No rock group has ever seized the imagination like Pink Floyd. In a field normally primarily concerned with sex, relationships, war and aggression, the self and others, Pink Floyd have explored space, psychosis, pastoralism, isolation, absence, business ethics, transcendence, death, madness, empathy, inertia, communication difficulties, war and the psychology of fascism. They have done so with a range of music perhaps surpassing anyone in the rock canon, from folky acoustic rural homages to ambient rhythms to orchestral grandiosity to ass-kicking hard rock. Yet there is something we can call ‘Floydian’: moderately-paced, spacious, repetitively melodic, coloured by the Farsifa keyboard, with lyrics of unusual verbal felicity about the human condition. This is not to say that Pink Floyd were formulaic: few bands have stretched themselves and worked so hard to improve their recorded output and their live performances. Many rock bands are spent creative forces after a few albums; Pink Floyd did not hit their golden period until their eighth album, sustaining it across three further works which remain among the highest-selling and most critically esteemed records ever made.
The context is important in understanding Pink Floyd. In the mid-1960s, rock ’n’ roll was a juvenile art, but groups like The Beatles and The Who worked to develop it into a more mature artform, with increasing musical, recording and lyrical sophistication. The distance from The Beatles’ album closers ‘Twist And Shout’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was just three years, demonstrating the incredible rate at which the genre was developing. The Who, similarly, moved the album towards a symphonic piece withTommy (1969), inaugurating the concept album as full thematically and musically integrated work (The Beatles’ 1967 albumSgt. Pepper, often considered the first rock concept album, is not unified lyrically, instead really only having an overture and a curtain-closer). However, in the jazz world, Miles Davis had moved the album from being a disparate collection of individual tracks to a thematic whole, as on the acclaimed albumsKind of Blue (1959) andSketches of Spain (1960). The LP, in rock as in jazz, was moving closer to becoming an integrated artistic unity, like a classical music symphony.
In this context Pink Floyd began in 1965. Starting as an R&B cover band based in London, and taking their name from two Piedmont blues musicians, the group developed rapidly during 1966 residencies at the Marquee club (in Wardour Street, Soho) and UFO (at Tottenham Court Road). Early bootlegs4 show setlists of basic R&B and Bo Diddley-style rock, with Barrett singing in an American style very far from his English manner onThe Piper at the Gates of Dawn. However, they had artistic and musical backgrounds exceeding these floundering derivative efforts. Barrett was an art student coming from an intellectual middle-class family (his father was a noted doctor). Wright was privately educated, had learned the trumpet and trombone as well as guitar and piano while still a schoolboy, and
