A Brief History Of Pink Floyd
By Andrew Means
Published by Andrew Means at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Andrew L. Means
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New Introduction
Chapter Five: Forging A New Floyd
Chapter Seven: A Sequel To Success
Chapter Nine: Building A Legacy
Chapter Thirteen: Amused & Divided
New Introduction
To begin with, let me state upfront that this history is missing a chunk. Namely, the last 10 years or so.
Here’s how it came about.
In the year 2000, a now defunct publisher asked me to write a shortish biography of Pink Floyd. It felt like a good idea, both from a personal and a wider viewpoint.
The group had been among my favorites since the first time I heard their breakthrough British single, “See Emily Play”, on radio’s weekly review of hits.
The timing seemed right too. By the end of the century, it appeared that the group’s career had reached a sort of lull — the kind of lull that made me wonder whether there was much more of significance to come from Pink Floyd and their estranged bassist Roger Waters.
After all, not many 50-ish rock stars could expect to top a catalog than included phenomenal albums like The Dark Side Of the Moon and The Wall, not to mention earlier classic songs like “The Heart Of The Sun”.
Where do you go after creating that but on to the golden oldies circuit?
All in all, I thought, not a bad time to reflect on a band’s career.
Well, time doesn’t stand still, even for rock stars.
Keyboardist Rick Wright and the group’s original front man and inspiration, Syd Barrett, have passed on to that great gig in the sky — to borrow one of the group’s celebrated song titles. (Barrett died in 2006 and Wright in 2008, of cancer.)
But Waters and guitarist Dave Gilmour have continued to write and record. Gilmour’s output is perhaps the most interesting, including as it does a remake of the group’s first single, the Syd Barrett composition “Arnold Layne”, and numerous collaborations, including an album in 2010 entitled Metallic Spheres with the group, The Orb.
Of his solo albums, the third — 2006’s On An Island — has been the most successful in terms of response. With Gilmour’s trademark Stratocaster guitar accompaniments and distinctive vocals, it’s close enough to latter day Pink Floyd releases to seem like a band album in all but name.
Waters has continued to create too, in typically unpredictable fashion. Who would have expected his 2010 version of the old civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome”? Rather more predictably, his commitment to political and social causes continues. He’s spoken out against Israeli policies towards Palestinians as well as on the more general themes of poverty and malaria.
Meanwhile, drummer Nick Mason still seems amenable to a few musical exploits when called upon — presumably as long as it doesn’t interfere with other pursuits, such as his passion for cars and racing them. One unique claim he has in Floydian history however is that he is, so far, the only member of that group to have written a book about his experiences. Entitled Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, it was published in 2004 and has even been adapted in an audio version with Mason doing the reading.
Most gratifying, from their many fans’ perspective, is that the remaining three do still perform once in a while — sometimes even together. Considering all the bitter words spoken since Waters left the group, the occasional re-unions are all the more remarkable.
They buried the hatchet for the Live 8 London performance in Hyde Park in 2005 — the first with Waters in 24 years — and have come together a couple of times since, including a London gig in May 2011 as part of Waters’ “The Wall Live” tour.
Apart from their concerts, news of interest to Pink Floyd fans continues to surface from time to time. But it tends to have little bearing on the performers’ creative endeavors. Instead it detours into legal snafus or contractual updates or repackaged/re-mixed re-releases or reminiscences or Mason’s work with the musicians’ rights organization, Featured Artists’ Coalition.
Of course that dirigible pig from the Animals album — or at least its reincarnation — bobs up into the sky once in a while in a promotional venture. And Waters’ rock opera The Wall is probably good for adaptations in mediums we have yet to devise.
Still, without wishing to completely discount the chances of achievements to come, it seems all but a certainty that Pink Floyd’s great works will be seen to pre-date the year 2000. And so, with the advent of digital publishing, I felt that there might be some worth in re-offering a manuscript that was gathering figurative dust.
I’ve left it more or less as I wrote it in 2000, except for a little editing and formatting. There continues to be a steady flow of material about the group, and to the sources I list in the acknowledgments at the end I’d add the amazingly all-encompassing Wikipedia and the incisive and detailed retrospective magazine-style publication, Ultimate Music Guide Issue 6: Pink Floyd (from the makers of Uncut). In addition, Gilmour and Waters both have personal websites adding to the stack of Floydian information.
In retrospect, I’d make a few changes if I re-wrote this. For one thing, I hope I’d do a better job of expressing myself clearly and succinctly. For another, I’d consider opting either for British or American spelling — although there’s something rather appropriate about a transatlantic hybrid too.
Perhaps I should have included something about the financial troughs the band went through before hitting pay dirt. And, to give credit where it was due but not given, present and past members of the band have not been without a philanthropic spirit. Alongside his wife, writer Polly Samson, Gilmour campaigns about environmental issues and the plight of the homeless.
Oh, and I should have acknowledged the huge role played by the support people. The technical and logistical complexity behind the group and its road show is staggering. The same applies to Waters’ enterprises, notably with The Wall. As with most major acts, the faces you see in the media are only the tip of the iceberg.
I might also back pedal a bit on Pink Floyd’s image as spotlight-shunning wallflowers. Clearly they were not without egos — and the clashes that often accompany them.
But I continue to believe that few if any performers better illustrate the progress of rock music from the ’60s through the turn of the century. In Pink Floyd’s story can be seen the passage from the informal exploratory gatherings of the ’60s to the extravaganzas of more recent times, where the performer-audience dynamics are indeed sometimes reminiscent of totalitarian rallies of earlier decades. It was a transition that weighed upon the mind of Roger Waters for one, and found vent in his songs.
In retrospect though, the issue is not what they’ve done since the year 2000, given what they did before. As Gilmour sang — addressing fans with an insatiable appetite for more — “what do you want from me?”
A few million listeners might answer that by saying: “You’ve given far more than most, thank you very much.”
Imagine the ideal credentials for a top rock group and what comes to mind?
High on the list must be charismatic personalities and dynamic stage presence. Headline-generating controversy and flair are almost a given.
Now consider Pink Floyd. A top rock group undeniably, with the credentials to prove it. Their album The Dark Side Of The Moon became a staple in sales charts through the 1980s. The Wall, released in 1979, has become one of the best-known and best-selling works in rock history.
Yet for much of the group’s career, the individual members have been shadowy, almost anonymous figures. With the exception of the beginnings in the mid-1960s, when founding member Syd Barrett was briefly the group’s mercurial focal point, and the mid ’80s, when bassist Roger Waters left amid acrimony, Pink Floyd has been almost as faceless as a corporate logo.
Perhaps that’s one reason for the enduring attraction. From the perspective of someone outside the group’s inner circle, the individual members of Pink Floyd have appeared for the most part to be down-to-earth. People of exceptional talent and distinctive style to be sure, but with little of the histrionics and relatively few of the public displays of ego so familiar in other groups of their stature.
The emergence in more recent years of guitarist Dave Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters as rock personalities seems more something that was forced on them by circumstances rather than an innate need for attention. For years they were virtual recluses as far as media attention was concerned. Then, after the split between Waters and the rest of the group, both Waters and Gilmour were nudged into the spotlight to justify their respective positions. Waters, a man who hated even to have his photograph taken, suddenly had to contend with the role of high-profile soloist.
There may have been good reasons for this reluctance to become celebrity spokespeople. Roger Waters, for one, issued a perennial complaint that press interviews were tiresomely repetitive. He became reluctant to tell ill-prepared reporters how the group’s name was coined and other basic information — and who can blame him for that?
There was more to it however than simple reluctance to face the media. From an audience’s viewpoint, right from early days, there has been the feeling that a Floyd concert was a multi-faceted experience. It might be generated by a handful of musicians somewhere, sometimes out-of-sight, behind walls of speakers and amplifiers. All the same the listener, exposed to successive volleys of bizarre sound effects coming from all directions, often felt very conscious of being part of a multi-dimensional artistic collage in which coloured lights, sounds of nature, spacey electronic blips and even the audience itself was all part of the show. Add to that the cocktail of drugs — LSD, marijuana, hashish, heroin to mention a few — that might be involved in the audience’s appreciation.
If there is a recurring theme through Pink Floyd’s output it may rest on the solitude, even the alienation, of the individual. From Syd Barrett’s rapid mental disintegration in the late ’60s to their reflective moods of the ’80s, the group’s lyrics frequently explore the frontiers of introspection. The Wall, of course, is the now perennial story of the individual being suffocated by the rigid structure of the community at large.
Classic rock act that Pink Floyd is, the group’s signature sounds are often instantly recognizable. Individual songs like “Money”, from the album The Dark Side Of The Moon, have become so familiar from years of radio play that concert audiences erupt in excitement seconds after they start. Not only that but — in common with a select number of other rock acts — Pink Floyd is usually identifiable from any snippet of music in their repertoire. It’s the equivalent perhaps of a single gene incorporating an individual’s entire genetic make-up.
In addition, it is music that has aged well. While many rock trends quickly outlive their appeal, Pink Floyd songs bridge differences in age and cultural background. If rock performers prove able to play on through their golden years without becoming caricatures, these individuals will be among the ones to achieve that.
Under-appreciated in early years perhaps was the kind of chemistry between group members that is the foundation of great rock groups. The pairings are in some cases as polarized as the positive and negative ends of a magnet, and that just seems to accentuate their achievements. The names have become as familiar as pepper and salt — Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Through part of Floyd’s history, Gilmour and Waters provide just such an example. Gilmour’s soaring guitar solos and effects did much to dramatize lyric content dominated, through the late ’70s and early ’80s, by Waters.
Of course the balance of personalities in any creative organization is liable to shift and the Gilmour-Waters paradigm took time to emerge. Along with that came a veering away from surreal soundscapes towards a more orthodox rock emphasis on rhythm and song structure.
Even after Barrett’s departure, the balance of power within Floyd was far from static. Indeed one point of interest is how the emphasis in the music shifted from Wright and Mason to favour Gilmour and Waters. Floyd albums of the late ’60s and early ’70s are resplendent with Masonic timpani and Wrightful flourishes on organ, piano and other keyboards. Visually too, it was typically cymbals and drums and maybe a cockpit of keyboards that audiences would see on the stage, the dimensions of the equipment dwarfing Gilmour’s and Waters’ more modest arsenal of guitar and bass guitar.
One clear exception to this in terms of prominent sounds was the doleful introduction to Waters’ composition “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun” — surely one of the most recognized riffs in classic rock. All the same, Gilmour’s trademark tours-de-force were yet to come.
The eventual shift in Floyd’s leadership was not unrelated to force of personality. Mason and Wright were more laid back, and this half of Pink Floyd has tended to be downplayed as musical contributors. True, Mason’s name appears infrequently among song credits and Wright’s promising start as a writer soon became overshadowed by Waters. Nonetheless, prior to The Dark Side Of The Moon in particular, they made their presence felt. Mason went beyond the standard drum kit to colour Floyd material with cymbals, gongs and kettledrums; Wright’s gentle vocals, free-form embellishments and slow build-ups to keyboard climaxes were among the strongest elements of that period.
However, Waters came more and more to be regarded as the central figure in the group. Evidently he had felt it incumbent upon himself to fill Barrett’s shoes as the group’s main songwriter, and seemed intent on expanding that role. Gilmour, for his part, became the vital factor in Floyd’s viability when Waters left the band after the making of The Final Cut album of 1983. Gilmour’s determination to act as a foil to Waters ensured Pink Floyd continued to live, although the prospect of the two former colleagues dueling through media interviews was as distressing to some fans as similar disputes between rock’s leading lights had been in earlier years. The Lennon-McCartney rift comes to mind of course.
Like numerous English groups emerging on the rock scene of the mid 1960s, Pink Floyd had to move to London to make the big time. The group’s roots though were in Cambridge, a city of 100,000 some 60 miles to the north of the British capital. Three of the principal members — Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour — grew up there, and the group’s first manager, Peter Jenner, was a graduate of Cambridge University.
The city is famous, of course, for the university and the ancient buildings associated with it. But it is also a regional crossroads. As a good location for a river crossing, the settlement here started attracting traders and powerbrokers in pre-Roman times, and one can still recognize its historic importance as an urban oasis, surrounded as it is now by fertile fields and idyllic rural settings.
At one time Cambridge was on the edge of forest and the fens, a huge expanse of marshland dotted by inaccessible islands. For centuries it had a reputation as an inhospitable, mysterious region, and its inhabitants were considered to be insular and independent. In time most of the fens were drained and converted into farmland and sedate villages.
Cambridge itself has attracted an influx of hi-tech companies over the past decade or so. All the same, the flavour of that dreamy netherworld of the fens surfaces from time to time in Floyd’s repertoire. A good example is Waters’ “Grantchester Meadows”, from the Ummagumma album, a song named after a public area on the banks of the town’s historic thoroughfare, the River Cam.
On the face of it, Cambridge provided a relatively comfortable upbringing for the three future leading lights of Pink Floyd. All three came from middle class families. Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett, born in January 6th, 1946, was the son of a pathologist. The father of David Gilmour, born March 6th, 1946, was a professor of genetics and his mother a schoolteacher and film editor.
The parents of Roger Waters had also both been teachers. But, as many Floyd fans would subsequently learn through his songs on the album The Final Cut, Waters’ father Eric Fletcher Waters had been killed in the 1944 campaign at Anzio in Italy during the Second World War. Waters was born on September 9th, 1943, in the village of Great Bookham, Surrey, but grew up in Cambridge.
Friendship and musical interests developed gradually between the three. Growing up, they were part of a larger gathering of friends and acquaintances and apparently didn’t have a strong connection to each other. As in any locality, groups and their members came and went.
Barrett, following his own father’s death when he was 14, began to show a talent for writing whimsical songs. Geoff Mott and the Mottoes was the first of a succession of local groups that had the future Floyd star in its ranks.
According to one account, it was around this time that Barrett acquired his nickname. Apparently there was a jazz bass player named Sid Barrett in Cambridge. The name transferred to the nascent Floydian, with the spelling changed to ‘Syd’ to distinguish the two. Another explanation of the nickname is that ‘Syd’ derives from his much-favoured hallucinogen, acid.
Hovering around practice sessions as a non-playing spectator was Roger Waters, who reportedly was not born with musical talent and was considered by Floyd’s first manager, Peter Jenner, to be tone deaf.
David Gilmour, meanwhile, was developing by his late teens into a competent guitarist with a sense of ambition about where his talents might lead. When Gilmour and Barrett met at Cambridge College of Arts, after finishing high school, it was the former who gave tips to the latter. Gilmour would recall in later interviews how he had helped Barrett unravel guitar parts from Rolling Stones records and how they would play around with slide guitar techniques that both would develop to good effect with Pink Floyd.
Gilmour’s first major career move was with a local R&B-oriented group called Jokers Wild. Though their repertoire reportedly was mainly cover versions, the group attracted attention in influential places. A single — a cover version of American R&B duo Sam & Dave’s “You Don’t Know What I Know” — was scotched by the rush release in Britain of the original recording. During 1966 and 1967 Gilmour lived in France and Spain, playing with a variety of groups.
Gilmour’s musical goals and achievements of this period apparently far outstripped those of his future Floyd colleagues. While he was dedicating himself to music, supported by work as a male model on the side, Barrett and Waters went to London colleges to study art and architecture respectively. There Waters met a couple of fellow students, Richard William Wright and Nicholas Berkeley Mason.
Wright, born in London on July 28th, 1945, was already dedicated to music, specifically jazz. He had enrolled in an architectural course at Regent Street Polytechnic in London on the suggestion of a teacher but apparently without much devotion to the subject. He was the only member of the group with any formal musical training, having studied at London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music. He already played guitar and various keyboards, notably Hammond and Farfisa organs, as well as cello, and was also investigating the avant-garde electronics of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Mason, born January 27th 1945 in the central England city of Birmingham, would long suffer from a reputation as a barely-adequate drummer. His main claim to distinction when Waters met him was as son of a filmmaker and sports car collector.
It wasn’t long though before the three were making music under such names as the Architectural Abdabs and Sigma 6. By this time Waters had a guitar, and the group also included Rick Wright’s future wife, vocalist Juliette Gale. Waters was switched to bass guitar after the addition to the group of a student friend Bob Klose, whose abilities as a jazz guitarist generally outclassed his colleagues. Klose (whose name is sometimes printed as ‘Close’) didn’t stay long, reportedly unable to reconcile himself to Barrett’s freewheeling influence.
By late 1965 the initial Pink Floyd line-up was more or less in place. Barrett had joined Waters, Wright and Mason and contributed the band’s name. Pink Floyd was one of several names the nascent group tried, among them The T-Set and the Screaming Abdabs. Eventually they tried The Pink Floyd Sound, and then shortened the name.
Gilmour, still with Jokers Wild at that point, crossed paths with them fairly frequently when the two bands played on the same bill. But Gilmour’s relatively conservative tastes in music contrasted with what his future colleagues were playing. It was to be early 1968 before Gilmour, fresh from his overseas travels, would actually join Floyd to supplement Barrett’s crumbling presence.