Artist: PinkFloyd
Genre(s):
Other
Discography:
Meddle
Year: 1971
Tracks: 6
Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all mode of limited effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on well-nigh classical, operatic quality, in both legal and wrangle. Despite their astral simulacrum, the radical was brought depressed to earth in the eighties by in spades mundane power struggles over leaders and, at long last, ownership of the band's very name. After that time, they were small more than a dinosaur play, able of filling stadiums and topping the charts, only offering little more than a spectacular diversion of their well-nigh successful formulas. Their latter-day triteness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first 10 or so of their cosmos, they were one of the well-nigh forward-looking groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.
Patch Pink Floyd ar for the most part known for their hoity-toity concept albums of the seventies, they started as a selfsame different variety of psychedelic band. Soon later on they kickoff began playing in concert in the mid-'60s, they fell firm under the leadership of lead guitar player Syd Barrett, the gifted flair world Health Organization would write and let the cat out of the bag most of their early real. The Cambridge aboriginal shared the phase with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The refer Pink Floyd, on the face of it so kinky, was actually derived from the first name calling of deuce ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at outset, Pink Floyd were practically more ceremonious than the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock candy and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.
Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, yet, stretch kayoed songs with wild instrumental disorientation passages incorporating feedback; electronic screeches; and unusual, eerie sounds created by tawdry amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding lucille Ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London resistance; onstage, they began to integrate scant shows to add together to the psychedelic effect. Most significantly, Syd Barrett began to indite pop-psychedelic gems that combined strange psychedelic arrangements (peculiarly in the haunting guitar and ethereal organ licks) with tricky melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, dewy-eyed marvel.
The grouping landed a recording press with EMI in other 1967 and made the Top 20 with a splendid debut undivided, "Arnold Layne," a benevolent, laughable vignette about a cross-dresser. The review, the kaleidoscopic "See Emily Play," made the Top Ten. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, likewise released in 1967, may take been the sterling British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated nearly all by Barrett's songs, the record album was a charming merriment house of driving, mystical rockers ("Lucifer Sam"); odd character sketches ("The Gnome"); childhood flashbacks ("Motorcycle," "Matilda Mother"); and freakier pieces with prolonged instrumental passages ("Astronomy Domine," "Interstellar Overdrive," "POW R Toch") that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colorful as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and blithesome than those of their subsequent epics.
The reason Pink Floyd ne'er made a like album was that Genus Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began display increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. Barrett would go catatonic onstage, acting euphony that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, allow unequaled play the come out star biz. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their visual sensation and material, the rest of the mathematical group was even so finding him insufferable to work with, bouncy or in the studio.
Around the beginning of 1968, guitar player Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band world Health Organization was as well from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth extremity. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live kit; Barrett would still be capable to publish and kick in to the records. That couldn't work either, and inside a few months Barrett was out of the group. Pink Floyd's management, looking for at the wreckage of a band that was straight off without its tip guitarist, lead singer, and primary songster, distinct to abandon the mathematical group and superintend Barrett as a solo act.
Such calamities would have proven insuperable for 99 taboo of C bands in like predicaments. Incredibly, Pink Floyd would regroup and non only keep up their popularity, but finally become even more than successful. It was early in the game even, after all; the first base album had made the British Top Ten, just the group was placid nearly unknown in America, where the loss of Syd Barrett meant goose egg to the media. Gilmour was an excellent guitar player, and the band proven capable of writing enough original material to generate farther ambitious albums, Waters finally emerging as the predominant composer. The 1968 follow-up to Genus Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets, made the British Top Ten, exploitation Barrett's vision as an obvious blueprint, but taking a more formal, sober, and quasi-classical tonus, peculiarly in the long instrumental parts. Barrett, for his part, would go on to make a couple of interesting solo records ahead his mental problems instigated a retreat into obliviousness.
Over the next iV years, Pink Floyd would continue to culture their brand of experimental rock, which marital psychedelia with ever-grander arrangements on a Wagnerian operatic scale. Hidden underneath the impulse, reverberant organs and guitars and insistently restated themes were elusive blues and pop influences that unbroken the material accessible to a wide interview. Abandoning the singles market, they concentrated on album-length full treatment, and reinforced a vast following in the progressive rock resistance with unvarying touring in both Europe and North America. While LPs wish Ummagumma (dual-lane into lively recordings and experimental outings by each penis of the band), Atom Heart Mother (a collaboration with composer Ron Geesin), and More... (a photographic film soundtrack) were temperamental, each contained some extremely effective music.
By the early '70s, Syd Barrett was a attenuation or nonexistent memory for nearly of Pink Floyd's fans, although the group, one could argue, never did pair the glare of that slightly anomalous 1967 debut. Tamper (1971) sharpened the band's sprawl epics into something more approachable, and svelte the scientific discipline fiction atmosphere that the radical had been exploring e'er since 1968. Nothing, however, prepared Pink Floyd or their audience for the massive mainstream success of their 1973 record album, Dark Side of the Moon, which made their make of cosmic stone even more approachable with state of the art production; more than focussed songwriting; an ground forces of well-time two-channel sound effects; and touches of saxophone and soulful distaff substitute vocals.
Dark Side of the Moon finally broke Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it made number one. More surprisingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of the Apostles of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an uncomprehensible 741 weeks on the Billboard record album chart. Additionally, the principally subservient textures of the songs helped make Black Side of the Moon easily transformable on an outside level, and the record became (and still is) one of the nigh popular rock albums oecumenical.
It was as well an highly hard act to stick to, although the followup, Wish You Were Here (1975), too made number one, highlighted by a testimonial of sorts to the long-departed Barrett, "Glisten On You Crazy Diamond." Moody Side of the Moon had been dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the cold infertility of modernistic living; Wish You Were Here and Animals (1977) highly-developed these glowering themes level more explicitly. By this time Waters was taking a firm hand over Pink Floyd's lyrical and musical vision, which was amalgamate by The Wall (1979).
The barren, overambitious double concept record album concerned itself with the corporeal and emotional walls modern humans build about themselves for survival. The Wall was a immense winner (level by Pink Floyd's standards), in part because the music was losing some of its heavy-duty electronic textures in favour of more reachable pop elements. Although Pink Floyd had seldom level released singles since the belated '60s, one of the tracks, "Some other Brick in the Wall," became a transatlantic number one. The band had been launch more and more rarify stage shows throughout the '70s, merely the touring production of The Wall, featuring a construction of an factual wall during the band's performance, was the to the highest degree overweening so far.
In the 1980s, the group began to ravel. Each of the 4 had done some slope and solo projects in the yesteryear; more troublingly, Waters was declaratory control of the band's musical and lyrical identity. That wouldn't feature been such a trouble had The Final Cut (1983) been such an unimpressive sweat, with little of the electronic innovation so distinctive of their premature ferment. Shortly later, the stripe split up -- for a spell. In 1986, Waters was suing Gilmour and Mason to dissolve the group's partnership (Wright had baffled total membership status alone); Waters lost, going a Roger-less Pink Floyd to get a Top Five record album with Fugitive Lapse of Reason in 1987. In an irony that was nil less than cosmic, around 20 geezerhood afterwards Pink Floyd throw off their original leader to resume their career with smashing commercial success, they would do the same once again to his heir. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nix more than moderate sales and attention, piece he watched his former colleagues (with Wright back in towage) rescale the charts.
Pink Floyd noneffervescent had a immense fan base, merely there's slight that's noteworthy around their post-Waters output signal. They knew their chemical formula, could execute it on a grand plate, and could number on millions of customers -- many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came knocked out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a penis -- to buy their records and see their sporadic tours. The Division Bell, their low gear studio record album in septenary long time, topped the charts in 1994 without fashioning whatsoever impact on the flow rock-and-roll scenery, omit in a marketing sense. Ditto for the live Pulse record album, recorded during a typically elaborately arranged 1994 tour, which included a concert version of The Dark Side of the Moon in its integrality. Waters' solo career sputtered along, highlighted by a solo recreation of The Wall, performed at the internet site of the sometime Berlin Wall in 1990, and released as an album. Syd Barrett continued to be completely removed from the world eye except as a sort of pilot for the fallen genius.
