David Gilmour/David Bowie - Arnold Layne (Live)

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“Arnold Layne” dates from the period when Barrett was still living with his mother in Cambridge. “I thought ‘Arnold Layne’ was a nice name, and it fitted very well into the music I had already composed,” he explains. “I was at Cambridge at the time and I started to write the song. I pinched the line about ‘moonshine washing line’ from Rog, our bass guitarist, because he has an enormous washing line in the back garden of his house. Then I thought Arnold Layne must have a hobby, and it went on from there.” Arnold’s hobby is a peculiar one: he steals women’s clothing from clotheslines, then dresses in it and admires himself in the mirror. A strange pastime that feeds his fantasies and deviant behavior to the point where he is eventually caught red-handed. His punishment, which we are to understand as some kind of incarceration (prison? lunatic asylum?) is not long in coming: Doors bang… The inspiration for “Arnold Layne” came from a real-life incident, as Roger Waters explains: “My mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers. 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 and pieces off our washing lines. They never caught him. He stopped doing it after a bit when things got too hot for him.” A song about fetishism, then, “Arnold Layne” sits somewhere between the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (a broadside on trendiness) and the Who’s “Pictures of Lily” (which deals with teenage fantasies).

The group had the idea of making a short promotional film to accompany “Arnold Layne,” and entrusted its direction to Derek Nice, head of promotions at EMI, and an acquaintance of June Child. June became the wife of Marc Bolan (T-Rex) and was the secretary of Blackhill Enterprises, the early management group they partnered with. The shoot took place in the village of East Wittering on the West Sussex coast, and cost the modest sum of £2,000. The film shows the four members of the group on a beach, their faces intermittently masked, in the act of dressing a mannequin.

“Arnold Layne” dates from the period when Barrett was still living with his mother in Cambridge. “I thought ‘Arnold Layne’ was a nice name, and it fitted very well into the music I had already composed,” he explains. “I was at Cambridge at the time and I started to write the song. I pinched the line about ‘moonshine washing line’ from Rog, our bass guitarist, because he has an enormous washing line in the back garden of his house. Then I thought Arnold Layne must have a hobby, and it went on from there.” Arnold’s hobby is a peculiar one: he steals women’s clothing from clotheslines, then dresses in it and admires himself in the mirror. A strange pastime that feeds his fantasies and deviant behavior to the point where he is eventually caught red-handed. His punishment, which we are to understand as some kind of incarceration (prison? lunatic asylum?) is not long in coming: Doors bang… The inspiration for “Arnold Layne” came from a real-life incident, as Roger Waters explains: “My mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers. 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 and pieces off our washing lines. They never caught him. He stopped doing it after a bit when things got too hot for him.” A song about fetishism, then, “Arnold Layne” sits somewhere between the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (a broadside on trendiness) and the Who’s “Pictures of Lily” (which deals with teenage fantasies). The group had the idea of making a short promotional film to accompany “Arnold Layne,” and entrusted its direction to Derek Nice, head of promotions at EMI, and an acquaintance of June Child. June became the wife of Marc Bolan (T-Rex) and was the secretary of Blackhill Enterprises, the early management group they partnered with. The shoot took place in the village of East Wittering on the West Sussex coast, and cost the modest sum of £2,000. The film shows the four members of the group on a beach, their faces intermittently masked, in the act of dressing a mannequin.

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