Pink Floyd Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Pink Floyd is a British psychedelic rock band famous for its songwriting, harmonic classical rock compositions, bombastic style and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd is one of rock's most successful acts, ranking seventh in number of albums sold worldwide.
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2 Live performances 3 Recent activity 4 Discography 5 Bibliography 6 Tribute Bands 7 See also 8 External links |
Pink Floyd formed in 1964 from an earlier band whose names included Sigma 6, T-Set, Megadeaths, The Screaming Abdabs, The Architectural Abdabs, and The Abdabs. The band was again renamed The Pink Floyd Sound and then, around the time of their first album release, simply The Pink Floyd (after two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). The definite article was simply dropped a couple of albums later.
Pink Floyd originally consisted of Bob Klose (lead guitar), Syd Barrett (vocals, rhythm guitar), Richard Wright (keyboardss, vocals), Roger Waters (bass, vocals) and Nick Mason (drums). They covereded rhythm and blues staples such as "Louie, Louie". As Barrett started writing tunes more influenced by American surf music, psychedelic rock, and British whimsy, humour and literature, the heavily jazz-oriented Klose departed and left a rather stable foursome. The band formed Blackhill Enterprises, a six-way business partnership with their managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King.
In 1968, guitarist David Gilmour joined the band to carry out the playing and singing duties of Barrett, whose mental health was deteriorating, but nevertheless was intended to remain as the band's figurehead and songwriter. With Barrett's behaviour becoming less and less predictable, the band's live shows became increasingly ramshackle until, eventually, the other band members simply stopped taking him to the concerts.
Once Barrett's departure was formalised, Jenner and King decided to remain with him, and the six-way Blackhill partnership was dissolved.
Whilst Barrett had written the bulk of the first record, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), he contributed little to the second A Saucerful of Secrets (1968).
After the film soundtrack More, the next record, the double album Ummagumma (part recorded at Mothers Rock Club, Birmingham, and in Manchester in 1969), was a mix of live recordings and unchecked studio experimentation by the band members, with each recording half a side of vinyl as a solo project (Mason's wife makes an uncredited contribution as a flautist).
1970's Atom Heart Mother, a UK number one album, is somewhat dated and has been described by Gilmour as the sound of a band "blundering about in the dark". The title piece owes much to orchestration by Ron Geesin.
The band's sound was considerably more focused on Meddle (1971), with the 23-minute epic "Echoes" (in this track the band used the Zinovieff's VCS3 synth for the first time) . This album also included the atmospheric "One of These Days" (a concert classic, with a distorted, disembodied one-line vocal, "One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces") and the pop-jazz stylings of "San Tropez". Their taste for experimentation was expressed on "Seamus" (earlier, "Mademoiselle Nobs"), a pure-blues number featuring lead vocals by a Russian wolfhound.
A less-well-known album, Obscured By Clouds, was released in 1972, as the soundtrack for the film "La Vallee" and was the band's first US Top 50 album.
Despite their never having been a hit-single-driven group, their massively successful 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon, featured a US number Top 20 track ("Money"), and more importantly remained in the top 100 for over a decade, breaking many records on the way, and making it one of the top selling albums of all time. Dark Side of the Moon was a concept album dealing with themes of insanity, neurosis and fame which, due to the use of new 16-track recording equipment at Abbey Road Studios and the investment of an enormous amount of time by engineer Alan Parsons, set new standards for sound fidelity.
Dark Side of the Moon and the three following albums (Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall) are held up by some fans as the peak of Pink Floyd's career. The first of those, Wish You Were Here, released in 1975, is a theme album about absence. "Wish You Were Here" included the critically-acclaimed, mainly instrumental nine part "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", which was a tribute to Barrett in which the lyrics deal explicitly with the aftermath of his breakdown and the classic title track.
By 1977, and the release of Animals, the band's music came under increasing criticism from some quarters in the new punk rock sphere as being too flabby and pretentious, having lost its way from the simplicity of early rock and roll. Animals contained more lengthy songs tied to a theme, taken in part from George Orwell's Animal Farm, which used pigs, dogs and sheep as metaphors for contemporary society. Animals was a lot more guitar-driven than the previous albums and was the start of the tensions between Waters and Wright.
1979's epic rock opera, The Wall, conceived mainly by Waters, gave Pink Floyd renewed acclaim and another hit single with their foray into critical pedagogy - "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II." It also included "Comfortably Numb" which, though never released as a single became a cornerstone of AOR and classic-rock radio playlists and is today one of the group's best-known songs. It is also the only song on Pink Floyd's first four concept albums not to segue at either the beginning or end. The album also became a vastly expensive and money-losing tour/stage show although the album's sales got the band out of the financial hole they were in. During this time, Waters increased his artistic influence and leadership of the band, prompting frequent conflicts with the other members and even firing Wright from the band, although Wright returned, on a fixed wage, for the album's few live concerts. Ironically, he was the only one of Pink Floyd to make any money from the "Wall" shows, the rest having to cover the excessive costs. The album was co-produced by Bob Ezrin, a friend of Waters who shared songwriting credits on "The Trial" whom then was kicked out of the Floyd camp by Waters after Ezrin inadvertently talked about the album to a journalist relative.
The Wall remained on best-selling-album lists for 14 years. A film starring Boomtown Rats founder Bob Geldof was adapted from it in 1982, written by Waters and directed by Alan Parker, and featuring striking animation by noted British cartoonist and long- time Floyd collaborator, Gerald Scarfe. The creation of the film saw the deterioration of the Waters/Gilmour relationship as Waters came to completely dominate the band.
1983 saw the release of The Final Cut. Even darker in tone than The Wall, this album re-examined many of the themes of that album while also addressing then-current events, including Waters' anger at Britain's participation in the Falklands War ("The Fletcher Memorial Home") and cynicism and fear of nuclear war ("Two Suns in the Sunset"). Wright's absence meant this album lacked the keyboard effects seen in previous Floyd works. Though released as a Pink Floyd album, the project was clearly dominated by Waters, and became a prototype in sound and form for later Waters solo projects. Only moderately successful by Floyd standards, the album yielded only one rock radio hit, "Not Now John". The arguing between Waters and Gilmour by this stage was rumoured to be so bad that they were never seen in the recording studio simultaneously and there was no tour and the band unofficially disbanded in 1983.
After The Final Cut, the band members went their separate ways, each releasing solo albums, until 1987, when Gilmour began to revive the band, with Nick Mason also involved. A bitter legal dispute with Roger Waters (who left the band in 1985) ensued, but Gilmour and Mason achieved the legal right to release an album as Pink Floyd (Waters, however, gained the rights to some traditional Pink Floyd imagery, including almost all of The Wall props and characters and all of the rights to "The Final Cut"). Richard Wright re-joined the duo during the recording sessions of A Momentary Lapse of Reason as a session musician, and was paid a weekly salary. By any account, Wright was reinstated as a full-fledged member of the band for the 1994 release of The Division Bell and its subsequent tour.
All of the members of Pink Floyd have released solo albums which have met with varying degrees of commercial and critical success. Waters' Amused To Death was especially praised.
Pink Floyd are renowned for their lavish stage shows, combining over-the-top visual experiences with their music to create a show in which the artists themselves are almost secondary. In their early days, Pink Floyd were among the first bands to use a dedicated traveling light show in conjunction with their performances, projecting slides, film clips, and psychedelic patterns onto a large circular screen. Later, additional special effects were added to the show, including lasers, pyrotechnics, and oversized balloons (notably a giant pig balloon which floated over the audience during performances of "Pigs" from the Animals album.
The lavish stage shows were also the basis for Douglas Adams' fictional rock group "Disaster Area" (creators of the loudest noise in the universe, and making use of solar-flares in their stage show) in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Douglas Adams was a personal friend of David Gilmour, and made a one-off guest appearance, on guitar, on The Division Bell tour.
Pink Floyd have not released any new studio material since 1994's The Division Bell, and while they have not officially broken up, neither is there any sign of a new album. The only band activity since The Division Bell have been the 1995 live album PULSE, a live version of The Wall, compiled from their 1980 and 1981 concerts, entitled Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 2000; a two-disc set of their greatest hits called Echoes, in 2001, the 30th Anniversary Hybrid SACD reissue of "The Dark Side of the Moon" (2003) and a re-release of The Final Cut with the single "When the Tigers Broke Free" added (2004). Although rumours are spreading that the threesome Floyd have returned to the studio to make new material, there is no official news to backup any claims on this to date. Due to the fact the band members have gone on to work on various projects(and drummer Nick Mason has written a book on his days with the band) and the death of longtime manager Steve O' Rourke on October 30, 2003, the future of the band is uncertain.
Echoes caused some controversy because, on the album, songs segue into each other continuously in a different order than on their original albums and have sometimes had substantial parts removed from them; parts of the songs "Echoes", "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Marooned" have been removed.
David Gilmour released a solo concert DVD, called David Gilmour in Concert, released in November of 2002 compiled from shows from June 22, 2001 and January 17, 2002 from The Royal Festival Hall in London. Rick Wright makes a guest appearance.
A multitude of tribute bands for Pink Floyd appeared in the 1990s. They include:
Also Colonel Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade recorded a complete live performance of the Pink Floyd classic album, Animals entitled Live Frogs Set 2 [1]
This is an Article on Pink Floyd. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Pink Floyd History
Live performances
Pink Floyd mounted their most elaborate stage show in conjunction with the tour of The Wall, in which a band of session musicians played the first song, wearing rubber face masks (proving successfully that the members of the band were not known for their individual personalities). Later in the show, a huge wall was built between the audience and the band, being demolished, explosively, as the finale. This show was recreated (by Waters) and a number of guest artists (including Bryan Adams, The Scorpions, and Van Morrison) assembled around Roger Waters in 1990 amid the ruins of the Berlin Wall.Recent activity
Discography
In the mid-Nineties, several people (supposedly including Trent Reznor and Jim Cauty of the KLF) released bootleg trance remixes of More, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Obscured By Clouds, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here (which was later reissued), Animals, The Wall, A Collection of Great Dance Songs, The Final Cut, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and The Division Bell.Unreleased Material
Bibliography
Tribute Bands
See also
External links