PINK FLOYD

Origin: Cambridge, England
Genre(s): Psychedelic rock, Progressive rock, Electronic music, Hard rock
Years active: 1965—present (on indefinite hiatus)

Website: www.pinkfloyd.co.uk

Members:
David Gilmour (1968-present)
Nick Mason (1965-present)
Richard Wright (1965-1981; 1987-present)

Former members:
Roger Waters (1965-1985)
Syd Barrett (1965-1968) (d. 2006)
Bob Klose (1965)

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.

On January 16, 1996, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Waters did not attend.

A live recording of The Wall was released in 2000, compiled from the 1980–1981 London concerts, entitled Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81. It reached #19 on the American album chart. In 2001, a remastered two-disc set of the band's best-known tracks entitled Echoes was released. Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright all collaborated on the editing, sequencing, and song selection of the included tracks. Minor controversy was caused due to the songs segueing into one another non-chronologically, presenting the material out of the context of the original albums. Some of the tracks, such as "Echoes", "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", "Marooned", and "High Hopes" have had substantial sections removed from them. The album reached #2 on the U.K. and U.S. charts.

In 2003, an SACD reissue of The Dark Side of the Moon was released with new artwork on the front cover. The album was also re-released as a 180-gram, virgin vinyl pressing in 2003, which included all the original album art from the original release of the album, albeit with a new poster The reissue of Wish You Were Here is in the works, with no release date announced.

Nick Mason's book, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd was published in 2004 in Europe and 2005 in the U.S. Mason made public promotional appearances in a few European and American cities, giving interviews and meeting fans at book signings. Some fans claimed that he said he wished he were on a tour with the band rather than on a book tour.

Longtime Pink Floyd manager Steve O'Rourke passed away on October 30, 2003. As a result, the legal incarnation of the band - David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright - reunited at his funeral and performed "Fat Old Sun" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" at the Chichester Cathedral in tribute.

Two years later, on July 2, 2005, the trio reunited once again for a one-off performance at the London Live 8 concert. This time, however they were joined by Waters - the first time all 4 band members were on stage together in 24 years. The band performed a four-song set consisting of "Speak to Me/Breathe/Breathe (Reprise)", "Money", "Wish You Were Here", and "Comfortably Numb", with both Gilmour and Waters sharing lead vocal duties. At the end, after the last song had been played, Gilmour said "thank you very much, good night" and started to walk off the stage. Waters called him back, however, and the band shared a group hug that became one of the most famous pictures of Live 8.

In the week after Live 8, there was a revival of interest in Pink Floyd. According to record store chain HMV, sales of Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd went up, in the following week, by 1343%, while Amazon reported increases in sales of The Wall at 3600%, Wish You Were Here at 2000%, The Dark Side of the Moon at 1400% and Animals at 1000%. David Gilmour subsequently declared that he would donate his share of profits from this sales boom to charity, and urged that all the other performing artists and their record companies should do the same.

On November 16, 2005 Pink Floyd were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame by Pete Townshend. Gilmour and Mason attended in person, explaining that Wright was in hospital following eye surgery, and Waters appeared on a video screen, from Rome.

David Gilmour released his third solo record, On an Island, on March 6, 2006, and began a tour of small concert venues in Europe, Canada and the U.S. with Richard Wright. During the tour, Gilmour and Wright treated their Oakland, California audience to an historic performance of Pink Floyd's first single, "Arnold Layne". On May 31, 2006, Nick Mason joined David Gilmour and Rick Wright to perform "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb" during Gilmour's final concert at Royal Albert Hall, marking the first public performance by the post-Waters Pink Floyd since the 1994 tour. The concert (along with the 29 and 30 May performances) was recorded for a DVD release later this year. Waters was also invited to perform, but final rehearsals for his 2006 Europe/U.S. tour required him to decline.

Waters and Wright are both reported to be working on solo albums, and there has been talk of Waters doing a Broadway musical version of The Wall, with extra music to be written by Waters. Waters also embarked on his worldwide The Dark Side of the Moon Live Tour; the setlist consisted of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety along with a selection of other Pink Floyd favourites and a small number of songs from Waters' solo career. Waters also contributed the song "Hello (I Love You)," cowritten by Howard Shore, to the 2007 film The Last Mimzy.

Many fans expressed hope that the band's Live 8 appearance would lead to a reunion tour, and a record-breaking US$250 million deal for a world tour was offered,[68] but the band made it clear that they have no such plans. In the weeks after the show, however, the rifts between the members seem to have mostly healed. Gilmour confirmed that he and Waters are on "pretty amicable terms", but Waters has offered conflicting comments on the issue, with statements as varied as "I [can] roll over for one show, but I couldn't roll over for a whole fucking tour" and "I hope we do it again," although most recently, his statements indicate his desire to play together again, not for a whole tour, but for an event similar to Live 8.
On January 31, 2006, David Gilmour issued a joint statement on behalf of the group stating that they have no plans to reunite, refuting rumours from several media outlets. Gilmour later stated in an interview with La Repubblica that he is finished with Pink Floyd and wishes to focus on solo projects and his family. He mentions that he agreed to play Live 8 with Waters to support the cause, to make peace with Waters, and knowing he would regret not taking part.[68] However, he states that Pink Floyd would be willing to perform for a concert "that would support Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts". Then speaking with Billboard, Gilmour changed his "finished with Pink Floyd" sentiment to "who knows". A surprise performance by the post-Waters Pink Floyd line-up of David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason occurred on the last performance of David Gilmour's three night run at The Royal Albert Hall on May 31, 2006 as the three played "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb".

2007 saw the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's signing to EMI and the 40th anniversary of the release of their first three singles "Arnold Layne", "See Emily Play" and "Apples and Oranges" and their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This was marked by the release of a limited edition set containing mono and stereo mixes of the albums, plus tracks from the singles and other rare recordings.

On May 10, 2007, Roger Waters performed at the Syd Barrett tribute concert at the Barbican Centre in London. This was then followed by a surprise performance by the post-Waters Pink Floyd line-up of David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason of "Arnold Layne" to a rapturous applause and standing ovation. However, hopes of a second reunion concert with the band's classic lineup were dashed when Waters did not perform with the group. Roger Waters took to the stage to screams of "Pink Floyd!" to which he responded, "Later." Gilmour, Mason, and Wright took to the stage to screams of "Roger Waters!" to which Gilmour politely responded, "Yeah, he was here too, now the rest of us."

More recently, Waters has become more and more open to a Pink Floyd reunion. In a 2007 interview, he said “I would have no problem if the rest of them wanted to get together. It wouldn’t even have to be to save the world. It could be just because it would be fun. And people would love it.”

On September 25th, 2007, Gilmour stated that a future reunion of Pink Floyd in any form, be it with or without Roger Waters, looked grim, stating that "I can’t see why I would want to be going back to that old thing. It’s very retrogressive. I want to look forward, and looking back isn’t my joy."

On December 10th (UK) & 11th (US) 2007, Pink Floyd released a new CD box set, Oh, By the Way, containing all fourteen studio albums with their newest respective CD remasters, original vinyl artwork plus new artwork from Storm Thorgerson.

Mason and Waters have said that they would be happy to do a Pink Floyd tour, but during the BBC1 Special, "Which One's Pink?," when asked about whether the band would reform, Gilmour ambiguously stated either "Ain't Gonna Happen" or "Anything could happen". Which of these two phrases were said is debatable. During the same documentary, Wright also stated that he "wouldn't mind playing the Pink Floyd 'music' again."

Discography

Studio albums:
* The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (August 5, 1967)
* A Saucerful of Secrets (June 29, 1968)
* Music from the Film More (July 27, 1969)
* Ummagumma (October 25, 1969)
* Atom Heart Mother (October 10, 1970)
* Meddle (October 30, 1971)
* Obscured by Clouds (June 3, 1972)
* The Dark Side of the Moon (March 24, 1973)
* Wish You Were Here (September 15, 1975)
* Animals (January 23, 1977)
* The Wall (November 30, 1979)
* The Final Cut (March 23, 1983)
* A Momentary Lapse of Reason (September 7, 1987)
* The Division Bell (March 30, 1994)

Live albums:
* Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) (live) #11 UK; #11 US
* P*U*L*S*E (1995) (2CD, live) #1 UK; #1 US
* Is There Anybody Out There? (2000) (live) #15 UK; #19 US

Compilations:
* Relics (1971) (A-sides, B-sides, album tracks 1967-69) #34 UK; #152 US
* A Nice Pair (1973) #36 US -The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - A Saucerful Of Secrets (album)
* A Collection of Great Dance Songs (1981) (compilation) #37 UK; #31 US
* Works (1983) (compilation) #68 US
* Shine On (1992) (box set)
* Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd (2001) #2 UK; #2 US
* Oh, by the Way (2007)

Soundtrack releases:
* Music from the Film More (1969) #9 UK; #153 US
* Obscured by Clouds (1972) #6 UK; #46 US

Other:
* Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (1967 documentary film soundtrack, featuring 2 tracks)
* "Give Birth to a Smile" (song featuring (uncredited) all four members from Roger Waters and Ron Geesin's Music from "The Body", 1969)
* The Man and the Journey (1969 aborted live concept album)
* Zabriskie Point (1970)
* Masters of Rock (1974)
* London '66-'67 (1995)
* 1967: The First Three Singles (1997)
* The Committee (1968) (Unreleased soundtrack from the film, The Committee)
* The Early Singles (Distribited with the Shine On box set)