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 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 grandoise 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 a much more conventional act that 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 alarm 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 (see separate entry
on Syd Barrett for more details).
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 anamolous 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 the 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