(40th-anniversary edition, EMI)

Part of the Syd Barrett cult was always predicated on the hope that he might return someday to explain everything. Why did he leave Pink Floyd right when its brand of electric Kool-Aid psychedelia was making headway on England's pop charts? Why, after a few spotty solo recordings, did he drop out of public life altogether, choosing a hermetic existence in the basement of his mother's Cambridge home? Was it the drugs? The pressures of fame? Or something else? And what the hell was he on about in "Matilda Mother" when he sang "With silver eyes the scarlet eagle/Showered silver on the people"?

Alas, Barrett died last year without offering us any answers. What we do have is the music. This is the 40th anniversary of Barrett's only full album with Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, so it seems an apt time to revisit the record, presented here in mono and stereo versions (with a third disc of singles and alternate versions).

Four decades on, this music still has the power to surprise. The lyrics (see above) read like fractured fairy tales, and the band, recording at Abbey Road Studios at the same time as the Beatles, used the studio to explore not only the whimsy swirling in Barrett's head ("The Gnome", "The Scarecrow"), but also the fear and paranoia. Although it was recorded during the Summer of Love, the aggressive noise of "Interstellar Overdrive" sounds more like a bad acid trip.