Nick Griffiths and Pink Floyd’s BBC ‘Scarecrow’: A Different Piper

Nick Griffiths wasn’t a household name, but he engineered some of Pink Floyd’s earliest BBC radio sessions. For the Top Gear session recorded on September 19, 1967, Griffiths was at the board when the band cut an alternate version of ‘The Scarecrow’. At that point the song had already appeared on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – released just six weeks earlier – so the BBC take wasn’t a demo; it was effectively a live-in-studio re-recording.

The biggest difference? The BBC version strips away the studio’s heavy phasing and the mechanical, almost toy-like tape loops that made the album cut so disorienting. Without those studio tricks, the song becomes more acoustic and intimate – Syd Barrett’s vocal sits closer, the slide guitar is cleaner, and the rhythm section is drier. Griffiths later said the sessions were relaxed, usually done in a single take, and that the band often seemed to prefer the BBC versions because they felt less cluttered. It’s a rare glimpse of the Piper era minus the production gloss.