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 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.
