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It's more than a little ironic that Pink Floyd’s most famous song “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)” is so far removed from what is special about the music of this, the quintessential and most influential of the psychedelic spacerock bands. Wrote New Musical Express in 1988: “No rock group experimented with sounds as imaginatively as Pink Floyd, with such limited technology and a commercial feel...their music was informed by a wealth of ideas that puts most of their peers to shame, past and present.” Roger Waters’ talents as a lyricist notwithstanding, Pink Floyd’s best music is more than anything else about ambient sound: the slow trance-inducing bass/drum throb, the ethereal organ and synth backdrops, the sighing and crying guitar lines, the clever and unexpected sound effects. It was a sound achieved through a combination of offbeat ideas, innovative recording techniques and a cosmic ambience that is peculiarly their own. The original line-up consisted of Syd Barrett (guitar & vocals), Nick Mason (percussion), Roger Waters (bass & vocals) and Rick Wright (keyboards & vocals). Adopted as the virtual house band by London’s swinging underground in the mid-60’s, the band held audiences spellbound with live sets of swirling, improvised, often instrumental music created under the leadership of the charismatic Syd Barrett. His spontaneous, madly energetic guitar playing was highly innovative for its time and his surreal, whimsical style of songwriting - though less apparent in their live shows - is preserved splendidly on the band’s first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. Four decades on, Barrett’s acid-drenched fairytale world of astrology, scarecrows and magical kingdoms is still a wonder to behold. Unfortunately the Floyd’s trippy concert workouts of this period were never captured on record, though the album does contain a few exploratory instrumentals. “Interstellar Overdrive” in particular sees the band laying the groundwork for extended epics to come. However, it was to be a future without Barrett whose drug-fuelled slide into strangeness and paranoia nearly destroyed the group. In truth, it destroyed Barrett. He remains a recluse to this day and one of rock's most infamous drug casualties. But his replacement proved a worthy one: old school friend and guitar tutor David Gilmour whose probing, melodic guitar lines and smooth, resonant vocals soon became one of the Floyd's most recognisable trademarks. After a couple of patchy albums, the new line-up started to find its feet on the double album Ummagumma. Coming in two distinct parts, the first half consists of four largely instrumental tracks taken from live concerts in Britain. Graced with Wright’s exotic Farfisa organ work and Gilmour’s spacey guitar lines and textures, tracks like “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “Set The Control’s For The Heart Of The Sun” see the quartet brilliantly extend and improvise on the original studio recordings to create otherworldly, primordial soundscapes. It's masterful ambient rock and captures Floyd at its peak as a live band: daring and wonderfully inspired. Ummagumma’s second half contains the band’s most experimental studio work - an erratic yet still fascinating collection of pastoral folk-like pieces, surreal tapestries of mellotron and sound effects and strange Eastern-sounding dirges. As a whole Ummgumma is a daring mixture of rock, electronics and classical avant-garde techniques and its influence has been enormous. It became one of the blueprints for a whole generation of emerging art rock acts including Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Klaus Schulze. The challenge for the Floyd at this stage of their career was to gel the experimental inroads made on Ummagumma into a more accessible sound. First came Atom Heart Mother, with the entire first half being an ambitious and highly underrated six-part suite featuring brass and choir arrangements written by Scottish composer Ron Geesin. Even if the main brass theme resembles a vaguely cheesy Western film score, the extended sequences of guitar/organ interplay are extraordinarily dreamy. The middle section builds splendidly, starting as a slow funky jam which gradually deepens as dramatic choral stabs start to appear in the mix. The standout track from the next album Meddle is a further refinement: the extraordinary twenty minute-plus opus “Echoes”. Largely instrumental, “Echoes” brings together everything the early Floyd did best: an expansive, richly integrated tapestry of rock improvisation, melodic themes and surreal passages of abstract sound. Both Atom Heart Mother and Meddle are also a charming time capsule for the band's way with lovely, pastoral hippie folk songs: the pristine "A Pillow Of Winds", the liquid lap-steel guitar phrases of "Fat Old Sun", and the soaring keyboards/brass/vocal blend of Wright's remarkable "Summer '68". The Dark Side Of The Moon, of course, skyrocketed the Floyd to superstar status and spawned the highly irritating but catchy U.S. hit single “Money”. Revolving around Roger Waters conceptual lyrics about madness and the pressures of the everyday, the compositions and sound effects on Dark Side are woven together seamlessly with a standard of mix and production that today still sounds exceptional (kudos to engineer Alan Parsons). It’s a fine album, and an uplifting one too despite the dark lyrical content. However with a few exceptions - “The Great Gig In The Sky” and "Us And Them " - Dark Side is not definitive ambient rock and a significant departure from the Floyd’s more cosmic explorations of the past. Perhaps more satisfying in that context are the follow-ups Wish You Were Here and Animals, which have longer instrumental passages and a spacey mood and intensity that is uniquely the Floyd’s. The mammoth nine part “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” from Wish You Were Here is a magnificent example of what Rolling Stone critic John Rockwell called the Floyd’s special sense of "line and continuity and ritualistic repetition". The opening sequence featuring Wright’s richly textured keyboards and a simple Gilmour guitar solo is mournfully, breathtakingly beautiful. Entire albums of ambient music have been inspired by this one short but unforgettable sequence. The cinematic, soaring and deeply brooding Animals proved to be the band's swansong as a tightly knit quartet producing their own albums. This is where the classic Pink Floyd ends. While remaining an entertaining live act to this day, by the end of the 1970's they were no longer an outfit exploring cosmic spaces and extended minimalist ideas. A period of personal upheavals coincided with the release of two brilliant but wordy concept albums The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983). Both are dominated by Roger Waters but with significant musical input from Gilmour, American producer Bob Ezrin and various session musicians and arrangers. Here the subjective qualities and sustained moods of the band's earlier music are gone, replaced with narratives that quite deliberately reign the music in instead of letting it fly. A few years later amid lawsuits and ridiculous legal squabbles over Waters departure, Gilmour and Mason managed to record the similarly song-orientated but generally soulless A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987), again with the aid of Bob Ezrin and a team of lyricists and session players (Wright briefly among them). The belated follow-up The Division Bell is a better effort and the only latterday Floyd record that comes close to capturing their true essence. It reunites the band creatively with Rick Wright and contains some fine epic songs and a lovely opening instrumental. Its a beautiful listen even if sonically the band shows a tendency to recycle past glories into bite-size pieces, as glorious and unique as those pieces may be. Since then the band has been silent in the studio and The Division Bell may well prove to be the final chapter in the Pink Floyd odyssey. |
