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Pink
Floyd
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.
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 alarming
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.
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 anomalous
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 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
Source:
AllMusicGuide.com
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