Pink Floyd

Roger Waters became the primary lyricist and thematic leader, devising the concepts behind the band's peak success with the albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). The musical film based on The Wall, Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982), won two  BAFTA Awards. (Best original song, Another Brick in the Wall, and best sound.)

Following personal tensions, Richard Wright left Pink Floyd in 1979, followed by Roger Waters in 1985. David Gilmour and Nick Mason continued as Pink Floyd, rejoined later by Richard Wright. They produced two more albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994)-and toured in support of both albums before entering a long period of inactivity. In 2005, all but Syd Barrett reunited for a one-off performance at the global awareness event Live 8. Syd Barrett died in 2006, and Richard Wright in 2008. The last Pink Floyd studio album, The Endless River (2014), was based on unreleased material from the Division Bell recording sessions.

By 2013, Pink Floyd had sold more than 250 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling music artists of all time. Wish You Were Here, The Dark Side of the Moon, and The Wall are among the best-selling albums of all time, and the latter two have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.  Four of the band's albums topped the US Billboard 200, and five of their albums topped the UK Album Chart. Hit singles include "See Emily Play" (1967), "Money" (1973), "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" (1979), "Not Now John" (1983), "On the Turning Away" (1987) and "High Hopes" (1994). The band also composed several film scores. They were inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. In 2008, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden presented Pink Floyd with the Polar Music Prize for their contribution to modern music.

In September 1963, Roger Waters and Nick Mason moved into a apartment at 39 Stanhope Gardens near Crouch End in London, owned by Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor at the nearby Hornsey College of Art  and the Regent Street Polytechnic. Nick Mason moved out after the 1964 academic year, and guitarist Bob Klose moved in during September 1964, prompting Roger Waters' switch to bass. Sigma 6 went through several names, including The Meggadeaths, The Abdabs and The Screaming Abdabs, Leonard's Lodgers, and The Spectrum Five, before settling on The Tea Set. In 1964, as Clive Metcalfe and Keith Noble left to form their own band, guitarist Syd Barrett joined Bob Klose and Roger Waters at Stanhope Gardens. Syd Barrett, two years younger, had moved to London in 1962 to study at the Camberwell College of Arts.  Roger Waters and Syd Barrett were childhood friends; Roger Waters had often visited Syd Barrett and watched him play guitar at Syd Barrett's mother's house. Nick Mason said about Syd Barrett: "In a period when everyone was being cool in a very adolescent, self-conscious way, Syd was unfashionably outgoing; my enduring memory of our first encounter is the fact that he bothered to come up and introduce himself to me."

Keith Noble and Clive Metcalfe left the Tea Set in late 1963, and Bob Klose introduced the band to singer Chris Dennis, a technician with the Royal Air Force (RAF). In December 1964, they secured their first recording time, at a studio in West Hampstead, through one of Richard Wright's friends, who let them use some down time free. Richard Wright, who was taking a break from his studies, did not participate in the session. When the RAF assigned Chris Dennis a post in Bahrain in early 1965, Syd Barrett became the band's frontman. Later that year, they became the resident band at the Countdown Club near Kensington High Street in London, where from late night until early morning they played three sets of 90 minutes each. During this period, spurred by the group's need to extend their sets to minimise song repetition, the band realised that "songs could be extended with lengthy solos", wrote Nick Mason. After pressure from his parents and advice from his college tutors, Bob Klose quit the band in mid-1965 and Syd Barrett took over lead guitar. The group first referred to themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound in late 1965. Syd Barrett created the name on the spur of the moment when he discovered that another band, also called The Tea Set, were to perform at one of their gigs. The name is derived from the given names of two Blues musicians whose Piedmont blues records Syd Barrett had in his collection, Pink Anderson  and Floyd Council.

By 1966, the group's repertoire consisted mainly of Rhythm and blues songs and they had begun to receive paid bookings, including a performance at the Marquee Club in December 1966, where Peter Jenner, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, noticed them. Pete Jenner was impressed by the sonic effects Syd Barrett and Richard Wright created, and with his business partner and friend Andrew King became their manager. The pair had little experience in the music industry and used Andrew King's inheritance to set up Blackhill Enterprises, purchasing about £1,000 (equivalent to £19,000 in 2020) worth of new instruments and equipment for the band. It was around this time that Pete Jenner suggested they drop the "Sound" part of their band name, thus becoming Pink Floyd.

Under Pete Jenner and Andrew King's guidance, the group became part of London's underground music  scene, playing at venues including All Saints Hall and the Marquee Club. While performing at the Countdown Club, the band had experimented with long instrumental excursions, and they began to expand them with rudimentary but effective light shows, projected by coloured slides and domestic lights. Peter Jenner and Andrew King's social connections helped gain the band prominent coverage in the Financial Times and an article in the Sunday Times which stated:

"At the launching of the new magazine IT the other night a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre coloured shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them ... apparently very psychedelic."

In 1966, the band strengthened their business relationship with Blackhill Enterprises, becoming equal partners with Peter Jenner and Andrew King and the band members each holding a one-sixth share. By late 1966, their set included fewer R&B standards and more Syd Barrett originals, many of which would be included on their first album. While they had significantly increased the frequency of their performances, the band were still not widely accepted. Following a performance at a Catholic youth club, the owner refused to pay them, claiming that their performance was not music. When their management filed suit in a small claims court against the owner of the youth organisation, a local magistrate upheld the owner's decision. The band was much better received at the UFO Club in London, where they began to build a fan base. Syd Barrett's performances were enthusiastic, "leaping around ... madness ... improvisation ... [inspired] to get past his limitations and into areas that were ... very interesting. Which none of the others could do", wrote biographer Nicholas Schaffner.

It fared slightly better than "Arnold Layne", peaking at number 6 in the UK. The band performed on the BBC's Look of the Week, where Roger Waters and Syd Barrett, erudite and engaging, faced tough questioning from Hans Keller. They appeared on the BBC's Top of the Pops, a popular programme that controversially required artists to mime their singing and playing. Though Pink Floyd returned for two more performances, by the third, Syd Barrett had begun to unravel, and around this time the band first noticed significant changes in his behaviour. By early 1967, he was regularly using LSD, and Nick Mason  described him as "completely distanced from everything going on".

"I found [Syd Barrett] in the dressing room and he was so ... gone. Roger Waters and I got him on his feet, [and] we got him out to the stage ... The band started to play and Syd just stood there. He had his guitar around his neck and his arms just hanging down".

Forced to cancel Pink Floyd's appearance at the prestigious National Jazz and Blues Festival, as well as several other shows, Andrew King informed the music press that Syd Barrett was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Roger Waters arranged a meeting with psychiatrist R. D. Laing, and though Roger Waters personally drove Syd Barrett to the appointment, Syd refused to come out of the car. A stay in Formentera with Sam Hutt, a doctor well established in the underground music scene, led to no visible improvement. The band followed a few concert dates in Europe during September with their first tour of the US in October. As the US tour went on, Syd's condition grew steadily worse. During appearances on the Dick Clark and Pat Boone shows in November, Syd confounded his hosts by giving terse answers to questions (or not responding at all) and staring into space. He refused to move his lips when it came time to mime "See Emily Play" on Pat Boone's show. After these embarrassing episodes, Andrew King ended their US visit and immediately sent them home to London. Soon after their return, they supported Jimi Hendrix during a tour of England; however, Syd Barrett's depression worsened as the tour continued.

Transition and international success (1967-1978)

instead introduced "Have You Got It Yet?" to the band, intentionally changing the structure on each performance so as to make the song impossible to follow and learn. In a January 1968 photoshoot of Pink Floyd, the photographs show Syd Barrett looking detached from the others, staring into the distance.

Working with Syd Barrett eventually proved too difficult, and matters came to a conclusion in January while en route to a performance in Southampton when a band member asked if they should collect Syd. According to David Gilmour, the answer was "Nah, let's not bother", signalling the end of Syd's tenure with Pink Floyd. Roger Waters later said, "He was our friend, but most of the time we wanted to strangle him." In early March 1968, Pink Floyd met with business partners Pete Jenner and Andrew King to discuss the band's future; Syd Barrett agreed to leave.

Pete Jenner and Andrew King believed Syd Barrett was the creative genius of the band, and decided to represent him and end their relationship with Pink Floyd. Bryan Morrison sold his business to Brian Epstein's NEMS Enterprises, and Steve O'Rourke became the band's personal manager. Blackhill announced Syd Barrett's departure on 6 April 1968. After Syd's departure, the burden of lyrical composition and creative direction fell mostly on Roger Waters. Initially, David Gilmour mimed to Syd Barrett's voice on the group's European TV appearances; however, while playing on the university circuit, they avoided Barrett songs in favour of Roger Waters and Richard Wright material such as "It Would Be So Nice" and "Careful with That Axe, Eugene".

As neither Roger Waters nor Nick Mason could read music, to illustrate the structure of the album's title track, they invented their own system of notation. David Gilmour later described their method as looking "like an architectural diagram".

Released in June 1968, the album featured a psychedelic cover designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis. The first of several Pink Floyd album covers designed by Hipgnosis, it was the second time that EMI permitted one of their groups to contract designers for an album jacket. The release peaked at number 9, spending 11 weeks on the UK chart. Record Mirror gave the album an overall favourable review, but urged listeners to "forget it as background music to a party". John Peel  described a live performance of the title track as "like a religious experience", while NME described the song as "long and boring ... [with] little to warrant its monotonous direction". On the day after the album's UK release, Pink Floyd performed at the first ever free concert in Hyde Park. In July 1968, they returned to the US for a second visit. Accompanied by the Soft Machine and the Who, it marked Pink Floyd's first significant tour. In December of that year, they released "Point Me at the Sky"; no more successful than the two singles they had released since "See Emily Play", it would be the band's last until their 1973 release (in limited territories, not including the UK), "Money".

Smith earned an executive producer credit, and the album marked his final official contribution to the band's discography. David Gilmour said it was "A neat way of saying that he didn't ... do anything". Roger Waters was critical of Atom Heart Mother, claiming that he would prefer if it were "thrown into the dustbin and never listened to by anyone ever again". David Gilmour once described it as "a load of rubbish", stating: "I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period." Pink Floyd's first number- one album, Atom Heart Mother was hugely successful in Britain, spending 18 weeks on the UK chart. It premièred at the Bath Festival on 27 June 1970.

Pink Floyd toured extensively across America and Europe in 1970. In 1971, Pink Floyd took second place in a reader's poll, in Melody Maker, and for the first time were making a profit. Nick Mason and Richard Wright became fathers and bought homes in London while David Gilmour, still single, moved to a 19th-century farm in Essex. Roger Waters installed a home recording studio at his house in Islington in a converted toolshed at the back of his garden. In January 1971, upon their return from touring Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd began working on new material. Lacking a central theme, they attempted several unproductive experiments; engineer John Leckie described the sessions as often beginning in the afternoon and ending early the next morning, "during which time nothing would get [accomplished]. There was no record company contact whatsoever, except when their label manager would show up now and again with a couple of bottles of wine and a couple of joints". The band spent long periods working on basic sounds, or a guitar riff. They also spent several days at Air Studios, attempting to create music using a variety of household objects, a project which would be revisited between  The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

Released in October 1971, "Meddle not only confirms lead guitarist David Gilmour's emergence as a real shaping force with the group, it states forcefully and accurately that the group is well into the growth track again", wrote Jean-Charles Costa of Rolling Stone.  NME called Meddle "an exceptionally good album", singling out "Echoes" as the "Zenith which the Floyd have been striving for". However, Melody Maker's Michael Watts found it underwhelming, calling the album "a soundtrack to a non-existent movie", and shrugging off Pink Floyd as "so much sound and fury, signifying nothing". Meddle is a transitional album between the Barrett-influenced group of the late 1960s and the emerging Pink Floyd. The LP peaked at number 3, spending 82 weeks on the UK Albums chart.

Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth described side one as "utterly confused ... [and] difficult to follow", but praised side two, writing: "The songs, the sounds ... [and] the rhythms were solid ... [the] saxophone hit the air, the band rocked and rolled". Rolling Stone's Loyd Grossman described it as "a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement."

Throughout March 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon featured as part of Pink Floyd's US tour. The album is one of the most commercially successful rock albums of all time; a US number-one, it remained on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart for more than fourteen years during the 1970s and 1980s, selling more than 45 million copies worldwide. In Britain, the album peaked at number 2, spending 364 weeks on the UK chart. The Dark Side of the Moon is the world's third best-selling album, and the twenty-first best-selling album of all time in the US. The success of the album brought enormous wealth to the members of Pink Floyd. Roger Waters and Richard Wright bought large country houses while Nick Mason became a collector of expensive cars. Disenchanted with their US record company, Capitol Records, Pink Floyd and Steve O'Rourke negotiated a new contract with Columbia Records, who gave them a reported advance of $1,000,000 (US$5,247,638 in 2020 dollars). In Europe, they continued to be represented by Harvest Records.

composed purely by chance by David Gilmour, reminded Roger Waters of Syd Barrett. The songs provided a fitting summary of the rise and fall of their former bandmate. Roger Waters commented: "Because I wanted to get as close as possible to what I felt ... [that] indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd."

While Pink Floyd were working on the album, Syd Barrett made an impromptu visit to the studio. Thorgerson recalled that he "sat round and talked for a bit, but he wasn't really there". He had changed significantly in appearance, so much so that the band did not initially recognise him. Roger Waters was reportedly deeply upset by the experience. Most of Wish You Were Here premiered on 5 July 1975, at an open-air music festival at Knebworth House. Released in September, it reached number one in both the UK and the US.

"It was partly my fault because I didn't push my material ... but Dave did have something to offer, and only managed to get a couple of things on there." Nick Mason recalled: "Roger was in full flow with the ideas, but he was really keeping Dave down, and frustrating him deliberately." David Gilmour, distracted by the birth of his first child, contributed little else toward the album. Similarly, neither Nick Mason nor Richard Wright contributed much toward Animals; Richard Wright had marital problems, and his relationship with Roger Waters was also suffering. Animals was the first Pink Floyd album with no writing credit for Richard Wright, who said: "This was when Roger really started to believe that he was the sole writer for the band ... that it was only because of him that [we] were still going ... when he started to develop his ego trips, the person he would have his conflicts with would be me."

Released in January 1977, Animals peaked on the UK chart at number two, and the US chart at number three. NME described the album as "one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music", and Melody Maker's Karl Dallas called it "[an] uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific".

Pink Floyd performed much of Animals during their "In the Flesh" tour. It was their first experience playing large stadiums, whose size caused unease in the band. Roger Waters began arriving at each venue alone, departing immediately after the performance. On one occasion, Richard Wright flew back to England, threatening to quit. At the Montreal Olympic Stadium, a group of noisy and enthusiastic fans in the front row of the audience irritated Roger Waters so much that he spat at one of them. The end of the tour marked a low point for David Gilmour, who felt that the band achieved the success they had sought, with nothing left for them to accomplish.

Roger Waters and David Gilmour worked independently; however, David began to feel the strain, sometimes barely maintaining his composure. After a final confrontation, David Gilmour's name disappeared from the credit list, reflecting what Roger Waters felt was his lack of songwriting contributions.

Though Nick Mason's musical contributions were minimal, he stayed busy recording sound effects for an experimental Holophonic system to be used on the album. With marital problems of his own, he remained a distant figure. Pink Floyd did not use Storm Thorgerson for the cover design, Roger Waters choosing to design the cover himself. Released in March 1983, The Final Cut went straight to number one in the UK and number six in the US. Roger Waters wrote all the lyrics, as well as all the music on the album. David Gilmour did not have any material ready for the album and asked Roger Waters to delay the recording until he could write some songs, but Roger refused. David later commented: "I'm certainly guilty at times of being lazy ... but he wasn't right about wanting to put some duff tracks on The Final Cut." Rolling Stone magazine gave the album five stars, with Kurt Loder calling it "a superlative achievement ... art rock's crowning masterpiece". Kurt Loder viewed The Final Cut as "essentially a Roger Waters solo album".

Clearly, our communication skills were still troublingly nonexistent. We left the restaurant with diametrically opposed views of what had been decided."

Following the release of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Roger Waters publicly insisted that Pink Floyd would not reunite. He contacted Steve O'Rourke to discuss settling future royalty payments. Steve felt obliged to inform Nick and David, which angered Roger, who wanted to dismiss him as the band's manager. He terminated his management contract with Steve O'Rourke and employed Peter Rudge to manage his affairs. Roger Waters wrote to EMI and Columbia announcing he had left the band, and asked them to release him from his contractual obligations. David Gilmour believed that Roger Waters left to hasten the demise of Pink Floyd. Roger Waters later stated that, by not making new albums, Pink Floyd would be in breach of contract, which would suggest that royalty payments would be suspended, and that the other band members had forced him from the group by threatening to sue him. He went to the High Court in an effort to dissolve the band and prevent the use of the Pink Floyd name, declaring Pink Floyd "a spent force creatively".

When Roger Waters' lawyers discovered that the partnership had never been formally confirmed, he returned to the High Court in an attempt to obtain a veto over further use of the band's name. David Gilmour responded with a press release affirming that Pink Floyd would continue to exist. The sides reached an out-of-court agreement, finalised on David Gilmour's houseboat the Astoria on Christmas Eve 1987. In 2013, Roger Waters said he regretted the lawsuit and had failed to appreciate that the Pink Floyd name had commercial value independent of the band members.