How UK and US critics first heard Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett albums — and how history rewrote the reviews

In 1967–68, British critics mostly embraced The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as a trippy, clever debut — NME called it “a brilliant exercise in psychedelic sound” and Melody Maker highlighted its originality. But across the Atlantic, the reaction was cooler. Rolling Stone’s first review of Piper dismissed it as “druggy mess,” and A Saucerful of Secrets barely registered in US publications, often shrugged off as a lesser follow-up.

Today, that gap has flipped. Piper is universally ranked among the greatest psychedelic albums ever made, with critics praising Barrett’s unfiltered imagination and the band’s garage-psych urgency. Saucerful, once treated as a confused transition piece, now gets respect as a key document of Pink Floyd learning to survive without Syd — tracks like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” foreshadow the space-rock they’d soon conquer. The British early adopters turned out to be right, but even they couldn’t have predicted how deeply these records would be canonized.