice property purchase. “He said, ‘You know I bought your cottage?’, Donovan recalled. I said, ‘Yeah? Why’d you buy my cottage?’ and he said, ‘You wrote all those bloody songs there.’ One song on Sunshine Superman was called ‘Three King Fishers’, and he said, ‘When I heard that song, my future with the band I was with, I knew my direction from one of your songs.’ That’s the effect of a catalyst, but I didn’t even know that until he told me.”
A key number on 1966’s Sunshine Superman, ‘Three King Fishers’ odyssey of sitars and exotic mysticism boldly staked new sonic terrain that proved a foundational template for much of UK psychedelia to follow, imbued with a spiritual gravitas yet unheard in much of music at the time. Perhaps Gilmour was pulled in by ‘Three King Fishers’ inescapable, mysterious magnetism? “He didn’t know he bought my cottage,” Donovan concluded. “He said, ‘Maybe all that happened there would rub off on me.’ A catalyst is a strange animal… a human animal… me.”
