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PR E S E N T S
PINK FLOYD ALBUM BY ALBUM: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY
INTERVIEWS
STORIES FROM STUDIO & STAGE
The making of
SIXTH EDITION
Digital Edition
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Dark Side Of The Moon
ALBUM ART EXPLAINED
50 YEARS OF MUSIC
Music Milestones The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn 8
Ummagumma review
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Space rock, fairy tales and a one-way ticket back to the fears of childhood. 10
Follow the Piper
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Riding high on the 60's Zeitgeist, Pink Floyd’s debut album captured the psychedelic spirit of the era with Syd Barrett leading the charge.
A Saucerful Of Secrets
Atom Heart Mother
Floyd say goodbye to Syd’s psychedelic excesses with a more spacious sound.
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Syd Barrett’s profound problems and the band’s subsequent sense of chaos and unease make for an intriguing, if disjointed, second album.
Meddle 44
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With Syd gone, Pink Floyd’s third album was a difficult and confounding affair. the making of more
Contents 6
review
Psychedelic blues rock, a hint of jazz, Water’s ‘happy’ moment and a song dedicated to a dog.
review
Floyd’s first full commission for a soundtrack album and it gave them room to explore their new sound.
Heart of the matter
Fractious horn players, a Dadaist collaborator and the Workers Revolutionary Party – welcome to one of Floyd’s most impenetrable albums.
A Time of Transition
More
review
Hard-to-place, but an important role in Floyd’s musical journey.
review
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BAND OF FOUR
With Syd Barrett now firmly planted in the band’s past, the quartet dip their toe into the world of avant garde.
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review
Floyd re-emerge with an experimental album divided into four sections.
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FINDING FOCUS
Shaking off the hangover of the Syd Barrett era, the band discovered their classic sound and set the controls for the stadium league.
pink floyd Obscured By Clouds
Animals
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review
A coherent, underrated album to accompany the film La Vallée. 52
Into La Vallée
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LET THERE BE DARK
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Wish You Were Here
Floyd’s album about absence still sounds, to this day, very present. A triumph yet it could so easily have been a last hurrah for the band.
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Fond farewell
The final album. Yet its roots lie in 20-plus year-old recordings.
10 Essential Tracks
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review
Or the final straw? What emerges when the wall comes tumbling down?
POSTCARD FROM THE EDGE
review
A tribute to the late Richard Wright and Floyd's “farewell album”.
The Final Cut
review
The follow-up to Dark Side more than satisfied their salivating, awaiting fans.
The Endless River 107
BACK TO THE WALL
Donald Trump is not the first person to think a wall is the answer. Pink Floyd got there first…
RINGING THE CHANGES
With the litigious wrangles of its predecessor behind them, Pink Floyd employ a raft of former compadres to record their 14th studio album
review
A darker side and the end of an era for the classic quartet.
Everything changed dramatically with a masterpiece as timeless as it is sublime.
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CALL OF THE WILD
review
A lighter, more widescreen production… Versus a lack of lyrical cohesion.
The Wall review
A perfectly-formed slice of Floyd as the quartet reach their peak.
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100
A savage concept piece that tore strips off the social order of 1970s Britain – and hastened the band’s demise…
The Dark Side Of The Moon
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review
Punk is raging and so is Roger Waters, as Floyd adapt Orwell and get venomous.
A band in the middle of a project that would launch them into the musical stratosphere, and beyond.
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The Division Bell
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What if you only could only take 10 tracks with you…
END OF AN ERA
Roger Waters’ paean to his father The Final Cut remains the most controversial in the band’s canon.
A Momentary Lapse Of Reason 94
review
Gilmour’s baby and the late-period release that the rock press loves to hate. 96
An act of defiance
History has not been kind to it but the first Floyd album without Waters is not without its merits.
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The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
MUSIC MILESTONES
By Will Simpson
Riding high on the 60s Zeitgeist, Pink Floyd’s debut album captured the psychedelic spirit of the era with Syd Barrett leading the charge.
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Photo: pink floyd music
Follow The Piper
pink floyd
O
ne remarkable aspect about the late 60s psychedelic explosion was how quickly it all happened. 1966 was a key year when a monochrome music scene almost overnight become flushed with colour. At the centre of this sudden explosion was a group of architecture and art students
“I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing, Psychedelia didn’t interest me” Norman Smith that had started the year playing blues as the Pink Floyd Sound but would evolve into the toast of underground London, dragging along an entire subculture in their wake. Like punk 10 years later, others would be left playing catch-up to the next big thing.
Leaders In Sound EMI, as the most prestigious British label, understandably wanted to nab the UK leaders of psychedelia. There was a brief dalliance with Polydor but both band and management chose EMI after their booking agent Bryan Morrison received a letter from the label’s in-house producer Norman Smith intimating that he was looking for bands to sign. The deal was concluded for an advance of £5,000
(not much these days, but in the 60s EMI was not used to giving advances to unknown groups). When Pink Floyd (the ‘Sound’ had been jettisoned at some point during 1966) entered the studio with Smith to start recording their debut album in February 1967, it was as the leaders of an underground movement that needed to be interpreted to mainstream pop consumers. There was a lot at stake. Smith and Floyd made for unlikely bedfellows. Twenty years older than his charges, Smith was an ex-RAF man who had engineered The Beatles records up to Rubber Soul. “I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the sort of music they were playing,” he later confessed. “Psychedelia didn’t interest me.” Smith was a jazz head – one of his
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A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
MUSIC MILESTONES
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PINK FLOYD
By Roy Delaney
A Time Of Transition
PHOTO: PINK FLOYD MUSIC LTD
Syd Barrett’s profound problems and the band’s subsequent sense of chaos and unease make for an intriguing, if disjointed, second album.
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PHOTO: GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
MORE
MUSIC MILESTONES
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PINK FLOYD
By Roy Delaney
The Making Of More Although they’d dabbled in film music before, this was the Floyd’s first full commission for a soundtrack album and it gave them room to explore their new sound.
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s one of the most talked about up-and-coming bands of their generation, beloved by both fans and critics alike, Pink Floyd had by 1969 also managed to crossover into the pop charts, despite the slightly complicated nature of their music. Things had been going ridiculously well for the few short years of their existence. But then disaster struck as they had to say farewell to arguably the
March 1 1971: The band strike a group pose during an Australian tour
most bankable member of the band for his increasingly erratic behaviour. Syd Barrett was the man who for most of their listenership was Pink Floyd. What should be their next move? How should they forge the next creative chapter of their musical journey without alienating existing fans and staying true to their unique creative vision. The answer displayed a shrewdness of mind that few expected from the band: record a soundtrack album. Now while this may have been disappointing for some of their more ardent fans who wanted to hear a few more songs in the vein of Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, it was smart. This way the new line-up would get the space to be creative with their sound, without the pressure that a 60s band
would normally be under for their difficult third album. At least that was the theory and it almost worked.
A LITTLE BIT MORE That album was More. Or to give it its grander official title, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack From The Film More. Released on 13 June 1969, it came a year after their troubled second album A Saucerful Of Secrets, and getting on for 18 months after they decided not to pick Syd up for that fateful gig in Southampton. With their new-found freedom from Syd Barrett’s unpredictability, the band clearly now had the space to work on developing their sound, and this shows throughout this occasionally disjointed but largely underrated album.
“WITH NEW-FOUND FREEDOM FROM SYD BARRETT’S UNPREDICTABILITY, THE BAND HAD SPACE TO WORK ON DEVELOPING THEIR SOUND” 25
MUSIC MILESTONES
By Martyn Lester
ATOM HEART MOTHER
Heart Of The Matter Fractious horn players, a Dadaist collaborator and the Workers Revolutionary Party – just a few of the elements involved in the convoluted creation of one of Floyd’s most impenetrable albums.
P
ink Floyd were an odd band in many ways. Among their idiosyncrasies was their fairly frequent habit of touring material and putting it on record later. Some groups of the era would, of course, pack their first album with songs they’d been performing in pubs, clubs and rainy fields while waiting to be ‘discovered’. But after that, most would ‘lay down’ an album and then tour to promote it. Floyd liked to try out new material on tour, fiddle with it in studio sessions, take it back on the road, hone it onstage and finally turn it into an album track. This gestation process was visible at its most elephantine in 1974 when the group regularly played two songs that would not appear on disc until Animals, three years later. Ditto, Side one of Atom Heart Mother also began life in this fashion.
‘THE EPIC’ Before we move forwards, a caveat. Although AHM is one of five Floyd
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albums to have the same name as one of its components, it’s the only one where they are regularly discussed at cross-purposes. So to avoid such confusion, we’ll be referring to one as ‘the album’ and the other as The Epic – for reasons which will all become clearer. Floyd began performing The Epic at least as early as January 1970 – usually introducing it as The Amazing Pudding. In March of that year, the group took the piece into studio sessions and laid down a rhythm track with the odd organ overdub and a couple of guitar solos. Pretty soon, though, they reached an impasse. While EMI were breathing down their necks to cut an album, they were also booked to tour the US in April, record soundtrack
pieces for the Antonioni movie Zabriskie Point, help Syd Barrett with a solo album… The solution, they decided, was to call in Ron Geesin. Geesin was an eccentric. Raised in Scotland by three-quarters English parents, Geesin never seems to have felt that he fitted in. He learned harmonica, then banjo and then, like the boy who ran away to the circus, he fled south as the hired-on-the-spot new pianist in a travelling jazz band that just happened to be passing through town. After four years with the Original Downtown Syncopators, Geesin had by 1968 transformed into an at least partly Dadaist one-man show, appearing on a number of bills with the Pink Floyd but
“FLOYD BEGAN PERFORMING THE EPIC AS EARLY AS JANUARY 1970, INTRODUCING IT AS THE AMAZING PUDDING”
PHOTO: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GET T Y IMAGES
PINK FLOYD
Pink Floyd in 1970 welcoming in a new decade with a new album, Atom Heart Mother
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Obscured By Clouds
music milestones
By Roy Delaney
Into La Vallée Three years after Pink Floyd’s soundtrack for More, director Barbet Schroeder approached the band for another. This time he found a band in the middle of a project that would launch them into the musical stratosphere, and beyond.
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pink floyd Pink Floyd on the brink of mega stardom. (From left) Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, Dave Gilmour
Photo: redferns/get t y images
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hen French-based film director Barbet Schroeder wanted somebody to compose a soundtrack for his second feature-length movie, his first impulse was to track down the people responsible for the music from his first. But three years after his debut, More, his original scorers had grown from the slightly shell-shocked post-Syd experimentalists into a confident group of men at the height of their creative powers. It showed in the way that the music was produced and the way things turned out in its immediate aftermath. This was 1972 and Pink Floyd were smack in the middle of
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MUSIC MILESTONES
By Jeff Hudson
The Dark Side Of The Moon
Let There Be Dark
Before 1973, Pink Floyd’s highest album position in the US charts was 55 for Atom Heart Mother and they never sold more than 250,000 copies of that album. That all changed dramatically with The Dark Side Of The Moon, a masterpiece as timeless as it is sublime.
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adness, loneliness and the passage of time are just a few of the themes dealt with on The Dark Side Of The Moon, a compelling masterpiece that remains as potent and enduring today as the day it was first released. The profound mental problems experienced by the band’s former creative force Syd Barrett fuelled Roger Waters’ idea for an album that dealt with the things that “make people mad” , while focusing on the pressures resulting from the band’s arduous lifestyle. Tellingly, Pink Floyd’s greatest album, was the last record on which the band collaborated on equal terms with each other. “It felt like the whole band were working together,” recalled Rick Wright, “It was a creative time. We were all very… open.” Readers too young to remember the original release of The Dark Side Of The Moon in March 1973 will still be aware of it. Chances are, they’ll probably even own it. It’s that kind of album. Listen to the pulsing heartbeat running from
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the intro of Speak To Me through to the fade-out of Eclipse. This is a record with a life of its own. This, after all, is the album that has sold 45 million copies, spent an absurd 741 weeks in the US Billboard charts without a break and was owned by every one-in-five households in the UK. This is the first album to be played in space. This is the biggest-selling album by a British band. Ever. For musicians, their fans, and the industry itself, things would never be the same after 24 March 1973.
Creation Of A Classic Despite half the band (Waters, Mason and, for a few terms, Wright) being
architecture students, there was a looseness to the way the Floyd did business in those early days that belies the sluggish, corporate-like moves the band made in subsequent years. In truth, there was no masterplan. As perfect as many people think it is, Dark Side did not mark the apogee of some meticulously plotted career path. Pre-1973, they had never sold more than 250,000 copies of any album or reached higher in the US charts than Atom Heart Mother’s lowly 55, but that never seemed to be a problem, at least not to the band. Dark Side was not a cynical stab at commercial salvation. The reality is that the album’s creation
“It felt like the whole band were working together. It was a creative time. We were all very… open” Rick Wright
pink floyd
Photo: nik wheeler/Sygma via Get t y Images
Roger Waters performs The Dark Side Of The Moon on stage during a concert in France
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MUSIC MILESTONES By Jeff Hudson
THE FINAL CUT
End Of An Era Roger Waters’ paean to his father – and very nearly the final album from Pink Floyd – The Final Cut remains the most controversial in the band’s canon.
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y 1982 Pink Floyd was no longer a single entity but rather one man in charge with a raggle taggle band of disenchanted musicians. On paper, David Gilmour and Nick Mason were every bit Roger Waters’ equal. It just didn’t feel like it. The Wall was widely received as Waters’ masterpiece. When talk of a new Floyd album began in 1982, the band met to discuss ideas. Gilmour saw it as an opportunity to discuss what the band wanted to do next, planning to work with Waters on writing new songs together. Waters had other ideas. Tons
PINK FLOYD
of them, in fact. Just as he’d done with The Wall, he presented Gilmour and Mason with a demo tape of an album already largely conceived and written. Perhaps lazily, Gilmour has since admitted, he and Mason decided to go with Waters’ songs because they were there. The only problem was, hadn’t they heard a lot of them before?
MORE BRICKS? Roger Waters might have taken the majority of writing credits on The Wall, but that didn’t mean he always got his own way. The band was, at least on paper, still a democracy. As such, If
Wright, Mason and Gilmour voted against doing something then Waters had little option but to agree. And that rankled. As the driving force behind the entire project Waters felt his vision should have been left untempered, especially by three men whose only contributions were, he felt, to every so often say ‘no’. But say ‘no’ they did, several times. When The Tigers Broke Free is a case in point. Originally written for inclusion on The Wall, it was vetoed by the rest of the band as ‘too personal’. The Hero’s Return, One Of The Few, Your Possible Pasts and The Final Cut
were all passed on as well. In response Waters decided that Alan Parker’s planned motion picture of The Wall should have a soundtrack of new songs – called Spare Bricks – including those excluded from the original album. After More and Zabriskie Point, it certainly wouldn’t be their weirdest film gig. In the event this didn’t materialise with just one of the songs, When The Tigers Broke Free, making the transition. A soundtrack is one thing. A proper Pink Floyd album is quite another. Gilmour, for one, could not see the value in rehashing old material on a
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PHOTO: ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS/GET T Y IMAGES
“PINK FLOYD WAS NOT A SINGLE ENTITY BUT ONE MAN IN CHARGE WITH A RAGGLE-TAGGLE BAND OF DISENCHANTED MUSICIANS”
MUSIC MILESTONES
Ringing The Changes By David Mead
With the litigious wrangles of its predecessor behind them, Pink Floyd employ a raft of former compadres to record their 14th studio album.
the division bell
Live at Earl’s Court, London, the band show off the amazing stage set of The Division Bell tour
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F
ree at last from the legal entanglements that had been reverberating during the recording and release of 1987’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, Gilmour, Mason and Wright decided to go ‘old school’ for their 14th release and merely meet together in the studio and jam, and see what came from it. These first tentative sessions began in the early part of 1993 at Britannia Row Studios, featuring the trio feeling their way through some instrumental ideas, extending and modelling them as they had done in the past. Still shell-shocked from Roger Waters’ departure and aware of the acrimony that existed in that quarter, observers relate that these initial sessions left the band unsure that they actually had anything to say musically. With the bass chair empty, it was decided to call upon the services of touring stalwart – and boyfriend to Wright’s daughter Gala – Guy Pratt to fill this most obvious void. The sessions continued and gradually songs began to form and it is from this period
that a lot of the band’s swansong album The Endless River is drawn.
Back in the studio The recording sessions were split between Gilmour’s riverboat Astoria, Britannia Row, Abbey Road, Metropolis and the Creek Recording Studio. As the music solidified, other players were called in along the way. Some were chosen from the ranks of the previous tour, including Tim Renwick on guitar and Dick Parry on saxophone (a long-serving Floyd auxiliary having played on Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, and a former bandmate of Gilmour’s during his Jokers Wild days). Extra hands were also summoned to the sessions in the form of Jon Carin and (producer) Bob Ezrin on keyboards, Gary Wallis on percussion and a host of backing vocalists, including Sam Brown, daughter of British rock’n’roller Joe. One problem remained: that of lyrics. None of the surviving members of Floyd felt they could fill the vacuum left by Waters, whose snarling and
sometimes cynical lyricism had adorned much of their previous and, there’s no doubt, finest work. After much consideration, lyrical content was to be provided largely by Gilmour’s soon-to-be wife, journalist Polly Samson and a theme began to emerge. Themes had always played an important part of Floyd’s back catalogue and here it was communication with songs like What Do You Want From Me, Poles Apart and A Great Day For Freedom, a nod towards the felling of The Berlin Wall in 1989. For the track Keep Talking the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking can be heard extolling the virtues of communication. This sample was taken from a TV advert for BT, Gilmour having thought that it framed the sentiments of both the song and the new album’s general theme perfectly. Another sound sampled by the band includes that which is heard at the beginning of The Division Bell’s opening track, Cluster One. What sounds a little like radio static is, in fact, a recording of the solar wind
“THREE STAGES WERE built at a cost of £3M to leapfrog each other as the band Ploughed its way across america and europe”
Photo: Mick Hutson/Redferns
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