Pink Floyd's First Single: 'Arnold Layne' and the Drug-Fueled B-Side 'Candy and a Currant Bun'

Pink Floyd’s debut single, “Arnold Layne,” dropped in March 1967, but the B-side “Candy and a Currant Bun” is the one that really sounds like a band still figuring out who they were. Syd Barrett wrote both sides, and the B-side is a frantic, fuzzed-out rocker with a lyric that’s pretty much a shopping list for a drug dealer—“candy” and “currant bun” were 1960s slang for pills and cannabis. The track was originally even more explicit: the demo had the line “I’m gonna take you down to the strawberry fields,” which got dropped to avoid confusion with the Beatles.

The whole single got banned by the BBC—not for the B-side’s drug references, but because “Arnold Layne” was about a transvestite who stole women’s clothes from washing lines. Still, “Candy and a Currant Bun” is a fascinating early artifact of the Floyd’s acid-tinged freakbeat period, before they went cosmic. It’s the only studio B-side from the Syd era that never appeared on an album, and it captures the band at their rawest and most playful, with Nick Mason’s drumming just barely holding the chaos together.