Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd is a musician.
Formed in London in 1965 by Syd Barrett, Nick Mason on drums, Roger Waters and Richard Wright, Pink Floyd spent two years as a psychedelic singles band with an underground following, then spent the next twenty-five reinventing what an album could be asked to do. David Gilmour joined at the end of 1967. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is Barrett's record, whimsical and genuinely odd, and by A Saucerful of Secrets the following year the group is audibly being rebuilt around a different set of instincts.
What they were good at, once they found it, was patience. Nobody else in rock was as willing to let four minutes pass without an event. Meddle (1971) is where it clicks, a full album side handed to one piece that grows out of a single bass figure. The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) took that method and bolted it to plain, blunt lyrics about money, madness and time running out, which is why it sold to millions of people with no interest in progressive rock at all.
Then it turned inward and got angrier. Wish You Were Here (1975) is about absence and about the music business. Animals (1977) is contemptuous. The Wall (1979) is a stadium show about hating stadium shows, and The Final Cut (1983) is barely a band record at all. After that the centre of gravity shifts to Gilmour, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell are smoother, better played and much less argumentative. The Endless River (2014) closed the account as a largely instrumental farewell.
They hold a Polar Music Prize and a Grammy for a rock instrumental, which is a funny pair of honours for a band whose most famous record is mostly about anxiety.
Music (25)
- The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
- Wish You Were Here (1975)
- The Wall (1979)
- Animals (1977)
- Meddle (1971)
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
- Atom Heart Mother (1970)
- The Final Cut (1983)
- The Division Bell (1994)
- A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)
- A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)
- Ummagumma (1969)
- The Endless River (2014)
- Obscured by Clouds (1972)
- More (1969)
- p·u·l·s·e (1995)
- Live at Pompeii (1990)
- Relics (1971)
- Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd (2001)
- Is There Anybody out There? The Wall Live: 1980–1981 (2000)
- Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988)
- A Collection of Great Dance Songs (1981)
- Shine On (1992)
- The Dark Side of the Moon Live 1974 (1989)
- Works (1983)
Where to start with Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon is the obvious choice and the obvious choice is correct here: it is short, it is sequenced as one continuous piece, and it lays out the band's entire method in a single sitting.
Go to Wish You Were Here next. It is warmer and sadder, and most people who have lived with both end up preferring it. Animals is for anyone who finds the band too polite, being mostly long tracks of pure contempt. The Wall is the largest and the most exhausting, so save it rather than skip it.
Working backwards, Meddle is where the sound gets invented, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a different band entirely, closer to English nursery-rhyme surrealism than to anything that followed. Obscured by Clouds is the underrated one. The Endless River is for completists and The Final Cut is for arguments.
The essential albums
The run from 1971 to 1983, which is the band as almost everyone knows it. Dark Side is the obvious start, Wish You Were Here is the better record and it is about Syd Barrett, and Animals is the angriest.
The Barrett era and the early records
The first five years, which sound almost nothing like what came after. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is Barrett's album and is playful and strange, and the records that follow are the band working out what to do without him.
The late albums and the live records
The Gilmour-led years after Waters left, plus the live catalogue. The later studio records are smoother and less angry, and Live at Pompeii, filmed in an empty Roman amphitheatre, is the best document of the early band.