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FORMED: 1965, London, England
Pink Floyd are the premier space-rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their
music has relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of
special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same
time they have 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 were
brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles
over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name.
Since that time, they've been little more than a dinosaur act, capable
of filling stadiums ... continue
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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; onstage, 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, child-like 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 funhouse 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 light-hearted 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. Syd would go
catatonic onstage, 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 were 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 Syd 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 were 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 #1. More astonishingly, it made them one of the
biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprensible
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 #1, 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 #1. 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 its original leader to resume its
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 have a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy
about their post-Waters output. They know their formula, they can execute it on
a grand scale, and they can 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, it was reported in the summer of 1996, was
lying ill in a Cambridge hospital, unable or unwilling to regulate his diabetic
condition. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
