Johnny Rotten's homemade "I Hate Pink Floyd" shirt was a great piece of merchandizing, but the once and future John Lydon didn't believe it. An acolyte of Hawkwind, Kosmische Musik, and weed, the man ended up making albums with Steve Vai and Ginger Baker. He was taking the piss on an easy target, despite Pink Floyd's output being marked by depression and madness, a far cry from the hippie dippy worlds created by peers like Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Some bands drop a couple (or just one) classic album then split. Their influence is etched in stone, their fans never had to see their inevitable drop, touring smaller venues and bringing in ringers to attempt to update their sound. Pink Floyd were in it for the long haul, their sound twisting as much from market forces as the band's increasingly different musical interests. Depending on who you ask, they ceased to exist after Piper at the Gates of Dawn, or after Meddle, or after The Final Cut. I have a love (or at least grudging respect) for all eras, even when the creativity took a back seat to court cases and backbiting. They're all still Pink Floyd, despite their only common thread being drummer Nick Mason.
Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and enjoying artists can mean identifying, analyzing, and coming to grips with the weaker parts of their output. Do I hate Pink Floyd? Sometimes. But it's all wrapped up in something I love, that ineffable Pink Floydness they created. The band did a great service to music writers of the 20th century, creating easily parsed eras with different lineups and the inevitable drama that comes with a cult band suddenly becoming huge. I've broken down each era to highlight the friction created when a band is searching for their sound, the pitfalls along the way, and how they navigate the thing they love turning against them.
Syd Barrett Era
The band was signed in the late 60s feeding frenzy for the Next Beatles, despite being more known for their freeform all-night noise jams than their skill at pop songwriting. While Piper may be the only real Pink Floyd album to a generation of young punks, on record the band chafes at being squeezed into the pop group mold. The shorter songs, while decent, show the lack of leadership under the eternally distracted Barrett. The jam tracks tend to meander in a way that's probably great when you're on drugs at 2am, but trying to squeeze it onto a record turns it from a journey into more of a slapdash collage. It's no wonder the band would stretch their epics into side-length for subsequent albums.
It's a mess, a beautiful mess, but a mess nonetheless. Waters in particular struggled to carve a niche for himself, "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" is more sound effects than songs, stumbling at the sort of mini pop symphony Barrett could toss off without a thought.
Side B is, besides "Interstellar Overdrive", a Barrett solo album in all but name. The increasingly demented songs point directly to his brief but well-regarded solo career, though as an adult it's a bit queasy hearing someone so clearly in distress.
Pre-Dark Side
A Saucerful of Secrets points the way forward, and sets the tone for what people think of when they imagine Pink Floyd: lethargic tempos, long jams, high-concept songs. It's also the beginning of the bands long tradition of re-using musical ideas, as opener "Let There Be More Light" is based on a bassline that popped up about halfway through "Interstellar Overdrive". Waters would bemoan the band's "Space Rock" label, but it doesn't help to open an album with a track about aliens visiting Suffolk.
Few people, not least the rest of the band, weren't too keen on Richard Wright's contributions to this album, with perpetual bully Waters referring to "See-Saw" as "The Most Boring Song I've Ever Heard Bar Two". To be fair, he's not wrong. Wright's songs were fairly light and toothless, hewing closer to the softer, nostalgic end of the late 60s than the more outré lands Pink Floyd explored. Citing a lack of material, Waters eventually came to overwhelm the band, though it should be noted that following Barrett's dismissal, Wright was briefly considered the best hope for Pink Floyd's success.
Despite his huge ego, Waters songs on the album tend to be pretty skeletal, creating a framework for the rest of the band to fill in but retaining songwriting credit for himself. "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" would blossom as an extended ambient jam on tour, but on record is downright narcotic. I still love this version, but anyone accusing Pink Floyd of being a little boring wouldn't be wrong if they used it as an example.
The album ends with the sole Barrett composition, "Jugband Blues", which in hindsight is an uneasy listen, as he bows out with a clear acknowledgement of his mental illness. The band, especially Gilmour, were wracked with guilt over sacking Barrett from the band, and the inclusion of this track was perhaps their way of keeping him from being destitute. Barrett passed away a millionaire, mostly due to his royalties from the first two Pink Floyd albums.
Pink Floyd were lazy. Tales abound of the hours whiled away in Abbey Road, since their record label contract allowed unlimited studio time. When that deal ran out, they quickly built their own studio. The band was capable of being quick and efficient, but only when making movie soundtracks.
More was their first feature-length project, and they approached it with a sense of workmanship that was sorely lacking in their own albums. I've recently come around to it, which does seem a little slap-dash and lacking in the big over-arching concepts they're known for, but in its place is a set of compact, well-written songs that stretch psychedelia into some dark places.
Well, half the record is great, at least. Side A has future live staples "Cymbaline" and "Green is the Colour", along with outliers like the proto-heavy metal "The Nile Song" and hazy "Cirrus Minor". Side B is home to instrumentals made specifically as cues, so it's pleasant but I'd be lying if I said I listened to it frequently.
The band also contributed to Zabriskie Point, but friction with director Michelangelo Antonioni led to most of their songs ending up on bootlegs. They've been officially available for a while now, but a word of warning: They aren't very good. Consisting mostly of re-recordings of old songs or short instrumental cues, it's mostly notable for outtake "The Violent Sequence" being re-used as the music on "Us and Them".
I'm willing to bet most of the original vinyl copies of Pink Floyd's first double album, Ummagumma, have well-worn first discs and pristine second discs. Their record label finally understanding the band's epic-length jams were what fans came to see, disc one is a slightly truncated version of their regular live show, with "Astronomy Domine", "Careful With that Axe, Eugene", "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", and "A Saucerful of Secrets" stretched past their original recorded versions. Disc two... it's not a mess, and by that I mean at least a mess wouldn't be boring. Each member was given half a side to do whatever they want, and only Waters' harsh noise (you read that right) "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" leaving any sort of impression. Despite the animosity that would eventually split the band, they really did their best work as a unit.
The band considered themselves Avant Garde Composers, so it makes sense they wrangled actual Avant Garde Composer Ron Geesin to co-write the title track for Atom Heart Mother, a 23 minute epic stitched together from various bits the band had written. The sound effects and the cow on the cover help to defuse the bands pretensions, along with their avoidance of the Big Orchestral Tropes, treating it more like a piece of film music than the grandiose style of Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra. The band hates it, but their recollection may be more informed by the torturous recording process and subsequent disastrous tour. I like an underdog, though it should be approached more like the zenith of their in-studio experimentation than a lost classic.
The second side, once again gives the band's three songwriter's their own showcase, and probably due to their brevity it's a lot more enjoyable than the 2nd disc of Ummagumma. Waters' "If" starts off shaky, with some of his worst lyrics (If I was a swan/I'd be gone), but in hindsight its a clear precursor to "Brain Damage". Wright's breezy, horn-inflected "Summer '68" isn't bad but nobody would have guessed it was a Pink Floyd song. Gilmour's "Fat Old Sun" shows his clear admiration of CSNY and the rest of their Laurel Canyon ilk. On record it's a decent folk-rock song, but live it would be stretched to nearly 30 minutes, which allowed its rose-colored nostalgia to expand and fill the whole room.
"Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" is 13 minutes of filler, but honestly it's my second favorite song on the album after the title track. Between audio verité of roadie Alan Styles muttering to himself as he makes breakfast, the band jams on the most melodic material they had done up to that point. Does it kind of sound like a theme song to a lost British sitcom? Sure. Is that bad? Never.
It stands to reason that Meddle, Pink Floyd's first front-to-back great album would also include its most notorious misfire, the blues throwaway "Seamus". Perhaps as a coda to the preceding song it would have been a funny bit of field recording, but as a separate track its eminently skippable. The album is bookended with the menacing "One of These Days" and the expansive "Echoes", but sandwiched in between sounds like a different version of Pink Floyd, one that pivoted to smooth yacht rock instead of dire, pessimistic albums about man's inhumanity to man. I have no qualms with the breezy "San Tropez" or "A Pillow of Winds", but their vocal harmonies and acoustic guitars do seem a bit at odds with their normal style. It's worth noting that most of these shorter tracks were co-written by Gilmour, who would go on to record with David Crosby and Graham Nash.
The band was actually partway through recording Dark Side of the Moon when the opportunity to make another Barbet Schroeder soundtrack came their way, the wonderful and weird Obscured by Clouds. Tighter and more structured than the loose More, I like how the band focuses on a single sound for each track (like the electronic drums on the title track, or the arpeggios on "Wots... Uh the Deal") and build the track around it. It's not this epic sea change like Dark Side, but it's a good example of how they could merge their weirder and more mainstream sides into single songs.
Mega Success
There's not much to say about one of the best selling albums of all time, but let's take a crack at it. "Any Colour You Like" exists solely as a bridge between "Us and Them" and "Brain Damage". Even in its embryonic form, it was a pretty loose guitar-led jam, and on record it's most interesting aspect is the guitar being processed to sound like Eric Clapton's on Cream's "Badge". The punters who saw the band in their heyday probably heard this song muffled by the restroom walls as they prepared for the finale.
Wish You Were Here doesn't have any bad tracks (there are only 4, after all), but a recent re-listen of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" reveals that the song is just synth solo > guitar solo > guitar solo > verse > guitar solo, over and over. I get why the punks hated this album. That, plus the ridiculous album packaging, which saw the high-concept photographs hidden behind an opaque black wrapper. Like the black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the band was this inescapable void that was easy to project your own ideas onto.
I can't say anything bad about Animals, except that the bookend "Pigs on the Wing" were only split up to give Waters more songwriting royalties, as the payouts are determined by the number of tracks, not their length. Dick move! For a song that has nothing to do with the rest of the Orwell-inspired album.
The Roger Waters Show
Waters already massive ego inflated exponentially during this time, when they played giant anonymous stadiums to huge crowds of fans obscured by elaborate stage lighting. Once you've reached this almost unbelievable level of success, where do you go? The rest of the band was content to play the hits and cash the checks, but Waters couldn't operate without pushing against something.
The Wall doesn't really sound like Pink Floyd. Besides the short, bitter songs, the band itself rarely appears on the same track: Waters demanded Wright be fired (the reasons are numerous, and both sides made some reasonable points, but that's a story for another day), and a plethora of studio musicians were hired to flesh out Waters' album. It's not really fair to judge it in comparison to previous Pink Floyd albums, so it sits in a category all its own. My personal iPod playlist trims the fat a bit: tracks like "Empty Spaces", "One of My Turns", "Don't Leave Me Now", "Bring the Boys Back Home", and "Stop" exist mostly as connecting tissue, and while some of these brief songs are worth a re-listen ("Vera", "The Show Must Go On", "Outside the Wall"), I'm rarely in the mood to sit through them.
The Final Cut is, without a doubt, a Roger Waters solo album. He seems to have forgotten what people liked about Pink Floyd, turning most of the songs into angry, quasi-Bob Dylan screeds. During the tense recording sessions, Gilmour finally had enough, telling Waters to only call him if he needed a guitar solo. My favorite thing to come from this album is Ruby Isle's disco-fied take on the title track.
The David Gilmour Show
To me, the best Pink Floyd songs are ones where Waters came up with a skeletal, dissonant song, and Gilmour & Wright would (for lack of a better term) pretty it up. Neither the guitarist nor the keyboardist were especially prolific in or out of the band, and Gilmour especially seemed to choke when he was forced to make a record. About Face, supposedly his break away from Pink Floyd, failed spectacularly, with cancelled tour dates and lackluster critical reception. In hindsight, his 1984 solo album was a bit too much Of Its Time, full of stadium trad rock and none of the complex harmony and creative lyrics that Roger Waters brought to the table.
Faced with record label pressure and mounting debts, Gilmour re-started Pink Floyd, which ignited a decade of lawsuits, as Roger Waters considered the band "a spent force". Their respective solo tours were disasters, with Gilmour willing to concede that having Pink Floyd on the marquee was going to put butts in the seats. Armed with record company backing and a platoon of co-writers, he got down to making demos for a new Pink Floyd album, which would give him an excuse to tour, as well as prove to the lawyers that Pink Floyd was a living, breathing organization without Roger Waters. It didn't start off well.
"This sounds nothing like Pink Floyd" was the record company's reaction to this first round of demos. To be fair, it was still essentially a David Gilmour solo album, with Richard Wright no longer in the band and Nick Mason, who already rarely contributed songwriting, content to delegate most of the drumming to session musicians. In any case, didn't the last two Pink Floyd albums not sound much like Pink Floyd either?
It's an expensive facsimile of a Pink Floyd album, but a facsimile nonetheless. While not a total disaster, it did accomplish its goal: give the band an excuse to launch a years-long tour that once again made them millionaires. To the credit of Gilmour and returning producer Bob Ezrin, they managed to carve out yet another distinct sound in the history of Pink Floyd. Shimmering synthesizers, ultra-compressed guitars, a deep-focus production style that was top-of-the-line in the 80s. It just has no edge, no bite, even "Dogs of War" can't help but be surgically designed to go down easy.
Here I will defend The Division Bell. After a marathon tour, drug addiction, sobriety, getting older, getting re-married, and Wright re-joining, the remaining members of Pink Floyd managed to somehow re-capture the feeling of their early albums.
It's an actual Concept Album, for one. A decade had passed since their last one, even longer if you consider The Wall the last one where all of the members had been on board with the concept. This was an older, mature Pink Floyd, and having an album about connection and communication was right up their alley; that is, they had plenty to write about. Sure a lot of it is corny, and the production has that 80s hangover, but they managed to pull off an album that can stand next to their more well-regarded work. "High Hopes", in particular, closes out this era of the band by fusing their early work with the wisdom that only time can give.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about the "last" Pink Floyd album is that it's non-canonical. Everything that people hate about post-Waters Pink Floyd is served up in high concentration on The Endless River. On paper, a tribute to the late Richard Wright using outtakes from The Division Bell sounds nice, but it all sounds hollow and one-dimensional. There's a reason this stuff was left off the album, and in any case, Gilmour's solo song "A Boat Lies Waiting" accomplishes a tender and heartfelt eulogy for his friend in 4:45, instead of the 90 minutes of The Endless River.
