One of the most enduring bands from the 1960’s, Pink Floyd carved their fame and following out of psychedelic performances and imaginative musical arrangements.
Until Michael Jackson’s Thriller album came along, Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon was the biggest selling album of all time.
In 1965 students Roger ‘Syd’ Barret, Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters all talented guitarists who move to London to further their educations in architecture, art and music. Barret and Waters meet a gifted keyboard player Rick Wright and the percussionist Nick Mason. They join forces to form a musical unit, the result of which is the British band Pink Floyd… and 50 years on they are LEGEND!
In 1967 EMI signed Pink Floyd up, giving them a £5000 advance and assigned them to their Columbia label, releasing their first single in March ’67 called “Arnold Lane” , a song about a kleptomaniac transvestite
Their first album Piper at the Gates was released August that year meeting with moderate success. This was the only album which fully featured Syd Barret whose erratic lifestyle was seriously impacting his ability to perform. He performed on only one track on their second album released in 1968 A Saucerful of Secrets.
The title track…. Be patient, it starts slowly
Perfectly well summed up by Rolling Stone, the band really had their major breakthrough in 1973
With the release of 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd abruptly went from a moderately successful acid-rock band to one of rock music's biggest acts. The recording, in fact, remained on Billboard's Top 200 album chart for 741 weeks, longer than any other album in history. Along with 1979's The Wall, it established Pink Floyd as purveyors of a distinctively dark vision.
Top 200 chart for 741 weeks… errrr, that is FOURTEEN years !!!
The title track
also from Dark Side of the Moon ....Money
Note: The EMI engineer on Dark Side of the Moon was Alan Parsons. I did not know this but I do know that I loved his music when he formed the band The Alan Parsons Project!! I would feature him but I do not have his vinyl albums in my collection
After touring the UK in 1975, the band went into the studio to record their 9th album, Wish You Were Here. By this time Roger Waters was the creative force behind the band, and also at this juncture Alan Parsons had departed to start his own band.
From the album Wish You Were Here.........Shine on you Crazy Diamond
Fast forward to 1978 where Waters introduced a concept for an album to the other members of the band. A 90 minute demo he called Bricks in the Wall
An extract from Wikipedia ...
Bob Ezrin co-produced, and he wrote a forty-page script for the new album. Ezrin based the story on the central figure of Pink—a gestalt character inspired by Waters' childhood experiences, the most notable of which was the death of his father in World War II. This first metaphorical brick led to more problems; Pink would become drug-addled and depressed by the music industry, eventually transforming into a megalomaniac, a development inspired partly by the decline of Syd Barrett. At the end of the album, the increasingly fascist audience would watch as Pink tore down the wall, once again becoming a regular and caring person.
The album released called THE WALL was a smash hit.... here are two of the better known tracks from the album Another Brick In The Wall (part one) and Mother
Next one, Mother
Over the next decade the band continued to tour and release albums, but the Gilmour, Wright and Waters relationships were starting to take strain, with eventually Wright getting the boot. Gilmour went off and released solo albums, as did Roger Waters.
The band was inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame in 1996. Pink Floyd sold over 250 million albums, received a Grammy for The Wall and numerous other awards. I once again found I could not do them justice or tell their story fully in just one post, but I trust you enjoyed the music and the read
I end with one of my all time favourites....Comfortably Numb...watch this video
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I am featuring artists from the 60’s and 70’s from diverse genre’s over the next few months. If you love music … FOLLOW and take the journey with me..it is going to be one thrilling ride !! Furthermore I will only be featuring artists from MY vinyl collection, and I shall start all of the posts with a photo of an album cover to authenticate
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Previous Music Legends
Leonard Cohen
The Doors
Bob Dylan
The Rolling Stones
60’s Protest Artists
Janis Joplin
Jimi Hendrix
Neil Young
And more .......