Exploding on to the Swinging London scene at the
height of flower power, the original Pink Floyd walked a
tightrope between the chart action of their psychedelic singles
and the superhip credibility of their free-form electronic
freakouts. Then, almost as soon as they'd arrived, Syd Barrett, their
charismatic singer, lead guitarist and songwriter, suffered an
LSD-induced total burnout. Most bands would have called it a day,
but with the substitution of steady hand Dave Gilmour on
guitar and vocals, and the subsequent disappearance of Barrett
into deep space, the Floyd carried on to become one of the
biggest bands on the planet, endlessly recycling their private
mythology of madness and loss. Despite a second crisis with the
departure of Roger Waters, the lyricist and chief
architect of Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish
You Were Here, the band continues with Gilmour at the
helm.
The Floyd story begins in early 1966 when Peter Jenner, a manager
in search of a band, checked out an embryonic Pink Floyd performance at The
Marquee Club in London. Impressed by the weird instrumental passages between
their psychedelic versions of "Louie Louie" and "Road Runner",
he swiftly introduced himself and offered to make them 'bigger than The
Beatles'. It was an offer they could hardly refuse, and they quickly progressed
from experimental freakouts in Notting Hill to playing an International Times
benefit at the Roundhouse in December 1966, as the house band of London's
burgeoning underground scene.
The early Floyd were very much the brainchild of
Syd Barrett. He was the frontman on vocals and lead guitar, he
wrote all the songs, and he even invented their name, a compound
of two of his favourite blues artists, Pink Anderson and Floyd
Council. Barrett was an art-school student - Waters (bass), Rick
Wright (keyboards) and Nick Mason (drums) had studied
architecture - and was keen on exploring the idea of 'music in
colour'. As a result, Floyd were way ahead of their time in
integrating music with visuals, as well as in their introduction
of avant-garde free-jazz elements into a rock context. They
forged a legend with their residency at the UFO Club in
London's Tottenham Court Road, where, cloaked by a dizzying
lightshow, the Floyd stunned audiences with extended versions of
their psychedelic anthems, "Interstellar Overdrive" and
"Astronomy Domine". But as well as entertaining the
acidheads of the UFO, Syd also nursed ambitions to make it on to Top
Of The Pops.
Early in 1967, Pink Floyd signed to EMI and
released a debut single, "Arnold Layne". Compressing
all their hip weirdness into a crisp three-minute cut, it reached
#20 in the UK charts, not bad for an experimental 'art' group.
Meanwhile, back in Underground London, Pink Floyd were chosen to
top the bill at the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, an
all-nighter held on April 29 at Alexandra Palace. Having already
played in Holland the same day, it is unlikely that the Floyd
were at their most inspired, but with most of the 20,000 audience
out of their heads on acid, nobody was disappointed. The real
breakthrough, however, came the following month at the Games For
May concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where punters were
promised 'space-age relaxation for the climax of spring, with
electronic compositions, colour and image projections, girls and
the Pink Floyd'. It was their first major solo presentation, and
the first concert to feature 'sound in the round' by using an
extra pair of speakers at the back of the hall.
"Games For May" was also the title of a
piece specially written for the event. With a new title and a bit
of nip and tuck, this emerged as their second single "See
Emily Play". A UK Top 5 hit, it was one of the best British
singles from the Summer Of Love and a superb taster for Pink
Floyd's debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn,
released in August 1967. One of the most original LPs of the 60s,
it combined the innovative soundscapes of the group's avant-garde
experimentation with the cream of Barrett's eccentric but
brilliant songcraft.
Sadly though, the pressures of writing and
recording, constant touring and wanton experimentation with LSD
were taking their toll on Syd's eggshell psyche. Dave Gilmour had
noticed him acting strangely as early as the recording of
"See Emily Play" in May. By autumn, he was freaking out
with a vengeance: his long awaited third single turned out to be
the shambolic "Apples & Oranges", his contributions
to the second album (including the often bootlegged
"Vegetable Man") were too disturbing to be used and his
on-stage performance declined to playing the same note all
evening. Worst of all was an abortive American tour which had to
be pulled after only a few dates due to Barrett's worsening
condition. His last major gig with the group was at Olympia that
December; early in the New Year, David Gilmour was asked to join
as second guitarist. There was a five-piece Floyd for a brief
interval until the inevitable parting of the ways, when Barrett
began his bizarre solo non-career.
As an old friend, Gilmour was the perfect choice
to keep the group together, though at first his role was merely
to play all Barrett's parts and to help salvage the recording
sessions for what was to become the Floyd's second album. Despite
the odds, A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) turned out
to be a surprisingly successful collection and, along with a
confident performance at the Hyde Park Free Concert in June 1968,
it did much to silence the critics who claimed that the Floyd
were dead without Barrett.
After a couple of flop singles, the group decided
to concentrate on weighty album material that would more
accurately reflect the extended improvisations of their stage
act. Perversely though, their first completely Barrettless work
was More, a much underrated 1969 soundtrack album
for French film director Barbet Schroeder. Banged out in only a
week, it consisted of relaxed instrumentals, intercut with simple
but atmospheric gems such as "Cirrus Minor". That
year's magnum opus, however, was Ummagumma, a
double album whose mystical-sounding title turned out to be a
Cambridgeshire fenland euphemism for sex. One album was live, the
other featured 'avant-garde' solo compositions from each member
of the group. The latter were not a great success, and from this
point on the band started moving away from their underground
pretensions towards a more conventional rock sound. The next
three albums, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle and
Obscured By Clouds (another Schroeder soundtrack),
chart this progression clearly, though none has aged particularly
well. Of the three, Meddle has the most to offer,
with the "Echoes" suite boasting some moments of real
power, but unfortunately quite a few longueurs.
However, in 1973, all the searching for new
directions finally came together with the release of Dark
Side Of The Moon, one of the best-selling albums of all
time. With its dominant themes of ageing, madness and death, the
band had finally come up with something meaningful to hang their
musical ideas on. It was an album so well integrated that it was
hard to imagine any of the songs from "Speak To Me" to
"Eclipse" being played without the context of the
others. But, despite the gloomy subject matter, it retains a
strangely comforting quality, perhaps because it makes everyone's
private concerns seem universal.
There was a two-year wait for Wish You Were
Here. Recording it was sheer torture and the band almost
split under the pressure, but their efforts produced some of
their strongest music, their most affecting lyrics and
undoubtedly one of the most intriguing album sleeves ever. The
key piece was the superb "Shine On You Crazy Diamond",
a lengthy tribute to Syd Barrett, whose spirit still seemed to
haunt the band. Inspired by Gilmour's melancholic guitar theme,
Waters came up with some of his most poignant lines. The album's
title said it all.
Once again, Pink Floyd lapsed into a creative
torpor, only to re-emerge in 1977 with Animals,
perhaps best known for its sleeve picture of a flying pig over
Battersea power station. Two of the tracks, "Sheep" and
"Dogs", were over three years old, being rewrites of
songs rejected from Wish You Were Here, and
although the album featured some stinging guitar work from
Gilmour, it lacked the thoroughgoing excellence of the previous
two.
Animals came out at the height of punk, when Pink
Floyd were generally reviled as dinosaur rockers, yet many of
Waters' lyrics expressed a bitterness and cynicism that should
have been recognized by self-proclaimed nihilist punk groups.
These strands were prominent in The Wall (1979), a
hopelessly ambitious album, concert tour and film project
(starring Bob Geldof as the alienated central character), first
inspired by Waters' hatred of the whole stadium-rock concept.
Megalomania is the word here, but the conceit of literally
walling off the audience during the live performance was
surprisingly effective.
During this period Roger Waters began to withdraw
behind a wall of his own. He took over more and more control of
the creative process, treating the others as little better than
glorified session musicians and allegedly engineering the
departure of founder member Rick Wright. The next album, The
Final Cut, was subtitled, 'By Roger Waters, Performed By
Pink Floyd'. Like Animals, it was largely made from
reheated leftovers (in this case spare bricks from The Wall),
but this time the result was decidedly half-baked and brought
about the band's fragmentation.
In 1986, Roger Waters announced that he had left
the band, assuming that the Pink Floyd would be finished without
him. He had reckoned without the determination of Dave Gilmour,
who decided to press ahead with Mason, a newly rehabilitated Rick
Wright and an army of session musicians. Waters was furious and
commenced a campaign of legal actions and slanging matches in the
press, all to no avail. He had forgotten that, just like Barrett
before him, he might have been the leader of the band, but to the
public he was a distant, faceless figure on stage, half-hidden
behind the dry ice, lights and inflatable pig.
The new Gilmour-led Floyd sounds infinitely more
'Floydian' than Roger Waters' dirge-like solo albums. But their
first effort, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, showed
that without Waters' lyrical input, the new Floyd were pretty
toothless. They followed this up in 1988 with The Delicate
Sound Of Thunder, a rather uninspired live album, though
a copy was taken by cosmonauts up to the Soviet Mir space station
in 1988, thus justifying the Pink Floyd's 'first in space'
T-shirt claim. Most disappointing of all was Shine On,
an expensively priced box-set that merely repackaged seven Floyd
favourites plus a bonus CD of the early singles, which annoyingly
remains unavailable separately.
In 1994, Floyd mark 3 finally hit their stride
with a new studio album, The Division Bell. Almost
a concept album, it had a general motif of poor communications
and it featured significant musical contributions from Wright and
Mason, amidst the session men. The accompanying world tour
boasted an astonishingly elaborate light show and complete
performances of Dark Side Of The Moon, all captured
on the recent live CD, P.U.L.S.E., with its
flashing box. However good their live son et lumière, though,
the new material still lacks the emotional punch of the old, and
unless Gilmour can find another songwriting partner of Roger
Waters' calibre, Pink Floyd seem destined to trade off past
glories.
Thanks to Iain Smith
The members of the band Pink Floyd are some of the best Musicians -- in any type of music, not just 'rock' -- throughout history. With lyrics, album reviews, a band history, and mp3s, this site is an excellent Floyd resource. Please note that mp3s only serve the purpose of giving fans a taste of something great. To get the full taste you need to own the album. It's like trying to get the experience of seeing The Starry Night by looking at a Van Gough postage stamp. The true experience comes from looking at the real thing. Get the Hint? Good. Buy the CD. Also note that some songs are not linked yet, the albums Darkside of the Moon, Animals, and Wish You Were Here are fully linked. Also, there are a few scattered mp3s on each album. Every album will be linked with mp3s soon -- hold tight.
