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David Gilmour - guitar, slide guitar, vocals (1968- ) Rick Wright - keyboards, vocals (1965-1980, 1987-2008) Nick Mason - drums, percussion, sound effects (1965- ) Roger Waters - bass guitar, vocals, sound effects (1965-1985) Syd Barrett - guitar, vocals (1965-1968) Rado 'Bob' Klose - guitar (1965) Jon Carin - backing vocals, keyboards, slide guitar, sound effects (1985-1995)
Inducted into Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 (Performer).

by Richie Unterberger

Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special 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 almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. Despite their astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name. After that time, they were little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.

While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandiose concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were much more conventional than the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.

Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback; electronic screeches; and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; on-stage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, childlike wonder.

The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, "Arnold Layne," a sympathetic, comic vignette about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic "See Emily Play," made the Top Ten. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming fun house of driving, mysterious rockers ("Lucifer Sam"); odd character sketches ("The Gnome"); childhood flashbacks ("Bike," "Matilda Mother"); and freakier pieces with lengthy 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, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and lighthearted than those of their subsequent epics.

The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. Barrett would go catatonic on-stage, playing music 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, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio.

Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live outfit; Barrett would still be able to write and contribute to the records. That couldn't work either, and within a few months Barrett was out of the group. Pink Floyd's management, looking at the wreckage of a band that was now without its lead guitarist, lead singer, and primary songwriter, decided to abandon the group and manage Barrett as a solo act.

Such calamities would have proven insurmountable for 99 out of 100 bands in similar predicaments. Incredibly, Pink Floyd would regroup and not only maintain their popularity, but eventually become even more successful. It was early in the game yet, after all; the first album had made the British Top Ten, but the group was still virtually unknown in America, where the loss of Syd Barrett meant nothing to the media. Gilmour was an excellent guitarist, and the band proved capable of writing enough original material to generate further ambitious albums, Waters eventually emerging as the dominant composer. The 1968 follow-up to Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets, made the British Top Ten, using Barrett's vision as an obvious blueprint, but taking a more formal, somber, and quasi-classical tone, especially in the long instrumental parts. Barrett, for his part, would go on to make a couple of interesting solo records before his mental problems instigated a retreat into oblivion.

Over the next four years, Pink Floyd would continue to polish their brand of experimental rock, which married psychedelia with ever-grander arrangements on a Wagnerian operatic scale. Hidden underneath the pulsing, reverberant organs and guitars and insistently restated themes were subtle blues and pop influences that kept the material accessible to a wide audience. Abandoning the singles market, they concentrated on album-length works, and built a huge following in the progressive rock underground with constant touring in both Europe and North America. While LPs like Ummagumma (divided into live recordings and experimental outings by each member of the band), Atom Heart Mother (a collaboration with composer Ron Geesin), and More... (a film soundtrack) were erratic, each contained some extremely effective music.

By the early '70s, Syd Barrett was a fading or nonexistent memory for most of Pink Floyd's fans, although the group, one could argue, never did match the brilliance of that somewhat anomalous 1967 debut. Meddle (1971) sharpened the band's sprawling epics into something more accessible, and polished the science fiction ambience that the group had been exploring ever since 1968. Nothing, however, prepared Pink Floyd or their audience for the massive mainstream success of their 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon, which made their brand of cosmic rock even more approachable with state-of-the-art production; more focused songwriting; an army of well-time stereophonic sound effects; and touches of saxophone and soulful female backup vocals.

Dark Side of the Moon finally broke Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it made number one. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprehensible 741 weeks on the Billboard album chart. Additionally, the primarily instrumental textures of the songs helped make Dark Side of the Moon easily translatable on an international level, and the record became (and still is) one of the most popular rock albums worldwide.

It was also an extremely hard act to follow, although the follow-up, Wish You Were Here (1975), also made number one, highlighted by a tribute of sorts to the long-departed Barrett, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." Dark Side of the Moon had been dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the cold sterility of modern life; Wish You Were Here and Animals (1977) developed these morose themes even more explicitly. By this time Waters was taking a firm hand over Pink Floyd's lyrical and musical vision, which was consolidated by The Wall (1979).

The bleak, overambitious double concept album concerned itself with the material and emotional walls modern humans build around themselves for survival. The Wall was a huge success (even by Pink Floyd's standards), in part because the music was losing some of its heavy-duty electronic textures in favor of more approachable pop elements. Although Pink Floyd had rarely even released singles since the late '60s, one of the tracks, "Another Brick in the Wall," became a transatlantic number one. The band had been launching increasingly elaborate stage shows throughout the '70s, but the touring production of The Wall, featuring a construction of an actual wall during the band's performance, was the most excessive yet.

In the 1980s, the group began to unravel. Each of the four had done some side and solo projects in the past; more troublingly, Waters was asserting control of the band's musical and lyrical identity. That wouldn't have been such a problem had The Final Cut (1983) been such an unimpressive effort, with little of the electronic innovation so typical of their previous work. Shortly afterward, the band split up -- for a while. In 1986, Waters was suing Gilmour and Mason to dissolve the group's partnership (Wright had lost full membership status entirely); Waters lost, leaving a Roger-less Pink Floyd to get a Top Five album with Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987. In an irony that was nothing less than cosmic, about 20 years after Pink Floyd shed their original leader to resume their career with great commercial success, they would do the same again to his successor. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nothing more than moderate sales and attention, while he watched his former colleagues (with Wright back in tow) rescale the charts.

Pink Floyd still had a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy about their post-Waters output. They knew their formula, could execute it on a grand scale, and could count on millions of customers -- many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a member -- to buy their records and see their sporadic tours. The Division Bell, their first studio album in seven years, topped the charts in 1994 without making any impact on the current rock scene, except in a marketing sense. Ditto for the live Pulse album, recorded during a typically elaborately staged 1994 tour, which included a concert version of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. In 2005, Waters, Gilmour, Mason, and Wright reunited to perform at Live 8. Barrett and Wright passed away, respectively, in 2006 and 2008; both were taken by cancer.

Sites: pinkfloyd.co.uk, pinkfloydarchives.com, pinkfloyd.com, MySpace
Members: David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Rado Klose, Richard Wright, Roger Waters, Syd Barrett    

Review Box Set:

Hard to believe though it is in 2011, there are some people, somewhere out there, who do not own a Pink Floyd record. And it's this fact, largely, that EMI are leaning on with their release of Discovery - a one-stop shopping purchase for the Floyd newcomer, collecting all 14 of the band's studio albums in a sturdy, attractive, expensive box. If you already own a handful of these, the asking price - about 130 - is going to be off-putting, especially as the albums contain no new material (the tracks are remastered, but for expanded versions you'll need to invest in 'Immersion' editions, yours for a pretty penny per set). But if you're in the market for an instant collection, it's a very tempting product. For the collectors out there, included is a booklet (although at 60 pages long, it's less 'let' and more 'book') compiling a host of imagery and graphics created for the band across their career. Assembled by Storm Thorgerson himself, it's a treasure trove of curios, arranged in chronological order, from the very first piece of art, created for a gig in Leeds in 1968, through to 2008's Blue Balls, shot for a book cover. It makes for a fantastic insight into an aspect of Pink Floyd's appeal almost as intrinsic to their success as their music - the singular aesthetic they presented with unfaltering consistency. Of particular interest are rough sketches for the artwork to the best-of set, Echoes - "I thought it echoed Ummagumma a bit," says Thorgerson - and a beautiful water image that was intended for the SACD pressing of Wish You Were Here, a pressing that's yet to be released ("gawd knows why?" reads the accompanying info). And the music itself? Deep breath, here's a Friends-style run-down. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn: the one where Syd Barrett took the lead, resulting in at least one song about a gnome. A Saucerful of Secrets: the one where Roger Waters expressed his songwriting might across numbers like Let There Be More Light and the kazoo-featuring Corporal Clegg. Music From the Film More: the one where Floyd matched folksy acoustic numbers with some truly heavy fare (and also their first without Barrett). Ummagumma: the one that was a live album, but not a live album. Atom Heart Mother: the one with the cow on the cover, which wasn't actually All That Good. Meddle: the one that represented a return to form, and home to the side-filling calling-card track Echoes. Still with us? And on we go. Obscured by Clouds: the one where Floyd began to properly break the stateside mainstream (but, again, it's not an album that's aged well). Dark Side of the Moon: the one that's become a classic. Wish You Were Here: the one that's arguably better than Dark Side, but doesn't get half the acclaim - it's their In Utero to Dark Side's Nevermind, notably disaffected with the business side of things. Animals: the one with the pig. The Wall: the one that didn't need no education, nor no thought control. The Final Cut: the one where David Gilmour was largely AWOL. A Momentary Lapse of Reason: the one where everyone hated everyone else, resulting in a disjointed affair barely worthy of the Pink Floyd name; it was also the first album to not feature Waters. The Division Bell: the one where (largely) Gilmour crafted a farewell affair that saw Floyd bow out with a whimper rather than a roar - although in High Hopes it featured one of the band's best, a real lump-in-the-throat closer with a video featuring a bust of Barrett. The band had, finally, come full circle. So, if you're without any Pink Floyd in your life, why not dive straight into the deep end? That's what Discovery is: this remarkable but frequently frustrating band at their inspirational best, their middle-of-the-road worst; at the peak of their pop-savvy accessibility and in the depths of so much impenetrable self-indulgence. It's everything anyone needs from Pink Floyd, in one package.

Details:

Artist  : Pink Floyd
Album   : The Discovery Studio Album Box Set
Label   : EMI Records
Catalog# : TOCP-71147~62
Format  : CD
Country  : Japan
Genre   : Rock
Styles  : Psychedelic Rock
Date   : 2011


Contains the following 14 remastered studio Discovery albums::

Track 1 - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Track 2 - A Saucerful Of Secrets
Track 3 - More
Track 4 - Ummagumma CD1
Track 5 - Ummagumma CD2
Track 6 - Atom Heart Mother
Track 7 - Meddle
Track 8 - Obscured By Clouds
Track 9 - The Dark Side Of The Moon
Track 10 - Wish You Were Here
Track 11 - Animals
Track 12 - The Wall CD1
Track 13 - The Wall CD2
Track 14 - The Final Cut
Track 15 - A Momentary Lapse Of Reason
Track 16 - The Division Bell


Notes:

Box set release from Pink Floyd consisting of 16 original albums, featuring the latest digital remastering by James Guthrie and new artwork by Storm Thorgerson. Comes with a photo book. *Discs included in this box set will be pressed in Japan, but all other details of the box set will be the same as the overseas version. 14-album titles: "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," "A Saucerful Of Secrets," "More," "Ummagumma," "Atom Heart Mother," "Meddle," "Obscured By Clouds," "The Dark Side Of The Moon," "Wish You Were Here," "Animals," "The Wall," "The Final Cut," "A Momentary Lapse Of Reason," and "The Division Bell (Tsui)." Housed in a digipack case. CDs come with obi strips.

Since 1967 Pink Floyd have produced one of the most outstanding and enduring catalogues in the history of recorded music. All 14 original Studio albums have now been painstakingly digitally remastered by James Guthrie (co-producer of The Wall), and are reissued with newly crafted packaging and booklets created by the band’s long-time artwork collaborator Storm Thorgerson.


‘Discovery’ albums are designed as an introduction to the artist, with all booklets including full album lyrics. All 14 newly remastered Discovery studio albums are now available as a boxset collection that also includes an exclusive 60-page artwork booklet designed by Storm Thorgerson.
Tracklist
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The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn1. Astronomy Domine
2. Lucifer Sam
3. Matilda Mother
4. Flaming
5. Pow R. Toc. H
6. Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk
7. Interstellar Overdrive
8. The Gnome
9. Chapter 24
10. The Scarecrow
11. Bike

A Saucerful Of Secrets
1. Let There Be More Light
2. Remember A Day
3. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
4. Corporal Clegg
5. A Saucerful Of Secrets
6. See Saw
7. Jugband Blues

More
1. Cirrus Minor
2. The Nile Song
3. Crying Song
4. Up The Khyber
5. Green Is The Colour
6. Cymbaline
7. Party Sequence
8. Main Theme
9. Ibiza Bar
10. More Blues
11. Quicksilver
12. A Spanish Piece
13. Dramatic Theme

Ummagumma
CD 1
1. Astronomy Domine (Live) (1994 Digital Remaster)
2. Careful With That Axe Eugene (Live) (1994 Digital Remaster)
3. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (Live) (1994 Digital Remaster)
4. A Saucerful Of Secrets (Live) (1994 Digital Remaster)
CD 2
1. Sysyphus (Part 1)
2. Sysyphus (Part 2)
3. Sysyphus (Part 3)
4. Sysyphus (Part 4)
4. Grantchester Meadows
5. Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict
6. The Narrow Way (Part 1)
7. The Narrow Way (Part 2) The Narrow Way (Part 3)
8. The Grand Vizier's Garden Party (Entrance)
9. The Grand Vizier's Garden Party (Entertainment)
10. The Grand Vizier's Garden Party (Exit)

Atom Heart Mother
1. Atom Heart Mother
2. If
3. Summer '68
4. Fat Old Sun
5. Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast

Meddle
1. One Of These Days
2. A Pillow Of Winds
3. Fearless
4. San Tropez
5. Seamus
6. Echoes

Obscured By Clouds
1. Obscured By Clouds
2. When You're In
3. Burning Bridges
4. The Gold It's In The ...
5. Wots ... Uh The Deal
6. Mudmen
7. Childhood's End
8. Free Four
9. Stay
10. Absolutely Curtains

The Dark Side Of The Moon
1. Speak To Me
2. Breathe
3. On The Run
4. Time
5. The Great Gig In The Sky
6. Money
7. Us And Them
8. Any Colour You Like
9. Brain Damage
10. Eclipse

Wish You Were Here
1. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One) (1-5)
2. Welcome To The Machine
3. Have A Cigar
4. Wish You Were Here
5. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part Two) (6-9)

Animals
1. Pigs On The Wing (Part One)
2. Dogs
3. Pigs (Three Different Ones)
4. Sheep
5. Pigs On The Wing (Part Two)

The Wall
CD 1
1. In The Flesh?
2. The Thin Ice
3. Another Brick In The Wall Part 1
4. The Happiest Days of Our Lives
5. Another Brick In The Wall Part 2
6. Mother
7. Goodbye Blue Sky
8. Empty Spaces
9. Young Lust
10. One of My Turns
11. Don't Leave Me Now
12. Another Brick In The Wall Part 3
13. Goodbye Cruel World
CD 2
1. Hey You
2. Is There Anybody Out There
3. Nobody Home
4. Vera
5. Bring The Boys Back Home
6. Comfortable Numb
7. The Show Must Go On
8. In The Flesh
9. Run Like Hell
10. Waiting For The Worms
11. Stop
12. The Trial
13. Outside The Wall

The Final Cut
1. The Post War Dream
2. Your Possible Pasts
3. One Of The Few
4. When The Tigers Broke Free
5. The Hero's Return
6. The Gunners Dream
7. Paranoid Eyes
8. Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert
9. The Fletcher Memorial Home
10. Southampton Dock
11. The Final Cut
12. Not Now John
13. Two Suns In The Sunset

A Momentary Lapse Of Reason
1. Signs Of Life
2. Learning To Fly
3. The Dogs Of War
4. One Slip
5. On The Turning Away
6. Yet Another Movie/Round And Around
7. A New Machine (Part 1)
8. Terminal Frost
9. A New Machine (Part 2)
10. Sorrow

The Division Bell
1. Cluster One
2. What Do You Want From Me
3. Poles Apart
4. Marooned
5. A Great Day For Freedom
6. Wearing The Inside Out
7. Take It Back
8. Coming Back To Life
9. Keep Talking
10. Lost For Words

11. High Hopes
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