|
Pink Floyd is a British rock band famous for their songwriting and psychedelic style, ranking #7 behind The Beatles in number of albums sold worldwide.
History
Formed in 1964 from an earlier band whose names included Sigma 6, T-Set, Megadeaths, The Screaming Abdabs, The Architectural Abdabs, and The Abdabs, Pink Floyd, initially called "The Pink Floyd Sound", originally consisted of
Bob Klose (lead guitar),
Syd Barrett (vocals, rhythm guitar), Richard
Wright (keyboards, vocals), Roger Waters (bass, vocals) and Nick Mason (drums) and was named after two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The band initially covered rhythm and blues staples such as
"Louie, Louie". As Barrett started writing tunes more influenced by
American surf music, psychedelic rock, and British whimsy, humor and literature, the heavily jazz-orientated Klose departed and left a rather stable foursome. They formed Blackhill Enterprises, a six-way partnership with their managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King.
In 1968, guitarist David Gilmour
joined the band to carry out the playing and singing duties of Barrett, who was suffering deteriorating mental health, but
nevertheless was intended to remain as the band's figurehead and songwriter.
With Barrett's state becoming less and less predictable, the band's live shows became increasingly ramshackle until eventually
the other band members simply stopped taking Barrett to the concerts.
Once Barrett's departure was formalised, Jenner and King decided to remain with him, and the Blackhill partnership was
dissolved.
Whilst Barrett had written the bulk of the first record, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), he
contributed little to the second A Saucerful of
Secrets (1968). With the loss of their main songwriter the band was perceived as
losing focus and a distinctive sound.
After the film soundtrack More, the next record, the double album Ummagumma
(part recorded at Mothers Rock Club, Birmingham, and in Manchester in 1969), was a mix of live recordings and unchecked studio experimentation by the band members, with each recording half
a side of vinyl as a solo project (Mason's wife makes an uncredited contribution as a flautist).
1970's Atom Heart
Mother, a UK number one album, is sometimes now considered a dated period piece and has been described by Gilmour as the
sound of a band "blundering about in the dark". The title piece owes much to orchestration by Ron Geesin.
The band's sound was considerably more focused in Meddle (1971), whose 23-minute epic "Echoes" is heard by many critics today as one of their best works
ever. This album also included the atmospheric "One of These Days" (now regarded as a concert classic, with a distorted,
disembodied one-line vocal) and the pop-jazz stylings of "St. Tropez". Their forays into experimentation and trying new things
were expressed on "Seamus" (earlier, "Mademoiselle Nobs"), a pure-blues number featuring lead vocals by a Russian wolfhound.
A little-known album, Obscured By Clouds, was
released in 1972, as the soundtrack for the film "La Vallee". Pieces like
"Wot's...uh the Deal," "Childhood's End," "Free Four," and "Stay" are regarded as exceptional components of the band's extensive
repertoire.
Despite their never having been a hit-single-driven group, their massively successful 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon,
featured a US number one track ("Money"), and more importantly remained
in the top 100 for over a decade, breaking many records on the way, and making it one of the top selling albums of all time.
Dark Side of the Moon was a concept album dealing with themes of
insanity, neurosis and fame which, due to the use of Abbey Road studio's
new 16-track recording equipment and the investment of an enormous amount of time by engineer Alan Parsons, set new standards for sound fidelity. Dark Side of the Moon has also been the source of
a persistent urban legend that it was conceived as a kind of synchronized soundtrack for the film The Wizard of Oz (David Gilmour has since gone on
record to deny the group had anything to do with "Dark Side"'s synchronization with "Oz").
Dark Side of the Moon and the three following albums (Wish You Were Here, Animals and The
Wall) are often held up as the peak of Pink Floyd's career, also known as the "Classic Floyd" period. The first of those,
Wish You Were Here, released in 1975, is a tribute to Barrett in which the lyrics deal explicitly with the aftermath of his breakdown, including
the critically-acclaimed, mainly instrumental "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and the classic title track.
By 1977, and the release of Animals, the band's music came under increasing criticism from some quarters in the new punk rock sphere as being too flabby and pretentious, having lost its way from the
simplicity of early rock and roll. Animals contained more
lengthy songs tied to a theme, taken in part from George Orwell's
Animal Farm, which used pigs, dogs and sheep as metaphors for
contemporary society. Animals was a lot more guitar-driven than the previous albums.
1979's epic rock opera, The Wall,
conceived mainly by Waters, gave Pink Floyd renewed acclaim and another hit single with their foray into critical pedagogy - "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II." It also bore
the extraordinary track "Comfortably Numb" which, though never released as a single became a cornerstone of AOR and classic-rock
radio playlists and is today one of the group's best-known songs. It is also the only song on Pink Floyd's first four concept albums not to segue at either the
beginning or end. The album also became a vastly expensive and money-losing tour/stage show. During this time, Roger Waters
increased his artistic influence and leadership of the band, prompting frequent conflicts with the other members and causing
Wright to quit the band, though he would return, on a fixed wage, for the album's few live concerts. Ironically, he was the only
one of Pink Floyd to make any money from the "Wall" shows, the rest having to cover the excessive costs. The album was
co-produced by Bob Ezrin, a friend of Waters who shared songwriting credits on
"The Trial".
The Wall remained on best-selling-album lists for 14 years. A film starring Boomtown Rats founder Bob Geldof was adapted from it in
1982, written by Waters and directed by Alan Parker, and featuring animation by noted British cartoonist and long- time Floyd collaborator, Gerald Scarfe.
1983 saw the release of The
Final Cut. Even darker in tone than The Wall, this album re-examined many of the themes of that album while
also addressing then-current events, including Waters' anger at Britain's participation in the Falklands War ("The Fletcher Memorial Home") and cynicism and fear of nuclear war ("Two Suns in the Sunset"). Though released as a Pink Floyd album, the project was clearly
dominated by Waters, and became a prototype in sound and form for later Waters solo projects. Only moderately successful by Floyd
standards, the album yielded only one minor radio hit, "Not Now John".
After The Final Cut, the band's members went their separate ways, each releasing solo albums, until 1987, when Gilmour began to revive the band, with Nick Mason also involved. A bitter legal dispute
with Roger Waters (who left the band in 1985) ensued, but Gilmour and Mason achieved the legal right to release an album as Pink
Floyd (Waters, however, gained the rights to some traditional Pink Floyd imagery, including almost all of The Wall).
Richard Wright re-joined the duo during the recording sessions of A Momentary Lapse of Reason as a session musician, and was paid a weekly salary. By any
account, Wright was a member of the band for the 1994 release of The Division Bell and its subsequent tour.
All of the members of Pink Floyd have released solo albums which have met with varying degrees of commercial and critical
success. Waters' Amused To Death was especially praised.
Discography
In the mid-Nineties, several people (supposedly including Trent Reznor
and Jim Cauty of the KLF) released bootleg trance
remixes of More, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Obscured By Clouds, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here (which was later
reissued), Animals, The Wall, A Collection of Great Dance Songs, The Final Cut, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and The Division
Bell.
Unreleased Material
- Household Objects (1974) (Never completed)
Bibliography
- For about ten years from 1982, a fanzine, "The Amazing Pudding" documented the band's activities.
Live performances
Pink Floyd are renowned for their lavish stage shows, combining over-the-top visual experiences with their music to create a
show in which the artists themselves are almost secondary. This was a major theme in the tour of The Wall, in which a
band of session musicians played the first song, wearing rubber face masks (proving successfully that the band were not known for
their individual personalities). Later in the show, a huge wall was built between the audience and the band, being demolished,
explosively, as the finale. This show was recreated by a number of guest artists (including Bryan Adams, The Scorpions, and Van Morrison) assembled around Roger Waters in 1990 amid the ruins of the Berlin Wall.
The lavish stage shows were also the basis for Douglas Adams'
fictional rock group "Disaster Area" (creators of the loudest noise in the universe, and making use of solar-flares in their
stage show) in The
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. Douglas Adams was a personal friend of David Gilmour, and made a one-off guest
appearance, on guitar, on the P.U.L.S.E tour.
Recent activity
Pink Floyd have not released any new studio material since 1994's The Division
Bell, and while they have not officially broken up, neither is there any sign of a new album. The only band activity since
The Division Bell has been a live version of The Wall, compiled from their 1980 and 1981 concerts, entitled
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live; a two-disc set of their greatest hits called Echoes, in 2001, and a re-release of The Final Cut with
the single "When the Tigers Broke Free" added (2004).
Echoes caused some controversy because, on the album, songs segue into each
other continuously in a different order than on their original albums and have sometimes had substantial parts removed from them;
parts of the songs "Echoes", "Shine On You Crazy
Diamond" and "Marooned" have been removed.
Other Things of Interest
See: Pink Floyd trivia
Tribute Bands
A multitude of tribute bands for Pink Floyd appeared in the 1990s. They include:
- The Australian Pink Floyd
Show
- The Great Gig in the
Sky
- The Pink Floyd Experience
- Pink Void
- Pink Froyd
External links
|