Pink Floyd Bio

8/8/2019 Pink Floyd Bio

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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 leadguitarist 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; electronicscreeches; 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. Mostimportantly, 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, thealbum 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. Dependentupon 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 fromCambridge, 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 andinsistently 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 NorthAmerica. 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 backupvocals.

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), alsomade 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 Anim

als (1977) developed these morosethemes 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 stageshows 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 thefour 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

² 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 hissuccessor. 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 littlethat'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 ²

many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon

came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a

member ² 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 analbum. Syd Barrett continued to be completely

removed from the public eye except as a sort of

archetype for the fallen genius.

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