This is a demo recording by a group called The Tea Set who first entered a London recording studio in December 1964. Here’s Lucy Leave by The Tea Set from 1965:

 

The two architectural students from the Regent Street Polytechnic college who started this band in 1963 had been working in a band called Sigma 6. They rehearsed in a tea room in the school’s basement and played at private functions covering songs by The Searchers, along with some original material written by fellow student, and future manager of the group, Ken Chapman. They went through several names as new members were added and lost, including The Meggadeaths, The Screaming Abdabs, Leonard’s Lodgers, and The Spectrum Five, before settling on The Tea Set. At this point, the band shifted members again, adding a 17 year old art student from Camberwell College of Art named Syd Barrett to the lineup, which now included founding member Roger Waters  and his room mate Bob Klose, along with Chris Dennis, a technician with the Royal Air Force.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, these guys changed names twice more before putting out their first single on Columbia 8156 in 1967. They took their new name from the names of a couple of Piedmont blues artists, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. calling themselves The Pink Floyd Sound. The name was shortened a bit for that first single to just The Pink Floyd.

You can find a great synopsis of Pink Floyd on Wikipedia (click here), so I won’t even try to get into the gory details. Their top side of their second single, See Emily Play, is particularly interesting as it’s been cited as one of the 500 most influential records of the rock era.

 

Here’s See Emily Play by The Pink Floyd on Columbia (UK) 8214 from 1967:

 

The original single was mono. The original 4-track master tape was lost, so no official stereo mix of this song exists. Believe it or not, the simulated stereo version was created later.

 

See Emily Play was named after a lady named Emily Young who became a famous English sculptor and artist, although Syd Barrett originally claimed he’d met the mythical Emily while sleeping in the woods in a drug-induced psychedelic dream. Not many people know that Emily Young also tried her hand at singing with a group called Zopf. She can be heard on this track from a strange album, produced by Brian Eno, called Music From The Penguin Cafe by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra from 1976. Emily also designed the original album cover.

 

Here’s Coronation by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra featuring Emily Young on vocals:

 

I’ve tried to dig up early demo recordings and early recordings from the 1950’s and 1960’s from many different artists. You’ll hear them all on MusicMaster Oldies, mixed right in there with every hit record from those amazing decades, along with a whole bunch of great songs that never became hits.