The Pink Floyd Base

Exploding on to the Swinging London scene at the height of flower power, the original Pink Floyd walked a tightrope between the chart action of their psychedelic singles and the superhip credibility of their free-form electronic freakouts. Then, almost as soon as theyd arrived, SYD BARRETT, their charismatic singer, lead guitarist and songwriter, suffered an LSD-induced total burnout. Most bands would have called it a day, but with the substitution of steady hand Dave Gilmour on guitar and vocals, and the subsequent ejection of Barrett into deep space, the Floyd carried on to become one of the biggest bands on the planet, endlessly recycling their private mythology of madness and loss. Despite a second crisis with the departure of Roger Waters, the lyricist and chief architect of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and WISH YOU WERE HERE, the band continues under Gilmours steady direction.

The Floyd story begins in early 1966 when Peter Jenner, a manager in search of a band, checked out an embryonic Pink Floyd performance at The Marquee Club in London. Impressed by the weird instrumental passages between their psychedelic versions of Louie Louie and Road Runner, he swiftly introduced himself and offered to make them bigger than The Beatles. It was an offer they could hardly refuse, and they quickly progressed from experimental freakouts in Notting Hill to playing the International Times benefit at the Roundhouse in December 1966, as the house band of Londons burgeoning underground scene.

The early Floyd were very much the creation of Syd Barrett. He was the frontman on vocals and lead guitar, he wrote all the songs, and he even invented their name, a compound of two of his favourite blues artists, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Barrett was an art-school student -- Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards) and Nick Mason (drums) had studied architecture -- and was keen on exploring the idea of music in colour. Floyd were way ahead of their time in integrating music with visuals, as well as in their introduction of avant-garde free-jazz elements into a rock context.

They forged a legend with their residency at the UFO Club in Londons Tottenham Court Road, where, cloaked by a dizzying light show, the Floyd stunned audiences with extended versions of their psychedelic anthems, Interstellar Overdrive and Astronomy Domine. But as well as entertaining the acidheads of the UFO, Syd also nursed ambitions to make it on to Top Of The Pops.

Early in 1967, Pink Floyd signed to EMI and released a debut single, Arnold Layne. Compressing all their hip weirdness into a crisp three-minute cut, it reached #20 in the UK charts, not bad for an underground art group. Meanwhile, back in Underground London, Pink Floyd were chosen to top the bill at the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, an all-nighter held on April 29 at Alexandra Palace. Having already played in Holland the same day, it is unlikely that the Floyd were at their most inspired, but with most of the 20,000 audience out of their heads on acid, nobody was disappointed. The real breakthrough, however, came the following month at the Games For May concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where punters were promised space-age relaxation for the climax of spring, with electronic compositions, colour and image projections, girls and the Pink Floyd. It was their first major solo presentation, and the first concert to feature sound in the round by using an extra pair of speakers at the back of the hall.

Games For May was also the title of a piece specially written for the event. With a new title and a bit of nip and tuck, this emerged as their second single See Emily Play. A UK Top 5 hit, it was one of the best British singles from the Summer Of Love and a superb taster for Pink Floyds debut album, THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, released in August 1967. One of the most original LPs of the 60s, it combined the innovative soundscapes of the groups avant-garde experimentation with the cream of Barretts eccentric but brilliant songcraft.

Sadly, though, the pressures of writing and recording, constant touring and wanton experimentation with LSD were taking their toll on Syds eggshell psyche. Dave Gilmour had noticed him acting strangely as early as the recording of See Emily Play in May. By autumn, he was freaking out with a vengeance. His long-awaited third single turned out to be the shambolic Apples & Oranges, his contributions to the second album (including the often-bootlegged Vegetable Man) were too disturbing to be used and his on-stage performance declined to playing the same note all evening. Worst of all was an abortive American tour, which had to be pulled after only a few dates due to Barretts worsening condition. His last major gig with the group was at Olympia that December; early in the New Year, David Gilmour was asked to join as second guitarist. There was a five-piece Floyd for a brief interval until Barrett was finally given the push, to begin his bizarre solo non-career.

As an old friend, Gilmour was the perfect choice to keep the group together, though at first his role was merely to play all Barretts parts and to help salvage the recording sessions for what was to become the Floyds second album. A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS (1968) turned out to be a surprisingly successful collection and, along with a confident performance at the Hyde Park Free Concert in June 1968, it did much to silence the critics who claimed that the Floyd were dead without Barrett.

After a couple of flop singles, the group decided to concentrate on weighty album material that would more accurately reflect the extended improvisations of their stage act. Perversely though, their first completely Barrettless work was MORE, a much underrated 1969 soundtrack album for French film director Barbet Schroeder. Banged out in only a week, it consisted of relaxed instrumentals, intercut with simple but atmospheric gems such as Cirrus Minor.

That years magnum opus, however, was UMMAGUMMA, a double album whose mystical-sounding title turned out to be a Cambridgeshire fenland euphemism for sex. One album was live, the other featured avant-garde solo compositions from each member of the group. The latter were not a great success, and from this point on the band started moving away from their underground pretensions towards a more conventional rock sound. The next three albums, ATOM HEART MOTHER, MEDDLE and OBSCURED BY CLOUDS (another Schroeder soundtrack), chart this progression clearly, though none has aged particularly well. Of the three, MEDDLE has the most to offer, with the Echoes suite boasting some moments of real power, and unfortunately an equal number of longueurs.

However, in 1973, all the searching for new directions finally came together with the release of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, one of the best-selling albums of all time. With its dominant themes of ageing, madness and death, the band had finally come up with something meaningful to hang their musical ideas on. It was an album so well integrated that it was hard to imagine any of the songs played without the context of the others.

There was a two-year wait for WISH YOU WERE HERE. Recording it was sheer torture and the band almost split under the pressure, but their efforts produced some of their strongest music, their most affecting lyrics and undoubtedly one of the most intriguing album sleeves ever. The key piece was the superb Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a lengthy tribute to Syd Barrett, whose spirit still seemed to haunt the band. Inspired by Gilmours melancholic guitar theme, Waters came up with some of his most poignant lines. The albums title said it all.

Once again, Pink Floyd lapsed into a creative torpor, only to re-emerge in 1977 with ANIMALS, perhaps best known for its sleeve picture of a flying pig over Battersea power station. Two of the tracks, Sheep and Dogs, were over three years old, being rewrites of songs rejected from WISH YOU WERE HERE, and although the album featured some stinging guitar work from Gilmour it lacked the thoroughgoing excellence of the previous two.

Animals came out at the height of punk, when Pink Floyd were generally reviled as dinosaur rockers, yet many of Waters lyrics expressed a bitterness and cynicism that should have been recognized by self-proclaimed nihilist punk groups. These strands were prominent in THE WALL (1979), a hopelessly ambitious album, concert tour and film project (directed by Alan Parker and starring Bob Geldof as the alienated central character), first inspired by Waters hatred of the whole stadium-rock concept. Self-indulgence is the word here, but the conceit of literally walling off the audience during the live performance was surprisingly effective.

During this period Roger Waters began to withdraw behind a wall of his own. He took over more and more control of the creative process, treating the others as glorified session musicians and allegedly engineering the departure of founder member Rick Wright. The next album, THE FINAL CUT, was subtitled, By Roger Waters, Performed By Pink Floyd. Like ANIMALS, it was largely made from reheated leftovers (in this case spare bricks from THE WALL), but this time the result was decidedly half-baked and brought about the bands final collapse.

In 1986, Roger Waters announced that he had left the band, assuming that the Pink Floyd would be finished without him. He had reckoned without the determination of Dave Gilmour, who decided to press ahead with Mason, a newly rehabilitated Rick Wright and an army of session musicians. Waters was furious and commenced a campaign of legal actions and slanging matches in the press, all to no avail. He had forgotten that, just like Barrett before him, he might have been the leader of the band, but to the public he was a distant, faceless figure on stage, half-hidden behind the dry ice, lights and inflatable pig. And, as Gilmour has pointed out, Waters might have created the concepts and lyrics, but Gilmour was behind most of the music.

The new Gilmour-led Floyd sounds infinitely more Floydian than Roger Waters dirge-like solo albums. But their first effort, A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON, showed that without Waters lyrical input the new Floyd were pretty toothless. They followed this up in 1988 with THE DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER, a rather uninspired live album, though a copy was taken by cosmonauts up to the Soviet Mir space station in 1988, thus justifying the Pink Floyds first in space T-shirt claim. Most disappointing of all was SHINE ON, an expensively priced box set that merely repackaged seven Floyd favourites plus a bonus CD of the early singles, which annoyingly remains unavailable separately.