The Delicate Sound of Floyd
The story of one of the most iconic bands in music history.
The van trundled along the country road, getting closer to Syd Barrett's home. Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason were inside, with their newest recruit, David Gilmour.
They had a gig to play at — but Syd hadn’t actually played at a gig in months. He was just as likely to break into a rendition of “Three Blind Mice” as stand motionless, staring into the distance as Gilmour, his substitute, played his chords. His schizophrenia was progressing, and his dependence on LSD (40 mg daily in his morning coffee) had crippled him and twisted his sense of what was real and what wasn’t.
“Shall we pick him up, chaps?”
Nobody said anything. The van went to the gig. They never picked Syd up again.
They didn’t ask to be famous. They just made the music. To them, it was all about the music. It was about experimenting. It was about being heard.
Audiences weren’t important. Crowds weren’t. Doing what was popular, musically, didn’t matter. They’d play long guitar solos. Their lyrics ranged from pop culture to dystopia. They’d experiment with instruments, with equipment, with mixing, with themes.
Pink Floyd made the sound they wanted — success was just a side effect.
In 1972, the band headed to the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, devastated by the volcano Mt. Vesuvius nearly 1,900 years ago. In the amphitheatre there, in the sweltering heat of coastal Italy, they made their music. They had the audacity to call it Live At Pompeii.
The obsession with sound led to some of the greatest moments of pure musical creation ever. The haunting C-sharp which opens my favourite Pink Floyd piece, Echoes, was obtained by Richard Wright using a grand piano connected to a Leslie rotating speaker, of all things.
Echoes embodies the human condition like no song I’ve ever heard. Its atonal singing, ranging from natural themes to human emotions; its haunting third movement; its mind-blowing, almost orgasmic, finale. And it’s just one song among the many, many masterpieces that Pink Floyd came out with over their career.
Dark Side of the Moon.
This is what sprung into your head, isn’t it?
The band walked in one day to see what Storm Thurgesen had lined up in terms of album art. They looked at the prism. They said, as one, “This one.” They walked out.
Dark Side of the Moon (1973) is an album that’s so good it’s been giving people chills since the day it came out. For the rest of human history, there’s probably going to be at least one person listening to it at any given point of time. It had to be taken off the Billboard Top 200 because it wouldn’t fall off. Its reign of 752 weeks has outlasted presidencies and space races.
Their moon rose as the sun set on older bands, such as Led Zeppelin. The old days of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll were ending — a new era of progressive rock was dawning and took hold in the ’80s, with Pink Floyd in the vanguard and an entire generation of grungy teens following in their wake.
(Random fact: If you watch The Wizard of Oz and start playing Dark Side of the Moon from the third time the MGM lion roars, they sync up eerily well— so well that there’s an official synced version called Dark Side of the Rainbow.)
Under Roger Waters’ leadership, the band tackled complex social ideas and the idea of their own estrangement from their personal identities. The Wall (1979) remains the gold standard in rock operas. It follows a kid named Pink (haha) and his childhood with an overbearing mother, fascist teachers, and his tragic adulthood, becoming a rockstar and suffering a drug overdose. The Wall tour was played at the Berlin Wall, and exemplifies the band’s ability to make complex personal and political statements through music.
Case in point: even after the band split for the last time, Waters lampooned Donald Trump in a concert in 2016. He’s the archetype of the big business/political system that Pink Floyd lampooned in their album Animals (1977). (In the album, businessmen are dogs, politicians are pigs, and the rest of us are sheep. Amusingly, this makes Donald Trump a pig-dog, which I’m sure North Korea would wholeheartedly agree with.)
But before Waters left, Pink Floyd recorded an album called Wish You Were Here (1975). It expressed their sorrow at Syd Barrett’s untimely departure from the band— they’d never had a chance to say goodbye to him as they’d known him. He wasn’t the same as he had been before schizophrenia and LSD — he couldn’t remember them, or comprehend their past together.
His nickname in college had been Crazy Diamond, so they wrote him a song.
Remember when you were young? You shone like the sun.
Shine On, You crazy Diamond.
As they recorded it at Abbey Road Studios, an elderly balding gentleman wandered in and sat peaceably outside the recording booth. One of them went out to see what he wanted, reasoning he was probably a lost senior citizen.
He was lost, but he wasn’t just anyone. Syd Barrett had somehow left home and wandered into the studio where a song was being recorded to bid him farewell. He didn’t know how or why he’d ended up there. The band, in tears, called his daughter to take him home. Syd died in 2006.
Roger Waters had been having issues with the other members of the band even during the live tour of The Wall. He left soon after, and David Gilmour took up the reins with Richard Wright and Nick Mason. Guy Pratt, the replacement bassist, later played guitar for A.R. Rehman in the Bollywood track Dil Se, in undoubtedly the strangest Pink Floyd — India connect I’ve ever heard off.
The band continued to record albums. Perhaps nothing could match the sheer monumental achievements of their previous work, but their concerts remained insanely inventive. The death of Richard Wright in 2008 led to the band finally being disbanded, but the world would never forget Pink Floyd.
While they were together, and even when they were apart, they towered over the rest.
Generations have been awed at Pink Floyd. Stoners, sound engineers, artists, songwriters, guitarists. They’ve spawned memorabilia, posters, records, CDs, hard drives. I’m really grateful to berty ashley for his extraordinary curating of a Pink Floyd audiovisual experience for the latest generation to be awed by their music, and to Badri and the team at Gathr for organizing it.
I was introduced to this band by my father, and we still make a point of listening to Floyd every time we meet. (I also come up with new interpretations of their music each time).
Though Pink Floyd never sought fame for their music, it’s taken on a life of its own, and has conveyed so much meaning to so many people. And that, perhaps, is what they set out to do in the first place. Or maybe it’s not. Who can unravel the will of the music gods?
