In the beginning - well, there were two beginnings: one at Regent Street Polytechnic in 1965, where 3 architecture students, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright started doing the guitar, keyboard and drums thing with a brilliant but wayward Camberwell Art College kid called "Syd" - though his real name was Roger - Barrett. The other beginning happened at Cambridge more than 10 years earlier: Waters went to primary school with Barrett, who later strummed around with another local guitarist, David Gilmour. Out of these overlapping social nuclei emerged the 30 year phenomenon called PINK FLOYD.
The name, like most of the early music, was Syd's, a homage to two of his old blues heroes, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The idea was to combine bluesy, free form improvisations with the sort of weird lighting effects that a generation in thrall to hallucinogenic substances called "psychedelic". The FLOYD took their lighting cues though, not from the drugs, but from a lecturer at Regent Street Poly, Mike Leonard, who let them live and rehearse in his house in North London; Leonard, an audio-visual specialist, helped to organise their shows and considered himself a group member. The FLOYD had other ideas. "We treated Mike appallingly," Mason recalls, "Because we thought he was so old..."
"We started out like everybody else, playing the R'n'B classics, but after Syd joined the direction changed, which suited me because I didn't like R'n'B much. I was a jazz fan and I'd studied the piano. With Syd it became more improvised; and there was more room for my classical feel." Wright.
"The hippies at Joe Boyd's UFO club loved us. But outside London people hated it. They used to throw things. I think we were probably terrible, but we didn't quite know it." Mason.
By the end of 1966, PINK FLOYD were satin shirted, quadraphonic darlings of the London counter-culture. By the end of the following year they were budding pop stars: they'd had two top 20 singles, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, and a top 10 album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which they recorded at EMI's Abbey Road studio, while The Beatles made Sgt Pepper in the next room. But the quirky tunes with oddball lyrics they sang on Top Of The Pops bore increasingly little relation to the spontaneous, rambly jams they were prone to playing live.
Part of the reason for their increasing waywardness in concert was that their leader, Syd Barrett, was losing his mind. At first, nobody could be sure. In those days, acting inscrutably weird was part of a rock star's job, and such stunts as Syd's refusal to speak when interviewed on the Pat Boone Show, on the FLOYD'S first tour of America in the Autumn of 1967, sat comfortably enough with FLOYD'S underground reputation. But the frequency with which he de-tuned his guitar on stage, standing vacantly rattling his bottom E string while the others tried to get on with the job, suggested that Syd was gradually losing touch with counter-cultural correctness, and much else besides. Some blame his LSD intake; others pointed to deeper insecurities.
Whatever the cause of their leader's disintegration, by the end of 1967 the future of PINK FLOYD was looking uncertain. The group's managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King, made a desperate bid to salvage things, attempting to persuade the half of the group whom they considered to be the musical brains, Barrett and Wright, to form a breakaway band. But by early 1968, Barrett was out of it, and the FLOYD had a personnel crisis. A new manager, Steve O'Rourke, was appointed to maintain the group's identity. After Jeff Beck had briefly been considered as a replacement guitarist/front man, that job went to Barrett's former busking buddy, now a gigging rock musician himself, David Gilmour. For a few gigs the band played live as a quintet, an amicable but unsteady arrangement which they soon abandoned. By the summer of 1968, PINK FLOYD were into their second incarnation.
"The idea wasn't to kick Syd out of the band; we wanted something similar to what the Beach Boys were doing with Brian Wilson at the time, where we'd go out and play live and Syd would stay home and write." Mason.
"When I joined I remember thinking they were actually a bit of a shambles, and that I could knock them into shape, because I considered myself to be a superior musician. I loved the first album, but the early gigs were pretty interminable." Gilmour.
"It soon became Roger's 'let's make a show' against Dave's 'let's make music.'" Mason.
For the rest of the psychedelic 60's the FLOYD assumed the informal role of soundtrack specialists. As their own live shows took on the aspect of son et lumiere mini-spectaculars, they contributed to the score of Antonioni's movie Zabriskie Point and Barbet Schroeder's More. When man landed on the moon in 1969, BBC television invited FLOYD to noodle spacily along with NASA's images, live in the studio. "We realised early on that you can make music for film work without synching it to individual frames," says Mason, himself the son of a filmmaker. Away from the soundtrack circuit they released 3 albums of distinctly uneasy listening: A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968), whose long, atmospheric but tuneless title track gave their producer Norman (later 'Hurricane') Smith plenty to think about; Ummagumma (1969), part live album, part sequence of solo efforts which, as Mason points out, "really show that in this band the sum is greater than the parts." Then came Atom Heart Mother, an orchestral and choral collaboration with the avant garde electronic composer Ron Geesin, who taught the band how to do their own tape edits, and how to create complex echo effects using two tape recorders. A subsequent plan to record an album of 'music' made from hitting or dropping household objects was shelved, but an inquisitive interest in sound experiments and musique concrete has since become one of FLOYD'S trademarks. In particular, the piano note which Wright fed through his Leslie rotating speaker unit inspired their first really successful long piece, Echoes, one side of 1971's Meddle album. PINK FLOYD, the Financial Times concluded shortly afterwards, "now have the furthest frontiers of pop music to themselves."
"I remember Nick and Roger drawing A Saucerful Of Secrets as an architectural diagram, a dynamic form with peaks, troughs and moods but no music, and no story line. For years afterwards we used to get letters from people saying what they thought it meant." Gilmour.
"Meddle was the first real PINK FLOYD album. It set a tempo, a feel and a style that we liked, and it introduced the idea of the theme that can be returned to. It sounds a bit hamfisted now, but the concept thing I liked." Mason.
1972 was the FLOYD'S year. As well as touring Meddle and devising the music for a filmed performance, Live At Pompeii, they began work on an idea which turned into their most popular record and, with 28 million copies sold, the third biggest album of all time: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. The new work was provisionally titled Eclipse, and performed in concerts around Europe throughout the year: "it was initially about the pressures of real life - travel, money, madness - and then it broadened out a bit," Mason recalls. Dark Side, recorded at Abbey Road at the end of 1972, and released in the Spring of 1973, ushered in the era of the "concept album".
America, which had paid the FLOYD little serious heed before, now fell for them in a big way. The track Money was a hit single; its parent album took up residence in the Billboard top 200 chart for an unprecedented 15 years. With the larger audiences, the stage shows expanded into large-scale stadium events -more films, brighter lights, vast flying theatrical props, like the crashing aeroplane. The 'Hypgnosis' images on their album sleeves - created by another old friend from the Cambridge days, Storm Thorgerson - supplied a surreal commentary on the music, as before, but by now they also encapsulated the doctrine of band invisibility. The FLOYD weren't a group so much as an experience. With the world in thrall to Dark Side, they moved from being a big cult band to one of the cornerstones of rock culture.
"Dark Side was the first time when the music, the lyrics and the visual design all came together. And to an extent I think perhaps we were hoisted by the petard of its success. You have objectives, goals, desires and with Dark Side they were suddenly all achieved." Gilmour.
The next two FLOYD albums had their origins in a protracted rehearsal session in North London in 1974, during which 3 long pieces were sketched out. Two of these eventually appeared as Sheep and Dogs on the 1976 Animals album; the other, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, was used, at Waters' urging, as the basis for the next release, Wish You Were Here, another concept album. This time the subject was more overtly personal; an elegy for Syd Barrett, the initiating genius of the band who, after making a couple of patchy solo albums with the help of his former partners, had returned to Cambridge. None of the band had seen anything of Barrett for 5 years when they started work on Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road in May 1975.
"It was the weirdest coincidence. I walked into the studio at Abbey Road and Roger was at the desk working on Shine On, and I saw this guy sitting on the couch behind. Big, about 16 stone, bald. I didn't think anything of it, because strangers were always turning up in the studio in those days. And then it suddenly clicked. Syd. He kept getting up, brushing his teeth with a toothbrush he had in his pocket and sitting down again...." Wright.
Acceptance and adulation in rock's major league didn't agree with the group's lyricist and conceptual director, Roger Waters. PINK FLOYD concerts had, Waters felt, lost their intimacy and power to communicate. Their increasingly theatrical ambition - manifest in the 40 foot inflatable pig Mark Fisher designed to launch the Animals album - didn't seem to be engaging the audience's attention in the right way. A new generation of FLOYD kids wanted the hits, particularly the ones off Dark Side. Hearing them screaming for Money at a gig in Montreal's Olympic stadium at the end of the Animals tour in 1977, Waters lost his temper and spat into the audience. Later he channelled his frustration into a project which explored the relationship, or lack of one, with his audience. Thus began the biggest PINK FLOYD concept album to date, The Wall.
The circumstances of its recording reflected a sequence of misfortunes and personal disputes which overtook the band in the late 1970's. In 1978 the financial recklessness and fraud of their investment company, Norton Warburg, lost the FLOYD #2 million of saved income, money upon which they hadn't yet paid tax. To recoup this loss they decided to record their next album as tax exiles in the South of France. By now, though, the 4-way creative tension which had underwritten their previous successes was giving way to murkier conflict. Roger Waters was beginning to feel that PINK FLOYD was a one man band: his. Though his plan to record an album called The Pro's And Con's Of Hitchhiking was rejected after a group discussion, such discussions were becoming rarer and less amicable. One argument surrounded the dwindling musical input of keyboardist Rick Wright with an ultimatum: either he voluntarily left the band thereafter or The Wall tapes would never be delivered.
When the FLOYD went on the road with The Wall for a limited run of concerts in 1980, the epic scale of the most ambitiously theatrical concert the rock world had ever seen, masked a group suffering from a textbook case of "musical differences". The giant wall of cardboard bricks at the front was only one of several symbolic barriers up there on stage. Gilmour and Waters found it hard to agree about who should do, or had done, what. Wright was now a paid employee, and Mason's old friendship with Waters was not ageing all that gracefully either.
Fortunately, great rock music doesn't have to be - in fact seldom is - made by great friends. The Wall album sold 20 million copies worldwide and, in 1979, spawned the FLOYD'S other No. 1 hit single, the anti-authoritarian schoolkids anthem Another Brick In The Wall Part 2. The stage show, designed by the satirical cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, was subsequently made into a film by the director Alan Parker, with Bob Geldof starring as the celebrity maddened rock dictator, Pink.
"The Wall is a conceptually brilliant album with some very good music in it, although frankly I think the rest of us felt some of it wasn't quite up to standard. But we'd had disagreements like that before. Things had always been a bit rocky. We worked very well together but we were never the closest of friends." Gilmour.
By the early 80's, the group had virtually devolved into an association of solo artists, with Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright each pursuing individual projects. The decision to record a selection of Waters' material that hadn't made it onto The Wall and to release that as a PINK FLOYD album, The Final Cut, was probably one of the band's less inspired, and least unanimous decisions. "It was really Roger's solo album," says Mason. "The rest of us just sort of drifted into it." Waters engaged in some predictable arm wrestling at the mixing desk with his co-producer Gilmour, but despite rancour, The Final Cut became another No. 1 album in 1983.
Two years and one solo album (The Pro's And Con's Of Hitchhiking) later, Waters announced that he was leaving. When Gilmour and Mason decided, in 1986, that they would continue PINK FLOYD without him, Waters contacted his lawyers, claiming the name, which he had disowned, no longer had any validity. "There was a lot of legal posturing," says Gilmour, "But it never went to court." After initially threatening to put an injunction on any promoter who staged a PINK FLOYD concert, Waters backed off. The 210,000 tickets sold in Toronto within 3 hours, proved that the world still firmly believed in the PINK FLOYD experience. Though it attracted far less publicity than the threat of litigation, an agreement was reached in 1987 between Waters, Gilmour and Mason which forever put an end to the dispute over rights to the name.
"You can make a romantic, good thing out of a band split. I would have liked it so much if we could have had the type of arrangement Genesis have with Peter Gabriel, where we supported each other; so that if Roger came back and did, say Live Aid, we would play with him." Mason.
The 1987 album, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, was chiefly overseen by Gilmour, by his own admission the only one "obstinate and pig-headed enough" not to have been demoralised by the years of argument with Waters. The legal wrangles, coupled with a doubt within the record company as to whether the band could still cut it as they were - a duo plus friends - meant that the huge cost of the recording of the album and promotion of the tour had to be financed personally by Gilmour and Mason.
The fans never had any doubts. The FLOYD'S world tour grew into their longest and most successful outing ever: over a period of 4 years, 5.5 million people saw 200 shows, including one on a floating stage in Venice in the Summer of 1989. A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, and its live offshoot, Delicate Sound Of Thunder, sold over 11 million copies worldwide, bringing total sales of their albums to 140 million. This live set also attained the distinction of becoming the first rock album to get played in outer space, in November 1988, by the crew of the Soviet-French Soyuz-7 mission.
"I felt young again. There was a feeling, and Roger probably has to take some credit for this, that if I'm not prepared to risk all for the one thing I do, then there's something wrong, and maybe I should have stayed being an architect." Mason.
The album, THE DIVISION BELL, represented a return to those cooperative group principles and practices which went missing sometime in the late 1970's. At the beginning of 1993, Gilmour, Mason and Wright spent 2 weeks improvising together, gathering nearly 50 sketches for songs. These were then tidied into shape and recorded with producer Bob Ezrin on Gilmour's houseboat studio on the River Thames.
Courtesty Of EMI
