The late 1960s exploded in a kaleidoscope of sound and colour, transforming popular music and culture with the rise of psychedelia.
From the swirling light shows to the elongated guitar solos, the psychedelic movement sought to mimic and explore altered states of consciousness, often induced by mind-altering substances like LSD. Yet, beneath the vibrant, often chaotic surface, a curious and pervasive theme emerged: an almost childlike fascination with innocence, fantasy, nonsense, and the whimsical worlds of childhood literature.
This wasn't merely nostalgia; it was a deliberate artistic choice, a way to articulate the ineffable, to subvert expectations, and to tap into a shared cultural subconscious. Figures like Syd Barrett, David Bowie and John Lennon, and bands such as Jefferson Airplane became conduits for this strange synthesis of the infantile and the revolutionary, blurring the lines between nursery rhymes and transcendent experiences.
At the heart of this seemingly contradictory impulse was the desire to escape the rigid realities of adulthood and explore alternative perceptions. The psychedelic experience, often described as a return to a more primal or childlike state of wonder, found a natural correlative in the literature of fantasy and nonsense.
Authors like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, whose works playfully twisted logic and embraced the absurd, became unlikely muses for musicians seeking to express the inexpressible. Their narratives of improbable characters, non-linear events, and vibrant, often unsettling, imagery provided a ready-made vocabulary for a generation exploring new frontiers of the mind.
Six psychedelic rockers who went back to the nursery
1. Syd Barrett
Syd Barrett embodied both psychedelia’s childlike wonder – and its tragic unravelling. As Pink Floyd’s original frontman and creative spark, he conjured a whimsical inner world drawn from nursery rhymes, fairy tales and surreal daydreams.
On Floyd’s 1967 debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, songs like ‘Flaming’ drift through sunlit landscapes and imaginary rivers, while ‘The Gnome’ and ‘The Scarecrow’ introduce fantastical, storybook figures. Yet this innocence was fused with daring experimentation: shifting song structures, abrupt tonal changes and guitar textures that felt beamed in from another dimension.
Barrett didn’t just reference these worlds – he lived inside them. ‘Bike’ captures this perfectly: a playful invitation spirals into a disorienting whirl of laughter, clocks and echoing sound effects, hinting at the unstable edges of his imagination. As his mental health deteriorated, that sense of wonder became fractured, the bright colours dimming into something eerie and disjointed. Barrett’s music remains both enchanting and heartbreaking –the sound of childhood fantasy turning, slowly, into something unreachable.
2. Donovan
Folk singer Donovan similarly embraced the fairy-tale aesthetic, though with a more consistently whimsical and less unsettling tone. Often dubbed ‘Britain’s Bob Dylan’, Donovan quickly evolved from acoustic folk troubadour to a purveyor of ‘Celtic rock’ and psychedelic pop.
A fascination with the mystical, the magical and the innocent permeated Donovan's work, drawing heavily on folklore and children's literature. Songs like ‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’ and ‘There is a Mountain’ are infused with a gentle, dreamlike quality, evoking pastoral scenes and simple truths, almost like illustrated storybooks set to music.
Donovan’s lyrics, from 1966’s Sunshine Superman onwards, frequently feature imagery reminiscent of nursery rhymes, fables, and a romanticized vision of childhood wonder. His psychedelic vision was less about the dark, fractured edges of the mind and more about exploring a vibrant, benevolent fantasy realm – a celestial playground where peace, love, and imaginative freedom reigned supreme. His work provided a softer, gentler entry point into psychedelia, inviting listeners to journey through fields of ‘yellow and green’ rather than venturing into the darker corners of the subconscious.
3. John Lennon
No discussion of psychedelia’s childlike lens is complete without a mention of John Lennon. A lifelong admirer of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Lennon’s own books – In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965) – revel in playful nonsense and surreal word games. This sensibility flowed directly into The Beatles’ psychedelic period.
‘I Am the Walrus’ (1967) is the clearest example here. Drawing on Carroll’s narrative poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, Lennon crafts a deliberately bewildering collage of nursery-rhyme fragments, absurd imagery, and confounding non-sequiturs. He famously aimed to write something critics couldn’t ‘decode’, mirroring the gleeful oddity of Lear’s verse. Its lines – ‘sitting on a cornflake’, anyone? – suspend meaning in favour of texture, humour, and dreamlike strangeness.
Likewise, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ conjures a childlike fantasy landscape: ‘tangerine trees’, ‘rocking horse people’. Lennon insisted that the song grew from a drawing by his son Julian – and its imagery feels less like drug-fuelled mysticism than a return to the joyous, imaginative freedoms of childhood.
4. Jefferson Airplane
Across the Atlantic, San Francisco psych rockers Jefferson Airplane offered an American perspective on this phenomenon, most famously with their iconic track ‘White Rabbit’, also from 1967. Grace Slick’s powerful vocals deliver lyrics that are a direct and thinly veiled allegory for the psychedelic drug experience, using Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as its central metaphor. The song explicitly references the White Rabbit, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Red Queen, and the ‘pill that makes you small’ or ‘pill that makes you grow’.
‘White Rabbit’ perfectly encapsulated the idea of following the 'rabbit hole' into an altered state, aligning the surreal, often illogical journey of Alice with the mind-bending effects of psychedelics. The song’s building intensity, from its hypnotic bass line and Spanish bolero rhythm to its explosive climax, mirrors the psychological progression of a trip. It was a cultural touchstone, demonstrating how the familiar, innocent imagery of childhood literature could be repurposed to articulate the profound and often disorienting experiences of a new counterculture.
5. Kevin Ayers
Kevin Ayers is one of the most fascinating characters in psychedelia, or in all of rock for that matter. A founder of Soft Machine, over the decades Ayers brought his peculiarly wry, melancholic English whimsy to collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Syd Barrett and Elton John.
On his debut solo LP, 1969’s aptly named Joy of a Toy, Ayers conjures a playful, surreal universe, blending gentle melodies, off-kilter rhythms, and lyrical nonsense that evokes fairytales and dreamlike logic. His songs shimmer with innocence and mischief, yet often carry subtle melancholy beneath their buoyant surface.
Like Barrett’s early Pink Floyd work or Lennon’s playful experiments, Ayers celebrates imagination unbound by adult convention, embracing whimsy, absurdity, and fantasy as serious artistic tools. The album’s pastoral, elastic soundscapes and curious instrumentation reinforce this sense of stepping into a childlike, malleable world.
6. David Bowie
Bowie can also be placed within this late-60s/early-70s fascination with childhood, whimsy, and surreal imagination, although he expresses it differently from the likes of Kevin Ayers or Syd Barrett. ‘The Laughing Gnome’ (1967) is the most overt example of Bowie going ‘back to the nursery’ – a novelty, music-hall-inflected track full of playful voices, nonsense, and wordplay. Elsewhere, early psychedelic-era tracks like ‘There Is a Happy Land’ or ‘Rubber Band’ similarly toy with whimsical storytelling, surreal characters, and nostalgic or fantastical imagery.
Even on later albums, like Space Oddity or The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie’s lyrics often explore playful, childlike perspectives, alternate realities, and theatrical personas. The key difference is that, unlike Ayers’ pastoral whimsy, Bowie often infuses his childlike or fantastical worlds with ambiguity, irony, or melancholy, merging imagination with psychological depth.
The psychedelic movement’s fascination with childhood and nonsense had several roots. First, it drew on a ready-made tradition of surreal storytelling from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, whose playful language and illogical narratives mirrored the fluid perceptions of psychedelic experience. Their work offered musicians a vocabulary for the ineffable. Second, childhood imagery served as subtle rebellion. By dressing radical ideas, altered consciousness, and social critique in childlike playfulness, artists could both evade authority and expose the rigidity of the adult world.
This return to childhood also expressed a cultural longing for innocence, spontaneity, and emotional openness – qualities the counterculture believed adult society had repressed. Psychedelia promised a way back to wonder. Musicians like Syd Barrett, John Lennon, and Jefferson Airplane deliberately blended nursery-rhyme whimsy with visionary experimentation, creating music that felt revolutionary yet familiar. The result was a soundworld where fantasy, memory, and liberation converged, inviting listeners to rediscover imagination itself.
These artists invited listeners to tumble down the rabbit hole, reminding them that sometimes, the most profound truths can be found not in the grand pronouncements of adulthood, but in the playful, absurd, and infinitely imaginative realms of childhood.
Top pic: Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
All pics Getty Images
