Alistair K. Nye, Music 1306 Section 22148

Pink Floyd

Forney, Kristine and Joseph Machlis. The Enjoyment of Music, 11th Edition / Shorter Version, Pg. 377

“The British group Pink Floyd has also exhibited great longevity: their 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, with its ageless themes of madness and death, remained on the Top-200 charts for a record 751 weeks. Their operatic, two-album concept-piece, The Wall (1980) ensured them a place in the annals of rock. Both Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead helped to spawn a new generation of improvisational jam bands and psychedelic trance music in the 1990s.”

Moore, Allan F.
Encyclopedia of Popular Music

The British rock band Pink Floyd was formed in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Rick Wright. They worked on several albums and were a leading force in the psychedelia movement and active participants in the counter culture of the 1960’s. They first achieved popular success with the album Atom Heart Mother released in 1970. The album was a combination of acoustic and choral songs and showed something of the style they would ultimately become most famous and recognizable for. The band would experiment with various sounds until they settled upon one that fit them and the time in which they lived.

Pink Floyd had gone through a lineup change in ’68 and had replaced Syd Barrett with Dave Gilmour, who would provide the band with the slow, mournful and sometimes haunting guitar work that would prove to be their signature sound. In addition Roger Waters had taken over much of the song writing for the band from Barrett, who was incapable because of constant and excessive drug use. In 1973 Pink Floyd released what would become their most famous and possibly, most treasured work. It would sell more than 40 million copies and provide them with a new audience, the U.S. After its release the band continued to write, however none of their albums would sell as well or be quite as popular. The Encyclopedia of Popular Music says this about them:
“Pink Floyd’s festering talent finally exploded in 1973 with Dark Side Of The Moon. It marked the arrival of Waters as an important lyricist and Gilmour as a guitar hero. Brilliantly produced - with a sharp awareness of stereo effects - the album became one of the biggest selling records of all time, currently in excess of 40 million copies. Its astonishing run on the BILLBOARD chart spanned well over a decade (it was the first of the band’s American chart-toppers), finally ending its initial chart sojourn in July 1988. It later returned to the charts to notch up a few more million sales.”

Sadly the band could not keep the differences between them from destroying the group and laying waste to the confidence of the band members in each other and themselves. In the early 1980’s the band was rife with internal fighting and conflict, Waters wanted to move the band one way and Gilmour believed that his contributions to their rock opera The Wall had not been recognized. The band released The Final Cut and then the members parted ways, most going into solo careers, none of them as successful as Pink Floyd.

Some have called the guitar solo from Comfortably Numb (The Wall, 1979) the most iconic and most famous solo ever written. Pink Floyd released one of the highest selling records of all time, inspired a generation and then fell apart. But in spite of this their music is timeless, it tells stories and speaks of things which we can all relate to, they really are one of the greatest rock bands of all time.