Pink Floyd biography

Due to his increasingly excessive use of LSD, Barrett's mental health soon deteriorated. He missed live shows and studio sessions and the band asked him to leave the group, replacing him in 1968 with guitarist Dave Gilmour. Barrett retreated to a reclusive life in his mother's Cambridge home, surfacing briefly in 1970 to record the idiosyncratic The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, produced by Waters and Gilmour. In 1974 he also made an abortive attempt to return to the studio. Pundits predicted the group would disintegrate without Barrett's madcap genius at the helm but Waters and Wright took up the songwriting reins.The band's second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets, was dominated by longer, more ambitious compositions inspired by astral themes and space exploration, notably, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. The harrowing Barrett penned Jugband Blues was also a highlight.

The increasingly cinematic aspect of the band's work was emphasized when they recorded the soundtrack for the 1969 Barbet Schroeder flick, More and Italian director Antonionio used music from their 1969 double album, Ummagumma, in his hippy culture road flick, Zabriskie Point. The band toyed with rock classical fusions on 1970's patchy, Atom Heart Mother album. The inconsistent Meddle (1971) followed while 1972's Obscured By Clouds album also came to be used on another Schroeder film, La Vallee. But these albums and their 1972 music film Live At Pompeii, were preludes to the group's greatest artistic and commercial success, 1973's Dark Side Of The Moon. The band had worked on the concept for over a year. With songs such as Us And Them, Money, Breathe and Time, the album dwelt on Waters' fascination with lunacy, depression and death. Full of snatched conversation, mad laughter and synthesized warblings, boffin rock had never been so perfectly executed. The album went on to sell 10m, lodging itself in the UK and US charts and elevating the Floyd from underground chin-strokers to stadium-filling behemoths. The album's use of stereo effects made it an audiophile's wet dream.

From here on, like their great 70s rivals, Led Zeppelin, the band would maintain a veneer of mysticism, hiding onstage behind gradiose effects and refusing to put their pictures on album covers relying instead on a series of cryptic graphics and pictures. They would release only four more albums in the next decade.

In the summer of 1975 their triumphant Knebworth performance previewed their next album, Wish You Were Here. The album featured a space-jazz ode to Barrett, Shine On You Crazy Diamond and featured bleak musings on futurism with Welcome To The Machine. Late in 1976 the band let loose their 40-foot inflatbale pig over Battersea power station after a promotional sesion for their forthcoming Animals album sleeve. The pig was never found even though the Civil Aviation Authority was alerted of the danger! The album proper followed in 1977. With a nod towards George Orwell's Animal Farm, album tracks like Sheep contained aggressive guitar lines and abrasive lyrics with targets such as moral rights campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

However 1979 saw the band hit the peak of their concept album powers with the doulbe album set, The Wall. Centring again around Waters childhood and the fictional life of pop star Pink, the album spawned a UK No. 1 single with Another Brick In The Wall Pt II and a film, with Bob Geldof in the starring role. The subsequent live shows would see a wall being erected between the band and the audience during the gig, symbolising the lack of communication Waters found around him as modern day rock star. The demands of making the album effectively split the band and a period of inactivity followed broken by 1983's The Final Cut album. With Wright now having left the band after a row with Waters and minimal input from Dave Gilmour, The Final Cut was effectively a Roger Waters record and without anyone to reign him in, the album was depressingly overbearing, full of needless, over dramatic guitar solos and his usual intense ruminations on the futility of war and a facelsss modern society.

The year ended with a Waters solo album, The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking, subsequently fighting Gilmour and Mason in the courts for the use of the Pink Floyd name. Waters announced in 1986 he was quitting Pink Floyd. But by now, Wright had returned to the band, joining Gilmour and Mason for 1987's A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. The album was dominated by Gilmour's writing and singing. A lavish world tour followed where they shifted 5.5m tickets, resulting in a live double album, The Delicate Sound Of Thunder. While the trio continued as Pink Floyd, Waters staged a 1990 live production of The Wall on the site of the Berlin Wall to mark its collapse. Gilmour, Mason and Wright would return to the studio in 1994 to record The Divison Bell, while nowhere near a return to form, there was a sense that the band had put some thought into the album's by now familiar grandiose themes (global meltdown, futurism). Hypnotic, minimalist tracks like Cluster One sounded, briefly, like throwbacks to their 70s heyday.

Pink Floyd have continued to keep their name alive purely through compilation and live releases including 1995's Pulse album and 2000's Is There Anybody Out There: The Wall: Live. In the latter part of the 90s they became unexpected heroes to the dance generation with ambient groups like The Orb citing them as a formative influence. And with rumours that Waters is currently considering rejoining the band for next year's thirtieth anniversary of the Wish You Where album, fans, and promoters alike must be rubbing their hands in expected glee. It's ironic that despite writing one of rock's best known anti-materialism rants (Money), the band have ended up becoming rich, rock dinosaurs prowling stadiums grazing on dollars. Discography