Pink Floyd was a U.K. psychedelic rock band made up of Syd Barrett (1946-2006), guitar and vocals; David Gilmour (6 March 1944, Cambridge), guitar; Roger Waters (6 September 1944, Cambridge), vocals and bass; Nick Mason (27 January 1945, Birmingham), drums; and Richard Wright (28 July 1945, London), keyboards. Waters, Mason and Wright played together in the Architectural Abdabs before being joined in 1965 by Barrett, who changed the band name to the Pink Floyd Sound. Their sound was attributed to Barrett, who had trouble coping (some say because of LSD, some say mental illness) and was ultimately replaced by Gilmour in 1968. Their early albums were spacey and experimental and they were among the first rock groups to use light shows during their concerts. Their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon took them from the fringes of psychedelic rock and put them on the top of the charts. The album went on to become one of the best selling records of all time, spending more than 25 years on Billboard's Top 200 chart. They had further success with Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979), but by the '80s the band drifted apart. In 1987 Gilmour, Mason and Wright reunited and recorded A Momentary Lapse of Reason. One of the top-selling rock groups in history, Pink Floyd was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
The 1982 film The Wall was based on their album and starred Bob Geldof... The band name comes from two bluesmen: Pink Anderson (1900-74) and Floyd Council (1911-76)... The band's cult status was enhanced in the 1990s when the rumor spread that the album Dark Side of the Moon took on new meaning when played in synchronization with the movie The Wizard of Oz.
Major Members: Nick Mason, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett
Biography
Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. Despite their astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name. After that time, they were little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.
While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandiose concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were much more conventional than the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.
Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback; electronic screeches; and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; on-stage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, childlike wonder.
The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, "Arnold Layne," a sympathetic, comic vignette about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic "See Emily Play," made the Top Ten. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming fun house of driving, mysterious rockers ("Lucifer Sam"); odd character sketches ("The Gnome"); childhood flashbacks ("Bike," "Matilda Mother"); and freakier pieces with lengthy instrumental passages ("Astronomy Domine," "Interstellar Overdrive," "Pow R Toch") that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and lighthearted than those of their subsequent epics.
The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. Barrett would go catatonic on-stage, playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio.
Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live outfit; Barrett would still be able to write and contribute to the records. That couldn't work either, and within a few months Barrett was out of the group. Pink Floyd's management, looking at the wreckage of a band that was now without its lead guitarist, lead singer, and primary songwriter, decided to abandon the group and manage Barrett as a solo act.
Such calamities would have proven insurmountable for 99 out of 100 bands in similar predicaments. Incredibly, Pink Floyd would regroup and not only maintain their popularity, but eventually become even more successful. It was early in the game yet, after all; the first album had made the British Top Ten, but the group was still virtually unknown in America, where the loss of Syd Barrett meant nothing to the media. Gilmour was an excellent guitarist, and the band proved capable of writing enough original material to generate further ambitious albums, Waters eventually emerging as the dominant composer. The 1968 follow-up to Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets, made the British Top Ten, using Barrett's vision as an obvious blueprint, but taking a more formal, somber, and quasi-classical tone, especially in the long instrumental parts. Barrett, for his part, would go on to make a couple of interesting solo records before his mental problems instigated a retreat into oblivion.
Over the next four years, Pink Floyd would continue to polish their brand of experimental rock, which married psychedelia with ever-grander arrangements on a Wagnerian operatic scale. Hidden underneath the pulsing, reverberant organs and guitars and insistently restated themes were subtle blues and pop influences that kept the material accessible to a wide audience. Abandoning the singles market, they concentrated on album-length works, and built a huge following in the progressive rock underground with constant touring in both Europe and North America. While LPs like Ummagumma (divided into live recordings and experimental outings by each member of the band), Atom Heart Mother (a collaboration with composer Ron Geesin), and More... (a film soundtrack) were erratic, each contained some extremely effective music.
By the early '70s, Syd Barrett was a fading or nonexistent memory for most of Pink Floyd's fans, although the group, one could argue, never did match the brilliance of that somewhat anomalous 1967 debut. Meddle (1971) sharpened the band's sprawling epics into something more accessible, and polished the science fiction ambience that the group had been exploring ever since 1968. Nothing, however, prepared Pink Floyd or their audience for the massive mainstream success of their 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon, which made their brand of cosmic rock even more approachable with state-of-the-art production; more focused songwriting; an army of well-time stereophonic sound effects; and touches of saxophone and soulful female backup vocals.
Dark Side of the Moon finally broke Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it made number one. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprehensible 741 weeks on the Billboard album chart. Additionally, the primarily instrumental textures of the songs helped make Dark Side of the Moon easily translatable on an international level, and the record became (and still is) one of the most popular rock albums worldwide.
It was also an extremely hard act to follow, although the follow-up, Wish You Were Here (1975), also made number one, highlighted by a tribute of sorts to the long-departed Barrett, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." Dark Side of the Moon had been dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the cold sterility of modern life; Wish You Were Here and Animals (1977) developed these morose themes even more explicitly. By this time Waters was taking a firm hand over Pink Floyd's lyrical and musical vision, which was consolidated by The Wall (1979).
The bleak, overambitious double concept album concerned itself with the material and emotional walls modern humans build around themselves for survival. The Wall was a huge success (even by Pink Floyd's standards), in part because the music was losing some of its heavy-duty electronic textures in favor of more approachable pop elements. Although Pink Floyd had rarely even released singles since the late '60s, one of the tracks, "Another Brick in the Wall," became a transatlantic number one. The band had been launching increasingly elaborate stage shows throughout the '70s, but the touring production of The Wall, featuring a construction of an actual wall during the band's performance, was the most excessive yet.
In the 1980s, the group began to unravel. Each of the four had done some side and solo projects in the past; more troublingly, Waters was asserting control of the band's musical and lyrical identity. That wouldn't have been such a problem had The Final Cut (1983) been such an unimpressive effort, with little of the electronic innovation so typical of their previous work. Shortly afterward, the band split up -- for a while. In 1986, Waters was suing Gilmour and Mason to dissolve the group's partnership (Wright had lost full membership status entirely); Waters lost, leaving a Roger-less Pink Floyd to get a Top Five album with Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987. In an irony that was nothing less than cosmic, about 20 years after Pink Floyd shed their original leader to resume their career with great commercial success, they would do the same again to his successor. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nothing more than moderate sales and attention, while he watched his former colleagues (with Wright back in tow) rescale the charts.
Pink Floyd still had a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy about their post-Waters output. They knew their formula, could execute it on a grand scale, and could count on millions of customers -- many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a member -- to buy their records and see their sporadic tours. The Division Bell, their first studio album in seven years, topped the charts in 1994 without making any impact on the current rock scene, except in a marketing sense. Ditto for the live Pulse album, recorded during a typically elaborately staged 1994 tour, which included a concert version of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Waters' solo career sputtered along, highlighted by a solo recreation of The Wall, performed at the site of the former Berlin Wall in 1990, and released as an album. Syd Barrett continued to be completely removed from the public eye except as a sort of archetype for the fallen genius. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
Pink Floyd had moderate mainstream success and were one of the most popular bands in the London underground music scene in the
late 1960s as a psychedelic band led by Syd Barrett; however, Barrett's erratic behaviour
eventually forced his colleagues to replace him with guitarist and singer David Gilmour.
After Barrett's departure, singer and bass player Roger Waters gradually became the band's
leader from around 1977 until his eventual departure from the group. The band recorded several albums, achieving worldwide success with The Dark Side of the
Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), and The Wall (1979). In 1985, Waters
declared Pink Floyd defunct, but the remaining members, led by Gilmour, sued Waters for rights to the name; they continued
recording and touring as Pink Floyd and enjoyed commercial success with A
Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994),
eventually reaching a settlement with Waters over the use of the name.
Waters performed with the band for the first time in 24 years on July 2, 2005 at the London Live 8 concert, playing to Pink Floyd's biggest
audience ever.
Pink Floyd evolved from an earlier rock band, formed in 1965, which was at various times called Sigma 6, the Meggadeaths, and the Abdabs. When the band split up, some members — guitarists Rado "Bob" Klose and Roger Waters, drummerNick
Mason, and wind instrument player Rick Wright — formed a new band called "Tea Set". After a brief stint with a lead vocalist
named Chris Dennis,[14] guitarist and vocalist Syd
Barrett joined the band, with Waters moving to bass.[15]
When Tea Set found themselves on the same bill as another band with the same name, Barrett came up with the alternative name
The Pink Floyd Sound, after two blues musicians, Pink
Anderson and Floyd Council.[16][17] For a time after this
they oscillated between Tea Set and The Pink Floyd Sound, with the latter name eventually winning out. The
Sound was dropped fairly quickly, but the definite article was still used regularly until 1968. The group's UK releases
during the Syd Barrett era credited them as The Pink Floyd as did their first two U.S. singles. David Gilmour is known to
have referred to the group as The Pink Floyd as late as 1984.[18]
The heavily jazz-oriented Klose left after recording only a demo,[19] leaving an otherwise stable lineup with Barrett on guitar and lead vocals, Waters on bass
guitar and backing vocals, Mason on drums and
percussion, and Wright switching to keyboards and backing vocals. Barrett soon
started writing his own songs, influenced by American and British psychedelic rock with his own brand of whimsical humour. Pink Floyd became a favourite in the
underground movement, playing at such prominent venues as the UFO club, the Marquee Club and the
Roundhouse.
As their popularity increased, the band members formed Blackhill Enterprises in
October 1966, a six-way business partnership with their managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew
King,[20] issuing the singles "Arnold Layne" in March 1967 and "See Emily Play" in June 1967.
"Arnold Layne" reached number 20 in the UK Singles Chart, and "See Emily Play" reached
number 6,[21] granting
the band its first national TV appearance on Top of the Pops in July 1967. (They
had earlier appeared, performing "Interstellar Overdrive" at the UFO Club, in a short documentary, "It's So Far Out It's Straight
Down". This was broadcast in March 1967 but seen only in the UK's Granada TV
region.)
Released in August 1967, the band's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn, is today considered to be a prime example of British psychedelic
music,[22] and was generally
well-received by critics at the time. It is now viewed as one of the best debut albums by many critics.[23] The album's tracks, predominantly
written by Barrett, showcase poetic lyrics and an eclectic mixture of music, from the avant-garde free-form piece
"Interstellar Overdrive" (sample(info)) to whimsical songs such as "The Scarecrow", inspired by the Fenlands, a rural
region north of Cambridge (Barrett, Gilmour and Waters's home town). Lyrics were entirely
surreal and often referred to folklore, such as "The Gnome". The music reflected newer
technologies in electronics through its prominent use of stereo panning, tape editing,
echo effects and electric keyboards. The album was a hit in the UK where it peaked at #6, but did not do well in North America,
reaching #131 in the U.S.,[24] and that only after it was reissued in the wake of the band's stateside commercial
breakthrough in the 1970s. During this period, the band toured with Jimi Hendrix, which
helped to increase its popularity.
Barrett's decline
As the band became more popular, the stresses of life on the road and a significant intake of psychedelic drugs took their toll on Barrett, whose mental health had been deteriorating for several
months. Barrett's strange behaviour has often been attributed to his drug use.[25] In January 1968, guitarist David Gilmour joined the band to carry out Barrett's playing and singing
duties, though evidently Jeff Beck was considered.[26]
With Barrett's behaviour becoming less and less predictable, and his almost constant use of LSD, he became very unstable, occasionally staring into space while the rest of the band
performed. During some performances, he would just strum one chord for the duration of a concert, or randomly begin detuning his
guitar.[27] The band's live shows became increasingly
ramshackle until, eventually, the other band members simply stopped taking him to the concerts. The last concert featuring
Barrett was on January 201968 on Hastings Pier. It was
originally hoped that Barrett would write for the band with Gilmour performing live, but
Barrett's increasingly difficult compositions, such as "Have You Got It, Yet?",
which changed melodies and chord progression with every take, eventually made the rest
of the band give up on this arrangement.[28] Once Barrett's departure was formalised in April 1968, producers Jenner and
King decided to remain with him, and the six-way Blackhill partnership was dissolved.[28] The band
adopted Steve O'Rourke as manager, and he remained with Pink Floyd until his death in
2003.[29]
After recording two solo albums (The Madcap Laughs and Barrett) in 1970 (co-produced by and sometimes featuring Gilmour, Waters and Wright) to moderate
success, Barrett went into seclusion. Again going by his given name, Roger, he lived a quiet life in his native Cambridge until
his death on July 72006.
Finding their feet: 1968–1970
This period was one of musical experimentation for the band. Gilmour, Waters and Wright each contributed material that had its
own voice and sound, giving this material less consistency than the Barrett-dominated early years or the more polished,
collaborative sound of later years. As Barrett had been the lead singer during his era, Gilmour,
Waters and Wright now split both songwriting and lead vocal duties. Waters mostly wrote low-key, jazzy melodies with dominant
bass lines and complex, symbolic lyrics, Gilmour focused on guitar-driven blues jams, and Wright preferred melodic psychedelic
keyboard-heavy numbers. Unlike Waters, Gilmour and Wright preferred tracks that had simple lyrics or that were purely
instrumental. Some of the band's most experimental music is from this period, such as
"A Saucerful of Secrets", consisting largely of noises, feedback,
percussions, oscillators and tape loops, and "Careful with That Axe, Eugene" (which went by a number of other names as well), a very
Waters-driven song with a bass and keyboard-heavy jam culminating in crashing drums and Waters' primal screams.
Whilst Barrett had written the bulk of the first album, only one composition by him, "Jugband
Blues", appeared on the second Floyd album. Barrett also played on the songs "Remember A Day" (recorded during the
sessions for Piper) and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun". A
Saucerful of Secrets was released in June 1968, reaching #9 in the UK and becoming the only Pink Floyd album not to
chart in the U.S.[24]
Somewhat uneven due to Barrett's departure, the album still contained much of his psychedelic sound combined with the more
experimental music that would be fully showcased on Ummagumma. Its centrepiece, the
12-minute title track, hinted at the epic, lengthy songs to come, but the album was poorly received by critics at the
time,[23] although critics today
tend to be kinder to the album in the context of their body of work.[22] Future Pink Floyd albums would expand upon the idea of long, sprawling compositions,
offering more focused songwriting with each subsequent release.
Pink Floyd were then recruited by director Barbet Schroeder to produce a soundtrack
for his film, More, which was premiered in May 1969. The music was released as a
Floyd album in its own right, Music From the Film More, in July 1969;
the album achieved another #9 finish in the UK, and peaked at #153 in the U.S.[24] Critics tend to find the collection of the film's music patchy
and uneven.[22] The band would use
this and future soundtrack recording sessions to produce work that may not have fit into the idea of what would appear on a
proper Pink Floyd LP; many of the tracks on More (as fans usually call it) were acoustic folk songs. Two of these songs, "Green Is the Colour" and
"Cymbaline", became fixtures in the band's live sets for a time and were a part of their live
The Man/The Journey suite, as can be heard in the many available
bootleg recordings from this period. "Cymbaline" was also the first Pink Floyd song to
deal with Roger Waters' cynical attitude toward the music industry explicitly. The rest of the album consisted of avant-garde
incidental pieces from the score (some of which were also part of The Man/The Journey) with a few heavier rock songs
thrown in, such as "The Nile Song".
The next record, the double album Ummagumma, was a mix of live recordings and unchecked studio experimentation by the
band members, with each member recording half a side of a vinyl record as a solo project (Mason's first wife makes an uncredited
contribution as a flautist).[30] Though the album was realised as solo outings and a live set, it was originally intended as a
purely avant-garde mixture of sounds from "found" instruments. The subsequent difficulties in recording and lack of group
organization led to the shelving of the project. The title is Cambridge slang for sexual intercourse[31] and reflects the attitude of the band at the time, as frustrations in the
studio followed them throughout these sessions. The band was wildly experimental on the studio disc, which featured Waters' pure
folk "Grantchester Meadows", an atonal & jarring piano piece
("Sysyphus"), meandering progressive rock textures ("
