London, 10 March 1967. As on every Friday since the end of last year, there is an evening at the UFO Club. And this time on stage at 31 Tottenham Court Road is a group still in an early, psychedelic and experimental phase: Pink Floyd.

Syd Barrett and company are not putting on a simple concert tonight; they have built a genuinely complex and innovative show through light effects, slide projections and film screenings. At this stage, Pink Floyd make their artistic contribution through music combined with the aid of these new scenic ideas. Astronomy Domine, See Emily Play, Interstellar Overdrive are just some of the tracks on the setlist that will appear on A Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their debut album due out in August of the same year.

The lights of the UFO Club grow ever more striking, with liquid slides created using vivid-coloured inks and other innovative techniques to illuminate the band members or project their shadows onto a screen placed behind them. But the venue is becoming too small to hold the large audiences who are beginning to follow Pink Floyd. And many other groups will perform there too, among them Procol Harum, Move and Soft Machine.

A few years later, Pink Floyd would go on to become a leading group in progressive rock (and beyond), but that is another story (more or less).

Leonardo Follieri