They don’t make pop videos like they used to!! Love this theatrical promo, Arnold Layne – the first single released by Pink Floyd. The song’s title character is a transvestite whose primary pastime is stealing women’s clothes and undergarments from washing lines. According to Roger Waters, Arnold Layne was actually based on a real person. “Both my mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers because there was a girls’ college up the road so there were constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines and ‘Arnold’ or whoever he was, had bits off our washing lines.”
However, despite finding a place in the Top 20, the song’s unusual transvestism theme attracted the ire of Radio London, which deemed the song was too far-removed from “normal” society for its listeners, before eventually banning it from radio airplay altogether.
This black and white promotional film of Arnold Layne features members of Pink Floyd dressing up a mannequin before showing it around a beach in East Wittering, West Sussex. Recently, an alternative promotional film was unearthed, which featured the band goofing around on Hampstead Heath, and also in front of St Michael’s Church in Highgate near to where the band were living at the time. It is the only known footage of Barrett lip synching to the song. Shot in the spring of 1967, around the time that Barrett had begun his mental deterioration.
Related articles
- Pink Floyd Record ‘Arnold Layne’: Rock N’ Roll Diary Extra (wzlx.radio.com)
