THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK

OF PINK FLOYD

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music,
as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international
researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to the critical study and interpretation
of one of the world’s most important and successful bands. For the frst time, this Handbook
will ‘tear down the wall,’ examining the band’s collective artistic creations and the infuence
of social, technological, commercial and political environments over several decades on their
work. Divided into fve parts, the book provides a thoroughly contextualised overview of the
musical works of Pink Floyd, including coverage of performance and sound; media, reception
and fandom; genre; periods of Pink Floyd’s work; and aesthetics and subjectivity. Drawing
on art, design, performance, culture and counterculture, emergent theoretical resources and
analytical frames are evaluated and discussed from across the social sciences, humanities and
creative arts. The Handbook is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well
as music industry professionals. It will appeal across a range of related subjects from music
production to cultural studies and media/communication studies.

Chris Hart is an independent author and researcher. Chris has been senior researcher on
several international research projects, working with major global brands across Europe.

Simon A. Morrison is a writer, academic and Programme Leader for Music Journalism at the
University of Chester.
ROUTLEDGE MUSIC HANDBOOKS

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK TO MUSIC UNDER GERMAN

OCCUPATION, 1938–1945
Propaganda, Myth and Reality
Edited by David Fanning, Erik Levi

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MUSIC SIGNIFICATION

Edited by Esti Sheinberg, William P. Dougherty

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK TO SOCIOLOGY OF MUSIC EDUCATION

Edited by Ruth Wright, Geir Johansen, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, Patrick Schmidt

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN’S WORK IN MUSIC

Edited by Rhiannon Mathias

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PINK FLOYD

Edited by Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

For more information about this series, please visit:

WWW.ROUTLEDGE.COM/ROUTLEDGE-MUSIC-HANDBOOKS/BOOK-SERIES/RMH
See also Routledge Music Companions:
www.routledge.com/Routledge-Music-Companions/book-series/MUSCOMP
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF
PINK FLOYD

Edited by
Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison
 Cover image: @ Pixabay.com
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison to be identifed as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hart, Chris, editor. | Morrison, Simon A., editor.
Title: The Routledge handbook to Pink Floyd / edited by Chris Hart and
Simon A. Morrison.
Description: [01.] | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge music handbooks | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2022015530 (print) | LCCN 2022015531 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367338275 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032335438 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780367338282 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pink Floyd (Musical group) | Rock music—History and
criticism. | Psychedelic rock music—History and criticism.
Classifcation: LCC ML421.P6 R68 2022 (print) | LCC ML421.P6
(ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23/eng/20220331
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015530
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015531
ISBN: 978-0-367-33827-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-33543-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-33828-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of tables and fgures ix

List of contributors xii
Acknowledgements xvi

Introduction: ‘What happened to the post-war dream?’ The story of

Pink Floyd 1
Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

Companions to the albums of Pink Floyd and sources on Pink Floyd 25

Chris Hart

PART I
Performance and sound 47

1 A cartographical companion to listening to and understanding the

songs of Pink Floyd 49
Chris Hart

2 A saucerful of secrets: Pink Floyd, free improvisation and collective

composition 73
John Encarnacao

3 David Gilmour: defning the ‘melodic’ guitarist 89

Richard Perks

v
 Contents

4 Planet Floyd: the evolution of Pink Floyd’s live performances 111

David Pattie

5 Back to the UFO: Pink Floyd, The Division Bell tour (1994) and the
retrofed aesthetics of psychedelia 125
Kimi Kärki

PART II
Media, reception and fandom 139

6 Original soundtracks: Pink Floyd in the movies 141

Philippe Gonin

7 ‘Us and them’: Pink Floyd and the British music media 157
Simon A. Morrison

8 Visual coverscapes: why Pink Floyd album covers don’t have types 172
Cinla Seker with Chris Hart

9 Pink Floyd memories and memorability: ‘a personal essay on fandom

and collecting’ 191
Bob Follen

PART III
Genre 209

10 In search of space (rock): Pink Floyd and genre formation in

popular music 211
Tico Romao

11 ‘On the Run’: the birth of electronic dance music? 226

Jim J. Mason

12 More punk than Pink: Pink Floyd’s relationship with 1970s UK punk 242
Martin James

13 Pink Floyd: the musical elements 257

David Detmer

vi
 Contents

PART IV
Periods of Pink Floyd’s work 273

14 The psychedelic self at play: re-reading whimsy in the early music of

Pink Floyd 275
James Barrett

15 Legacy recre/ation: mining the elements in the archive of The Early

Years box set 293
Rob Chapman

16 ‘Cruising for a bruising’: how The Dark Side of the Moon made Pink
Floyd successful beyond their wildest dreams and instigated their downfall 306
Daryl Easlea

17 Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and the stage theory of grief 318
Gilad Cohen

18 ‘A certain unease in the air’: transitional aspects of Pink Floyd’s Animals 338
Edward Macan

19 Behind The Wall: a tool for condemning totalitarianism 351

Jean-René Larue

20 Hey you! subjectivity and the ideological repressive state apparatuses

in Pink Floyd’s The Wall 369
Tina Richardson

21 Truth and manipulation in Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut 384

Glenn Fosbraey

PART V
Aesthetics and Subjectivity 401

22 Meadows, relics, and Victorian dolls’ houses: places, ephemera, and

the unreal realities of Pink Floyd 403
Peter Hughes Jachimiak

23 The Pink Floyd Intensity: humanity, aesthetics and the breathless fan 423
Robert Wilsmore

vii
 Contents

24 The cultural legacy of Syd Barrett’s English pastoral 438

Simon Gwyn Roberts

25 Temporal structuration in Pink Floyd’s The Wall 449

Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

26 A temporal journey through Pink Floyd’s music 464

Gilad Cohen

Pink Floyd: Selective Chronology of Relevant Events 484

Compiled by Chris Hart

Index 492

viii
 TABLES AND FIGURES

Tables
1.1 Albums with songs from the fve phases of Pink Floyd 54
1.2 Nostalgia – key themes, referents and lyric extracts 56
1.3 Lament – key themes, referents and lyric extracts 60
1.4 Trauma – key themes, referents and lyric extracts 65
2.1 Group compositions on Pink Floyd’s albums, 1967–1983 84
3.1 Timbral variation of guitar tracks throughout The Division Bell 95
25.1 Present, past and future in the album and motion picture of The Wall 453

Figures
3.1 Opening of guitar solo to ‘Money,’ illustrating ‘call and response’ 96
3.2 Excerpt from ‘Speak to Me/Breathe,’ illustrating ‘vocal-esque’ phrasing 97
3.3 Opening section of guitar solo in ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’
illustrating use of 9th over tonic minor chord 98
3.4 Excerpt from outro guitar solo in ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones),’ illustrating
use of 9th on tonic minor chord 98
3.5 Opening four bars of frst guitar solo in ‘Comfortably Numb,’ illustrating
use of arpeggiated triads 99
3.6 Excerpt from guitar solo in ‘Time,’ illustrating an alternative use of
arpeggiated triads 99
3.7 Graphic representation of pitch against time for frst 20 bars of fnal guitar
solo in ‘Dogs’ 100
3.8 ‘Melodic functions’ and ‘levels of impact’ assumed by Gilmour 105
5.1 Poster advertising two additional performances at Earls Court, London, 1994 126
5.2 Earls Court, Division Bell tour 1994. Original concert ticket 130
8.1 Alex Steinweiss cover, Nat King Cole’s The King Cole Trio album cover,
1945 (original in bright primary colours) 173
8.2 Graphical grid showing the basic elements of Dark Side of the Moon sleeve 180
8.3 Battersea Power Station – an imposing cathedral to power 183

ix
 Tables and fgures

8.4 The cover of The Wall is a simple pencil-drawn design 185

9.1 Obscure library image 196
9.2 Pompeii postcards 197
9.3 Mark Fisher acetate strip 197
9.4 David Gilmour Meltdown appearance ticket and programme 198
9.5 Cassette archive 199
9.6 The Final Cut cassette banner 199
9.7 The Dark Side of the Moon Earls Court programme 200
9.8 The Wall armband and badge 201
9.9 There’s Somebody Out There interview LP 202
9.10 Feed Your Head bootleg LP 203
9.11 Norman Smith autobiography 203
9.12 Invite for The Wall Live 80/81 204
9.13 Printer’s proof invitation for The Endless River album launch 205
9.14 ‘Arnold Layne’ promo advert 206
9.15 Michael Gothard’s La Vallee/Obscured by Clouds quad poster 206
9.16 Stephen Follen’s Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd cuttings 207
13.1 Album chart 1973 in Record World 260
14.1 1966 poster for Friday night gig at Hornsey College of Art 276
14.2 1967 San Francisco. By B. Maclean. Presented by Bill Graham 280
17.1 The form of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as part of the album Wish You
Were Here (1975) 319
17.2 A summary of the progression of bereavement stages based on Selby Jacobs’s
synthesised model and empirical tests 320
17.3 The pitch arsenal of the guitar and keyboard improvisations throughout Part
I (frst track, 0:00–3:50) 323
17.4 The yearning motif as a melody and as a chord 323
17.5 Introduction and catharsis of the yearning motif 324
17.6 Development of the yearning motif and the harmonic progression 325
17.7 Guitar accompaniments during the baritone saxophone solo and the tenor
saxophone solo 326
17.8 Guitar pattern in the transition to Part VIII 326
17.9 Repetition and build up in the slide guitar solo, refecting anger 328
17.10 The climax of ‘Shine On’ using two slide guitars 328
17.11 The instrumental theme in Part IV (as part of the yearning stage) and in
Part II (transitioning from the anger stage back to yeaning) 329
17.12 The beginning of the funeral march in Part IX, which represents the stage
of depression 331
17.13 The ‘acceptance’ section, which employs a Picardy third and quotes Syd
Barrett’s song ‘See Emily Play’ 332
17.14 The bereavement map of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ 333
26.1 Linear fow in ‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967) is challenged by constant
bouncing among potential tonic chords, prolonged chromatic motion in the
bass, and harmonic oscillation in the coda 470
26.2 ‘Echoes’ (1971) as an infated standard-scale song, alongside songs of a
similar structure: The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ (1968), The Rolling Stones’
‘Jumping’ Jack Flash’ (1968), and Pink Floyd’s ‘Matilda Mother’ (1967) 472

x
 Tables and fgures

26.3 Stillness and motion in ‘Echoes’’ verse, using motivic half-step ascend and a
major tonic chord 472
26.4 Structural ascending motion (B-B♯-C♯) in the exposition of ‘Echoes’ 474
26.5 Development of the ascending motif in the instrumental bridge and build
up toward the return of the verse 474
26.6 Temporal map of Pink Floyd’s recorded corpus, 1967–2014 478

xi
 CONTRIBUTORS

James Barrett, Umeå University, Sweden, is active in research and writing within the
internationally emerging feld of digital humanities. With external fnancing via the EU,
Cambridge University, Stanford University, Kulturrådet (Swedish Arts Council) and the Knut
and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, James has worked on projects in digital media and community.

Rob Chapman, University of Huddersfeld, was the singer with the Bristol-based band the
Glaxo Babies and with the British alternative rock band The Transmitters. As a music journalist,
he has written for Mojo and other magazines and newspapers and made some broadcasts with
the BBC National Network. Rob is probably best known to Pink Floyd fans for his Syd Barrett:
A Very Irregular Head (2010) and Psychedelia and Other Colours (2015).

Gilad Cohen, Ramapo College of New Jersey, is an active composer, performer and theorist
in various musical genres, including concert music, rock and music for theatre. Holding a Ph.D.
in composition from Princeton University, Gilad has received commissions worldwide, with his
music receiving numerous international prizes. His work on Pink Floyd resulted in the frst-ever
academic conference devoted to the band, which he produced in 2014 at Princeton University
with composer Dave Molk.

David Detmer is a professor of philosophy at Purdue University Northwest. He is the author

of seven books, including  Zinnophobia, about the radical American historian Howard Zinn
(2018); Phenomenology Explained (2013); and Simply Sartre (2020). His newest book, the frst ever
written about the British progressive rock band Renaissance, was published in 2021.

Daryl Easlea is based in the UK and writes for Record Collector and Mojo as well as authoring
books on Peter Gabriel, Sparks, CHIC and the Supremes, among many others. He has been
writing professionally about Pink Floyd for over 20 years, and his seven cover features (to date)
about the group for Prog magazine have been widely acclaimed.

John Encarnacao is a guitarist, singer-songwriter and improviser who has released more
than 30 albums and EPs. His books are Punk Aesthetics and New Folk (2013) and Teaching and

xii
 Contributors

Evaluating Music Performance at University (2020). Recent essay subjects include Courtney Bar-
nett, Throbbing Gristle and Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. John lectures in music at
Western Sydney University, Australia.

Bob Follen is the artist in residence at the ‘Louder Than Words’ music literature festival. He has
been collecting music memorabilia for over 30 years. As a leading afcionado of Pink Floyd, Bob
has advised on and curated exhibitions on Pink Floyd and also David Bowie. Bob is interested
in the social and cultural context of the band, enjoys researching the history of a band and is a
Floyd encyclopaedia. He lives in West Yorkshire with his partner Carla and cat Bluebell.

Glenn Fosbraey, University of Winchester, has authored books, articles and chapters on the
subjects of drama, song lyrics, sexuality and music, Leonard Cohen’s songs and poems and peda-
gogy and runs the university’s record label ‘Splendid Fred Records,’ producing and directing
productions. He has also authored poetry and short stories.

Philippe Gonin, Université de Bourgogne, is a specialist in contemporary music and analysis

of the image/sound relationship in cinema. He is also a composer, guitarist and orchestrator.
His research and publishing encompass myth and music and progressive rock in Europe. Recent
work includes the A Floyd Chamber Concerto – le disque!; Rock à Papa’”le rock n’est pas mort, il est
vieux, nuance!’’; and Un livre qui parle de Robert Wyatt, un livre qui parle de Rock Bottom.

Chris Hart is an independent author and researcher. Chris has been senior researcher on
several international research projects, working with major global brands across Europe. He is
also the author of popular textbooks on literature searching, literature reviewing and research
methods. He has also edited books on Talcott Parsons, the Chicago School of Sociology, Eng-
lishness and identity, entertainment and popular culture in the First and Second World Wars
and heroines and heroes.

Peter Hughes Jachimiak, University of South Wales, focuses in his research and writing on

experiencing and remembering the post-1945 period in order to ofer an insight into mediated
cultures. His recent work is on children’s cultures and youth cultures of the 1970s and 1980s
and the way in which the cultural artefacts of both childhood and youth of those two decades
manifested themselves within the wider cultural geographies of the time.

Martin James, Solent University, Southampton, is an internationally acclaimed music critic

whose work has been translated into 15 languages. He has published books on electronic music
cultural histories as well as a number of music biographies. He co-authored Understanding the
Music Industries (2013). Martin is also a practising musician who records and releases music
with fellow academic Sean Albiez. The project explores algorithm as taste management, audi-
ence engagement with nostalgia and public expectations of music performance in people over
50 years of age.

Kimi Kärki, University of Turku, is a musician with over 40 releases with bands such as Rever-
end Bizarre, Lord Vicar, Orne, Uhrijuhla and E-Musikgruppe Lux Ohr and solo albums under
the name Kimi Kärki. His doctoral thesis was on the cultural history of stadium rock and media
spectacles. He has written articles and edited several books on cultural history, popular music
studies and cultural integration.

xiii
 Contributors

Jean-René Larue, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, research interests centre

around French and Italian manifestations of Progressive Rock and Postmodernity. His Doc-
toral Thesis was entitled a, ‘Comparative study between French progressive rock and Italian
progressive rock: contextual infuences and musical creations’. In 2016, he won the IASPM -
bfe (International Association for the Study of Popular Music - French-speaking branch Europe)
Young Researcher Award and participated in several international events such as the “Rock
and Violence” conference in Rouen in 2017 or the French Musicology Society conference
(November 2017) and published several articles in peer-reviewed journals on various subjects
such as Led Zeppelin, Colette Magny, political commitment, rap, etc. Since 2017, he has been a
lecturer in the history of contemporary music and the history of jazz at the University of Reims
Champagne-Ardenne.

Edward Macan, College of the Redwoods, Eureka, California, is author of the early landmark
of progressive rock studies,  Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Countercul-
ture (1996), as well as Endless Enigma: A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (2006). He
is the keyboardist, mallet percussionist and principal composer for the group Hermetic Science,
with whom he has several commercial releases.

Jim J. Mason has been a lecturer at the University of Chester for 20 years and is currently
the programme leader for the Music Production programme. He has produced and composed
music across a range of styles for a variety of purposes and has had a number of pop and club
chart hits.

Simon A. Morrison is a writer, academic and Programme Leader for Music Journalism at the
University of Chester. He has reported on music scenes everywhere from Beijing to Brazil and
Moscow to Marrakech and written books including the collected journalism Discombobulated:
Dispatches from the Wrong Side and  Dancefoor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction.  His
research interest in the intersection of words and music has involved contributions to books
such as DJ Culture in the Mix and Kerouac on Record; journals including Popular Music; and confer-
ences in Portugal, Holland, Germany and Australia.

David Pattie, University of Birmingham, has published in a number of areas (Samuel Beckett,

contemporary theatre, Scottish theatre, popular music). He is the author of Rock Music in Perfor-
mance (2007) and has co-edited (with Sean Albiez) the following books: Kraftwerk: Music Non-
Stop (2012), Brian Eno: Oblique Music (2016) and The Velvet Underground: What Goes On (2022).

Richard Perks  is Senior Lecturer in Music Performance at the University of Kent (UK) and
Associate Professor of Music at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (UK). He
is one of Europe’s leading exponents of the fretless electric guitar, has extensive experience as
a session musician and has performed all over the world. Recent publications have addressed
the extended performance possibilities of the fretless electric guitar, guitar-focused musicology/
analysis, the combination of composition with improvisation and intercultural collaboration. In
2021, he was awarded research funding to explore the fretless guitar scene of west Asia.

Tina Richardson, Manchester Metropolitan University, is a cultural theorist and psychogeog-

rapher. Tina has published widely on urban space and popular culture, applying critical theory,
discourse analysis, semiology and post-structural approaches.

xiv
 Contributors

Simon Gwyn Roberts, University of Chester, worked as a fnancial, business and news jour-
nalist, editing several London-based publications before re-entering academia in 2003 to launch
the journalism programme at the University of Chester. His current research interests include,
the social media strategies of minority language groups, regionalism and the representation of
place, the history of newspapers, and the relationship between the news media and political
devolution.

Tico Romao, University of Alberta, focuses in his research interests and publishing on cogni-
tive flm theory, the representation of social types and action cinema. His publications include
topics such as action scenarios, social cognition and flm and applications of relevance theory
to flm.

Vesa-Matti Sarenius, University of Oulu, Finland, focuses in his research and writing on the
pedagogy of pre-high school education and systems of education in general. His special interests
are in mathematics education, especially in early childhood and primary education. He is also a
long-time Pink Floyd enthusiast and collector.

Cinla Seker, Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, is a teacher and practitioner in graphic art and
design. Her work embraces visual art produced for commercial music promotion and storytell-
ing in church murals. She has written on visual representations in album art, coving topics such
as The Cure, Depeche Mode, Yoko Ono, folk music album art and Balkan brass band album art.

Marian Tumanyan is an Armenian doctoral researcher working in the University of Oulu,

Finland. Her educational background is in pedagogy and psychology. Her research explores
how arts-based methods can be used when working with children on sensitive topics. She uses
participatory arts-based activities to collect data with children. Education and arts are her pas-
sions, so she aims to impact children’s and education specialists’ lives by her research.

Robert Wilsmore is a composer, producer, musicologist, academic and collaborator. He stud-

ied music at Bath College of HE (now Bath Spa University) and in 1994 was awarded doctor
of musical arts from Nottingham University, where he studied composition with Nicholas
Sackman. He has led on nationwide research projects on collaboration and has written many
articles and chapters on popular music and music production. In his time as an academic leader
for more than 20 years, he has been Assistant Head of Music at Leeds College of Music (Leeds
Conservatoire) and Head of the School of the Arts at York St John University.

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Georgina Gregory, who provided inspiration for this project in its early
stages. A thank-you goes to Beverley, whose eye for detail is unmatched and without whom
we may have missed important deadlines! And thanks also go to Ben Hart, who helped with
matters technological and musical.
Simon would like to thank his Uncle John, who, on a trip over from Australia in the early
1980s, took him to a second-hand vinyl record store and invited him to choose any album.
The purchase was The Dark Side of the Moon, and, at the age of 13, Simon thus began a lifelong
love afair with the band. Thanks also to Dad and cousin Charlie for further Floyd inspiration.
Simon dedicates his contribution to this book to his brother Jonny, his trusted guide in all
things musical, for inviting him, over everyone, to be his plus-one for Live 8 in 2005 and to be
there when the band reformed for that one night. He also dedicates it to his father, who took
him to see Pink Floyd in 1987 and died during the production of this book.
Special thanks go to Bob Follon for allowing us to enjoy his collection of Pink Floyd arte-
facts and agreeing to tell us about the signifcance of Pink Floyd to him.

xvi
 INTRODUCTION
‘What happened to the post-war dream?’
Te story of Pink Floyd

Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

Many people reading this book, just like those of you putting a Pink Floyd album on the
turntable, will already know something of the who, the what and the when of this intriguing
and continually relevant band. But for those of you who were not born in the 1950s or 1960s,
perhaps, what follows is an introduction to the biography and context of Pink Floyd’s members,
taking us through some of the events of the shared history that they experienced and setting the
socio-historic context which infuenced and shaped the band they were to become. While we
halt this historical journey around the time of the release of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), at
the end of this book, you will fnd a chronology of dates and events that adds more granularity
to the times and key events of all of the albums. As editors of this collection, we both felt keenly
that there was something about this particular band, something almost intangible, that elevated
them beyond other contemporaries of their era and warranted this level of penetrative scholarly
enquiry. However, before we even reach that point, it will be useful to outline the form and
function of this book itself and how it might best be deployed as a companion, and as a guide,
into the world of Pink Floyd.

Critical framework, genesis and mission for the Handbook

The cover of Pink Floyd’s most commercially successful album – 1973’s The Dark Side of the
Moon – famously features a prism into which a beam of white light is refracted, emerging in
a dazzling rainbow of primary colours. Designed by long-term Floyd collaborators Hipgnosis,
the image is now iconic. The pyramid also says much, however, about the monolithic, almost
mystical status achieved by this rock band. Further, the notion of the prism might also stand as a
useful image for this book, projecting light onto Pink Floyd but also tracing the many diferent
routes of analysis of the band and the varying discourses that run through their cultural and
musical DNA. In this section, therefore, the editors will ofer some guidance for how to navi-
gate this book: a useful compass, perhaps, to assist readers to orient themselves within its pages
and perhaps more swiftly fnd their way to materials they need.
Certainly, this Handbook is intended primarily for an academic audience and for popular
music scholars interested in both notions of popular music scholarship more broadly and, more
specifcally, the band Pink Floyd. However, the editors of this book were keen from the very

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-1 1
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

outset that, given its focus on an important band in the popular music canon, this book would
also be of interest to, and accessible for, a wider readership that might include, for instance,
more undergraduate students and the more casual music fan; to fans of the band and more
non-cognate readers; and to a global audience of music lovers from the Anglophone world
from which the band itself derives but also, importantly, beyond. While some chapters certainly
take a deep dive into issues of musicology and musicianship, or semiotics and cultural sociology,
penned by an array of music academics from across the globe, others will be very easily readable
for an audience beyond the – perhaps rarefed halls – of the academy.
To select one or two examples, certainly Richard Perks’ analysis of the guitar style of David
Gilmour (Chapter 3) comes into the former category and would suit students of music and
those primarily interested in a musicological route into music as text. We were also keen to
include the thoughts of independent scholars and music writers, however, and authors of more
commercially oriented works of music biography. In the case of Rob Chapman, for instance – a
writer we knew had already contributed to the knowledge of Pink Floyd with his fascinating
biography of Syd Barrett, A Very Peculiar Head – we hoped (and were glad to be proved right)
that he might be open to the idea of contributing some further thoughts to this collection
(Chapter 15). Equally, we were delighted that key prog rock writer Daryl Easlea would add
something specifcally on The Dark Side of the Moon. Easlea is a journalist who has interviewed
several band members and penned cover features for magazines, such as the Animals cover story
for Prog magazine that appeared during the editing of this book in January 2021. As editors, we
are both extremely proud that what started as a causal conversation on campus has now evolved
into what we believe to be the largest scholarly interrogation of the band yet undertaken. And
why be restricted, even, to words? Certainly, this was a band themselves given to instrumen-
tal composition and also the importance of visuals in both album cover design and their live
performance. Towards the centre of this book, therefore, you will fnd a largely visual essay on
the notion of music and memorabilia, with the collection of Floyd material assembled by uber-
enthusiast Bob Follen.

Genesis of the Handbook

Every contributor associated with this Handbook has a diferent story to tell, a diferent route
into their interest in and association with the band Pink Floyd. In terms of the origins of the
book itself – and notwithstanding the perhaps confusing pun on the word ‘genesis’ to discuss
the origins of a book on a ‘prog’ (progressive rock) band, we will briefy return to the Biblical,
rather than pop, use of the word ‘genesis’ to say one or two things on the origin story of the
book. It had been a project occupying the past several years for two academics from the Uni-
versity of Chester in the northwest of England. Chris Hart had both a long-standing interest
in the band and also a professional understanding of branding and semiotics that allowed for
his own route into thinking about, and writing about, the band. Having spent his life working
with imagery, signs and signifers, Chris was always fascinated not only with how this band
sounded but how they presented themselves visually and what clues might be encoded in, for
instance, the album cover artwork. That structural interest led to his input into the Cinla Seker
essay on Pink Floyd album covers (Chapter 8) and also his own conceptual mapping of a route
through the recorded output of the band that useful opens this Handbook and provides a the-
matic, cartographic way to develop an understanding of this complex band. An early iteration
of the title of the volume, for instance, encompassed the words ‘band’ and ‘brand’ as two ways
of unlocking their story.

2
 Introduction

Chris then approached his co-editor, Simon A. Morrison, as someone who might be
interested in collaborating on this project, since Simon was a) the Programme Leader for Music
Journalism and therefore someone with a background in popular music studies and b) someone
with an ofce just down the hall from Chris. Simon was, and indeed is, a fan of Pink Floyd.
On a trip over from Australia in 1983, an uncle treated him to one or two albums on vinyl
as a present. One of these happened to be The Dark Side of the Moon, acquired from Reckless
Records on Upper Street, Islington, and it is still the copy he has on his shelf, approaching
40 years later. In 1987 Simon’s dad took him to see Pink Floyd play as part of the Nordof Rob-
ins music therapy event at Knebworth, and concerts also followed by Roger Waters, in support
of his Radio K.A.O.S. solo album. In 2005 Simon was lucky enough to be in the audience for
the reunion of the band for Live 8 at Hyde Park, and an encounter with Floyd bass player Guy
Pratt at the Edinburgh Festival also led Simon to book Guy’s one-man show at a music festival
in Manchester called Louder Than Words (also, ironically perhaps, the title of the only track
with words on the last studio album from the band, 2014’s The Endless River).1 Chris’ ofer was
accepted almost immediately.
As academics, and true fans of Pink Floyd, both editors felt that the time was right for this
academic collection of chapter. For instance, the 2017 Victoria and Albert exhibition ‘Their
Mortal Remains’ provided the evidence of this persistent interest in the band. Both of the edi-
tors, and indeed some contributors, visited that exhibition, and all would agree that it was an
invaluable experience in terms of a deeper understanding of Floyd, building on exhibits and
materials from the band’s own archive, including music equipment and other ephemera.2 The
band may no longer be together or functioning as a live or recording outft, but certainly the
music remains, as does this interest. Re-issues, box sets and rarities continue to fnd releases,
providing fresh materials for scholars to work with. Indeed, Rob Chapman’s contribution to
the book, ‘Legacy Recre/Ation: Mining the Elements of The Early Years Boxset’ (Chapter 15),
uses just such a release as a way to gain fresh insight into their early recordings, mining the frst
seams of material for the band. Still making news, at the time of writing, a rerelease of the 1977
album Animals is being held up, it is suggested, by a dispute between key band members on their
contributions to Floyd music and whether sleeve notes should be included with the new release.
This Handbook has been something of an endless river in itself, running through these past few
tumultuous years for the two editors, but both remain happy that they found contributors who
agreed that this was the right time for a fresh scholarly assessment of the band. As editors, they
are both extremely proud that what started as a causal conversation on campus has evolved into
what they believe to be the largest scholarly interrogation of the band yet undertaken.
Of course a Handbook such as this can only work on the quality of its contributions. The
popular music community is truly global, with university courses including popular music on
ofer now live across the planet. As editors we hoped to encourage and broaden scholarship and
are therefore delighted the book includes contributions from the United States, Canada and
Australia, as well as scholars from Finland, France and Turkey. The international element to the
contributions certainly supports the enduring global appeal of the band.

Te critical infrastructure/apparatus for the Handbook

This Research Handbook does not, and could not, stand as an exhaustive overview of everything
to do with Pink Floyd. In this Handbook to the band’s outputs and eventual success, one or
two releases have, for instance, received less attention, although the Handbook does contain a
discography of the original albums with which the novice reader can navigate their way through

3
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

the diferent stages of this fascinating and enduring band. To extend that, streaming platforms
such as Spotify and Apple Music allow a uniquely modern access to their back catalogue. It
is anticipated the reader might use platforms such as these to provide a sonic context for the
analysis, whether musical or cultural, within the chapters in this book: a soundtrack as they read.
Alongside this, while what will shortly follow is a fairly brief historical journey through
post-war England, setting the context into which the band members were born, came together
as a music group and then evolved up to the phenomenal success following the release of The
Dark Side of the Moon (1973), this book is not intended to stand as the biographical story of
the band. For that, interested readers might turn to biographical works by the likes of Barry
Miles3 and indeed very useful insights into the band ofered by drummer Nick Mason.4 At the
end of this book you will, however, also fnd a chronology of dates and events that adds more
granularity to the times and events of all the albums that you might refer to for chronological
and biographic clarity as you delve into the various chapters. Equally, while much scholarship
within popular music studies (certainly that rooted in the CCCS, the so-called Birmingham
School of the 1960s and 1970s) might have been focused on class, we need to accept and be
clear, from the outset, that what is under consideration is a largely comfortable, middle-class
world where discourses around class, as well as age/youth and gender, would possibly be of less
relevance than the extremely important work going on in those areas in other spheres of popular
music scholarship.
In terms of typologies of enquiry that might conversely be relevant, Derek B. Scott, in his
own introduction to the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Musicology, usefully outlines
some of the diferent methodologies at work, even within the musicological branch of popular
music enquiry. He writes, for instance, that critical musicological, as a discipline, ‘is driven
by a desire to understand the meanings embedded in musical texts, whatever kind of musical
texts those may be.’5 Indeed there has long been discussion, if not contention, within the acad-
emy between those primarily concerned with the musicological analysis of music as text and
a more sociological approach that might consider those musical texts in their wider cultural-
political context. We hope that the balance through the sections in this collection allows for both,
touching on approaches and theoretical models as varied as musicology, cultural musicology and
semiotics, as well as contingencies around genre, fandom and audience, ideology, meaning and
politics. Scott continues, ‘Scholars from cultural and media studies have been most infuential,
but often have had little to say regarding musicological issues.’6 Scott is undoubtedly correct in
that assertion, but we hope to have ameliorated some of the jagged edges of that relationship by
including both approaches within this collection.

How to navigate the book

The book, then, is divided into fve sections – fve separate routes into an analysis of the
band and decoding its music and signifcance, which, taken together, ofer a comprehensive
collection of new insights into Pink Floyd from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. In
this sense, each section is like one refracted beam of colour from the enigmatic pyramid on the
cover of The Dark Side of the Moon, one beam for each section in the book, with one taken up
by this introduction. Of course there might also be points of overlap between these chapters,
and indeed these sections, but whether considered as separate paths into, or more as collective
map of, the band, this book functions as companion and guide for any interested sonic explorer.
First, and signifcantly of course, we have the music, technology and sounds of the band
itself, with the more defned musicological content contained within ‘Performance and Sound.’
This section includes chapters that largely consider the music, technology and sounds of the

4
 Introduction

band itself. Musicological approaches encompass everything from John Encarnacao’s consid-
eration of the use of improvisation in the band’s composition (Chapter 2) to the penetrative
musicological decoding of Gilmour’s iconic guitar sound – such a key and essential element
in the rich soundscape of the band – in Richard Perks’ chapter ‘David Gilmour: Defning the
“Melodic”: Guitarist’ (Chapter 3). The live performance and visual nature of the band are then
the focus of chapters by David Pattie and Kimi Kärki (Chapters 4 and 5, respectively). And for
the newcomer to the band, then, Chris Hart’s ‘A Cartographical Companion to Listening and
Understanding the Songs of Pink Floyd’ (Chapter 1) provides a route into the themes and con-
cepts underpinning the songs of Pink Floyd.
At the other end of the ‘text versus context’ paradigm, and ending the collection, Section 5 is
‘Aesthetics and Subjectivity.’ Here you will fnd less of the precise analysis of the music from the
band, but instead the focus shifts to the world around the band and their music. As an example,
Simon Gwyn Roberts chooses to consider landscape, using place – specifcally the somewhat
idyllic area of Cambridge and its surrounding countryside – as a route to understanding the
muse and motivations of the band’s frst principal songwriter, Syd Barrett (Chapter 24). Peter
Hughes Jachimiak, meanwhile, is quite literal in his survey of context, using the various items
and casual bricolage that might have occupied Barrett’s youth as a way of constructing a picture
of the spheres of infuence, of the things that drove him to write about the strange, varied and
whimsical subjects that occupied him. That chapter, ‘Meadows, Relics and Victorian Dolls’
Houses: Places, Ephemera and the Unreal Realities of Pink Floyd,’ stands as a useful companion
piece to the Roberts contribution in terms of its focus on spaces and places and is Chapter 22.
Within these two thematic, structural bookends lie the remaining beams of this prism of
analysis. Two central sections – Part III’s ‘Genre’ and the ‘Periods of Pink Floyd’s Work’ that
follows – are, taken together, a useful core of the book. This central spine of 12 chapters
considers the music, once again, and also how it adopts, or indeed resists, certain axes of genre.
An example of the latter is Martin James’ chapter, ‘More Punk Than Pink: Pink Floyd’s Rela-
tionship with 1970s UK Punk’ (Chapter 12). In this chapter 1977 is considered a pivotal year –
a year defned by punk music and the punk subculture, perhaps – but also the year that Pink
Floyd released their arguably most sonically angry album, Animals. Indeed, that relationship
might itself pivot on one item of clothing, the Pink Floyd T-shirt sported by Sex Pistols front
man Johnny Rotten, part destroyed and part embellished, with the handwritten ‘I Hate’ above
the words ‘Pink Floyd.’ Elsewhere in that section, the band’s innovative and ground-breaking
electronic production techniques are deployed by Jim J. Mason in his contention that the 1973
track ‘On the Run’ might be the ur-text, and the root note, for what we now understand to be
electronic dance music (Chapter 11).
In terms of Part IV, ‘Periods of Pink Floyd’s Work’, academics from around the world
usefully contribute an analysis that, taken together, encompasses all of the key Floyd work.
These chapters have therefore been arranged chronologically, so as to form a developing insight
into the evolution of the band, from James Barrett and Rob Chapman’s analysis of the early
psychedelic Syd Barrett incarnation of the band (Chapters 14 and 15), through to the last Pink
Floyd album to feature Roger Waters, 1983’s The Final Cut. Interestingly, two contributors
choose to take apart the political bricks that form the important Floyd album The Wall, drawing
on discourses around totalitarianism, repression, truth and manipulation: Jean-René Larue’s
‘Behind The Wall: A Tool for Condemning Totalitarianism’ (Chapter 19) and then the following
chapter from Tina Richardson, ‘Hey You! Subjectivity and the Ideological Repressive State
Apparatuses in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.’
Notions of canon might also be touched on at this point, for instance in considering why the
focus for these contributions largely centres on the key 1960s and 1970s albums, with a lesser

5
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

interest in the latter post-Waters Floyd albums. Although this is a band that functioned, in one
form or another, for over 40 years, it can be argued that the key output can really be identifed
as taking place within one ten-year period – 1973–1983. Certainly – and whatever might come
next for the band – the structural integrity and sanctity of that ten-year stretch will not be altered,
notwithstanding the important coda represented by the Live 8 appearance in 2005. There were
one or two gaps, however, presenting a troubling lacuna in this overview of Floyd’s musical
output. To correct this, in the development of the book, the editors commissioned new work
on two key Floyd albums. Of the resulting chapters, ‘ “Cruising for a Bruising”: How The Dark
Side of the Moon Made Pink Floyd Successful Beyond Their Wildest Dreams and Instigated Their
Downfall’ (Chapter 16) was a welcome contribution from acclaimed prog rock writer Daryl Eas-
lea and ofered the chance to develop his notion that the commercial success and untold riches
that that album brought to the band might have actually had a commensurately negative impact
on the creativity and cohesion previously enjoyed by the group. Gilad Cohen’s contribution also
closed the gap on Wish You Were Here content, with Chapter 17’s intriguing connection of music
and psychoanalysis, ‘Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the Stage Theory of Grief.’
Finally, the section ‘Media, Reception and Fandom’ forms Part II of this collection and also
extends the analysis of the band beyond the purely musicological to develop this analysis into
more contextual areas of enquiry and contingencies around, for instance, reception of the music
in the British music press throughout the entire lifespan of the band, with Simon A. Morrison’s
chapter ‘Us and Them: Pink Floyd and the British Music Media’ (Chapter 7). Philippe Gonin
also provides an important and useful survey of the use of Pink Floyd music in flms in Chap-
ter 6. The ambient, soundscape aesthetic of much Pink Floyd music made them ideal candidates
for soundtrack scoring, and it would be impossible to publish a Pink Floyd collection without
a consideration of their work on soundtracks, across important albums such as More (1969) and
Obscured by Clouds (1972). Making up the remaining two chapters of that contextual section
is Cinla Seker’s chapter on Floyd album covers and Bob Follen’s visual essay of his collection
of Pink Floyd ephemera and memorabilia. Although an artist rather than an academic, Bob is
someone with a powerful story to tell about his journey towards Pink Floyd. For that reason,
and accepting it is a tonal shift from the academic style of much of the book, the editors were
both keen to encourage Bob to pen an introduction to that visual essay to detail the emotional
connection to Pink Floyd that led to this lifelong passion and obsession with collecting Floyd
memorabilia, some of which has been given to him by the band members themselves.
In terms of the structure of the book, the editors hope that the thematic underpinning of
this collection would appeal to the inner architecture student in band members such as Roger
Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason. As editors, we certainly feel that in this way, we have
covered the bases, whether musicological, semiotic, cultural, political or ideological, with a
fabulous range of approaches that, in themselves, demonstrate the enduring broad richness
of the source material – Pink Floyd. These contributions ofer both the casual music fan and
popular music scholar many routes into understanding the band, their music, live performance
and visual sensibilities and stand as a supportive Handbook to both.

‘Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?’

By any commercial or critical measure, Pink Floyd remain a hugely successful band. In 2013,
after 50 years in business, Pink Floyd reached the landmark of over 250 million records sold.7
Since then, they have, of course, sold even more, because this is a band that seems to fnd a
fresh audience with each new generation. Pink Floyd and its associated brand extensions are a
global industry, ofering multiple products for us to enjoy. There are music recordings and live

6
 Introduction

shows and flms going back fve decades, while currently, in 2021, band members can still be
seen performing live in some format or other. Remarkable when you consider most of them
are nearly octogenarians. Roger Waters (born in 1943) has played various incarnations of The
Wall (for instance, for the 2015 documentary Rogers Waters: The Wall),8 he completed touring
his powerful political extravaganza Us+Them and is again on the road touring the United States
with a new show called This Is Not a Drill. As ever, we fnd Waters responding actively, and
certainly robustly, to the current political climate. Nick Mason (born in 1944) is also on the road
with his nostalgic Saucerful of Secrets tour – a musical presentation of Pink Floyd as they may have
been in the 1960s, with psychedelic lighting efects and a fower-power feel. David Gilmour
(born in 1946) went back to the Roman Amphitheatre at Pompeii in 2016, 45 years after Pink
Floyd played there, to produce an audio-visual spectacular typical of Pink Floyd in their golden
era. He also turns out for tributes to musicians who have recently died, such as the Peter Green
Tribute organised by Mick Fleetwood in 2020. And in the spring of 2020, Gilmour supported
his wife, the successful author Polly Sampson, in a tour of the United Kingdom, with their show
A Theatre for Dreamers, to promote her latest book of the same name.9 Surveying the commercial
and musical landscape of Pink Floyd in this, their sixth decade, we can, therefore, claim without
contradiction that they are, and continue to be, one of the most successful and infuential groups
in the history of popular music, and indeed popular culture writ large.
Such global success was not always evident for The Pink Floyd of 1965 (the addition of the
defnite article was very much a part of their early nomenclature). As teenagers of the early
1960s, Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett, Richard Wright, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and
Bob Klose all had the ambition to be successful ‘pop stars’ and enjoy the wealth it could bring
them. As for most budding bands, this aspiration was something that existed alongside ‘real life,’
however. In real life, drawing boards, T-squares and slide rulers dominated the lives of Richard
Wright, Nick Mason and Roger Waters, as they were all students at Regent Street Polytechnic
studying architecture. Meanwhile, the younger Syd Barrett (born 1946), who had been taught
by Waters’ mother, went of to study art in 1962 at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and
Technology. David Gilmour was also at the same college; he had begun a course in modern
languages. But before this, even, Barrett, Waters and Gilmour knew each other from their
childhood in Cambridge. Therefore, in background and outlook, these fve young men shared
a very similar safe, middle-class denizen culture and indeed shared much more besides. All came
from successful middle-class parents. Waters’ and Gilmour’s mothers had been schoolteachers,
with Gilmour’s later becoming a flm editor at the BBC and his father a lecturer in zoology at
the University of Cambridge. Waters’ father was also a schoolteacher, while Wright’s father was
head biochemist at Unigate Dairies. Barrett’s father was a prominent pathologist at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge, who was lost to cancer when Syd (still Roger at that point) was just 16.
As a teenager, meanwhile, Mason was given an Aston Martin by his documentary flmmaker
and scriptwriter father. Gilmour spent time in a boarding school and as a teenager was left in
the United Kingdom when his parents went to work in the United States. Waters – famously,
as you will see as you read through this book – lost his father to war, a seismic moment in his
life. Hence, even from this brief biographical sketch, we can start to trace the shared bounds of
background and biographical connectives that drew the varied members of Pink Floyd together.
What was probably also inherited from their parents is the band’s commitment to social
causes. In supporting the CND, the Countryside Alliance, artists’ organisations, rights for Pales-
tine, homeless charities, environmental movements (such as Greenpeace), therapeutic charities,
human rights charities like Amnesty International, endangered animals and more, Gilmour,
Waters and Mason continue to give both a voice, and indeed a not insubstantial amount of
money, to many just causes worldwide.10

7
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

1946 to 1966
Roger Waters tells a number of stories about his childhood experiences and those of his genera-
tion in terms of the impact the Second World War had on their lives. At the time of writing this
introduction, Waters is in his mid-70s, and most of the war generation – those who were adults
during the war – are now deceased; the small number still living are in their late 90s or are cen-
tenarians. To understand the trauma of the so-called war babies, however, there is the need to
understand what caused the trauma. The telling and re-telling of the war and its impact carries
its own inherent problem: just how long in the collective memory can a narrative last? That is to
say, to contemporary generations, the narratives that shape the identity of a previous generation
such as that of Waters become, with successive generations, further removed from lived reality
and therefore may become less meaningful. Therefore, to understand albums like The Final Cut
(1983/2004), some understanding of the experience of historical events at this time is needed.
In this next section, you will therefore fnd a potted chronology of historic events relevant to
the meanings to be found in the songs of Pink Floyd. The proposition at this juncture is that to
get a sense of the post-war generation – the generation of Pink Floyd and their peers – some
understanding of their world is fundamental, because it gives us a frame of historical reference
that the subsequent generations perhaps take for granted.
First, then, the war and the post-war era that formed the context in which these band
members grew up. When ‘The’ Pink Floyd (as it was then) had their frst experience of, albeit
moderate, success in the mid-1960s, it was a world diametrically opposed to the one the mem-
bers of the band were born into in the 1940s. Waters and Wright were three years old, and
Mason two, in the winter of 1946. Gilmour and Barrett were less than a year old. But 1946
was hard and cruel; for many millions of people, it was a deadly year. The war had ended, but
social chaos, regional and continental conficts and entrenched resentments endured; meteoro-
logically, December 1946 was the coldest on record. Life would get better for the masses, but
in September 1946, war-time leader Winston Churchill asked, ‘What is the plight to which
Europe has been reduced?’ He tells his reader that:

Over wide areas, a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, careworn and bewil-
dered human beings gape at the ruins of their cities and homes and scan the dark
horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror.11

Churchill was well placed to describe the condition of Europe and the rest of the world; he
had been, and still was, a key player in world afairs, though he was no longer prime minister.
A quick survey of events in 1946–47 reveals that austerity in Britain was actually worse than
it had been in the war years: there was less food and less fuel, and the country was, essentially,
bankrupt. In a more macro-economic context, atomic weapons were being ‘tested’ underwater
at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands; the rape of as many as two million German women was
ignored by the Allied powers; civil war broke out in Greece; Mao-Zedong resumed the civil
war in China; Jewish survivors looked to form their own state in Palestine and pushed back
against the British in the region; anti-Semitism across Europe was still killing Jewish people
who had survived the Holocaust; anti-Jewish riots broke out across the United Kingdom;
Indian Muslims, Sikhs and Hindis began to massacre each other as India pressed for independ-
ence from the British; Stalin consolidated his power and control of the USSR through ruthless
tyranny and fear; Europe became divided into the East, controlled by Stalin, and the West by
the Allies of France, America and Britain. Following those divisions, the Cold War began. And
across Europe, over four million displaced persons headed, mostly on foot, back to their homes,

8
 Introduction

having been forcibly removed to work as slave labour, while over seven million refugees sought
safe places. By the end of the year – Sunday, December 29 – it had indeed become the coldest
on record; the destroyed cities across Europe now frozen at –20° and below, their inhabitants
about to hear the phrase ‘cold war’ for the frst time . . . and for those people, its meaning was
very much double edged.
Things were not all bad, however; there were also signs for hope. Change was about to
come to the British and West Europeans so that by the mid-1960s – just 20 years after the end
of the war – radical change could come to the social, cultural, economic and technological
structures of society – especially in Britain. For the British, the hope and surprise came in the
form of a mild-mannered, somewhat reserved man, lacking charisma and with no sense of self-
publicity. His name was Clement Attlee, and he became the Labour prime minister in 1945.12
Attlee was to have a greater role in shaping the future of Britain than his immediate predecessor
(and, in fact, most of them). Attlee, along with others such as Ernest Bevin, Aneurin Bevin,
Ellen Wilkinson and Staford Cripps, were not about simply re-building Britain but build-
ing a new Britain that would provide personal and social security for all. Between 1945 and
1946, the Labour government passed over 200 Acts of Parliament, 8 of which, in 1946, were
major pieces of legislation, for instance, establishing the NHS (free health care at the point of
delivery); social security (unemployment, sickness, maternity benefts); plans for building mil-
lions of houses; protection and rights for women and children; rights for workers protecting
them against exploitation; fnancial support for farmers; free secondary education and raising of
the school leaving age to 15; a rebuilding programme for schools (expansion of technical and
arts-based further education); establishing County Colleges for 15–18-year-olds; and, crucially,
providing scholarships for university students, sparking a causal link between that decision and
what would follow for UK culture.
Hope was on the horizon, but in 1946, the Britain in which Waters, Wright, Gilmour,
Mason and Barrett lived was nevertheless divided economically and geographically. Social class –
with its measurable economic and cultural inequalities – was still a major factor in life chances
and opportunities.

Grantchester Meadows
The pastoral ballad ‘Grantchester Meadows’ from Ummagumma (1969) is therefore a useful
nostalgic reminiscence of the childhood and youth of the members of Pink Floyd, living in
Cambridgeshire at this time. The ‘Meadow’ is part of the River Cam’s foodplain, bordered by
the quaint-sounding Jesus Green and Midsummer Common. As a rural tranquil for wildlife, it
is now the aptly named Paradise Nature Reserve. These are the felds and meadows in which
the three boys from the Waters, Barrett and Gilmour families played when children and subse-
quently enjoyed throughout their youth (Wright, meanwhile, grew up in Middlesex).
The River Cam also runs through the nearby city of Cambridge itself, world renowned for
its university colleges and their magnifcent buildings. In the 1950s, Cambridge and its sur-
rounding areas were light-years away from places like the East End of London, Liverpool and
Manchester. The industrial towns of the north and midlands, including those on the Clyde and
in the Welsh valleys, might be characterised as grim, dark places, where many inhabitants had
been ground down by relentless labour, pollution and poverty. War damage was everywhere
to be seen as late as the mid-1960s, especially in the major cities – Manchester, Liverpool,
Birmingham, Hull, Coventry and many more.13 Cambridge was not spared German bombing,
however. Between 1940 and 1942, bombing killed 30 people, destroying over 50 houses and
badly damaging a further 1,271.

9
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

Waters, Barrett and Gilmour were not, however, the product of such industrial towns or of
the working class. Waters could claim working-class heritage; his father Eric Fletcher Waters
was the grandson of a Durham miner. But Eric never worked in the coal mines; he became
a schoolteacher, like his mother before him. The Waters family did have Labour Party afli-
ations, and Eric joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. But such was the middle- and
upper-class domination of both these parties, especially by the British intelligentsia, that gradu-
ates of Oxford and Cambridge Universities still dominated party politics in the United King-
dom. Labour Party leaders throughout the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were Oxford educated. The
Communist Party, while enjoying some support in working-class areas, was also dominated by
leading intellectuals – authors and academics such as E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Iris
Murdoch and Christopher Hill.
These fortunate fve young men, who, as we have seen, developed from childhood friends
sharing their youth in the better parts of the university town of Cambridge, also had sufcient
economic and cultural capital to ultimately propel them into higher education at a time when
98% of their age group would be starting a lifetime of employment rather than staying in educa-
tion. Moving to London would see the start of the next stage in their shared lives.

Te pendulum of 1960s London starts to swing

London was, throughout the twentieth century, it seems, the place to be. And this was espe-
cially so in the 1960s. The members of the nascent Pink Floyd were in London at just the
right time, in all the right places and indulging in all the right pursuits. From the mid-1960s
and arguably all the way through to 1969, London was seen as the epicentre of the so-called
‘swinging sixties.’ While this term is convenient as a description of changes in social struc-
turers in Western countries, it is not entirely, or certainly universally, accurate. Like most
newspaper, magazine and newsreel headlines, the phrase was the invention of these media –
although it seems to have stuck in the popular imagination. This is not to say things were
not changing; they were, and rapidly. And the would-be pop stars in art and design colleges,
regardless of their backgrounds, could exploit such changes, while at the same time, milk-
men, railway workers and engineering apprentices were also seeing the opportunities to be
had being ‘in a band.’
Across Great Britain young men like Syd Barrett and Dave Gilmour had musical aspirations.
Others had already exploited those aspirations and were leading the way. In Liverpool, Alan
Sytner believed he could recreate the jazz scene of West Bank of Paris in a cellar he called the
Cavern Club. The result was, of course, cultural history.14 The Beatles, Gerry & The Pacemak-
ers, Cilla Black and Brian Epstein all became associated with the Cavern Club. Manchester was
no diferent, with bands such as The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits and Wayne Fontana and The
Mindbenders. Northern bands often played in both cities – and indeed anywhere a paying gig
could be found – within reasonable travelling distance. These were the days of small vans which
had often seen better days – Morris’, Austins and Bedfords were popular (the forerunners to
Pink Floyd – The Tea Set – had a Bedford).15 Gigs further afeld could only be managed for
many bands around the day job, college or both. Similar places to the Cavern Club could be
found all over the country and across Europe, places for young people to listen and dance to
music, places that traditionally did not sell alcohol. Some bands and singers did graduate to the
larger venues and had success in the United States, Europe and beyond – for example, Freddie
and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer, The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits and Cilla Black – all alumni
of the small, dingy Cavern Club. With the exception of Freddie and the Dreamers – which was
more of a novelty stage act – the rest, including The Beatles, did develop musically, with many

10
 Introduction

individuals progressing to more serious and advanced forms of popular music – evolving into
solid state musicians who went on to defne the 1970s, writing songs that have stood the tests
of time thereafter.16
These bands and artists were largely (though not all) from working-class backgrounds and
from the industrialised towns and cities. They were popular music acts that relied on their abil-
ity to create three-minute songs that sounded like American rock & roll, that were cheap to
buy, that could be played on the radio and performed with minimal technical skills and basic
equipment. Plus, the largest demographic in America and Europe was by this stage the young,
in employment (or their parents were), at college or school and enjoying a disposable income.
While life was still conservative, young people began to think about leisure and politics in ways
that were diferent to many of their parents. It is in this sense that the ‘swing’ in the sixties was
about to happen.

From Cambridge to London

In the meantime, the early 1960s was also the time that these students of architecture – Mason,
Waters and Wright, along with friends Keith Noble, Clive Metcalfe and his sister Sheilagh –
thought of forming their own band. When they did, they called themselves Sigma 6. Joined
by Wright’s girlfriend Juliette Gale on backing vocals, they changed their name to the Meg-
gadeaths, then Screaming Abdabs, Leonard’s Lodgers and the Spectrum Five, before settling on
The Tea Set. The band also had a manager and songwriter, Ken Chapman, and, in the main, did
covers of American rhythm and blues (R&B). When they were rejected by a music publisher,
the band lost Noble and the Metcalfes; by late 1963 they had been reduced to Mason, Wright
and Waters. Back in Cambridge, Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, along with friend Bob Klose,
were enjoying what was still an active, if local, music scene.17 Syd was known as ‘Syd the Beat,’
and he and Gilmour were in successive short-lived bands, though never together at this stage.
Gilmour was the frst to go semi-professional, with the band Joker’s Wild.
By the summer of 1964, Barrett and Klose had moved to London to study art and linked up
with their friend Waters. Waters and Mason were lodgers of Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor
at the Regent Street Polytechnic and nearby Hornsey College of Art. Leonard allowed Mason
and Waters to practice at the house at 39 Stanhope Gardens and even flled in for Wright on
keyboards when Wright travelled to Greece after taking a break from his studies. When Mason
moved out of Stanhope Gardens, Klose moved in, shortly followed by Barrett. It was actually
Bob Klose, the most competent guitar player among the lodgers, that really brought the band
together. Barrett was focused on his art course, so another friend from Cambridge, Chris Den-
nis, took vocal duties. Waters became the bass player, while Wright – who had been on guitar –
went back to his natural home on keyboards, while Mason took drums. It was at this point that
the band became The Tea Set. But with Barrett now also lodging at Stanhope Gardens while
Dennis was serving in the R.A.F. and posted overseas, it made sense that Dennis leave the band.
And so Barrett became a full member.
In December 1964 the band, minus Wright, secured time in a recording studio. They also
secured a London residency at a club, near Kensington High Street. There, they played three sets
of 90 minutes each, from late night until early morning. Moving away from the R&B sound,
and to avoid repetition, they learned to extend the songs with lengthy improvised solos. Wright
also returned from his ‘holiday,’ striking up a friendship with Barrett over their interest in jazz
and blues music. Barrett, who did not get on with Klose, took the lead but felt uneasy with the
role. At one point he considered asking his friend Dave Gilmour to replace him in the band,
but the band already needed him, and his unique ability to write novel lyrics, and he stayed.

11
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

Hence, the friends and fat-mates from 39 Stanhope Gardens and beyond became a band . . .
and were soon getting paid gigs.18
The name Pink Floyd was a spur-of-the-moment decision to solve an immediate problem.
Finding out, at one of these early gigs, that there was another band called The Tea Set, Barrett
spliced the names of two blues men – Pink Anderson and Floyd Council – and The Pink Floyd
Blues Band was created. By mid-1965 Klose had left the band to focus on his studies. As Klose
was the ‘blues element,’ the band became The Pink Floyd Sound. (This practical sonic aspect of
the band, it seems, has always been a feature.) In October 1965, the Pink Floyd Sound played at
the 21st birthday party of Storm Thorgerson’s girlfriend and her twin sister at the large country
house of their parents. An unknown American songwriter also performed, by the name of Paul
Simon; so did Gilmour, with Joker’s Wild. However, even by 1965 nothing was certain: the
band was not making enough income for the four young men to live on; they were not a band
like those groups from Liverpool or Manchester now enjoying success worldwide.
The more immediate world around Pink Floyd was, however, changing. Signs of a genuine
counterculture were emerging, encompassing art, poetry, music, politics and experimentation
of all kinds. This was the cultural context, and opportunity, that the band needed to thrive.

Te child is grown, the dream is gone

College studies, and some work beyond, progressed for some, but two breaks into the world
of professional musicianship would change things forever. The frst – at the Marquee Club in
March 1966 – was a chance to break into the club scene, lucrative for further paying gigs. The
second, and really fortunate, break, however, was meeting Peter Jenner at this event – an aca-
demic at the London School of Economics and music afcionado with involvement in a music
label called DNA. Matters with Jenner would wait until the summer was over, however; being
students, the members of the Pink Floyd Sound were mostly of and away for the summer
holidays. Mason went to the United States and started to think about going back to college in
September, giving the band little thought. But when in New York he read a review in a US
newspaper that mentioned the Pink Floyd Sound, it made him ‘realise that the band had the
potential to be more than simply a vehicle for our own amusement.’19 After the summer, and
with no one else seemingly willing to look after the band, Jenner and his friend Andrew King
became their managers. With inherited money, King bought the band new equipment. He and
Jenner also introduced the band to the emerging London ‘underground’ cultural scene.
Life in the United Kingdom was changing. The ‘swing’ was beginning to develop a distinctly
heavy, pendulous rhythm by 1966. The Labour government initiated a series of liberal reforms
to the laws prohibiting homosexuality and also to the restrictions around abortion and divorce,
along with laws on obscenity. The contraceptive pill was also becoming available, providing a
degree of emancipation for women. In the creative industries there was a visual explosion: in
fashion, design, photography and music, the mid-60s became a technicolour extravaganza. In
clothing, Mary Quant championed the mini-skirt in 1965, challenging the norm for women
to conceal their legs. In place of nylon stockings, she also advocated brightly coloured tights. In
household design, Terence Conran radicalised the idea of functionality, ofering ultra-modern
design of everyday objects in bright colours. Even newspapers became colourful. In 1966, The
Sunday Times launched its colour supplement; the cultural events it reported on could now be
illustrated with glorious colour photographs. Television, however, was still in black and white
(until 1969), with only three channels to choose from. However even then, innovative sci-f
flled the schedules, programmes such as Doctor Who, The Andromeda Breakthrough and Space
Patrol – plus, in the music realm, Top of the Pops and Juke Box Jury.

12
 Introduction

The contrast with the previous two decades could not have been starker. The threats of
extinction experienced during the 1940s had abated somewhat, only to be replaced by the
drab 1950s. By 1966, however, this largely youth-based worldwide technicolour counterculture
was taking hold and replacing the gloom. Focused among college and university students, the
acid-rock culture crossed cultural boundaries; the common opposition to the norms and world-
views of parents and grandparents created a generalised opposition to the established political
technocracies. According to Moore (2012), the counterculture had various targets for revolt,
including:

the heartless American war machine; the conformity of the organisation man; intrac-
table government bureaucracies; an atomised landscape of suburbs and highways; soul-
less consumer materialism and the standardisation of mass culture; the rationalisation
of an educational system enmeshed with industry and the military.20

While many of these targets were deserving of opprobrium (and indeed continue to be so),
the very commercialisation and modernism so disliked were also feeding the counterculture
itself. The counterculture was supported by products and brands like any other in the market-
place: miniskirts, functional furniture, record players, transistor radios and records and more
and more mass-produced goods. What was diferent, however, was two things: frst, there was
choice in fashion, music, cars, motorbikes, holidays, places to go and experiences to be had.
And second, there was image; having the ‘look’ was everything. In early photographs of Roger
Waters we see the rebel look: black leather jacket, blue jeans, polo-neck jumper and leather
boots. Mason, on the other hand, never seems to have gone for fashion at this stage, circa
1965/66; instead, he still dressed respectably, with a shirt and tie, V-necked jumper and had a
smart crease in his trousers, dead centre.21 By 1966 The Beatles had their image; they too went
from traditional men’s suits to ‘fower-power’ dress . . . and everyone else was not far behind.
And in 1966, while one could be a rocker, biker, greaser, mod, surfer, folkie, psychedelic proto-
hippie, protester, root rocker or hard rocker,22 the local record shop remained the locus for all
such tribes. And soon there would be the festival to bring the tribes further together, where
even more music and countercultural experiences could be had. The boys of The Tea Set and
now The Pink Floyd Sound were present and centre at the beginnings of this counterculture
explosion.23 Wright, Jenner and King were, in particular, connected to many of the main players
in this new world. Via the London Free School and the Indica Book Shop, new experiences
for the band began to open up.
The London Free School (LFS) was not a formal school; rather, it was set up by like-minded
academics and interested parties to provide a forum for learning and sharing of ideas.24 Many of
the founders also played a part in promoting The Pink Floyd Sound. Based in the multicultural
Notting Hill area, Jenner, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Joe Boyd, Rhaune Laslett and others met to
organise classes in music, art, photography and mental wellbeing. Laslett, a community activist,
set up numerous events, including the Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant (September 1966), which
was ultimately to become the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival. Needing fnance for the
LFS, Jenner organised for The Pink Floyd Sound to play at the local church hall, All Saints, in
Powis Gardens in the September of 1966. This became a regular gig, although as Mason (2004)
recalls:

playing church halls wasn’t what we expected our new managers to be aiming for. But
in fact it turned out to be one of the best venues . . . since W11 rapidly established
itself as the hub of the alternative movement.25

13
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

Mason further remembers that their audiences, though never more than the 300 that the
Hall could take, were diferent from the R&B community and viewers of Top of the Pops. They
were ‘freaks’ who liked to freak-out and ‘loon about.’ He also mentions that their chemically
altered states of mind meant they would fnd interest in absolutely anything upwards of paint
drying. This, then, was the ideal relaxed and supine scenario for the band to improvise, try out
ideas and use their new light show, developed by Jenner, his wife Sumi and King from an earlier
incarnation. It was a basic do-it-yourself rig . . . and probably dangerous . . . but it worked,
projecting changing colourful images onto, and behind, the band and into the hall. No other
band had anything like this.26 In October 1966, the music newspaper Melody Maker commented
favourably on the light show but added the band could do well if they moved further away from
their dated R&B set to do music more in keeping with this innovative show.27
Monies from these gigs went towards launching IT (International Times) – a newspaper that
aimed to bring together valuable intel on the what, where and who of everything happing in
the London underground. Pink Floyd played at the launch of the newspaper, which, while a
technical fasco, was a success for both the band and the paper, an event considered in more
detail in Simon A. Morrison’s chapter on Floyd and the UK press (Chapter 7). The band were
now also thinking about their image. For this gig they spent time trying to look like what they
thought ‘pop stars’ should look like – with ‘satin shirts, velvet loon pants, scarves and high-
heeled Gohill boots.’28 A few years later, however, and the image was gone: shirts, jeans and
sensible footwear were adopted as the norm, and any sense of looking like pop stars gone with
it. So casual was the look that the individual members of the band became, in terms of public
recognisability, almost invisible.29
By the end of October, matters with Jenner and King were formalised into contracts, each
owning one-sixth of Blackhill Enterprises and one-sixth of the band. Gigs now came the band’s
way, including a brief return to the Marquee Club, a Catholic youth club and charity event for
Oxfam and gigs outside of London. The next brick in the foundation of potential success came
with the UFO (‘U-fo’ – Underground Freak Out) Club – set up in December 1966 by Hoppy
and Joe Boyd. The UFO was also a cellar, and on the opening night, Friday, December 23,
Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were on the bill, competing for an audience with movies.30 For
a several months, Pink Floyd were regular turns at the club . . . but bigger and better paid gigs
were on their way.

International youthtopias and LSD

After the popularity of British bands in the United States waned from the mid-1960s, American
artists returned to the fore, and many were far more politically and socially minded than their
British counterparts. From the middle of 1965 things were changing stateside; nice apolitical
pop music was joined by a more serious and sophisticated ‘rock’ music. In America, the Civil
Rights movement and wider students protests were gaining ground. US universities became
battlegrounds – not just over ideas and ideologies but literally between students, police and
the civil guard. Bob Dylan, in typical style, released the aptly named ‘The Times They Are
A-Changin’ in 1965.
Before being banned, LSD was closely associated with the mid-1960s culture and milieu of
musicians, artists and authors. Bands such as The Grateful Dead, for instance, were well known
for their LSD usage. The popularisation of LSD and similar drugs began in San Francisco in the
early 1960s. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), sponsored events that
used acid; colourful lights, flm projection and improvised music were often part of these events.
From his Californian base at La Honda, Kesey gathered around him the colourful characters

14
 Introduction

that would form The Merry Pranksters, a rag-tag group of countercultural renegades. The
Merry Pranksters travelled across the continental United States in bus called Further, painted in
psychedelic swirls and curvaceous patterns. At the wheel was Neal Cassady, the source for Jack
Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty in the celebrated 1957 Beat Generation novel On the Road,
a direct link between the counterculture and its Beat antecedents. These journeys would them-
selves be reported by New Journalist Tom Wolfe in his iconic insight into this world, 1968’s The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Also central to this entire west-coast scene was concert promoter Bill
Graham, the man behind the legendary Filmore venues. In his biographic oral history, Graham
himself remarks, ‘Cream was the frst of the English bands like Pink Floyd and Ten Years After
who exemplifed something much diferent than what was going on in the American scene.’31
But even before that, shops were opening in California with the word ‘psychedelic’ in their
titles, and in London the World Psychedelic Centre opened in 1965. By 1966, however, LSD
was banned in the United Kingdom, although it was nonetheless still widely available, its infu-
ence referenced in music such as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967),
The Small Faces’ ‘Itchycoo Park’ (1967) and Cream’s Disraeli Gears (1967). Psychedelia had a
‘sound,’ and this sound was now popular. An early example – ‘White Rabbit’ (1967) by Jefer-
son Airplane – used Lewis Carroll’s ostensibly children’s-oriented book Alice in Wonderland as
a source, referencing mushrooms and hookah-smoking caterpillars. Barrett also used stories he
remembered from his childhood in his songs, stories such as The Wind in the Willows, Cautionary
Verses, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and The Chronicles of Narnia.
The use of children’s stories was therefore common, alongside the popular use of once-exotic
instruments such as the sitar and tabla drums. Using this fusion of folk, jazz and R&B, with long
jams and studio production efects such as panning, phasing, reverb and wah wah on electric
guitars, all contributed to the general style of the ‘psychedelic’ genre. At a charity fundraiser for
Oxfam, for instance, the bill included some big names, including Alan Price, who – knowing
Pink Floyd were to play – used reverb on his Hammond organ, announcing this was his own
psychedelic music.32
In terms of music, the step change, it can be argued, can be heard in the music of bands such
as the Beach Boys. Pet Sounds (1966) illustrated the possibilities of writing music to a concept, in
this instance refecting aspects of human existence in modernist cultures. The album deals with
alienation and estrangement, isolation and loneliness and belonging – essentially chronicling
relationships in modern society.33 The creation of Brian Wilson, with Tony Asher, his ‘wall
of sound’ compositions included a range of instruments, vocals and found sounds,34 placed in
elaborate layers within the music. Like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul (1965), Pet Sounds has no fller
tracks; there is a consistent thread to the songs, with no sense that some were intended to be
45-rpm singles. In addition, it was meticulously produced. There is an experiential sensibility in
listening to Pet Sounds that is also present in some of Pink Floyd’s studio albums, an experience
that derives from the repeated listening value to be had from such an album. Jim DeRogatis
(2003) explains this notion when he notes that nuances ‘continue to reveal themselves after
dozens of listens, just as previously unnoticed corners of the world reveal themselves during the
psychedelic experience.’35 For Wilson, the psychedelic experience was induced by chemicals,
notably LSD.36 For Floyd afcionados reading this book, the probable efects of LSD on Syd
Barrett are also well known. The diference between Wilson and Barrett is the former survived
his excessive use of drugs, going on to have a career in music beyond the experience – albeit
with life-long mental and physical health issues.
In 1966, when psychedelia was building momentum, Pink Floyd were at the centre of
London’s psychedelic enclave, playing largely, at this time, to friendly partisan audiences in ven-
ues like UFO club, described as overpowering spaces, with the smell of incense, noise, sweaty

15
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

bodies and a gathered mass of stoned souls. Recollections from those there at the time also
tell of a sense that you had to ‘ft in,’ look the part and get involved, in order to be accepted.
These were small venues that some experienced as elitist. Often being the last band to play, and
performing a two-hour set, The Pink Floyd, we may assume, played to receptive audiences for
the very reason those audiences went to the UFO and similar clubs – to alter their mood and
listen to ‘space-music,’ such as the at times 40-minute-long rendition of ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’
(Readers interested in this genre might turn to Chapter 10, Tico Romao’s chapter on these
origins.) With a loyal following, The Pink Floyd developed a special relationship with their
audience, who referred to them as ‘our band.’37 By the latter part of the decade, there was no
other band quite like Pink Floyd. In the psychedelic circuit of London, The Pink Floyd enjoyed
almost cult status, which, through determinism and tenacity, would eventually to be turned into
global success. That level of success was, however, still eight years away.
However, the relationship between Pink Floyd, the London countercultural realm and the
psychedelic scene with which they are so closely associated is more opaque and complex than
might be at frst imagined. Pink Floyd were the house band of the underground, certainly,
along with contemporaries such as Soft Machine; however, that may have been more by virtue
of circumstance and timing rather than overt or deliberate design. Both James Barrett and Rob
Chapman look at this in more detail (Chapters 14 and 15). To look back on this fascinating and
fecund period in cultural history is possibly to imagine that the whole of London was swinging
to some irresistible shared groove; that one had only to visit Carnaby Street to be given the
hippie uniform and membership to the underground in-crowd. In reality, becoming part of the
cognoscenti was a lot more involved than climbing into your kaftan coat and visiting UFO. In
reality (for such a place certainly still existed in the mid-to-late 1960s), there was a sense that
the capital’s counterculture was really only happening for a few select souls.
Interestingly, even at this early stage, the music press was also starting to pick up on the fact
that there was something happening in London. Miles writes: ‘The Pink Floyd Sound became
the public face of the London underground scene, even though, with the exception of Syd,
they were actually somewhat removed from it.’38 Music writer Mick Farren would seem to rein-
force this reading of the band dynamic, recalling that at the Notting Hill Free School events, it
with Syd who radiated psychedelic colour:

The member of the band to whom the eye was most naturally drawn was guitar-
ist Syd Barrett. In all respects Syd, with his femininity, psychosis and curls, was the
embodiment of psychedelic male beauty. In a satin shirt with puf sleeves and fow-
ing collar, he was Lord George Byron with a telecaster. If only by the perfection of
his eyeshadow, Syd Barrett was clearly going to be a heart-throb superstar, unless, of
course, he went mad in the process.39

Indeed as the rest of the band played out, LSD began to take hold of the inward life and
work of Barrett, his subsequent entropic decline documented in detail elsewhere and in other
books, such as the Rob Chapman one previously cited.40 While a personal tragedy for both the
man himself, and his friends and bandmates, it was perhaps also tragically ironic that the arrival
of his replacement – his old friend David Gilmour – also marked, it can be argued, the real start
of Pink Floyd as a truly commercially successful proposition. As early as 1966, after attending a
Cream gig, Nick Mason says he was motivated to think about doing this properly,41 but up until
then, The Pink Floyd were realistically a hobby band, ftting in gigs as and when they could,
often to the detriment of college work. For the band to properly succeed and ascend to another
level, two things were needed: timing and the ability to spot opportunities. The band had both.

16
 Introduction

Appearances on Top of the Pops followed, a short flm was made of the band – a novel thing at
the time – while reviews in popular music magazines appeared, as did a recording contract with
EMI, in the spring of 1967.

‘You gotta get an album out/you owe it to the people’

With Abbey Road recording studios waiting, an advance of £5,000 and some songs already
recorded . . . what could go wrong? Well, while Wright was now dedicating all his time to his
music, Waters had a job, Mason was still enrolled at college and Barrett had stopped attending
college completely. Possibly all somewhat typical behaviour for students. The main concern for
EMI, however, was their new band’s identifcation with the psychedelic scene, LSD . . . and
Barrett himself. But with ‘Arnold Lane’ recorded before the signing, they were ready to go with
their frst single. Hence, with the prospect of owning a successful property, EMI’s concerns were
possibly negated by the potential fnancial returns from their new band.
An improved van was soon acquired, along with a professional agent – Bryan Morrison of
the Morrison Agency. As agent for many London venues and with some allegedly dubious
acquaintances, Morrison booked the band more paying gigs, many now outside London. Not
all audiences were as friendly as those at the UFO Club, however – ballrooms and the like were
common gig venues, playing to audiences that wanted dance music, or at least the singles they
had heard on Top of the Pops. The ‘scene’ in much of the provinces was as far removed from the
psychedelic village of London as it was possible to be; the band were now paying dues to their
art . . . even if this meant dodging the occasional projectile thrown at them. Further, although
paying gigs were coming in, the income was low, and much of it was immediately spent on
equipment.
At this time two events happened, however, that changed things considerably. The frst was
the band playing the ‘14 Hour Technicolour Dream,’ a mass event held in London’s Alexandra
Palace on April 29, 1967, and then again at ‘Games for May’ two weeks later on May 12. The
‘Technicolour Dream’ was billed as a ‘Kaleidoscope of Colour,’ with ‘Beautiful People’ and
numerous bands, all for the entry fee of £1. Promoted by, and for, IT, tickets were sold via
the equally hip Indica Gallery bookshop, while on the day, LSD and other chemical stimulants
were in abundance. Syd, according to Mason, was unaware of much of what was going on – as
were most of the audience when Pink Floyd began to play. By this point it was dawn, and early
sunlight streamed through windows, splaying coloured light across the foor.42 The audience
was nevertheless appreciative, many from the UFO Club, including a young man from Ireland
called Jack Lyons, who reports:

What a wonderful world we lived in back then, with no computers and no mobile
phones. Everybody just had to enjoy what was going on and hope for the best.43

Also wonderful was ‘Games for May,’ held in the prestigious classical music venue the Queen
Elizabeth Hall. Through an acquaintance of Jenner and King, Pink Floyd were given a two-
hour slot, and, unlike at Alexandra Palace (where they experienced technical problems and
played to their old familiar audience), they now had the technical control to conceive and
deliver a multimedia extravaganza. Unusual for the time, lighting and control desks were used
along with Wright’s Azimuth Co-ordinator – a device with a joy-stick allowing him to move
the music and sound efects around the hall, from speaker to speaker. With seats for this audi-
ence, the band could showcase their music to a paying audience wanting to truly listen to the
band play. Between these two events, Pink Floyd had become a bona fde proposition. And by

17
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

now they had material to play, such as ‘Arnold Lane,’ ‘See Emily Play,’ ‘Games for May,’ ‘Chap-
ter 24,’ ‘Matilda Mother’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ With better sound, better equipment, better lights
and a bubble-machine, amongst other efects, their performance was deemed a real success.44
‘Arnold Lane,’ however, was banned from radio stations such as Radio London, apparently
referring in its lyrics to ‘sexual pervasion,’ in terms of Arnold’s predilection for stealing women’s
underwear. Another single, ‘See Emily Play,’ followed, along with another appearance on Top
of the Pops. Syd refused to appear for this, their third, time. ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ by Procol
Harum was at Number 1, and at EMI, record producer Normal Smith entered the lives of the
band. Smith oversaw the production of that second single and produced Pink Floyd’s debut
album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967. Through Norman and others at
Abbey Road, the band had access to every advantage of the professional studio, including some
of the most experienced and skilful engineers in the business. However, the bar was really set
by The Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released May 1967) – and that bar
was set high.

Caught in the crossfre/of childhood and stardom

The original counterculture club scene, with keen participatory audience, was now being
replaced by a commodifcation of psychedelia. Commercialisation meant the idea of the ‘freak-
out,’ rather than the associated behaviours, could be rolled out beyond London to the provinces.
At the same time the powers of control – the police, media and judiciary – reinstated their
authority in the belief that the established order was under threat. Their panic over the morals
of the populace saw the use of obscenity laws to prosecute individuals, to insist flms used at gigs
were passed by the ofcial censor and to criminalise LSD.45
Syd was still prodigiously productive in writing songs. He had given the band their frst
singles and an album and had furnished a style and soundtrack beftting the psychedelic under-
ground. But his consumption of drugs such as LSD, combined with what may have been other
underlying health issues, began to be noted by the rest of the band. As the frontman and the
darling of audiences, Syd’s occasional ‘odd’ behaviour was difcult to disguise; on stage, his
apparently vacant new look, and commensurate surprising lack of presence, were symptoms
that something was wrong. Mason recounts that Syd’s life was diferent to the rest of the band:
While Mason, Wright and Waters remained faithful to beer, Syd was by now ‘tripping’ multiple
times a day. None of the bandmates now visited Syd’s place socially, only going to pick him up
to go to gigs.46 The pressure to produce more of the music demanded by the record-buying
public was tangible; having the fortunes of his comrades in his hands at the same time must also
have been difcult to cope with. Mental exhaustion was certainly one aspect of Syd’s decline
and ultimate withdrawal. The famous radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing was contacted, but Syd
refused to meet him. Laing did, however, ofer his professional opinion of Syd: Syd’s behaviour
was a reaction to those around him and society itself. It was, in a sense, the most sane response
to an increasingly insane world.
Nevertheless, gigs in America were arranged, with appearances on American television, then
back to the United Kingdom as part of a Jimi Hendrix tour. Syd’s abilities came in and out of
focus, but his unreliability was now a problem for the band, management and the venues with
paying customers. By the time the last tour fnished at Olympia at the end of December 1967,
Syd had totally withdrawn from the reality of professional performer on the stage and, beyond
the stage, equally withdrawn from the world the rest of the band now inhabited. Initially, the
suggestion was to follow what The Beach Boys had done when Brian Wilson became ill: to
have Syd write the songs but not perform.47 Then, that old friend of Syd’s, David Gilmour, was

18
 Introduction

asked to fll in for him for a few gigs, and in January 1968 David became the ffth member of
the band. This was followed by the moment, and the decision, that changed the course for the
band as they moved towards their 1970s incarnation. En route to pick up Syd from his digs, the
question was fnally asked. Should he actually be picked up at all? The response was that they
should perhaps not bother. And that was the end of Syd’s active role in Pink Floyd.
The band were now a four-piece again, and Gilmour’s contribution was evident from the
start, immediately revealing the paucity of Syd’s contributions in his last few months.

Did you exchange/a walk-on part in the war/for a lead role in a cage?
In 1968 it was still really about gigs, rather than tours, taking the band around the British Isles
and across Europe. Pink Floyd were, of course, largely playing the songs Syd had written, and
it was time to step out and write their own new tracks. A Saucerful of Secrets was released in
June 1968: Wright provided two tracks, Waters three, Syd one, and the title track, ‘A Saucer-
ful of Secrets,’ was the product of the band as a whole. The cover of the album was created by
Cambridge friends of the band – Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey (‘Po’) Powell – of the agency
Hipgnosis. Graduates of the Royal College of Art, Thorgerson and Powell would come to
design the instantly iconographic covers for the band for the next 40 years, an aspect of the
semiotic nature of the band interrogated in Chapter 8 of this book. Singles released from the
album barely dented the charts; however, A Saucerful of Secrets sold well as an album proposition,
reaching Number 9 in the UK album charts; a success for the band at this stage in their career.
A third single from the album fopped, however, and marked the progression of the band from
a singles to an album outft.
With more material, and a defned diference in the quality of their sound, the band moved
up another notch. Pink Floyd performed at a mass outdoor free concert in Hyde Park and then
embarked on a full tour of America – by now the largest market for popular music. With a mod-
icum of fame and better bank balances, Pink Floyd now attracted attention. Ofers to do scores
for flms (More and The Committee) followed in 1968 (for more on Floyd and soundtracks, please
see Chapter 6) and, in what would become a trademark strategy, the band banked what they
scored within their live performances; nothing went to waste. The soundtrack to More sold well,
also reaching Number 9 in the UK album charts, and the frst of what might be called the ‘tran-
sition’ albums was also a success. Ummagumma (1969) followed More fve months later, charting
at Number 5 in the United Kingdom and scoring well across Europe, although the US market
remained stubbornly more resistant to the unique sound of Pink Floyd. A combination of live
and studio work, with each member of the band contributing ‘their bit,’ Ummagumma proved
the sum was greater than the parts. Waters, Wright, Mason and Gilmour were not to repeat
this tactic to produce albums; the lesson learnt was that they needed each other. In late 1970,
Atom Heart Mother made Number 1 in the UK album charts, also appearing in a quadrophonic
version. Technically, Atom Heart Mother showed that collaborative working – bringing in other
artists and arrangers – paid benefts. It was, however, Meddle (1971) that showcased the direc-
tion in which the band was now going in terms of producing immaculately textured, cohesive
instrumental compositions. Now coming to the fore in terms of songwriting were Gilmour and
Waters, with Wright and Mason providing what was now their immediately recognisable style
of playing and supplying the sound efects and sonics so characteristic of the Pink Floyd sound.
Pink Floyd were now fully paid-up members of the music scene, touring the United King-
dom, Europe and America. And, of course, when the clocks ticked over to 1973, record stores
all around the world could barely fll their racks with copies of The Dark Side of the Moon. Con-
cise, economic and crystal clear, this album had it all – a cohesive, full-blown concept album,

19
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

addressing universal concerns of the things that cause us stress and anxiety, using cutting-edge
recording techniques and equipment, sound and sonic efects and soaring vocals to create the
culmination of everything the band had been working towards. The album went into the top 10
all around the world, and in the United Kingdom it peaked at Number 2, bizarrely just behind
a K-Tel album of 1960s greatest hits. Unlike that K-Tel album, The Dark Side of the Moon has
been a mainstay of the album charts ever since its release, and it changed the band forever, yet
few alive in the world of that time would actually be able to recognise the members of the band
that made it, even if they walked past them. However, global success, wealth and the freedom to
do whatever they wanted were now theirs. Even if you knew nothing of their earlier work or
Barrett-era releases, it was likely you would know The Dark Side of the Moon; once heard, it was
never forgotten, and Pink Floyd were duly crowned music royalty. (For more on this album in
particular, see Daryl Easlea’s overview in Chapter 16.) And in every sense, for their record com-
panies and large venues worldwide, the band was now a money-making machine, the very thing
the band would turn their attention to as one of the themes of Wish You Were Here (1975), the
focus of Chapter 17. Pink Floyd was a global band, and a global brand. They could do whatever
they pleased, ironically free to indulge in a new car, caviar or four-star daydream. Free, indeed,
to buy themselves a football team.
By the time of The Dark Side of the Moon, the band’s modus operandum was clear. What
characterised the work of Pink Floyd was ‘themes,’ all their ideas and concerns fnding their way
into the music they made. In 1975 Roger Waters, in many ways summarising what Pink Floyd
said through their music, commented:

I think the world is a very, very sad fucking place . . . I fnd myself at the moment,
backing away from it all . . . I’m very sad about Syd. . . . ‘Shine On’s’ not really about
[him] – he’s just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge
in because it’s the only way they can cope with how fucking sad it is – modern life, to
withdraw completely.48

‘And everything under the sun is in tune/but the sun is eclipsed

by the moon’
In the decade between 1973 and 1983 Pink Floyd released another four unique albums, all osten-
sibly under the leadership of Waters. Alongside the album releases came the ever-more-impressive
stage shows, flms of those shows and the cinematic release of Pink Floyd: The Wall.49 The
themes of The Dark Side of the Moon were expanded across these albums to include the loss of a
friend (Barrett) and a critique of the music business in Wish You Were Here (1975); critiques of
post-industrial society, social inequalities, societal decay, power and control in Animals (1977);
pressures of stardom, social isolation, drug use, loss of control over the ‘self,’ fascism and the
death of a father in The Wall (1979); and fnally, failure of the post-war promise of a better
world, critiques of world leaders and a remembrance of a father killed by war in the anti-war,
anti-nuclear album The Final Cut (1983). Increasingly, these albums would become the creative
visions of Waters alone, although all were performed by Pink Floyd. This extended, creatively
and commercially successful phase of Pink Floyd came to an end with The Final Cut. With
Wright forced out of the band by Waters, the acrimonious climate that had developed since
1974 saw Waters go his own way to follow a solo career. Waters, it can be argued, may have
thought that by this stage he was Pink Floyd; nonetheless, after much expenditure on lawyers,
the name became the preserve of Gilmour and Mason.

20
 Introduction

Pink Floyd emerged from this difcult period as an ostensibly three-piece band, with the
return of Wright. (There were, of course, numerous talented musicians in support, some of
whom became proxy band members, such as bass player Guy Pratt.) Now led by Gilmour, there
was also a new album, Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987). Though the reviews of the album were
not universally positive – with some saying the album lacked the provocative force characteristic
of previous Pink Floyd albums – it nevertheless sold well, reaching between Number 1 and
3 in many markets. It also outsold, by a substantial number, The Final Cut. Armed with this
new album, the band went back on the road, producing one of the highest-grossing tours of
the 1980s: the Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour (1987–88), playing multiple nights at Wembley
Stadium, Madison Square Garden, the Palace of Versailles, in Venice and throughout North
America, Australasia, Japan, Europe and in the Olympic Stadium, Moscow (USSR), over-
all, approaching 200 mega-concerts to approximately 5.5 million people over two years. The
culmination of the tour was the live album The Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) and a video of
the concert.
In 1994, a second post-Waters original studio album was released, The Division Bell. Again
poorly received by many critics, phenomenal sales nevertheless pushed the album to Number
1 across the world. A tour followed, the last by Pink Floyd, with the live album Pulse, and a
1995 flm of the tour also going to Number 1 in territories around the world. In 2014 came
The Endless River, an almost exclusively instrumental re-working of material left over from The
Division Bell sessions, much of it by Wright and Gilmour and reworked as a tribute to the work
of the late Richard Wright. Since 2014, Pink Floyd have, as a functioning band, essentially been
no more.

Conclusion
This introduction to this book is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Pink Floyd but
rather an in-road into the band while also setting the band in the context of some of the social
and cultural events that, especially in their early years, were catalysts and muse for the develop-
ment and success of the band. Many other contemporary English bands followed similar career
journeys and had similar levels of success, such as Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Deep Purple and
more. All have unique and interesting stories, but this one is Pink Floyd’s alone.
In particular for this introduction, however, the emphasis has been on the period between
the mid-1960s and the release of The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, the years that give us the
themes and motifs, the concepts and subjects, of the Pink Floyd canon of work, their own expe-
riences – especially as children and as students – forming the rich resource for much of their
music, as though working through these experiences, both positive and negative, in their music:
sonic self-analysis. Such themes include the nursery rhymes and children’s literature often used
by Barrett to connect to his own childhood in Cambridge, with the songs of both Barrett, and
indeed those of Rick Wright, taking inspiration from notions of their own childhood memo-
ries. Beyond Cambridge, Barrett’s decline becomes a now near-mythical tale of a beautiful
Icarus fying too close to the white heat of the London club and drug scene of the mid-1960s,
the same scene so important to the early success of the band. In a sense, Barrett’s later contri-
bution to the band was his very absence, a lacuna which featured so centrally, and rang out so
loudly, on The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, inspiring musical attacks from his
remaining bandmates on the relentless pressure from the music industry to create more of the
‘product’ that had, ironically and tragically, contributed to his decline. The socialist upbring-
ing of Waters – and the wider inequalities appearing in society – manifests itself in Animals;

21
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

while Waters’ anti-war CND afliations that began in his youth are expressed in The Final Cut,
running alongside the loss of his father, taken by war. And perhaps the double album The Wall
brings all of these strands together across its four sides; the confict born of success, stardom,
power, drugs and mental illness, all pressed into the grooves of vinyl a generalised biography
of the band. Then, following the bitter, acrimonious exit of Waters from the band, themes of
communication, and the need to talk, emerge.
Over the past fve decades, then, Pink Floyd have created some of the most memorable
music, and music experiences, in the history of popular music, over a succession of impressive,
endearing and enduring albums and increasingly complex live shows. Pink Floyd are amongst
only a handful of bands for whom, while most of their albums were successful, several have
become iconic and canonical in terms of popular music history. The authors contributing to
this book have each considered diferent routes into unpacking and deconstructing the music
and meaning of this perennially important band. Taken together, holistically, we believe that
this book ofers a comprehensive overview and analysis of the band from both musicological
and cultural perspectives, and a handbook to understanding the music and signifcance of Pink
Floyd. With this book, we believe the band have fnally received the attention from the academy
that they so richly deserve.

Notes
1 After that performance, Simon and Guy retired to the bar of the Kimpton Hotel in Manchester, where
the festival was taking place. A couple of drinks in, and most of King Crimson (minus Robert Fripp,
who had gone to bed) walked into the same bar, as they were staying in the hotel after their gig in the
city. What followed was an impromptu, unexpected and totally delightful few drinks in the company
of members of two of the most important progressive rock bands of their time.
2 A book came from that exhibition – 2017’s Pink Floyd – Their Mortal Remains. London: V&A Publish-
ing. Although not the same experience as seeing the materials frst hand, it provides a useful overview
of what was on display at the exhibition.
3 Miles, B. (2006). Pink Floyd: The Early Years. London: Omnibus Press.
4 Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out. A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
5 Scott, D. B. (2016). ‘Introduction’, in Scott, D. B. (ed.)., The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular
Musicology. Farnham: Ashgate, page 2.
6 Ibid:4.
7 By records is meant ‘units’, made up of diferent media such as vinyl records, cassette tapes, 8-tracks,
VHS tapes, CD-ROMS and DVDs.
8 Waters, R. and Evans, S. (2015). Roger Waters: The Wall. London: Rue Productions.
9 In February–March  2020, a terrible virus called COVID-19 spread from China and engulfed the
world, leading to a global shut-down of live events. Many of the shows and events planned by the
members of the band have been cancelled or postponed until at least the autumn of 2020 in response
to this virus.
10 The four original members of Pink Floyd last played together at the 2005 Live 8 concert in London.
This was the frst time they had played together in 24 years, and they were the only band not be to
verbally announced by their name. Simon A. Morrison was at this event.
11 Quoted in Schlesinger, A. (1967). ‘The Origins of the Cold War’, Foreign Afairs, No. 64, October,
from the original, September 19, 1946, speech Churchill delivered at the University of Zurich.
12 Labour Party landslide victory, 393 seats to Conservative 21, on July 26, 1945, beating the war-time
leader Churchill and his Conservative Party.
13 Between November  14 and 15, 1940, German bombers dropped 503 tons of high-explosive and
30,000 incendiary bombs on the city of Coventry, killing 568 people and seriously injuring 850. Over
a third of houses were made uninhabitable.
14 That is after Sytner sold the club in 1959.
15 Nick Mason, when in The Tea Set circa 1963, can be seen loading his gear into the band’s Bedford
on page 21 of his (2004) Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

22
 Introduction

A  better-quality version of this photograph, taken outside the digs, shows other band members at
the widow of the house where some of them lived, looking like ghouls. See https://s3-eu-central-
1.amazonaws.com/centaur-wp/creativereview/prod/content/uploads/2017/05/G7532-NP600A-
NICK-WITH-VAN-1.tif-%C2%A9Pink-Floyd-Archive-1965-copy.jpg.
16 Too many to mention all of them, but people such as Kevin Godley of The Magic Lanterns went on to
form art rock band 10cc; Graham Nash of The Hollies went on to form Crosby, Stills & Nash; and Eric
Stewart, also of The Hollies, went on to have success with many global artists such as Paul McCartney
and as a member of 10cc.
17 Also in Cambridge and part of the ‘set’ was Storm Thorgerson – also an alumnus of the Cambridgesh-
ire High School for Boys, with Barrett in the year below him and Waters in the year above him.
Mrs Thorgerson and Mrs Waters were friends.
18 Mason moved out in order to focus on his college work.
19 Op. cit. Mason (2004):33.
20 Moore, R. (2012). ‘ “Break on Through”: Counterculture, Music and Modernity in the 1960s’, Vol-
ume! La revue des musiques populaires, 9(1):34–49.
21 See Op. cit. Mason (2004):22.
22 Of course, there were more, such as rockabilly, country, blues, jazz, gospel and so on. And Elvis was
still active.
23 Whether a real counterculture or myth, a lot was happening that propelled Pink Floyd into becoming
professional musicians.
24 The LFS was based at 26 Powis Terrace – once a jazz record shop and brothel and opposite David
Hockney’s studio. In reality the LFS provided little in the way of education. It was, however, a catalyst
to the underground movement in the UK. See Vague, T. (2012). Getting It Straight in Notting Hill Gate:
A West London Psychogeography Report. e-book. London: Bread and Circuses.
25 Op. cit. Mason (2004):39.
26 Lots of photographs exist of the early lighting efects. For a contemporary example, see the Mathos
Space Projector – a lava lamp that heats coloured lava, projecting a constantly changing psychedelic image
onto walls.
27 Jones, N. (1966). ‘Pink Floyd: All Saints Church Hall, London’, Melody Maker, 22 October.
28 Op. cit. Mason (2004):43. And mentioned in The Wall.
29 A personal note. In the early 2000s Chris Hart stood in a line of three to four people in a village shop
in Crannock Cornwall waiting to buy a pasty. I initially failed to notice, even as a Floydian, that in front
of me was Mr Gilmour. I remember he purchased six large pasties.
30 For a history of the UFO club, see Boyd, J. (2009). White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. e-book.
London: Serpent’s Tail.
31 Graham, B. and Greenfeld, R. (2004). Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out. Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press, page 216.
32 Op. cit. Mason (2004):45 recounts this and mentions the mums of the band were in the audience.
33 See Slater, P. (1970). The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon
Press for an analysis of these themes.
34 Found sounds are everyday sounds. On Pet Sounds these included a bicycle bell. Found sounds soon
made their way into the work of Pink Floyd.
35 DeRogatis, J. (2003). Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock. Hal Leonard Corpora-
tion, page 36.
36 LSD is short for lysergic acid diethylamide. Also known as acid, it is a hallucinogenic chemical.
37 Houghton, R. (2017). Pink Floyd. I Was There. Red Planet, pages 22–24. Also see pages 25–31 for
more personal memories of the UFO and other venues where The Pink Floyd played in 1966. Also
see Op. cit. Mason (2004):46.
38 Miles, B. (2006). Pink Floyd: The Early Years. London: Omnibus Press, page 57.
39 Farren, M. (2001). Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. London: Jonathan Cape, page 91.
40 See for example, Chapman, G. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London: Faber and Faber.
41 Op. cit. Mason (2004):51–52.
42 Ibid.
43 Lyons, J. (1967). ‘I Was There: Alexandra Palace 29 April 1967’, in Op. cit. Houghton (2017):50–53.
44 Nonetheless, the band were banned from the Hall for throwing fowers into the audience.
45 A lot has been written on moral panics; the original seminal study is still the best place to start, see
Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

23
 Chris Hart and Simon A. Morrison

46 Op. cit. Mason (2004).

47 For more information and a comparative treatment of Barrett and Wilson see, Carter, D. (2010). ‘The
Vegetables Turned: Sifting the Psychedelic Subsoil of Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett’, Popular Music
History, 4(1).
48 Sedgewick, N. (2017 [1975]). In the Pink (Not a Hunting Memoir). Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd.,
page 21.
49 Parker, A. (1982). Pink Floyd: The Wall. London: Goldcrest.

24
 COMPANIONS TO THE
ALBUMS OF PINK FLOYD AND
SOURCES ON PINK FLOYD
Chris Hart

Introduction
For the true afcionado of Pink Floyd, these two companions may have little use. This is because
they have been deliberately written for those readers and music listeners who have an interest
in the band but as yet know little about them or their work. As such, this chapter is intended
to be a starting point for getting to know further sources that can be consulted about the band
and what, in general terms, the original albums and tracks are about.
In compiling these two companions, attention has been given to providing useful and detailed
information to assist your understanding of the band. The lists of sources included, for instance,
are those considered the most useful and available on a given topic. Hence, for the history of
the band, Nick Mason’s (2004) book is essential reading. This book is widely available. You will
notice multiple sources have, where available, been suggested for each category. This is to help
balance out any biases, address any omissions in a particular publication and give the reader a
wider perspective on the topic they are interested in. Hence, while Mason’s (2004) book Inside
Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd is essential, so too is a lesser-known one on the history of
the band by Nick Sedgwick (2017), strangely titled In the Pink (Not a Hunting Memoir).
There are, as with most bands and music artists, a plethora of sources on both them and their
work. In the selection on sources, some websites and flm materials have been included. The
reason for this inclusion is that fan websites have come a long way since the early days of the
internet: they are now key sources of information, subject to the scrutiny of the fan community
and can, usually, be a source for further information and multiple interpretations of a track.
Turning to the list and descriptions of the original albums published by Pink Floyd is more
subjective. The descriptions of what individual songs and tracks are about are, to a large degree,
personal. These, therefore, are my interpretations, and they are necessarily brief – a point that
cannot be overemphasised – for if you are relatively new to the Pink Floyd universe, then expect
debate to abound about diferent tracks and albums. This is a feature of Pink Floyd’s music; it
encourages multiple interpretations. It also demands, for the braver fan, a fuller understanding,
and knowledge, about what a particular song is referring to in its lyrics and, for the fuller expe-
rience, what a particular structure and rhythm are trying to achieve. This is so much more the
case when Pink Floyd released massive boxsets of their work containing remixes, vinyl copies,

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-2 25
 Chris Hart

previously unreleased materials, videos and ephemera. Given various names according to the
period or album title, these box sets are extensive historical records of what the band was doing
at a particular time. For example, Cambridge St/ation 1965–1967 (released 2017) covers Syd
Barrett’s time with the band and includes demos made before they had a recording contract,
previously unreleased tracks, sessions they did for the BBC and more, while others boxsets cover
the late 1960s and early 1970s – such as Dramatis/ation 1969 (released 2017), 1970 Devi/Ation
(released 2017), Reverber/ation 1971 (released 2017) and Obfusc/ation 1972 (released 2017).
Boxsets called ‘discovery,’ ‘immersion’ and ‘experience’ were released in 2011 covering the
post-1972 output of the band. The ‘discovery’ editions are remastered versions of original
recordings, with additional interpretive materials and artwork. The ‘immersion’ editions, how-
ever, take the interest to a completely new level. These box sets are huge collections of materials
wholly on one album. The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall all have
been released as ‘immersion’ box sets. The Dark Side of the Moon is the only album, to date, to
have an ‘experience’ box set.
The ‘immersion’ editions are aimed at the fan rather than casual listener. Take, for example,
The Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Box Set (released 2011). This penetrative collection of mate-
rials covers every aspect of the album. The box includes:

40 page booklet designed by Storm Thorgerson, an exclusive photo book by Jill

Furmanovsky, exclusive Storm Thorgerson art print and collectors’ cards, a replica
of The Dark Side Of The Moon tour ticket and backstage pass, a scarf, black mar-
bles, credits booklet, The Dark Side Of The Moon Digitally (remastered By James
Guthrie), The Dark Side Of The Moon performed live at Wembley in 1974 (2011
Mix And Previously Unreleased), The Dark Side Of The Moon 1972 early album
mix, previously unreleased, engineered by Alan Parsons, ‘The Hard Way’ (From
‘Household Objects’ Project), ‘Us And Them’, Richard Wright Demo, ‘The Travel
Sequence’, Live From Brighton June  1972, ‘The Mortality Sequence’, Live From
Brighton June 1972, ‘Any Colour You Like’, Live From Brighton June 1972, ‘The
Travel Sequence’, Studio Recording 1972, ‘Money’, Roger Waters’ Demo. On other
DVD and CD discs are – The Dark Side Of The Moon, James Guthrie 2003 5.1 Sur-
round Mix (previously released only on SACD) in standard resolution audio at 448
kbps, The Dark Side Of The Moon, James Guthrie 2003 5.1 Surround Mix (previ-
ously released only on SACD) in high resolution audio at 640 kbps, The Dark Side Of
The Moon, LPCM Stereo mix (as disc 1), The Dark Side Of The Moon, Alan Parsons
Quad Mix (previously released only on vinyl LP and 8 track tape in 1973) in standard
resolution audio at 448 kbps, The Dark Side Of The Moon, Alan Parsons Quad Mix
(previously released only on vinyl LP/8 track tape in 1973) in high resolution audio at
640 kbps, Live In Brighton 1972, The Dark Side Of The Moon, 2003 documentary
(25 min EPK), Concert Screen Films (60 min total). Plus audio collections – The
Dark Side Of The Moon, James Guthrie 2003 5.1 Surround Mix (previously released
only on SACD) in high resolution audio at 96 kHz/24-bit, The Dark Side Of The
Moon, Original stereo mix (1973) mastered in high resolution audio at 96 kHz/24-bit.
And flms of Live In Brighton 1972, British Tour 1974, French Tour 1974, and the
North American Tour 1975.

This kind of ‘immersion’ boxset has fascination for many fans but is not necessary to appreci-
ate and experience Pink Floyd. The individual albums are the starting points for ‘getting into
Pink Floyd’ at diferent stages in their development. These recordings are, then, the source for

26
 Companions to the albums

critical appreciation that includes making your own interpretation of the music of Pink Floyd.
We hope that the following companion to the sources and the albums helps you on your way
to achieving what you want from listening to Pink Floyd.

A companion guide to the original albums by Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd released 15 albums of original music between 1967 and 2014, although, as we have
just seen, there are many other products related to the original albums. Related products include
compilation albums, limited box sets, music for movie flms, singles and videos of concerts.
This section provides an overview of the original albums.

Te Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

Track listing
1 Astronomy Domine 04:12 (Barrett)
2 Lucifer Sam 03:07 (Barrett)
3 Matilda Mother 03:09 (Barrett)
4 Flaming 02:47 (Barrett)
5 Pow R. Toc H. 04:28 (Barrett/Mason/Waters/Wright)
6 Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk 03:05 (Waters)
7 Interstellar Overdrive 09:42 (Barrett/Mason/Waters/Wright)
8 The Gnome 02:13 (Barrett)
9 Chapter 24 03:43 (Barrett)
10 The Scarecrow 02:11 (Barrett)
11 Bike 03:22 (Barrett)

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a collection of songs mostly written by Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett.
The album takes its title from chapter seven of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Wind
in the Willows.
The songs are generally cheerful and light, with a sense of mischievous fun. ‘Bike,’ for exam-
ple, is lyrically about a bicycle, gingerbread men, a cloak and a homeless mouse – all comedic,
childlike reminiscences. The notable instrumental section uses a range of found sounds and
efects that were to become a characteristic feature on future albums. Released at the height of
the psychedelic fashion, tracks such as ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’ show
how improvisations and free-form structures used in live performances (lasting 20 minutes or
more) can become recordable tracks. Although they are over 50 years old, songs and instrumen-
tals from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn are now part of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets successful
tour and live recording (2018/-).
‘Astronomy Domine’ is a composition in the style of ‘space rock,’ using sounds to conjure in
the imagination a trip into space.
‘Lucifer Sam’ is a song about a cat, inspired by a children’s book. Upbeat, with the feel of a
theme tune for a sixties action drama.
‘Matilda Mother’ is a song about a book read to Syd as a child by his mother.
‘Flaming’ is a colourful, imaginative piece of poetry that is both whimsical and psychedelic,
with the odd sound efect.
‘Pow R. Toc H.,’ with sound efects and use of onomatopoeic technique, has a clear structure
even though sounding experimental.

27
 Chris Hart

‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,’ written by Waters, is diferent to the other tracks on
this album; a morbid song that is almost a psychedelic frenzy.
‘Interstellar Overdrive’ is classic space rock throughout, built around a single simple rift.
‘The Gnome’ is based on Syd’s childhood memories and tells the story of a gnome.
‘Chapter  24’ is a song based on Eastern philosophy. Wright’s harmonium dominates
throughout.
‘The Scarecrow’ is a poetic song about the life of a scarecrow. It has some sad undertones
about life and fate.
‘Bike’ is a delightful, fun song about a bicycle, amongst other things. Sound efects through-
out and at the end of the track add to the fairy-tale whimsy.

A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)

Track listing
1 Let There Be More Light 05:37 (Waters)
2 Remember a Day 04:34 (Wright)
3 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun 05:28 (Waters)
4 Corporal Clegg 04:12 (Waters)
5 A Saucerful of Secrets 11:57 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
6 See-Saw 04:37 (Wright)
7 Jugband Blues 03:00 (Barrett)

A Saucerful of Secrets is another collection of songs without any major theme connecting them.
It is also the album that marked the end of Barrett as the leader and principal songwriter for the
band. David Gilmour was brought in to cover Barrett’s guitar playing, and for a short time Pink
Floyd had fve members. Gilmour’s arrival prioritised the role of the guitar in the band, which
would become a feature of their music from then on.
Barrett wrote only one song for this album, ‘Jugband Blues,’ compared to the eight he wrote
on Piper. It can be seen that three songs: ‘Let There Be More Light,’ ‘Remember a Day’ and
‘See-Saw’ are nostalgic. Childhood, and freedom to play, now become the themes in Wright’s
‘Remember a Day’ and ‘See-Saw.’ In Waters’ ‘Let There Be More Light,’ literature from child-
hood, love of science fction and adolescence are the referents.
‘Let There Be More Light’ is the opening track and brings space rock full force from the
new Floyd lineup.
‘Remember a Day’ is pure nostalgia for childhood, when time had little meaning. A sooth-
ing piece from Wright.
‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ combines notions of sadness, mental illness and
suicidal thoughts, producing a narrative and scenario that, when played live, allowed for impro-
vision and extended versions of the track.
‘Corporal Clegg’ can be seen as the forerunner of many ‘war-themed’ songs, with an anti-
war stance by Waters. The song tells of the toll paid by soldiers and their families due to war.
‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ is an instrumental that has the structure and form of a symphony. At
over 11 minutes long, this marked a move away from the three–four-minute song towards the
longer, immersive musical experiences that became the stock-in-trade of the band. This track,
more than any other at the time, signalled the way the band would eventually go, to produce a
suite of tracks that had a concept based on a cluster of interrelated themes.

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‘See-Saw’ by Wright is in the style of Barrett with deeper undertones and efects. A soulful,
nostalgic reminiscence of childhood.
‘Jugband Blues’ is the last song to be written and sung by Barrett with Pink Floyd. It is a
remarkable song in which Barrett is ironic, humorous and sardonic. He seems to be refecting
on his disenchantment with life as a rock musician and band leader. The remarkable Roger
‘Syd’ Barrett would himself, of course, be the resource for future Pink Floyd concept albums.

More (1969)

Track listing
1 Cirrus Minor 5.18 (Waters)
2 The Nile Song 3.27 (Waters)
3 Crying Song 3.34 (Waters)
4 Up the Khyber 2.13 (Mason and Wright)
5 Green Is the Colour 2.59 (Waters)
6 Cymbaline 4.50 (Waters)
7 Party Sequence 1.07 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)
8 Main Theme 5.28 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)
9 Ibiza Bar 3.19 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)
10 More Blues 2.13 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)
11 Quicksilver 7.14 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)
12 A Spanish Piece 1.05 (Gilmour)
13 Dramatic Theme 2.17 (Waters, Wright, Gilmour and Mason)

More is the soundtrack to the movie More (dir. Barbet Schroder, 1969). Pink Floyd had already
collaborated with flmmakers, but More was the frst full soundtrack they created. The flm is
about love and self-destruction through drug use. The two main characters, Stefan and Estelle,
embark on a love afair, take drugs that cause psychedelic episodes, ending in the death of
Stefan. Seeking the Ibizan sun, freedom and escape, the two characters are meant to represent
the post-war European generation, escaping the drudge, dreariness and trauma of the war
generation.
The band created mood music to accompany the scenes showing the journey of the two
characters. A mix of folk, rock and ambient sounds are embedded into the narrative.
‘Cirrus Minor’ is a ballad based on a poem by Hi He, from which Waters had also taken
inspiration for ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’ The song describes a journey across
the galaxy to the constellation Cirrus Minor. The instrumental parts create a surreal entrancing
sound.
‘The Nile Song’ is loud and brash in the form of hard rock with raspy singing from Gilmour.
‘Crying Song’ accompanies a crucial scene in the flm, when Estelle become a drug dealer.
In the scene, a poster shows a nuclear mushroom; at the same time, from a radio, the song plays
its soft melody, creating a dream-like experience.
‘Up the Khyber’ is jazz combined with space-music sound efects. Mason’s drumming is the
backbone of the piece, on which dissonant piano is played to produce an hallucinatory efect.
In the 1960s, the Khyber Pass was a well-known route to Afghanistan and drugs.
‘Green Is the Colour’ is a soft soothing melody echoing the sound of the Mediterranean sea
lapping on the shore. Beautiful lyrics, sung softly by Gilmour, accompany the harmony.

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‘Cymbaline’ is a slow atmospheric piece with a lot of echo and reverb adding to the surreal
quality of the sounds.
‘Party Sequence’ brings an hypnotic percussion sound to the scenes of a party being held in
the villa.
‘Main Theme’ is an instrumental accompanying the titles and opening scenes of the flm.
The gong dominates and, with Wright’s organ playing, the melody has an oriental sound.
‘Ibiza Bar’ has a heavy rock feel due to the drumming and Hendrix-style guitar.
‘More Blues’ takes infuences from, and reminds us of, the place the band got their name –
musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. A true jazz/blues piece due to Gilmour on guitar.
‘Quicksilver’ accompanies a drug-taking scene. The psychedelic moods come in waves to
mirror the efects (presumably) of the efects of drug taking.
‘A Spanish Piece’ is a Flamenco-style track to create the feel of music being played on the
radio in a Spanish bar.
‘Dramatic Theme’ is an instrumental that brings the flm to a close. Based on the same hook
used in ‘Let There Be More Light,’ the beat is slower.

Ummagumma (1969)

Track listing
1 Sysyphus Part 1 01:09 (Wright)
2 Sysyphus Part 2 03:30 (Wright)
3 Sysyphus Part 3 01:50 (Wright)
4 Sysyphus Part 4 07:00 (Wright)
5 Grantchester Meadows 07:26 (Waters)
6 Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict
05:00 (Waters)
7 The Narrow Way Part 1 03:28 (Gilmour)
8 The Narrow Way Part 2 02:53 (Gilmour)
9 The Narrow Way Part 3 05:57 (Gilmour)
10 The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party Part 1 (Entrance) 01:00 (Mason)
11 The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party Part 2 (Entertainment) 07:06 (Mason)
12 The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party Part 3 (Exit) 00:39 (Mason)
13 Astronomy Domine 08:30 (Barrett)
14 Careful with That Axe, Eugene 08:51 (Waters/Mason/Wright/Gilmour)
15 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun 09:12 (Waters)
16 A Saucerful of Secrets 12:48 (Waters/Mason/Wright/Gilmour)

Ummagumma (pronounced OOH-ma GOO-ma) is a double album. One disc is a live recording
of gigs in Birmingham and Manchester; the other disc is a collection of original songs and tracks
by individual members of the band. The idea was that each member could contribute their own
compositions, even if some had the strangest titles.
The four tracks taken from earlier studio albums and recorded live include Barrett’s ‘Astron-
omy Domine’ – all are longer versions of solid pieces that the band played live into the early
1970s.
The four sets of tracks, with one from each member of the band, have, as a result, nothing
in common; more an experiment based on idea that each member could show their talents.

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Wright’s ‘Sysyphus,’ in four parts, is a symphony reminiscent of a Hollywood religious epic

movie. Waters’ ballad ‘Grantchester Meadows’ harks back to the place where he grew up with
Barrett and Gilmour. ‘Several Species .  .  .’ uses a collection of found and created sounds of
animals followed by a verse about mythical beings (such as Picts). Gilmour’s ‘The Narrow Way’
(parts 1–3) is two-thirds instrumental, with the latter part having lyrics that refer to dangerous
journeys, presumably the one Barrett took a couple of years earlier. Mason’s instrumental ‘The
Grand Vizier’s Garden Party’ (parts 1–3) starts with a fute before moving into sound efects
accompanied by a wide range of percussion.

Atom Heart Mother (1970)

Track listing
1 Atom Heart Mother 23:46 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour/Geesin)
2 If 04:31 (Waters)
3 Summer ’68 05:28 (Wright)
4 Fat Old Sun 05:23 (Gilmour)
5 Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast 13:43 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)

Atom Heart Mother is a two-part album. One side is a continuous piece, the other side comprises
four songs.
The opening track, ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ has 16 parts, organised into six ‘movements.’ The
23-minute track goes from loud and epic to surreal foating moods, to a choir, an organ, funky
bass, to distorted sounds and fnally to the end, where all the musicians play.
‘If ’ is a slow sung romantic composition that is infused with sadness.
‘Summer’ is an up-beat story of a brief relationship, possibly with a groupie. The piano, bass
guitar and trumpets form counter-melodies producing a truly quality sound.
‘Fat Old Sun’ is a nostalgic reminiscence in the style of a folk song.
‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ is the fnal track on the album. The song has three parts, begin-
ning with the sounds of a man preparing and cooking his breakfast, sounds that reappear at later
stages in the track. The second part is a folky acoustic guitar ballad that is accompanied by a
slide guitar. The fnal part is the band at its best – we hear the Pink Floyd playing their sound.

Meddle (1971)

Track listing
1 One of These Days 05:43 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
2 A Pillow of Winds 05:30 (Waters/Gilmour)
3 Fearless 06:08 (Waters/Gilmour)
4 San Tropez 03:43 (Waters)
5 Seamus 02:14 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
6 Echoes 23:31 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)

Meddle has no theme or overriding concept linking the six tracks, yet even as separate pieces,
they are all imbued with a sound quality that is now becoming characteristic of a more conf-
dent Pink Floyd.

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‘One of These Days’ is a powerful instrumental. It has tension, movement and seamless
efects and sounds like it could be the motivating soundtrack to the Olympic Games.
‘A Pillow of Winds’ is a slow ballad that invites the listener to dream along with the rhythms
of nature.
‘Fearless’ is a simple song about facing adversity and never losing hope. The track references
football (soccer) and ends with football fans singing the terrace favourite ‘You’ll Never Walk
Alone.’
‘San Tropez’ is a jazzy number that stands out as the odd one in this collection. Its cryptic
lyrics could refer to drug use or not.
‘Seamus’ is a novelty track about a dog that howls when music is played.
‘Echoes’ is a complex ‘space’ opera of the highest standard, exhibiting in parts the sound that
was now, and would be from then on, classic Pink Floyd. The lyrics appeal for communication
and empathy rather than aggression.

Obscured by Clouds (1972)

Track listing
1 Obscured by Clouds 03:04 (Waters/Gilmour)
2 When You’re In 02:30 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
3 Burning Bridges 03:29 (Waters/Wright)
4 The Gold It’s in the . . . 03:07 (Waters/Gilmour)
5 Wots . . . Uh the Deal 05:08 (Waters/Gilmour)
6 Mudmen 04:20 (Wright/Gilmour)
7 Childhood’s End 04:32 (Gilmour)
8 Free Four 04:15 (Waters/Wright)
9 Stay 04:05 (Waters/Wright)
10 Absolutely Curtains 05:52 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)

Obscured by Clouds is the soundtrack for the motion picture La Vallee (dir. Schroeder, 1972). The
separate songs and instrumentals have no theme connecting them. Their intent was to provide
music and sound to accompany the flm’s narrative of self-discovery.
‘Obscured by Clouds’ is an ambient piece employing an hypnotic beat and distorted guitar.
‘When You’re In’ starts with raps on a snare drum before becoming a hard rock piece.
‘Burning Bridges’ is a ballad with jazz-rock harmonies and the unmistakable Wright on
organ.
‘The Gold It’s in the . . .’ is a conventional rock song in the style of other groups in the single
charts at the time.
‘Wots . . . Uh the Deal’ is a nostalgic song about growing old and being homesick.
‘Mudmen’ is an instrumental adaptation of ‘Burning Bridges.’
‘Childhood’s End’ politicises the transition from childhood to adolescence, suggesting a
choice needs to be made regarding where one stands on political and social issues.
‘Free Four’ deals with old age and death, ofering advice along the way.
‘Stay’ is a song about the morning after a one-night stand.
‘Absolutely Curtains’ is an instrumental that includes singing from indigenous Mapuga
people.

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Te Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

Track listing
1 Speak to Me 01:08 (Mason)
2 Breathe 02:49 (Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
3 On the Run 03:51 (Waters/Gilmour)
4 Time 06:50 (Mason/Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
5 The Great Gig in the Sky 04:44 (Wright)
6 Money 06:23 (Waters)
7 Us and Them 07:50 (Waters/Wright)
8 Any Colour You Like 03:26 (Mason/Wright/Gilmour)
9 Brain Damage 03:47 (Waters)
10 Eclipse 02:12 (Waters)

The Dark Side of the Moon is a watershed, marking the band’s break with space rock and psyche-
delia. It is also a true concept album. While there had been other albums based around inter-
linked concepts, TDSOTM took the format to a new level. The concepts in the album include
‘deadlines, travel, the stress of fying, the lure of money, a fear of dying, and problems of mental
instability spilling over into madness.’1 The result is a timeless masterpiece that appealed to, and
continues to resonate with, diferent cultures worldwide.
The album artwork is iconic, recognisable along with The Wall cover as Pink Floyd. There
are no words on the outside cover, just the prism and a white beam of light refracted into most
of its constituent colours.
Features of the album include each track merging into the next one, random clips of dia-
logue, laughter and sound efects – all contributing to a cohesive piece of musical art.
‘Speak to Me’ opens the album, with the sounds of a heartbeat produced by Mason striking
a drum. The same efect is at the end of the last track to bookend the album. The track includes
some spoken statements about madness and acts as an overture to the rest of the album, with the
message that madness comes from being isolated and alone, that being connected, and being in
communication with others, is good for mental well-being.
‘Breathe’ is a song about not being afraid to care about yourself and the world and about the
absurdity of being an individual in a society of others.
‘On the Run’ is an instrumental that, through sonic sound efects, describes the frantic
nature of contemporary life.
‘Time’ is a song about not wasting your time because eventually time will lay waste to you.
‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ is an instrumental with two spoken phrases about not being afraid
of dying. Clare Torry’s vocal contribution adds depth to Wright’s masterpiece.
‘Money’ is an ironic song about the power of money and the dysfunctional nature of con-
sumer culture. An anti-capitalist composition in which money is cast as the villain and bringer
of evils.
‘Us and Them’ is another iconic composition by Wright, with lyrics by Waters. The song
asks if it is possible to be human in an inhuman world in which power and control are unevenly
distributed. Saxophone by Dick Parry and a quartet of talented backing vocals create an hyp-
notic sound.
‘Any Colour You Like’ is an instrumental, providing a brief relief from the intensity of ‘Us
and Them’ and ‘Brain Damage.’ Wright’s Minimoog dominates the frst part with foating,

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shifting notes. Mason produces a precise metronomic pattern on a snare drum while a groove is
supplied by Waters on bass guitar. Gilmour provides a distinctive rhythm on a distorted guitar.
‘Brain Damage’ is a song about madness, friendship and loss. The song is a simple but moving
and evocative reminiscence of Syd (Roger) Barrett and for anyone who has ever felt sadness.
‘Eclipse’ is a short summary of the core messages (concepts) on the album. All four musi-
cians, working in harmony, produce a perfect ending to the album. Doris Troy’s beautiful
vocalisations leave the listener in no doubt that they have just experienced something special.

Wish You Were Here (1975)

Track listing
1 Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V) 13:37 (Waters/Wright/Gilmour)
2 Welcome to the Machine 07:25 (Waters)
3 Have a Cigar 05:25 (Waters)
4 Wish You Were Here 05:19 (Waters/Gilmour)
5 Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI–IX) 12:26 (Waters/Wright/Gilmour)

Wish You Were Here is, again, a concept album, this time centred on absence and disillusion-
ment, especially with the music business. It is also, in part, a lament about Syd Barrett, about
how he once was and what happened to him because of the pressures and relentless demands
of the music industry. The album has become signifcant for the visit Syd made to the studios
when ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ was being recorded – no-one recognised him because
his appearance had changed so much in the intervening years.
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V)’ is a heart-felt lament and homage to a friend and
band member who was lost along the way to the band’s success. The fve-part track is a remark-
able composition that musically describes the music business as a machine. The lyrics leave you
wondering about Syd, asking ‘what if . . .’.
‘Welcome to the Machine’ is a song about the ways in which the music business is a machine
that has power and control over artists, only valuing them so long as they produce hit songs.
‘Have a Cigar’ follows the theme and critique of ‘Welcome to the Machine.’ The music busi-
ness is here portrayed as an impersonal factory that cares only about money.
‘Wish You Were Here’ is a song that deals with complex dichotomies of the self, time and
personality. These themes are set within memories of the friendship Waters once enjoyed with
Barrett.
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI–IX)’ takes the concept of music being a machine
and the absence of Syd to another level. At the end of Part IX, Wright plays the opening notes
to ‘See Emily Play,’ to acknowledge Syd. To this day, it remains an epic piece of music.

Animals (1977)

Track listing
1 Pigs on the Wing (Part 1) 01:25 (Waters)
2 Dogs 17:04 (Waters/Gilmour)
3 Pigs (Three Diferent Ones) 11:22 (Waters)
4 Sheep 10:24 (Waters)
5 Pigs on the Wing (Part 2) 01:25 (Waters)

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Animals is an album concerned with challenging political orthodoxy, conservatism and authori-
tarianism from an Orwellian perspective. All but one track is solely written by Waters. Over-
all, this is a raw and angry critique of contemporary capitalist exploitation, oppression and
inequalities.
‘Pigs on the Wing (Part 1)’ is an odd love song in which Waters thanks his partner for saving
him from a ‘pig on the wing’ (an enemy), the enemy being the excesses made available through
fame and wealth.
‘Dogs’ is a satirical attack on the ideological machinery and the alienating efects of capitalism.
‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones)’ is a song attacking diferent types of people who show no
humanity to others or want their view of morality to be the only one.
‘Sheep’ is a song about the ways populations obediently follow orders, keep in line and
remain passive. It calls for class consciousness and rebellion against oppression and exploitation.
‘Pigs on the Wing (Part 2)’ is a song Waters uses to say that, although he is wealthy, he will
not become a pig (capitalist) or dog (controller of the masses) in the system.

Te Wall (1979)

Track listing
1 In the Flesh? 03:22 (Waters)
2 The Thin Ice 02:25 (Waters)
3 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 03:45 (Waters)
4 The Happiest Days of Our Lives 01:21 (Waters)
5 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 04:00 (Waters)
6 Mother 05:30 (Waters)
7 Goodbye Blue Sky 02:53 (Waters)
8 Empty Spaces 02:04 (Waters)
9 Young Lust 03:29 (Waters/Gilmour)
10 One of My Turns 03:37 (Waters)
11 Don’t Leave Me Now 04:16 (Waters)
12 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3 01:43 (Waters)
13 Goodbye Cruel World 00:45 (Waters)
14 Hey You 04:44 (Waters)
15 Is There Anybody Out There? 02:48 (Waters)
16 Nobody Home 03:37 (Waters)
17 Vera 01:22 (Waters)
18 Bring the Boys Back Home 01:17 (Waters)
19 Comfortably Numb 06:24 (Waters/Gilmour)
20 The Show Must Go On 01:37 (Waters)
21 In the Flesh 04:15 (Waters)
22 Run Like Hell 04:23 (Waters/Gilmour)
23 Waiting for the Worms 03:56 (Waters)
24 Stop 00:33 (Waters)
25 The Trial 05:18 (Waters/Ezrin)
26 Outside the Wall 01:43 (Waters)

The Wall is a mammoth rock opera that has a series of interconnected themes, a narrative about
multiple characters but centred around a rock star called ‘Pink.’ The themes on the album deal

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with his multiple traumas, his delusions of dictatorship, his failed relationships, drug use and
psychological deterioration. The Wall was conceived, from the outset, as a stage show and flm
and as a double album – and it became all three.
‘In the Flesh?’ is a hard-hitting song that tells of Pink’s trauma at losing his father in the
Second World War, of his internalised screaming, powerlessness and delusions of reasserting
himself.
‘The Thin Ice’ is a song in which Waters relates the experience of many war-babies who had
lost fathers and how they coped with such experiences. Waters lost his own father in the war.
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ continues the theme of trauma brought on by memories
of a lost father. The theme is extended to have meaning for anyone who has lost a signifcant
other in their life. To cope with such experiences, the song tells of how we build walls around
us to protect ourselves.
‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’ is an ironic song about the demeaning experience of
school. At the micro level, Waters criticises teachers for psychologically bullying pupils. At the
macro level, he critiques the entire educational system for moulding children to meet the needs
of the system.
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ continues the critique of education as a system of oppres-
sion and degradation. Schools are seen as mincing machines that strip children of their essential
creativity and humanity.
‘Mother’ is a song about how Pink’s mother is overprotective and domineering and how her
own fears have been internalised in her child.
‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ summarises the preceding narrative and themes. The innocence of a
child is taken away by war, destruction and the death of loved ones.
‘Empty Spaces’ details Pink’s contemplation on how to complete the wall he has built around
himself and how he is losing a grip on reality.
‘Young Lust’ relates how Pink calls his wife on the telephone, only to have a man answer.
Another failed relationship in Pink’s life.
‘One of My Turns’ is about Pink with a groupie, and although she attempts to get his inter-
est, he stares at a television screen on which a war movie plays. Pink bursts into a violent rage,
smashing up his hotel room.
‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ takes Pink to the edge of mental illness as he appeals to his wife not
to leave him all alone.
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3’ sees Pink complete his metaphorical wall and completely
isolate himself from reality.
‘Goodbye Cruel World’ is not about suicide. It is about Pink becoming totally withdrawn
in a catatonic state.
‘Hey You’ is a call for help. But Pink’s call cannot be heard because his wall is too high.
‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ shows how Pink is now isolated and alienated from every-
thing and everyone. He then asks if anybody at all is out there.
‘Nobody Home’ is Pink having all the trappings of success but without anyone to call on
the telephone.
‘Vera’ pays homage to the iconic Dame Vera Lynn, singer and performer during the Second
World War.
‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ is a song about taking responsibility. As an anti-war song, it
calls for those responsible for war to be held to account. At the same time, it is about not letting
becoming a rock star, or conspicuous consumption, replace relationships with other people.

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‘Comfortably Numb’ sees Pink in a catatonic state, but his manager wants him to perform,
to earn money, and so gets a doctor to administer an injection to him. Pink recalls his childhood
and how his dreams have now all gone.
‘The Show Must Go On’ is a critique of the impossible demands of the music business, plac-
ing money before the health and welfare of artists.
‘In the Flesh’ is one of the three songs about totalitarianism, the others being ‘Run Like
Hell’ and ‘Waiting for the Worms.’ These songs aim to be ofensive by employing Nazi symbols
to show how the music business controls fans – treating them like sheep. It is also about the
irrationality of prejudice and hate.
‘Run Like Hell’ takes the musical form of a Nazi rally from the 1930s, where totalitarian
dictators have control over the beliefs and behaviour of the masses.
‘Waiting for the Worms’ is a frightening song about mass murder instigated by the state – as
in 1930s–40s Germany – but can also be taken to mean any state at any time.
‘Stop’ tells of Pink’s return to reality. As the accused in a trial, Pink examines his memories,
realising his part in building his wall. All of this is in Pink’s mind.
‘The Trial’ features a judge, who calls for Pink to be exposed and his wall to be torn down.
The song ends with the wall exploding.
‘Outside the Wall’ is a short song that ends The Wall. Like a requiem, it calls for remembering
and moving on, acknowledging those around us who are outside our wall.

Te Final Cut (1983, Extended version 2004)

Track listing
1 The Post War Dream 03:00 (Waters)
2 Your Possible Pasts 04:26 (Waters)
3 One of the Few 01:12 (Waters)
4 When the Tigers Broke Free 03:17 (Waters)
5 The Hero’s Return 02:43 (Waters)
6 The Gunner’s Dream 05:18 (Waters)
7 Paranoid Eyes 03:41 (Waters)
8 Get Your Filthy Hands Of My Desert 01:17 (Waters)
9 The Fletcher Memorial Home 04:12 (Waters)
10 Southampton Dock 02:11 (Waters)
11 The Final Cut 04:46 (Waters)
12 Not Now John 04:56 (Waters)
13 Two Suns in the Sunset 05:23 (Waters)

The Final Cut is a full-blown, no punches pulled, anti-war album. The album has the subtitle ‘A
requiem for the post war dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.’ It is also an album
without Richard Wright, and Gilmour and Mason’s role is made clear, as this is a Roger Waters
album. The destruction and death in the Second World War (1939–45) and the politics of the
Falklands War (1982) are two main themes of the album. The 2004 re-issue includes the track
‘When the Tigers Broke Free.’
‘The Post War Dream’ is a song that targets British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for
going to war and due to her government’s economic strategy ending the post-war dream.

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‘Your Possible Pasts’ is a dark song about lessons we can learn from the past and how past
events impact the present, especially the relatives of those lost in war.
‘One of the Few’ is a simple song that has real impact. It concerns a school teacher (the same
one in The Wall), who is experiencing paranoia, having survived the brutality of war.
‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ is a moving song about the death of Waters’ father near Anzio
during the Second World War. A Tiger is a German tank.
‘The Hero’s Return’ returns to the school teacher from ‘One of the Few.’ He is so trauma-
tised by his war experiences he can only speak to his wife about his emotions when she is asleep.
‘The Gunner’s Dream’ is a song about the oppression of free speech and loss of peace. A crew
member of a bomber imagines a world of peace where you can speak your mind without fear
of repression as he parachutes away from his damaged aircraft.
‘Paranoid Eyes’ is a sad song about the depression of believing the messages governments
propagate about the righteousness of war, of facing the truth of being deceived and of self-
medicating with alcohol.
‘Get Your Filthy Hands Of My Desert’ is an attack on world leaders for allowing wars to
continue, especially the Falklands War.
‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ is a song about the death of Waters’ father in the Second
World War, in which the call is made for world leaders who are tyrants and preach hate to be
retired or removed from life.
‘Southampton Dock’ tells of the wives and mothers waving husbands and sons of to war
once again to solve political conficts. There is a chilling reference to poppy felds and graves.
‘The Final Cut’ takes us back to ‘Pink’ from The Wall. The song is dark, talking about rejec-
tion, sexual frustration and isolation.
‘Not Now John’ is a song that criticises the way British society had become under Thatcher-
ism. The media, misinformation, war and fear of unemployment are the themes through which
Waters exclaims how desperate life has become for many, who can now only seek solace in
drugs and alcohol.
‘Two Suns in the Sunset’ fnishes the album with an apocalyptic nuclear explosion, due to
politicians being allowed to wage war and having extinction-event weapons at their disposal.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)

Track listing
1 Signs of Life 04:24 (Gilmour/Ezrin)
2 Learning to Fly 04:53 (Gilmour/Ezrin/Moore/Carin)
3 The Dogs of War 06:09 (Gilmour/Moore)
4 One Slip 05:07 (Gilmour/Manzanera)
5 On the Turning Away 05:42 (Gilmour/Moore)
6 Yet Another Movie/Round and Around 07:28 (Gilmour/Leonard)
7 A New Machine (Part 1) 01:46 (Gilmour)
8 Terminal Frost 06:17 (Gilmour)
9 A New Machine (Part 2) 00:39 (Gilmour)
10 Sorrow 08:47 (Gilmour)

A Momentary Lapse of Reason is the frst post-Waters Pink Floyd album. (Waters left the band in
1985). Whereas most Pink Floyd albums have a meta-concept, Momentary Lapse does not; it is a
collection of songs and instrumentals without a theme linking them together.

38
 Companions to the albums

‘Signs of Life’ is a nostalgic instrumental with a few lines spoken at the beginning about the
loss of childhood.
‘Learning to Fly’ is a song about learning to fy an aeroplane and taking the lead of a mega-
band called Pink Floyd.
‘The Dogs of War’ is a political song about mercenaries who kill for money regardless of the
right or wrong of the cause.
‘One Slip’ is a song about a brief sexual encounter that results in a child.
‘On the Turning Away’ is a song that calls for people to engage with world leaders, hold
them to account and change the world.
‘Yet Another Movie/Round and Around’ is a complex composition whose surreal lyrics
concern a narrator who is himself dreaming a surreal dream.
‘A New Machine (Part 1)’ is largely an instrumental, but the cryptic lyrics and title hint this
is about a new kind of Pink Floyd and that Mason and Wright need to believe in themselves
to be a part of it.
‘Terminal Frost’ is an atmospheric instrumental that features saxophone and the unmistakable
organ playing of Wright (by now partially back in the band).
‘A New Machine (Part 2)’ is a short, upbeat end to Part 1.
‘Sorrow’ is about sadness and disillusionment. Its themes are pollution and fear for the future.

Te Division Bell (1994)

Track listing
1 Cluster One 05:58 (Wright/Gilmour)
2 What Do You Want from Me 04:22 (Wright/Gilmour/Samson)
3 Poles Apart 07:04 (Gilmour/Samson/Laird-Clowes)
4 Marooned 05:30 (Wright/Gilmour)
5 A Great Day for Freedom 04:18 (Gilmour/Samson)
6 Wearing the Inside Out 06:50 (Wright/Moore)
7 Take It Back 06:12 (Gilmour/Ezrin/Samson/Laird-Clowes)
8 Coming Back to Life 06:19 (Gilmour)
9 Keep Talking 06:11 (Wright/Gilmour/Samson)
10 Lost for Words 05:15 (Gilmour/Samson)
11 High Hopes 08:32 (Gilmour/Samson)

The Division Bell is about the problems, barriers and need for communication between people.
It also marked Richard Wright’s return as a full member of Pink Floyd. He co-wrote three
tracks with Gilmour, wrote a major piece for the album and brought his unique keyboard sound
back to Pink Floyd.
‘Cluster One’ introduces the concept of communication and meaning – it starts with sound
efects that, on frst hearing, sound like there is something wrong with the recording. Crackling
sounds last for one minute and are of solar winds interfering with the Earth’s magnetic felds.
This haunting instrumental harks back to the introduction of ‘Shine On,’ with Gilmour and
Wright in perfect symbiosis.
‘What Do You Want from Me’ is a song with blues undertones that is about communication
between a couple, with one unsure what the other wants from them.
‘Poles Apart’ is a song about Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, casting Syd as fun to be with . . .
and Waters not.

39
 Chris Hart

‘Marooned’ is an instrumental that has sounds like whales communicating with one another.
Gilmour produces a beautiful sound on his Fender Stratocaster No. 0001.
‘A Great Day for Freedom’ is a song about the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Soviet
Bloc’s anti-democratic control.
‘Wearing the Inside Out’ is a Wright composition on which he performs the vocals. This
track is pure Pink Floyd, with deep meanings about identity and self-worth. Using frst-person
narrative, Wright tells of his depression that lifted a little when he regained the ability to recon-
nect with people.
‘Take It Back’ is a fast-paced environmental song that warns nature is powerful, and nature
can take back from humankind that which they have destroyed, exploited and damaged. An apt
manifesto, indeed.
‘Coming Back to Life’ is a haunting song about making the decision to move on from the
past and make a new life for oneself.
‘Keep Talking’ includes a famous sample from Professor Stephen Hawking saying, ‘For mil-
lions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed
the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.’ This song makes
the appeal for people of the world to keep talking for the sake of understanding, peace and
harmony.
‘Lost for Words’ is song about not wasting time thinking about those who have aggrieved
you and, if they do not want to make peace with you, you should move on with what really
matters in your life.
‘High Hopes’ is a nostalgic lament, looking with both sadness and fondness at the past, when
‘we’ were young. Soothing sounds of the English countryside and church bells are followed by
lyrics about friends no longer with us, the problems of ambition and life as an endless river.
The album art by Storm Thorgerson (and Keith Breeden) centred around the use of gestalt
designs, in which the same image can be interpreted in diferent ways and, in so doing, raise
problems of interpretation and communication. The two heads, looking at one another, can
also be seen to be one head; it depends on how you interpret the elements in the image. The
alternative ways of seeing the heads (or head) mean that the viewer is part of the communica-
tion inherent in the design.

Te Endless River (2014)

Track listing
1 Things Left Unsaid 04:24 (Wright/Gilmour)
2 It’s What We Do 06:21 (Wright/Gilmour)
3 Ebb and Flow 01:50 (Wright/Gilmour)
4 Sum 04:49 (Mason/Wright/Gilmour)
5 Skins 02:37 (Mason/Wright/Gilmour)
6 Unsung 01:06 (Wright)
7 Anisina 03:15 (Gilmour)
8 The Lost Art of Conversation 01:43 (Wright)
9 On Noodle Street 01:42 (Wright/Gilmour)
10 Night Light 01:42 (Wright/Gilmour)
11 Allons-y (1) 01:56 (Gilmour)
12 Autumn ’68 01:35 (Wright)
13 Allons-y (2) 01:35 (Gilmour)

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 Companions to the albums

14 Talkin’ Hawkin’ 03:25 (Gilmour/Wright)

15 Calling 03:38 (Gilmour/Moore)
16 Eyes to Pearls 01:51 (Gilmour)
17 Surfacing 02:46 (Gilmour)
18 Louder Than Words 06:32 (Gilmour/Samson)

The Endless River is a tribute to Richard Wright, who died September 15, 2008. It is based on
improvisation sessions recorded, but not used, on The Division Bell (1994), and the music, move-
ments, and experience stand as a showcase for the sound Wright brought to Pink Floyd. The
album is a symphony in four movements, made up of 18 titles. On the extended versions, there
are 21 titles. Only one track, ‘Louder Than Words,’ has lyrics.
The outtakes from Division Bell were taken by producer and musician Phil Manzanera and
with Andy Jackson, Martin Glover and Gilmour were given shape, structure, direction and,
importantly, meaning.
The tracks form a continuous fow of mostly ambient music. Once the end of the album is
reached, the music fades out in the same way that, at the beginning, it faded in. This is remi-
niscent of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), which featured a heartbeat at the beginning and
end of the album.
The musical structure of the album, the tracks themselves and the cover art connect in a
symbiotic homology. ‘Ebb And Flow,’ for example, expresses sadness, melancholy and isolation
along with hope. These are emotions and experiences Richard Wright went through in his 50s.
The remarkable album art by Ahmed Emad Eldin (and Po Powell) shows a solitary man, punt-
ing towards the setting sun on a calm sea (formed of clouds). The man is on a journey, and this
connects squarely with ‘Autumn ’68,’ taking the listener back to 1969 when Wright played the
Grand Organ at the Royal Albert Hall – a few hours before the band played The Final Lunacy,
the concept for their 1969 tour, The Man and the Journey.
The Endless River was the last original album by Pink Floyd.
‘Things Left Unsaid’ begins with Wright saying, ‘We certainly have an unspoken under-
standing. But a lot of things unsaid as well’. These lyrics, like many other sonic aspects of the
album, reference past times, music and experiences.
‘It’s What We Do’ is a soothing reminisce of the track ‘Wish You Were Here,’ and Wright’s
playing is pure 1970s.
‘Ebb and Flow’ is sentimental, expressing a soft sadness and meditation.
‘Sum’ places Wright’s keyboards at its centre with precise playing from Mason and Gilmour.
It is a reminder of the psychedelic fun once enjoyed by the band, yet it has an aggressive force.
‘Skins’ has a beating heart supplied by Mason doing what he does best in his drumming, with
reminders from ‘A Saucerful’ and ‘On the Run.’ The big gong gets a gonging.
‘Unsung’ is a transition piece that nonetheless has a calmness.
‘Anisina’ is Turkish, meaning ‘in memory of.’ Wright does not play on this ballad. Gilmour’s
solo sections, Atzmon’s saxophone and Mason’s drumming, along with clarinet, make for an
unusually pleasing piece. The ending has a sound efect like a sail being flled by the wind.
‘The Lost Art of Conversation’ is reminiscent of the opening to ‘Wish You Were Here,’ with
a fusion of American jazz and blues producing a real chill factor.
‘On Noodle Street’ has, at the beginning, a 1960s television drama theme sound behind it,
due to various guitars.
‘Night Light,’ at the same length as ‘On Noodle Street,’ is another ambient composition
expressing a meditative serenity.
‘Allons-y (1)’ is a fast-paced piece that would not have been out of place on The Wall.

41
 Chris Hart

‘Autumn ’68’ was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall on their Grand organ by Wright in
1969. Additional material is supplied by Gilmour on electric guitar, Mason on the gong and
Iddins on keyboards. It sounds like this was to be a symphony.
‘Allons-y (2)’ reprises ‘Allons-y (1),’ with the addition of bass and synthesiser.
‘Talkin’ Hawkin’ takes ‘Keep Talking’ from The Division Bell and uses the original quote from
Professor Hawking, ‘All we need to do is keep talking.’
‘Calling’ is an ambient experimental composition containing space and machine-like sound
efects. The strings, percussion and efects render a dark, in places tense, mood.
‘Eyes to Pearls’ borrows from ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ with a rhythm that
develops a solid texture. A feeling of nostalgia is created with a contemporary quality.
‘Surfacing’ takes the sound back to The Division Bell and ‘Poles Apart.’ The vocals add atmos-
phere, and at the end, sound efects give the impression that a bell is tolling and there are seagulls
fying above the sea.
‘Louder Than Words’ is the only track on the album to have lyrics. Its focus is on com-
munication and based on an observation by Polly Sampson (Gilmour’s partner) that the band
members were silent with each other when waiting to go on stage at the 2005 Live 8 concert.
Yet, once on stage, they produced amazing music together. There are multiple references to
early works, making this a ftting tribute to Rick Wright and 47 years of Pink Floyd.

A companion to the sources on Pink Floyd

The aim of this section is to provide a companion set of readings and sources of information
that complement the chapters in this volume and might form signposts for the interested reader,
and intrepid Floyd scholar, to follow.

How to fnd sources and resources on Pink Floyd

The publishing landscape is diverse and complicated and contains publications of varying qual-
ity. In and among this landscape, especially on the Internet, are thousands of publications (in
print and electronic) on or about Pink Floyd. In addition, publications on and about Pink Floyd
continue to be produced by professional music authors, researchers (like this book you are read-
ing), organisations such as museums, members of the band, magazine article writers and fans.
There is also a growing corpus of publications about the artefacts, rather than the music, of Pink
Floyd. These include publications on the album art and musical scores. Most of this material
comes under what is called bibliographic control, when a publication has a recognised publisher
and unique number attached to it. These numbers are for books, academic journals and maga-
zines. For books they are called ISBNs (International Standard Book Number), and for journals
and magazines they are called ISSNs (International Standard Serial Number). Each publication
(product) has a unique number attached to it, making locating it much easier than one that does
not. Also, publishers (and authors) that use the ISBN and ISSN system must deposit multiple
copies of their work with the main ‘deposit libraries’ in the country. So, the book you are read-
ing has its unique ISBN number, and multiple copies have been deposited in the legal deposit
libraries of the United Kingdom. The advantage of this system is that if you know the number
of a book or journal, then you can order a copy of that publication through most libraries.
Publications (products) that do not have an ISBN or ISSN are outside of bibliographic
control. These often include self-published works, articles on websites, conference papers and
theses produced for master’s or doctorate degrees. Some of these types of publications have

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 Companions to the albums

some bibliographic control; theses, for example, can be found by searching databases dedicated
to recording them. The other publications are collectively called ‘grey literature.’ A classic exam-
ple of this is Nick Sedgwick’s (2017) In the Pink (Not a Hunting Memoir), an important book
about Pink Floyd but outside bibliographic control. (It was published as a private publication by
Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd and is only available from the US website of Roger Waters.)

A guide to core sources and resources on Pink Floyd

The following is a selective guide to the core sources and resources on Pink Floyd. It does not
contain items that are about topics relating to the band, such as album covers or sheet music.
Where available, the ISBN or ISSN has been included in the bibliographic details and approxi-
mate number of pages. The number of pages is sometimes, especially with books, an indication
of the quality (although not always) of the book. This guide is organised into the following
broad categories, each with its own sub-sections:

1 Reference publications
2 Publications on the albums
3 Autobiographical publications
4 Research publications
5 Grey literature and web sites
6 Memorabilia
7 Fan perspectives

Note
1 Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out. A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page
160.

1. Reference publications
The following have been categorised as reference sources, as they are ideal publications to con-
sult for information and facts.

Facts
Povey, G. (2016). The Complete Pink Floyd: The Ultimate Reference. London: Welbeck Publishing. ISBN:
1780976518, 448 pages.
Shea, S. (2009). Pink Floyd FAQ – Everything Left to Know and More! London: Backbeat Books. ISBN:
978-0-87930-950-3, 330 pages.

Albums and songs

Guesdon, J.-M. and Margotin, P. (2017). Pink Floyd: All the Songs. The Story behind Every Track. New York:
Black Dog & Leventhal. ISBN: 978-0-316-43924-4, 592 pages.
Popof, M. (2018). Pink Floyd – Album by Album. Beverly, MA: Voyageur Press. ISBN: 978-0-7603-6061-
3, 240 pages.
Wild, A. (2017). Pink Floyd: Song by Song. Bedford: Fonthill Media; Illustrated edition. ISBN:
978-1-78155-599-6, 160 pages.

43
 Chris Hart

History
Hodges, R. and Priston, J. (2000). Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology, 1966–1971. London: Cherry Red
Books. ISBN: 1901447073, 302 pages.
Manning, T. (2006). The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd. London and New York: Penguin Books. ISBN:
1843535750, 298 pages.
Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A  Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
ISBN: 9780297843870, 459 pages. New edition published 2017.

Reviews
Fitch, V. (2001). Pink Floyd: The Press Reports 1966–1983. Croyden: CG Publishing. ISBN: 1-896522-72-6,
304 pages.

Encyclopedia
Fitch, V. (2005). The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia. Burlington: Apogee Books. ISBN: 1894959248, 448 pages.
Heatley, M. (ed.). (2007). The Defnitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock. London: Star Fire Publishing. ISBN:
978-1-84451-996-5, 448 pages.
Larkin, C. (ed.). (2006). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music. 4th edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ISBN: 978-0-19-531373-4, ten volumes.

2. Albums
There are sources covering all the albums, most of the songs and publications (including flm
and radio) dedicated to the historical discussion of a particular album.

General sources
Atom Heart Mother (1970): Geesin, R. (2013). The Flaming Cow: The Making of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart
Mother. Cheltenham: The History Press. ISBN: 978-0-7524-8615-4, 120 pages.
Fitch, V. and Mahon, R. (2006). Comfortably Numb: A History of “The Wall” – Pink Floyd 1978–1981. PFA
Publishing, Inc., limited edition of just 5,000 copies. ISBN: 0-9777366-0-1, 288 pages.
Guesdon, J.-M. and Margotin, P. (2017). Pink Floyd: All the Songs. The Story behind Every Track. New York:
Black Dog & Leventhal. ISBN: 978-0-316-43924-4, 592 pages.
Mabbett, A. (1995). The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus Press. ISBN: 0-7119-
4301-X, 128 pages.
Nemcof, M. Y. (2012). Tearing Down the Wall. The Contemporary Guide to Decoding Pink Floyd – The Wall
One Brick at a Time. Californi: Glenneyre Press LLC. ISBN: 9781934602270, 180 pages.
Popof, M. (2018). Pink Floyd: Album by Album. Beverly, MA: Voyageur Press. ISBN: 978-0-7603-6061-3,
240 pages.
Reising, R. (ed.). (2005). ‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Hampshire:
Ashgate Publishing Limited. ISBN: 0-7546-4019-1, 251 pages.
Southall, B. (2013). Dark Side of the Moon Revealed. Huntingdon: Clarksdale Books. ISBN:
978-1-9059-5998-3, 190 pages.
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973): Harris, J. (2005). The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd
Masterpiece. London: Fourth Estate. ISBN: 978-0-00-779090-6, 191 pages.
The Final Cut (1983): Fitch, V. (2014). The Final Cut: A History of Pink Floyd 1982–1983. PFA Publishing,
Inc., limited edition of just 1,500 copies. ISBN: 0-9777366-9-5, 120 pages.
The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon. (2008). DVD ASIN: B00009QNXX, 1 hour and 24 minutes.
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967): Cavanagh, J. (2003). The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. New York:
Continuum Books. ISBN: 0-8264-1497-4, 124 pages.

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 Companions to the albums

The Story of Pink Floyd – Behind the Wall: Inside the Minds of Pink Floyd. DVD, ASIN: B0042QHAFQ,
1 hour and 20 minutes. Dir: Sonia Anderson.
The Wall (1979): Bench, J. and O’Brien, D. (2004). Pink Floyd – The Wall: In the Studio, on Stage, and on
Screen. Cheltenham: Reynolds & Hearn. ISBN: 1-903111-82-X, 142 pages.
Ummagumma (1969): Young, R. (2015). ‘Ummagumma’, in The Ultimate Music Guide: Pink Floyd. London:
Time Inc. (UK) Ltd.
Wild, A. (2017). Pink Floyd: Song by Song. Stroud: Fonthill Media; Illustrated edition. ISBN:
978-1-78155-599-6, 160 pages.
Wish You Were Here (1975): The Story of Wish You Were Here. (2012). DVD ASIN: B007KIZ4V0, 1 hour
and 25 minutes. Director: John Edginton.

3. Autobiographical publications
Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A  Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
ISBN: 9780297843870, 459 pages. New edition published 2017.
Sedgwick, N. (2017). In the Pink (Not a Hunting Memoir). London: Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd,
272 pages.

4. Research publications
Blake, M. (2007). Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. London: Aurum Press. ISBN:
978-1-84513-261-3, 418 pages.
Fielder, H. (2013). Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall. New York: Race Point Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-937994-
25-9, 240 pages.
Fitch, V. and Mahon, R. (2006). Comfortably Numb: A History of The Wall Pink Floyd 1978–1981. PFA
(Pink Floyd Archives) Publishing. ISBN: 0-9777366-0-1, 288 pages.
Houghton, R. (2017). Pink Floyd: I Was There. Cornwall: Red Planet Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-9113-
4625-8, 437 pages.
Kopp, B. (2018). Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to the Dark Side of the Moon. Maryland, MA:
Rowman & Littlefeld. ISBN: 978-1-5381-0827-7, 237 pages.
Miles, B. (2006). Pink Floyd: The Early Years. London: Omnibus Press. ISBN: 1-84609-444-5, 160 pages.
Pink Floyd: The Complete Story (2015). London: Time Inc (UK) Uncut, NME.
Povey, G. (2007). Echoes: The Complete History of “Pink Floyd”. Mind Head Publishing via Omnibus Press.
ISBN: 9780955462405, 368 pages.
Purvis, G. (2020). Pink Floyd in the 1970s. Tewkesbury: Sonic Bond Publishing. ISBN: 978-1-78952-072-
9, 128 pages.
Reisch, G. A. (ed.). (2007). Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with That Axiom, Eugene. Chicago: Open
Court Publishing. ISBN: 0-8126-9636-0, 298 pages.
Reising, R. (2005). Speak to Me: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Farnham: Ashgate.
ISBN: 0-7546-4019-1, 251 pages.
Scarfe, G. (2010). The Making of Pink Floyd The Wall. Cambridge: Da capo Press.
Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. London: Harmony Books. ISBN:
0-517-57608-2, 348 pages.
Tachikawa, N. (1992). One of These Days. Tokyo: Shinko Muysic Publishing Co. ISBN: 41401-61410-0,
237 pages. (written in Japanese).

5. Grey literature and websites

Magazines
Billboard. Via Google Books, back issues are free to read. https://books.google.com.
Rock’s Backpages. Over 40,000 classic articles that include over 1,000 on Pink Floyd. www.rocksbackpages.
com.

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 Chris Hart

Web sites, fanzines and discussion groups

A Fleeting Glimpse. www.pinkfoydz.com.
Brain Damage. www.brain-damage.co.uk/index.php.
Pink Floyd Archives (PFA). www.pinkfoydarchives.com/directry.htm.
Pink Floyd Ofcial site. www.pinkfoyd.com/home.php.
Pink Floyd Podcast. http://foydpodcast.com.
Floyd Boots. http://foydboots.com.

Teses
EThos. The British Library database of theses. https://ethos.bl.uk/.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations. Worldwide database of theses. https://oatd.org.
WorldCat Discovery UCLA. Access to dissertation theses worldwide. https://ucla.on.worldcat.org/v2.

6. Memorabilia
Fitch, V. (1998). Pink Floyd Tour Folders & Concert Programmes. PFA, 68 pages.
Hearn, M. (ed.). (2008). Pink Floyd: REX Collections. Cheltenham: Reynolds  & Hearn. ISBN:
9781905287499, 160 pages. A book of photographs of Pink Floyd.
Povey, G. (2012). The Treasures of Pink Floyd. London: Carlton Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-78097-123-0,
63 pages.
———. (2018). Pink Floyd in Objects. London: Carlton Books Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-78739-162-8, 224 pages.

7. Fan perspectives
MacDonald, B. (ed.). (1996). Pink Floyd: Through the Eyes of the Band, Its Fans, Friends and Foes. London:
Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN: 0 283 06273 8, 348 pages.

46
 PART I

Performance and sound

 1
A CARTOGRAPHICAL
COMPANION TO LISTENING
TO AND UNDERSTANDING
THE SONGS OF PINK FLOYD
Chris Hart

Introduction
The demographic problem is this. A 20-year-old will not normally have the historic under-
standing of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to appreciate the intricacy or referents, both
overt and subtle, in a particular song by Pink Floyd. Even for those who lived through a particu-
lar period in time, when looked on from many decades after, it can seem strange and familiar at
the same time. The advantage those born between the 1950s and late 1960s have is they have a
knowledge about the events that they share with the members of Pink Floyd. Their privileged
knowledge does not, however, give them automatic purchase on understanding the themes, ref-
erents, emotions or politics expressed in a particular Pink Floyd song. This chapter is intended,
therefore, to ofer a companion to the songs of Pink Floyd in the form of a cartographical map.
Used with the introduction and the chronology of events in this book, this chapter provides a
‘way into’ thinking about the themes that have characterised the songs of the band.
The method this chapter ofers is cartographical – it is a map of the emotions used as the
resource for 58 songs released by Pink Floyd from ten original Pink Floyd albums covering the
period 1967 to 1994. This map aims to provide a window into the world of words, phrases and
referents used by the writers of these songs. We begin this journey by looking at the statement:
There is no Pink Floyd.

Tere is no Pink Floyd

There is no Pink Floyd. When I think of Pink Floyd, I am invoking the albums and tracks that
I prefer, that were produced by a particular confguration of artists and supporting musicians at a
particular period in time. I also have a preference for certain performances and media on which
I play my Pink Floyd. The same stands for many of the contributors of this book. It may be
when you think of Pink Floyd, you share with me the preference for a certain album and certain
tracks. It may be also that you have a very diferent idea to me of which Pink Floyd is the most
interesting, musically speaking, technically speaking and so on. In other words, whatever Pink
Floyd is, it is not the same for everyone, and to make this matter more complicated, the passing
of half a century since a group of young students and others got together with the ambition of

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-4 49
 Chris Hart

being ‘a band,’ with the comings and goings of diferent individuals, is the reason there is no
Pink Floyd but multiple Pink Floyds.
If, following this line of reasoning as fans, ‘we’ accept we tend to know our way around the
landscape of the history of the band, its members and recordings – and we know these things
alongside many other trivial facts about the band – what is this a knowledge of? Following the
work of Gilbert Ryle (2009 [1949]), this can be seen and treated as cartographical social knowl-
edge, which like a cartographical map of a place has its prominent features alongside subtle
details. Web sites, books and magazine articles act as guides to the route taken by the band, by
ofering chronological timelines on the sequence of events and outputs; lists on the what, who,
where and when; and facts such as the sales of particular albums. And this is where the book
The Concept of Mind (2009 [1949]) by English philosopher Gilbert Ryle becomes relevant to this
discussion and endeavour.1
Let me unpack this idea to show the point being made here. Ryle (2009) uses an analogy
of a villager who knows their way around their village and area. They know the landscape in
which they live so well that if asked to explain their village in terms of points on a compass,
exact distances and gradients, then this level of detail is irrelevant to them. They simply ‘know,’
through years of experience, how to get from A to B without the need for a map, signposts and
street names. Tanney (2009) refers to the same implicit knowledge (in her introduction to the
60th anniversary edition of Ryle’s book) with her analogy, that of the expert chef. The suc-
cessful chef does not, Tanney (2009) argues, follow a recipe book, just as the villager does not
follow a map. She asks,

how, then, are we to distinguish successful from non-successful performances if not

by saying that in the frst case, the relevant moves were infuenced by apprehension or
‘cognitive awareness’ of a rule whereas in the latter case they were not?2

From a rational standpoint (or approach), we could say that the villager could use a map and
the chef a recipe book. But what if neither could read? How, then, can we account for their
abilities to expertly apply geographical and culinary skills? Therefore, to be able to perform
something well that is recognised by others as expert does not require, as Ryle (2009) and
Wittgenstein (1953) point out, a theory of rational abilities, such as the ability to read music,
write grammatically correct sentences or understand how a map works. Useful as these would
be, they are not necessary criteria for a successful performance. Hence, we can listen to a track
by Pink Floyd and appreciate what we are hearing. But with knowledge about that track comes
the potential to gain a deeper level of understanding and thereby an enriched appreciation of it.
This takes us to the next observation and example used by Tanney (2009). If the partner of a
successful chef tries to cook by following a recipe book, will they be as good as their chef part-
ner? Similarly, if I play a Minimoog, using the sheet music to Part III, from the album Wish You
Were Here (1975), then would I be as good as Richard Wright? My learning to play the opening
of Part III, then, is one thing, but doing so with the skill and understanding of Richard Wright
is another, unequivocally diferent ability. A good performance is not, therefore, if we follow
the reasoning of Ryle (2009) and others such as Wittgenstein, about knowing and following
the rules. Assuming ‘knowing and following’ a score equates to the same level of performance
as the original artist is a misplaced assumption and has consequences that may lead to mistaken
beliefs. Tanney (2009) points out that,

philosophers have the tendency to forget or ignore the fact that the ability to follow
rules – in the cases in which this notion has clear application – involves various skills

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of its own with their own (separate) criteria for success. Ignoring this, philosophers
argue that the skills that may be acquired by training and drill (knowledge by wont or
know-how) are reducible to knowledge of recipes or rules and that knowledge of the
recipes or rules will fgure in a cognitive explanation of the ability.3

Conceptualising the concepts of Pink Floyd songs and albums

Taking the point made by Tanney (2009) means is there is no recipe for understanding Pink
Floyd, but there can be a number of approaches. This chapter and the others in this volume are
approaches to understanding Pink Floyd. Given this, there cannot be a universal explanation for
the popularity of Pink Floyd (and their global success). In short we can say there are approaches
to but no theory of Pink Floyd. And to re-iterate, it is the approaches to the band that this book
is all about. But this theme does not end here: in collecting approaches, we are looking at the
approaches to their music that Pink Floyd have taken over the years.
Despite there being no theory of Pink Floyd, the concept that there ought to be has some-
times infused comments from band members when they have tried to explain their music.
Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright have all in numerous articles been able to take the role
of self-refecting agents ‘and stand back from their performances and speak the language of the
“theorist”’.4 However, the point to note is the language they use is not that of the musicologist
but of the social-political-philosopher explaining what infuenced particular albums and tracks,
such as,

multifarious specifc mental concepts, such as those of knowing, learning, discovering,

imagining, pretending, hoping, wanting, feeling depressed, feeling a pain, resolving,
doing voluntarily, doing deliberately, perceiving, remembering and so on.

The quote is from Gilbert Ryle, saying that The Concept of Mind (1949)5 could have been
subtitled using these words and phrases. If we think of the list of Pink Floyd albums, such as
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), The Final Cut (1983) and The
Wall (1979), what are they about if not ‘specifc mental concepts, such as those of . . . imagin-
ing, pretending, hoping, wanting, feeling depressed, feeling a pain, resolving, . . . perceiving,
remembering and so on’?
Taking the foregoing observations into account and the ‘demographic problem’ mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter, I would like to make the following proposition as a way to
bring conceptual clarity and a way of getting more from listening to the ‘works’ created by Pink
Floyd.
Proposition: there is no need for an approach based in intellectualisation when it comes
to providing a map of concepts with which the listener can better understand what they are
listening to in relation to a Pink Floyd song. This proposition holds within it the claim that
understanding a Pink Floyd song, such as ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ (1975), is graduated –
there are levels of understanding, with the deepest being in having a ‘knowledge-about’ multi-
farious historic events, personal relationships among the band and cultural movements within
and external to but infuential on Pink Floyd up until 1975.

Category mistake – why there is no Pink Floyd

To claim you ‘like’ Pink Floyd seems to be a sentence that makes sense. This could be a response
to the question, ‘Who is your favourite band?’ At this general level of typifcation (Natanson,

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 Chris Hart

1970), this is indeed a rational answer.6 If Pink Floyd is your favourite band, then the expecta-
tion is you would be able to go beyond the general to the particular, to exhibit your ‘Floydian
knowledge.’ This ‘knowledge about’ constitutes the deeper-level indexical details, hierarchi-
cally ordered and available to the Floydian to go beyond merely talking about Floyd. It is what
Michael Silverstein (2003) calls ‘convention-dependent-indexical iconicity’ or ‘wine talk.’7 To
be able to talk Floydian is like being able to ‘talk DNA science,’ ‘talk particle physics,’ ‘talk Van
Gogh’ and so on – in short, it is the ability to use ‘knowledge about’ to establish authorisation
credentials that in turn facilitate and legitimatise critical evaluations of the subject, in this case
the works of Pink Floyd.
The existence of ‘Floyd talk,’ then, reveals that it is a mistake to claim there is a Pink Floyd.
Borrowing liberally from Ryle (1949), it is akin to walking down Oxford Road in Manchester
(England) and asking a passer-by, ‘Where is the university?’ As any Mancunian knows, there
are many universities in the city, and the larger ones have campuses across the city and beyond.
So, the reality is while the question seems reasonable, it reveals that the asker does not have the
deeper level ‘knowledge about’ the multiplicity of universities and campuses across the city. In a
similar logic, Pink Floyd is not a ‘psychedelic band,’ ‘progressive rock band’ or ‘hippy band’ – all
of these are what Ryle (1949) calls category mistakes.8 Pink Floyd is often referred to as a concept
band, when in reality the band is itself a concept.
Category mistakes can be made by anyone. They result from the use of a concept to describe
or ask about something (or a type of something) to which they do not belong or cannot without
detailed description be empirically identifed. For example, also in the city of Manchester, there
are two globally successful football (soccer) teams, but who in each team is responsible for their
team’s ‘spirit’? Team spirit is an abstract concept, and asking who or where it is allocates it to
a ‘type’ that has no empirical meaning, and hence there is no answer to this kind of question.
Hence, there is no singular Pink Floyd, or type of sound, or experience. There are, however,
multifarious mental concepts that have over fve decades been used by multifarious incarnations
of the band to create music. The music catalogue of Pink Floyd is, therefore, something from
which we as listeners can obtain diferent levels of understanding and immersion into concepts
the band have used to express universal emotions such as imagining, pretending, hoping, wanting,
feeling pain, coping with loss, resolving, perceiving, remembering, communicating and so on.

Knowing-how and knowing-about are not mutually exclusive

Let me now introduce some more philosophy to aid the analytical journey. Knowing-how to
do something and knowing-about (or of) something others know how to do are not, con-
trary to Ryle’s formulation, necessarily diferent capabilities. I may not know how, or have the
higher-level disposition, to play the Farfsa organ as well as or in the style of Richard Wright,
but I can train myself to know-how to listen intelligently to Wright’s musical contribution to
a particular song.9
For Ryle (1949), his ‘ghost in the machine’10 is the intellectualist assumption that an excel-
lent performance is the result of some ‘hidden stream of consciousness’ originating in the mind
of the performer, that is, something we lesser performers do not have. Two important points
come out of this that are relevant to our concerns. The frst is ‘drilling and training,’ and the
second is ‘phases.’
According to Ryle (1949), setting aside fortuitous fukes, intelligent performance can be
achieved through drilling and training.11 In the introduction to this volume and numerous
books on the history of Pink Floyd, especially Nick Mason’s (2004) Inside Out – A Personal
History of Pink Floyd, we can see the amateur band learning to play their instruments, use

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equipment and understand the music business. Successive long sessions on stage were where
and when they did the drill. The early phases of the band in the mid-1960s were about learn-
ing to be an operational group.12 Operationally speaking they learnt the ‘what, why and how’
of delivering a performance for audiences. They came to know ‘what’ the practice of being a
professional band was about, ‘what’ was required from each member and ‘why’ the performance
was important to success. They also learnt ‘how’ to be musicians in a band. The lessons of the
drill were so strong that operationally when Syd Barrett began his decline after the relative suc-
cess of the frst album, the band had sufcient discipline to cope with the exit of Syd.
Taking Ryle’s (1949) argument of phases for the purpose of this chapter, the word here is
being used to refer to diferent levels of performance at diferent times. In the case of the songs
and instrumental music of Pink Floyd, there have been phases in the competency regarding the
know-how of the band: As the band gained more experience (training in Ryle’s words) they
graduated to higher levels of disposition to express their musical concepts in diferent ways. If
we think of diferent songs, instrumentals and albums as diferent actualisations, then we can see
the gradual development of know-how. We can also appreciate the increasing levels of know-
how intelligence (skills) they brought to their music. Ryle (1949) gives a good example of what
this means.

When Jane Austen wished to show the specifc kind of pride which characterised the
heroine of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, she had to represent her actions, words, thoughts and
feelings in a thousand diferent situations. There is no standard type of action or reac-
tion such that Jane Austen could say ‘My heroine’s kind of pride was just the tendency
to do this, whenever a situation of that sort arose.’13

Jane Austin knew-how through experience to use characterisations and narrative conficts
to represent ‘pride’ in her novel. Pink Floyd also learnt the know-how enabling them to com-
municate in their music ‘multifarious specifc mental concepts.’
How some of the major emotional concepts were expressed in diferent songs by Pink Floyd
will be the subject of the sections which follow. And in the spirit of the cartographer, the tem-
poral landscape will be categorised according to the recognisable features which will be used as
a guide to the Floydian terrain.

Cartographical companion
In setting the philosophical context for this chapter, the work of Ryle (1949) and implicitly
Wittgenstein (1953) has been used.14 The reason for this is to recommend a method by which
the newcomer to the works of Pink Floyd might obtain a more enriched listening experience
if they know-about what they are listening to. This involves avoiding propounding theories or
ofering interpretations but clarifying (‘throwing light on’) and presenting infuences and refer-
ents present in the songs over successive incarnations of the band. However, the map provided
in this chapter is not defnitive but a starting point for developing other maps and as a point of
departure to critically assess any framework of interpretation, especially this one.

Te maps
The maps that follow are essentially lists of albums and songs categorised in diferent ways. The
diferences between the maps are a matter of detail. The maps go from the level of the album
and song title to the level of the song. At the level of the song I describe the core themes in that

53
 Chris Hart

song and what things are being referred to in it. A guiding set of emotional themes is also used
to categorise the songs. These themes are nostalgia, lament and trauma. These three emotional
themes have then been mapped onto diferent phases in the band’s history.
The maps presented here are not meant to be exhaustive but aim to present a guide to the
vital relevance of the themes in the songs of Pink Floyd. Within this aim is the objective to situ-
ate the themes within the relevant literature on nostalgia, lament and trauma.
The fve phases in this thematic map are shown in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Albums with songs from the fve phases of Pink Floyd

(1) The Syd Barrett Phase: The Beginning

Albums included in the Tracks/songs included in the map

map Track number on album and song title
Date and Title
1967 The Piper at the Gates 1 Astronomy Domine 8 The Gnome
of Dawn 2 Lucifer Sam 9 Chapter 24
3 Matilda Mother 11 Bike
4 Flaming
1968 A Saucerful of Secrets 1 Let There Be More Light 3 Corporal Clegg
2 Remember a Day 4 See-Saw

(2) Learning the Drill Phase: Surviving Without Syd Barrett

1970 Atom Heart Mother 2 If 4 Fat Old Sun
3 Summer ‘68
1972 Obscured by Clouds 3 Burning Bridges 7 Childhood’s End
5 Wots . .  Uh the Deal 8 Free Four

(3) The Classic Phase: Knowing-How

1973 The Dark Side of the 2 Breathe 7 Us and Them
Moon 4 Time/Breathe Reprise 9 Brain Damage
1975 Wish You Were Here 1 Shine On You Crazy Diamond 5 Shine On You Crazy
I–V Diamond VI–IX
4 Wish You Were Here

(4) The Roger Waters Phase: Politicisation of the Know-How

1979 The Wall
16
1983 The Final Cut
Track list from 2004
re-release that includes
‘When the Tigers Broke
Free’ – (frst released as a
single 1982)
1 In the Flesh? 17 Vera
2 The Thin Ice 18 Bring the Boys Back Home
3 Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 22 Run Like Hell
4 The Happiest Days of Our Lives 23 Waiting for the Worms
7 Goodbye Blue Sky 26 Outside the Wall
Nobody Home
2 Your Possible Pasts 7 Paranoid Eyes
3 One of the Few 9 The Fletcher Memorial Home
4 When the Tigers Broke Free 10 Southampton Dock
5 The Hero’s Return 11 The Final Cut
6 The Gunner’s Dream 13 Two Suns in the Sunset

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(5) The David Gilmour Phase: Know-How Reimagined

1987 A Momentary Lapse of
Reason
1994 The Division Bell
1 Signs of Life 8 A New Machine (1)
5 On the Turning Away 11 Sorrow
6 Yet Another Movie
2 What Do You Want from Me? 7 Take It Back
3 Poles Apart 8 Coming Back to Life
5 A Great Day for Freedom 10 Lost for Words
11 High Hopes

Nostalgia
Etymologically, nostalgia was, and still is, treated as a concept. It derives from the Greek ‘nostos,’
meaning to ‘return to one’s native land,’ and ‘algos,’ meaning ‘to feel pain or sorrow.’15 The sense
of sorrow, sufering and grief was also the sense the word had in 1688, when the word ‘nostalgia’
was frst recorded. It was used by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to label physical symp-
toms, such as anxiety, sadness, loneliness, fever, insomnia and loss of appetite among soldiers
fghting in foreign lands.16 A biological materialist frame of reference regarded homesickness
and nostalgia, therefore, as interchangeable terms for the same symptoms.
The idea of nostalgia as an illness, both physical and psychological, persevered into the
twentieth century, gaining traction during the First World War in the diagnosis and treatment of
‘shell-shocked’ soldiers. Nicknamed ‘Dottyville’ by war poet Siegfried Sassoon,17 Craiglockhart
Hospital in Scotland was established to deal with the huge number of soldiers sufering mental
illness and trauma from frontline experience in the First World War.18 Sassoon was one of many
patients at Craiglockhart who showed all the symptoms of nostalgia, including melancholy or
depression. Sassoon wrote about his time at Craiglockhart, drawing attention to the close rela-
tionship between nostalgia and trauma.
But contrary to the claim by Shepherd et al. (2003) that there is little research on nostalgia
from the 1940s onwards, there has been a growing interest in researching the concept of nos-
talgia in a number of felds and disciplines.19 In 1941, Willis McCann, after undertaking some
initial research, reviewed the literature on nostalgia and concluded20 that nostalgia was a reaction
to homesickness – that in the face of being separated from home, having an intense desire to be
home and being prevented from doing so gave rise to a range of biological and psychological
symptoms characteristic of depression.
With the development of the social sciences, throughout the mid-twentieth century, socio-
logical approaches began to look at nostalgia more positively. In work by Davis (1979) and then
by others such as Holbrook and Schindler (1991); Stern (1992); Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt
and Routledge (2006); and Sierra and McQuitty (2007), nostalgia was placed within the ways in
which positive memories are expressed about common experiences members of a group share
from their collective past.21 Holbrook and Schindler (1991) capture the essence of the sociologi-
cal turn in re-defning nostalgia when they say it is:

a preference (general liking, positive attitude, or favorable afect) toward objects

(people, places, or things) that were more common (popular, fashionable, or widely
circulated) when one was younger (in early adulthood, in adolescence, in childhood,
or even before birth).22

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 Chris Hart

Table 1.2 Nostalgia – key themes, referents and lyric extracts

(1) The Syd Barrett Phase: The Beginning

1967 ‘Astronomy Domine’ Key themes: Romantic poetry. British philosophy. Shakespeare.
(Barrett) Confict between past and present. Referents: Dan Dare – the
popular hero of the Eagle Comic; Oberon, Miranda, Titania,
Neptune, Titan, Jupiter, Saturn. Lyric extract: ‘a second scene –
Now fghts between the blue you once knew’ [lines 1–2]
1967 ‘Lucifer Sam’ Key themes: Lucifer. Witch. Cat. Referents: Dick Whittington and
(Barrett) His Cat, circa 1605; ffteenth-century song ‘Riddles Wisely
Expounded.’ ‘That cat’s something I can’t explain’ [line 4
repeated]
1967 ‘Matilda Mother’ Key themes: Childhood. Fairy tales. Memories. Mother.
(Barrett) Childhood home. Referents: Children’s fairy tales; Hilaire
Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’ – includes ‘Matilda’;
Tolkien. ‘And fairy stories held me high on’ [line 20]
1967 ‘Flaming’ Key themes: Childhood. Adolescence. Games. Nature. Referents:
(Barrett) Green meadows (Cambridge childhood); before the death of his
father; Allen Ginsberg’s (1956) America (‘I have mystical visions
and cosmic vibrations’); Aldous Huxley’s To make this trivial
world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme. ‘Lazing in the
foggy dew’ [line 5]
1967 ‘The Gnome’ Key themes: River. Fresh air. Grass. Gnomes. Adventures.
(Barrett) Referents: Grantchester Meadows; Tolkien’s ‘Rings’ series,
especially salvation of the Hobbits by a little man who wears a
blue coat and who sings nonsense rhymes. ‘I want to tell you a
story – About a little man’ [lines 1–2]
1968 ‘Let There Be More Light’ Key themes: Space ship. Contact human race. Cosmic powers.
(Waters) Referents: The science fction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’,
(1912–1917) ‘Barsoom’ series and the main character John
Carter, A.E van Vogt’s (1959) ‘Rull’ stories; Arthur C. Clarke’s
(1953) ‘Childhood’s End’; flm, The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951). ‘The living soul of Hereward the Wake’ [line 12]
1968 ‘Remember a Day’ Key themes: Remembering. Young. Play. Dreaming. Freedom.
(Wright) Referents: ‘Sing a song that can’t be sung’ by the Beatles (1967);
Syd Barrett. ‘A day when you were young – Free to play alone
with time’ [lines 2–3]
1968 ‘See-Saw’ Key themes: Childhood. Playing. Siblings. Children’s playground.
(Wright) Seesaw. Freedom. River. Referents: Syd Barrett’s childhood
with friend Libby Gausden. ‘Sits on a stick in the river –
Laughter in his sleep’ [lines 6–7]

(2) Learning the Drill Phase: Surviving Without Syd Barrett

1972 ‘Wots . . . Uh the Deal’
(Gilmour & Waters)
Key themes: Being and growing older. Travel. Years, time passed
by. Referents: Film La Vallée (a.k.a. Obscured by Clouds) and
Viviane and Oliver’s love-making scene. ‘Cause there’s a chill
wind blowing in my soul – And I think I’m growing old’ [lines
9–10]

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(5) The David Gilmour Phase: Know-How Reimagined

1987 ‘Signs of Life’
(Gilmour)
1987 ‘Yet Another Movie’
(Gilmour & Leonard)
1994 ‘A Great Day for Freedom’
(Gilmour & Samson)
1994 ‘High Hopes’
(Gilmour & Samson)
Key themes: Childhood. Simplicity. Changes. Other people.
Referents: River Thames. Boats on a river. First signs of life.
‘When the child like view of the world went, nothing replaced
it . . . nothing replaced it . . .’ [line 1]
Key themes: Dreams. Past. Cinema of one’s youth. Love, power
and sacrifce. Referents: Film, On the Waterfront (1954); flm,
Casablanca (1942). ‘The seas of faces, eyes upraised – The empty
screen, the vacant look’ [19–20]
Key themes: Melancholic optimism. New beginnings. Referents:
Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). Disintegration of the Eastern
Block, Europe.
‘On the day the wall came down – The Ship of Fools had fnally
run aground’ [lines 5–6]
Key themes: Childhood and freedom. Wonderment. Life. Pres-
sures and changes. Loss of innocence and dreams. Referents:
Childhood in Cambridge. Syd Barrett. ‘Beyond the horizon
of the place we lived when we were young – In a world of
magnets and miracles’ [lines 1–2]

The use of childhood (and sometimes adolescence) is the most common trope in the nos-
talgic songs of Pink Floyd. Through the use of idealised space, time frames and objects, songs
such as ‘Remember a Day’ (1968 Wright) are all about being a child – about daydreaming and
playing.23 There may be a biographical element to ‘Remember a Day’ in the same way as there
are some biographical elements in Barrett’s songs about his childhood. Even if there are no
biographical elements, the sentiment is sufciently universal to transcend the private sphere to
create a sense of the past that most listeners of the song can imagine.
Invoking the past as nostalgic memories is, as Santesso (2006) observes, a trope often used in
fction to take a reader back in time to the perspective of the world from a child’s standpoint.
Idealised, actual or fctional referents to toys, games, playing and nursery rhymes can invoke
nostalgic childhood memories in most people.24 This is, however, a time to which we cannot
return. In Freud’s (1917) distinction, this loss is abstract: it is something we can remember for
a short time and feel melancholic about, knowing there is nothing we can do but remember.25
From the melancholic in Freud (1917), a key point Holbrook and Schindler (1991) make is
that there is, in their view, a demonstrable connection between nostalgia and music, a bridge
connecting one back to times and places from the past:

for the case of popular music . . . we proposed that aesthetic tastes might refect a ten-
dency analogous to imprinting in which certain species form irreversible attachments
to objects encountered during certain critical periods in their early lives.26

Out of the 14 songs categorised under nostalgia, any could be used to demonstrate the
concept as defned by Holbrook and Schindler (1991). The song we will look at, ‘Remember
a Day’ (1968, Wright),27 was only performed twice by Pink Floyd. The categories assigned to
this song are ‘remembering,’ ‘young,’ ‘play,’ ‘dreaming’ and ‘freedom.’ From the album A Saucerful

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 Chris Hart

of Secrets (1968), ‘Remember a Day,’ along with the album, in fact, was not received with any
enthusiasm. Rolling Stone’s Jim Miller (1968) had the following to say about the album and track:

Unfortunately the Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, is not as interest-
ing as their frst, as a matter of fact, it is rather mediocre. For one thing Barrett seems
either to have left the group or to have given up actively participating in it . . .
Rick Wright, whose organ playing is generally capable if not inventive, has also
contributed a couple of songs to Saucerful. ‘Remember a Day’ itself is inofensive,
but features some rather miserable bottleneck guitar, second rate piano, and empty-
sounding acoustic guitar work. Here, as throughout, Nickie Mason’s drumming is
busy and inefective.28

‘Remember a Day’ is inofensive because of the turbulence of the pressure to create and
release a follow-up album to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, given Barrett’s deteriorating men-
tal health circa 1967. Hence, Miller (1968) was on the right track with his observation about
Barrett. Nonetheless, following Wright’s death, Gilmour’s tribute to him on the Later with Jools
Holland television show (September 23, 2008) brings a greater sense of clarity and defnition to
the song than does the original recording,29 placing it frmly as a piece of nostalgia and, in the
case of this performance, a nostalgic remembrance for Richard Wright.
The lyrics exhibit nostalgia in their use of temporality as the constant theme; the concept
of time bridges each verse. The listener is being asked to ‘remember’ when they were ‘young’
(‘Remember a day before today’); to imagine a ‘day’ doing what typical children do when you
had, it is implied, no responsibilities. ‘Time’ was to be ‘played with’ (‘Free to play alone with
time’), and it stretches, seeming longer than clock time, as it lasted forever, as ‘evening never
comes.’ In the frst three lines time and nostalgia are intimately interconnected, and Wright then
employs notions of time, as experienced by most people, using his own personal experiences to
give instances of events, in verses two and three. This is not objectifed, measurable ‘clock time’
but time as remembered by recounting experiences (or feelings about a time), when time itself
was unimportant. Bergson (2001), when discussing the ontology of time, calls this the durée –
the preservation of, in this case, a pleasant set of memories – with no particular date or time,
just remembered experiences in one’s consciousness.30
We are not here talking about temporality in the music of ‘Remember a Day’ but how time
is being used as a resource in the lyrics. That use of time as ‘times’ remembered results in mak-
ing visible the paradox of temporality, of time as a linear succession of events. The past, present
and future, what Ricoeur (1991) calls the ‘paradox of the triple present,’31 are simultaneous in
the act of recollection of times ‘gone by.’ Ricoeur (1991) further argues that recollections are
‘traces’ or ‘remnants’ that are created in the present, in the here and now, and give in the act of
creation the present its sense of time while projecting into the future the notion it too will be
part of the pendulum of temporality. In other words, if we cannot remember the past, then we
have no sense of the present, and if we have no sense of the present, then, as a consequence,
notions of the future dissolve.
In the next verse, Wright seems to paraphrase the lyric ‘Nothing you can sing that can’t be
sung,’ from The Beatles single ‘All You Need Is Love’ (1967), with his frst line, ‘Sing a song
that can’t be sung.’ He then tells of childhood games of playing ‘kings and queens’ (‘Queen,
you shall be it if you wish’). The ‘queen and king’ may have been personally remembered by
Wright, but if not, then this of no great concern because it is the idea of playing childhood
games that is relevant here. The commonality of understanding games children play is what is
important, what Jose van Dijck (2006) terms ‘individually embodied’ reminiscences that are

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‘culturally embedded’ within most people’s memories.32 Playing ‘kings and queens’ and ‘Climb
your favourite apple tree,’ and ‘Hide from your little brother’s gun’ (playing ‘cops and robbers,’
perhaps).33 There is in these few lines the sense of remembered fun and play, of inconsequential
living for the day. In terms borrowed from Schutz (1946), what was relevant as a child has been
replaced by the concerns imposed by being an adult.34 The structures of what is relevant have
changed. The zone of relevance when a child is subscribed and small; based on familiar places
and people, the world is (and was for Wright) an altogether simpler place. Time was largely
irrelevant; you could ‘Dream yourself away’ playing make-believe in a time that only had the
present. There was, as yet, no past to remember, just another day in which to play and be free.
In the next two lines there is a bittersweet reminiscence when Wright asks, ‘Why can’t we play
today,’ wishing they could stay that way.
There is a sense of wish-fullness, of seeing the past as a better place than the present. In
this way, Wright’s nostalgia is somewhat romantic.35 The sweet traces of memories of pleas-
ant days have the reality of a ‘being’ who once was but has now been exiled to the present
and is a diferent person in a diferent temporal and spatial reality but who can nonetheless
look back and recount non-specifc but relevant experiences such as, ‘climbing an apple
tree,’ ‘catching the sun,’ ‘hiding from your brother’ and ‘day dreaming.’ Wright ends his song
by lamenting how the reality of the present is bittersweet and wishing he were able to blow
the years away.
Wright may be looking back to a time before he and Pink Floyd had the pressures and anxi-
eties of the audience, and the demands of the music business, to produce material regardless
of their competence and confdence to do so. Barrett was beginning a diferent journey to the
rest of the band. While he made measurable contributions to A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), his
creativity and music abilities were much less than on Piper at the Gates of Dawn. With the rela-
tive success of Piper, and the increasing absence of Barrett, the pressure, it may be postulated,
was on the three remaining members of the band to fll the gap. Without the talent of Barrett,
Pink Floyd faced possible extinction. The future was uncertain, and in the social-psychology
literature on nostalgia, we have a strain that focuses on nostalgia as a response to uncertainty,
disruption and change. Davis (1979), for example, identifed increased interest in nostalgia
when a group or culture faced disruption and discontinuity to their norms,36 while Pickering
and Keightley (2006) argued nostalgia is a response mechanism when faced with uncertainties
and challenges to the current state of afairs, that is, the present.37 As a response mechanism,
Sedikides et al. (2008) add that nostalgia provides a sense of continuity with what was once
important, as changes are experienced that are beyond the individual’s or the group’s control.38
The act of being propelled into possible fame and fortune, having a moderate taste of success
and then experiencing the real possibility of losing the anticipated rewards, may have brought
together the past, present and future for Wright.
Hence, in the foregoing discussion, various concepts have been extracted and used to under-
stand a song from the early years of the band. The aim in doing this was to demonstrate that
no matter the song, there are frames of reference that can be used to attain a more enriching
appreciation than may have otherwise been possible – that is, knowing the concepts on which
the song was built takes the listening experience to another level.

Lament
The notion of lament in terms of a feeling, experience or emotion is not something that has
attracted much attention from scholars of popular music.39 It seems to have been subsumed
instead into discussions of nostalgia and trauma in music. If we were looking at poetry or

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Table 1.3 Lament – key themes, referents and lyric extracts

(1) The Syd Barrett Phase: The Beginning

1967 ‘Chapter 24’ Key themes: Winter solstice. Change. Sunset. Darkness. Movement.
(Barrett) Referents: Chapter 24 of the I Ching book of Chinese philosophy –
1960s core text for counter-culture – is titled ‘The Turning Point or
The Return.’ ‘The time is with the month of winter solstice – When the
change is due to come’ [lines 9–10]
1968 ‘Corporal Clegg’ Key themes: The Second World War. Injuries. Irony. Referents: Death of
(Waters) Waters’ father in the war. Use of kazoos – as on Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day
Women’ (1966); Beatles-style harmonies, for example, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967). ‘Cor poral Clegg had a wooden leg –
He won it in the war, in 1944’ [line 1–2]

(2) Learning the Drill Phase: Surviving Without Syd Barrett

1970 ‘Summer ’68’ Key themes: Brief love. Feelings. Caring. Leaving. Referents: Life on the
(Wright) road as a band. Beach Boys vocal style. ‘Tomorrow brings another town
and another girl like you’ [line 14]
1970 ‘Fat Old Sun’ Key themes: Summer evenings. River. Nature. Laughter. Sunset. Referents:
(Gilmour) Grantchester Meadows. River Cam. Adolescence. Passing of time.
‘Distant bells, new mown grass – Smells so sweet’ [lines 5–6]
1970 ‘If ’ Key themes: Regret. Sanity. Fear. Leaving. Referents: Decline and loss of
(Waters) Syd Barrett. Alienation and estrangement from the world. ‘And if I go
insane/Will you still let me join in with the game?’ [lines 16–17]
1972 ‘Burning Bridges’ Key themes: Burning bridges. Changing. Cage. Freedom. Referents: Film
(Wright & Waters) La Vallée (a.k.a. Obscured by Clouds) and Viviane’s voyage of self-discovery.
‘Ancient bonds are breaking – Moving on and changing sides’ [lines 6–7]
1972 ‘Childhood’s End’ Key themes: Being alive. Being the last human. War. The unknown end
(Wright & Gilmour) of all things. Referents: Arthur C. Clarke’s (1953) ‘Childhood’s End,’
Jan Rodrick, the main character, is the last person alive on the Earth.
‘There’ll be war, there’ll be peace – But everything one day will cease’
[lines 21–22]
1972 ‘Free Four’ Key themes: Memories. Shortness of life. Death. Soldier. Referents: Death
(Waters) of Waters father in the Second World War during Operation Shingle
(1944). ‘And I am the dead man’s son – And he was buried like a mole in
a fox hole’ [lines 14–15]

(3) The Classic Phase: Knowing-How

1973 ‘Breathe’ Key themes: Birth. Life. Death. Self-determination. Appreciate life.
(Waters, Gilmour & Referents: Albert Camus (1955) ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’
Wright) ‘All you touch and all you see – Is all your life will ever be’ [7–8]
1973 ‘Time/Breathe Key themes: Time passing. Life. Reliance on others. Getting older. Lack of
Reprise’ achievement. Death. Referents: Stages of life. Self-determination. Simple
(Mason, Waters, pleasures. Eternal renewal. Gospel of Saint John, chapter 1, verse 5. ‘And
Wright & then one day you fnd ten years have got behind you – No one told you
Gilmour) when to run, you missed the starting gun’ [lines 7–8]
1973 ‘Us and Them’ Key themes: First World War. Propaganda. Ordinary men. Liberty. Not
(Wright & Waters) helping others in need. Referents: War and the trenches. Futility of war.
Disregard for human life. Being humane. ‘And the general sat – And the
lines on the map’ [lines 8–9]

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1973 ‘Brain Damage’ Key themes: Mental illness. Adolescent memories of fun. Madness of
(Waters) society. Biological intervention for mental illness. Lunar as moon to
lunatic. Referents: Square of grass between the River Cam and Kings
College Chapel, Cambridge. Adolescence. Syd Barrett’s mental health.
‘The lunatic is on the grass – Remembering games and daisy chains and
laughs.’ [lines 3–4]
1975 ‘Shine On You Key themes: Youth. Creativity. Admiration. Visionary person. Referents:
Crazy Diamond (I–V)’ Syd Barrett in the early 1960s. Music industry as a machine. ‘Remember
(Mason, Gilmour, when you were young, you shone like the sun – Shine on you crazy
Wright & Waters) diamond’ [lines 1–2]
1975 ‘Wish You Were Key themes: Questions. Reality. Change. Choices. Referents: Syd Barrett.
Here’ Schizophrenia. Love. ‘How I wish, how I wish you were here’ [line 16]
(Gilmour & Waters)
1975 ‘Shine On You Key themes: Remembering the good. Adoration. Decline and exclusion.
Crazy Diamond Referents: Syd Barrett. Adolescence, creativity and freedom. Confict.
(VI–IX)’ ‘Shine on you crazy diamond. You were caught on the crossfre of
(Gilmour, Wright & childhood and stardom’ [lines 4–5]
Waters)

(4) The Roger Waters Phase: Politicisation of the Know-How

1979 ‘Vera’ Key themes: Wartime radio. Memories of childhood. Regrets. Referents:
(Waters) Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again.’ Film Battle of Britain (1969). ‘We would
meet again – Some sunny day?’ [lines 4–5]
1983 (2004) ‘The Key themes: Memories of war. The post-war expectations of peace.
Gunner’s Dream’ Disappointment. Senseless killing continues. Referents: Rupert Brookes,
(Waters) ‘The Soldier’ – who lived in Grantchester. IRA bombing in 1982 that
killed 11 military personnel and several horses.
‘You can relax on both sides of the tracks – And maniacs don’t blow holes
in bandsmen by remote control’ [lines 24–25]
1983 (2004) ‘The Key themes: Tyranny and tyrants. Politicians as wasters. Referents:
Fletcher Memorial Intransigent politicians in the early 1980s – Reagan and Haig, Begin,
Home’ Thatcher, Paisley, McCarthy, Nixon. Cold war. Eric Fletcher – Waters’
(Waters) father. ‘Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere – And build
them a home, a little place of their own’ [lines 1–2]
1983 (2004) Key themes: War still being fought. Post-war dream of peace shattered.
‘Southampton Dock’ More widows and fatherless children. Referents: D-day, 6 June 1944.
(Waters) Falklands War (1982). Troop ships embarking from Southampton docks.
‘She stands upon Southampton dock – She bravely waves the boys –
Goodbye again’ [lines 8 and 14]
1983 (2004) ‘Two Suns Key themes: Madness of nuclear weapons. End of the human race. War.
in the Sunset’ Powerlessness. Referents: Neo-colonialism. Nuclear armament, Cruise
(Waters) missiles. Actor as president of the United States. ‘Even though the day is
done – Two suns in the sunset – Hmm’ [lines 13, 14 and 15]

(5) The David Gilmour Phase: Know-How Reimagined

1987 ‘On the Turning Key themes: Post-war dream and expectations. Re-gaining the vision.
Away’ Challenging inhumane political ideologies. Referents: Protest songs.
(Gilmour & Moore) Mid-1980s right-wing governments. ‘No more turning away – From the
weak and the weary’ [lines 26–27]

(Continued )

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Table 1.3 (Continued)

1987 ‘A New Machine Key themes: Losing confdence. Supporting friends. Dealing with the past.
(Part 1)’ Referents: ‘Wish You Were Here’; Pink Floyd post–Roger Waters.
(Gilmour) ‘I will always be here – I will always look out from behind these eyes’ [lines
1–2]
1987 ‘Sorrow’ Key themes: Sadness. Disillusionment. Sorrow. Haunted memories. Lost
(Gilmour) world. Broken promises. Referents: Steinbeck (1939) Grapes of Wrath.
Post-war dream. ‘A man lies and dreams of green felds and rivers – But
awakes to a morning with no reason for waking’ [lines 2–3]
1994 ‘What Do You Key themes: Communication. Confict. Need to talk. Referents: Girlfriend.
Want from Me’ Roger Waters. ‘You can have anything you want – You can drift, you can
(Gilmour, Wright & dream, even walk on water’ [lines 18–19]
Samson)
1994 ‘Poles Apart’ Key themes: Sadness. Lost friends. Trauma. Referents: Syd Barrett. Roger
(Gilmour, Samson & Waters. ‘You were always the golden boy then – And that you’d never
Laird-Clowes) lose that light in your eyes’ [lines 4–5] ‘. . . I stared out the steel in your
eyes’ [line 9 partial]
1994 ‘Take It Back’ Key themes: Power of nature. Love and afection. Reckless behaviour has
(Gilmour, Ezrin, Sam- consequences. All can be easily lost. Referents: ‘Gaia’ – Earth in Greek
son & Laird-Clowes) mythology. Ecological-environmental manifesto. ‘I push her to the limit
to see if she will break’ [line 9]
1994 ‘Coming Back to Key themes: Endings and beginnings. Old and new. Relationships.
Life’ Referents: Syd Barrett. Waters, Mason and Wright. Professional and
(Gilmour) personal relationships. ‘I knew the moment had arrived – For killing the
past and coming back to life’ [lines 13–14]
1994 ‘Lost for Words’ Key themes: Friendship lost. Confict. Reconciliation rejected. Referents:
(Gilmour & Samson) Confict with Roger Waters.
‘And I ask could we wipe the slate clean? – But they tell me to please go
fuck myself ’ [lines 18–19]

religious texts, then there is an abundance of primary material and secondary analysis to mine
for inspiration.40 Therefore, this section takes as its focus the lament in terms of looking at who
is being lamented and why. But frst, some defnitions have been used to orient this analysis
which can be used to think about deeper meanings in the songs within this category.
One can express lament about a situation, past or present, by communicating sorrow,
remorse or regret. We have, as listeners, heard music and songs that lament; the most common,
probably, is the requiem – music that has been written or used to mourn the death of someone
dear to us or others. Requiems tend to be associated with art music. Examples would typi-
cally include Mozart, Requiem in D Minor, K. 626 (1791); Berlioz, Grand Messe des Morts, Op.
5 (1837); Haydn, Requiem in C minor, MH 155; von Suppé, Requiem in D Minor (1855); and
Kraus, Requiem in D Minor (1775). There are, to my knowledge, over 5,000 requiems by over
3,000 composers.41 Hence, the requiem is a common form of music.
In the works of Pink Floyd, several songs lament the loss of Syd Barrett as a member of the
band and as a friend. The interesting point is photography and flm can record the changes to a
person’s appearance. In the case of Syd Barrett, the photographs of him in the early 1960s show
him as a good-looking, slim, healthy and fashionable young man with a trendy hair style. Later
photographs show Syd as a middle-aged, balding, overweight individual. The tragic demise of

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Syd is often recounted in the memories of the band during the 1975 recording of ‘Shine On
You Crazy Diamond.’ In an interview for VH1, Rick Wright spoke about the session, saying:

One thing that really stands out in my mind, that I’ll never forget; I was going in to
the Shine On sessions. I went in the studio and I saw this guy sitting at the back of
the studio, he was only as far away as you are from me. And I didn’t recognise him.
I said, ‘Who’s that guy behind you?’ ‘That’s Syd.’ And I just cracked up, I couldn’t
believe it . . . he had shaven all his hair of . . . I mean, his eyebrows, everything . . .
he was jumping up and down brushing his teeth, it was awful. And, uh, I  was in,
I mean Roger was in tears, I think I was; we were both in tears. It was very shock-
ing . . . seven years of no contact and then to walk in while we’re actually doing that
particular track. I don’t know – coincidence, karma, fate, who knows? But it was very,
very, very powerful.42

Seven years earlier, as of April 6, 1968, Syd Barrett had ceased to be a member of Pink Floyd.
On the continuum from nostalgia to trauma stands lamenting; it is the feeling of missing
someone who is no longer in your life. As an album, Wish You Were Here (1975) largely stands
within the category of lament. For this reason, the case example in this section is the songs Shine
On You Crazy Diamond I–V, Wish You Were Here and Shine On You Crazy Diamond VI–X. The
songs are categorised as: Remembering the good, adoration, decline and exclusion, with the
referents: Syd Barrett, adolescence, creativity, freedom and confict. Wish You Were Here (1975)
is about the pressures of becoming a successful musician.
From the standpoint of the members of Pink Floyd, by 1975 they were frmly in, and part
of, a demanding music industry that was driven by money supplied by the purchase of albums
and singles. The songs Shine On You Crazy Diamond I–V, Wish You Were Here and Shine On You
Crazy Diamond VI–IX are about the pressure of such success and its consequences. At the centre
of these songs is Syd Barrett. He is never mentioned by name; his collapse into mental illness is,
instead, the implied consequence of success – he is referred to, simply, as ‘you.’
Shine On You Crazy Diamond I–IX makes up the bulk of the album and is largely instrumen-
tal. The lyrics that are used in the songs place the absent Syd as the core referent to organise the
lament for the narrative. As Waters stated in 1975:

he’s [meaning Syd] just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to
indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how fucking sad it is – modern
life, to withdraw completely.43

The lyrics begin in Part V with Waters on lead vocals singing, ‘Remember when you were
young, [laughter sound efect] you shone like the sun,’ a clear and evident reference to Barrett.
The next line, ‘Shine on you crazy diamond,’ sees Waters accompanied by Gilmour and Wright,
with backing singers Venetta Field and Carlena Williams just about discernible in the mix. The
collaborative unity of four voices could be understood as an act of response, as others agree-
ing with Waters’ initial claim. The same agreement can be understood from the contrast made
in Waters’ second solo line, ‘Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.’ How
Barrett once was is now sharply contrasted with who he became – in Waters’ terms ‘withdrawn
completely.’
It is this contrast structure that allows the story of Barrett to be told, and told with afection
and a sense of lament. Syd, according to Joe Boyd (producer of the band’s frst single), had a

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‘twinkle in his eye. I mean he was a real eye-twinkler,’ but on meeting him in 1975, Boyd says
he ‘looked right in his eye and there was no twinkle. No glint. And it was like somebody had
pulled the blinds, you know, nobody home.’44
The contrast structure in ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is clear. Verse 1 tells of Barrett
being ‘young,’ and ‘shining like the sun’; by verse 2, Barrett’s eyes are ‘like black holes.’ The
chorus tells us how Barrett was caught in a ‘crossfre’ between ‘stardom’ and ‘childhood,’ yet the
chorus calls him, in the past tense, a ‘legend’ and ‘martyr’ who is now a ‘stranger’ and the object
of ‘laughter.’ Verse 3 gives the reasons for Barrett’s condition: that it was too much for him to be
‘exposed in the light.’ Finally, Barrett’s talents are listed: he was a ‘painter,’ ‘piper,’ and ‘visionary.’
Yet, and despite all of this, he ‘wore out his welcome,’ becoming, through his erratic behaviour,
alienated from his band members.
The subject Syd is described as a legend, a leader, someone with vision, an artist, a raver (a late
1960s archetype, with brightly coloured clothing) and fun. He was an artist with many aspects,
like a diamond that has multiple surfaces, each shining in diferent ways. But the contrast, and the
source of lament, is the loss of this diamond, in the recounting of what happened to Syd when
he was only 21 years old. The reality of the success of the band’s frst album, largely the product
of Barrett’s creativity, left him exposed to the ‘light’ of the steely music industry; a machine that
would crush and discard you as quickly as it embraced you. Barrett was exposed at such a young
age to what we can only assume were threatening demands to produce more of the same.
There is a will expressed in the song for Barrett to ‘come back,’ to ‘recover’ his youthful self
in ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond.’ But this did not happen. Barrett’s behaviour when perform-
ing became erratic and unreliable, so much so that he ‘wore out [his] welcome with random
precision.’

Trauma
From the Pink Floyd corpus of songs, 17 express trauma of some sort. All 17 songs come from
just two albums: The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983 [2004]). Most of the songs on these
two albums were, of course, written by Roger Waters.
Trauma originates from the Greek, meaning ‘wound.’ As would be expected, the literature
on and about trauma is extensive, crossing disciplinary boundaries and concentrated in thera-
peutic practices within the psychological felds. Levine (2005), a core source in the therapy
literature,45 lists the following as symptoms of trauma: problems with decision-making, dissocia-
tion, addiction, physical symptoms, self-destructive behaviours, altered outlook on life and frac-
tured relationships with other people. In The Wall, ‘Pink,’ the rock musician and main character,
seems to exhibit all of these behaviours. Pink’s trauma is presented as a result of his childhood
and the stresses of being a rock star.
The Wall’s narrative tells of Pink’s loss of his father in the Second World War, physical and
psychological abuse from teachers and memories of being in a bombing raid. This can be related
to Corsini’s (2002) argument that the emotional pain of an event (however remembered) can be
the shock to the mind that can have an enduring traumatic efect for years, if not a lifetime.46 In
the case of Pink, there were multiple experiences, resulting in plural traumata.
A key argument in what is known as pluralistic trauma theory (post-Freud-Caruthian
model)47 is the position that trauma is a fuid process that is invoked in successive moments of
recollection, and such memories are an interplay of internal forces (recollections) and exter-
nal pressures. Kirmayer (1996)48 explains how traumatic recollections are governed by social
contexts and cultural models for memories, narratives and life stories. Such cultural models

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Table 1.4 Trauma – key themes, referents and lyric extracts

(4) The Roger Waters Phase: Politicisation of the Know-How

1979 ‘In the Flesh?’ Key themes: Performance. A show. Fandom. A wall. Referents: Trauma
(Waters) of childhood. Death of a father in the Second World War.
‘If you want to fnd out what’s behind these cold eyes – You’ll just have
to claw your way through this disguise’ [lines 5–6]
1979 ‘The Thin Ice’ Key themes: Love of a mother and father. Is no certainty. Left behind.
(Waters) Referents: War babies. Loss of husbands and fathers in the Second
World War. ‘Dragging behind you the silent reproach – Of a million
tear-stained eyes’ [lines 10–11]
1979 ‘Another Brick in Key themes: Loss of a father. Photograph. Memory. Referents: Waters’
the Wall, Part 1’ memory and photograph of his father killed in the war. Children
(Waters) everywhere forced to endure loss of a parent. ‘Daddy’s fown across the
ocean – Leaving just a memory’ [lines 1–2]
1979 ‘The Happiest Days Key themes: School. Abuse from teachers. Referents: Ironic sarcasm.
of Our Lives’ School days. Cruelty. Oppression. Film, The Happiest Days of Your Life
(Waters) (1950). ‘There were certain teachers who would – Hurt the children
any way they could’ [lines 3–4]
1979 ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ Key themes: German bombing. Explosions and fear. Memories. Pain.
(Waters) Referents: Air raid. Innocence of childhood.
‘Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the – Promise
of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?’ [lines 5–6]
1979 ‘Nobody Home’ Key themes: Isolation. Abandonment. Loneliness. Referents: Jimi Hendrix’s
(Waters) afro. Richard Wright on grand piano. Syd Barrett’s use of elastic bands
to keep his shoes on. Jacques Prévert (French poet). ‘I got elastic bands
keepin’ my shoes on – Got those swollen-hand blues’ [lines 4–5]
1979 ‘Bring the Boys Key themes: Troops leaving home. Children being orphaned. Isolation
Back Home’ and loneliness. Loss. Referents: Anti-war movement. ‘Bring the boys
(Waters) back home – Don’t leave the children on their own, no, no’ [lines 2–3]
1979 ‘Run Like Hell’ Key themes: Fascism. Dictatorship. Nazi rallies. Intolerance. Referents:
(Gilmour & Waters) Film, Privilege (1967). Dictatorships.
‘They’re gonna send you back to mother – In a cardboard box – You
better run’ [lines 28–29]
1979 ‘Waiting for the Key themes: Fear of what might be. Totalitarianism. Horror. Referents:
Worms’ British fascism, Oswald Mosley. Riots in the United Kingdom. Beach
(Waters) Boys. ‘Waiting to turn on the showers – And fre the ovens’ [lines 22–23]
1979 ‘Outside the Wall’ Key themes: Life repeating itself. Sorrow. Trauma dividing people. Place
(Waters) of artists to express emotions. Referents: Berlin Wall in war years. ‘The
bleeding hearts and the artists – Make their stand’ [lines 6–7]
1983 ‘The Post War Key themes: Challenge to the post-war dream. Margaret Thatcher and
Dream’ monetarism. De-industrialisation. Referents: Post-war dream. Late
(Waters) 1970s United Kingdom – depression. Industrial decline. Rise of
Thatcherism. Falkland’s War. ‘What have we done to England – What
happened to the post war dream?’ [lines 13 & 14]
1983 ‘Your Possible Pasts’ Key themes: The past. The present. The possible future. Flags and jingoism.
(Waters) Referents: Repression. Resentment. The red ‘poppy.’ War and the
Second World War. ‘The Wall’ (1979). ‘In derelict sidings the poppies
entwine – With cattle trucks lying in wait for the next time’ [lines 5–6]

(Continued)

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Table 1.4 (Continued)

1983 ‘One of the Few’ Key themes: Ex-soldier. Survivor. Psychological damage. Referents:
(Waters) Leonard Cheshire. Soldiers returning ‘home’ after battle. ‘When you’re
one of the few – What do you do to make ends meet? “(Teach)”’
[lines 1 & 3]
1983 ‘When the Tigers Key themes: Death of a soldier, father and husband. Futility of war.
Broke Free’ Referents: Death of Roger Waters’ father in 1944. Tiger tanks.
(Waters) ‘And kind old King George – Sent mother a note – When he heard that
father was gone’ [lines 12, 13 &14]
1983 ‘The Hero’s Return’ Key themes: Bitter, painful memories. Inability to talk about what
(Waters) happened. No heroes. Referents: Bombing of Dresden. RAF bomber
crews. ‘A memory that is too painful – To withstand the light of day’
[lines 12–13]
1983 ‘Paranoid Eyes’ Key themes: War veteran. Paranoia. Fear. Alcoholism. Referents: Mental
(Waters) illness. Fear. Depression. Pretending normality.
‘Button your lip. Don’t let the shield slip – Take a fresh grip on your
bullet proof mask’ [lines 1–2]
1983 ‘The Final Cut’ Key themes: Mental illness. Fear of rejection and isolation.
(Waters) Contemplating suicide. Trauma of confict. Referents: ‘The Wall,’
PTSD. ‘Through the fsh-eyed lens of tear stained eyes – I can barely
defne the shape of this moment in time’ [lines 1–2]

infuence what is viewed as salient, how it is interpreted and encoded at the time of registration
and, most important for long-term memories that serve autobiographical functions, what is
socially possible to speak of and what must remain hidden and unacknowledged.
Whether autobiographical or not, Pink’s experiences and those of the young Roger Waters
have common points of reference; most are centred on the latter part of the Second World War
and the immediate post-war years. The essential diference between Waters and the fctional
Pink is that Pink’s traumata are shown to be personal, whereas, given Waters’ age (approximately
5 months old) when his father was killed and Cambridge was bombed, it is unlikely he could
have any tangible personal memories of the events. Of course we cannot categorically say he
was untraumatised by these events. His mother, like many other wives and mothers, experi-
enced the trauma of losing her husband and living through the utter fear of bombing raids. The
war generation collectively experienced the realities of the war and the austerity of the post-war
years, and it may be that the war generation and the post-war generation (born in the 1950s–
early 1960s) have carried, in their collective memories, the trauma of the war.49 The song that
illustrates the experience of war that will be discussed is ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ (1979).
‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ (1979) needs to be placed within the narrative of The Wall. The enter-
prise as a whole – of album, stage show and flm – combines here to place ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’
as a strong anti-war message, based on the line: ‘The fames are all long gone, but the pain
lingers on.’ The experiences of war lead to, it is being declared, multiple traumas for those who
experienced the events frst hand and their children. While this song is about air raids during
the Second World War, it can be understood as standing for the experience of any air raid, in
any war, anywhere. This aspect is shown in the flm, Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). However,
‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ is anchored in Britain during The Blitz. This is achieved with the opening
lines, said by a child in a distinctly British accent: ‘Look Mummy, there’s an airplane up in the
sky.’ Just preceding this is the sounds of propeller-driven aircraft, typical of the Second World

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War, that replace the sounds of birdsong. In the place of peace and tranquillity come the war
plane and death.
Musically, and in the performance of the lyrics, there is a homology; the sense of oscilla-
tion a trauma victim could be expected to display is homologous to the shift and disruption in
the shape of the melody, as heard in the fnger picking on the acoustic guitar and hesitancy in
the voice. With the voice, it is with a stutter that each of the three questions are asked begin-
ning with, ‘Di-di-di-did.’ The terror of being in an air raid cannot be easily described. Fear is
expressed by the stammer acting to disrupt the coherence of the word ‘did,’ as though the singer
is experiencing some pain in the vocalisation of the question. The ‘you’ is repeated three times
in each successive line. Use of ‘you’ is inter-personal; in terms of relevance, it is directed to
anyone of Waters’ generation who lived through the air raids. It pertains in an account of direct
experience, which, given Waters’ age even at the end of the war when V-rockets were hitting
southern England, is dubious. Nonetheless, culturally and psychologically, air raids were an
experience of many war babies, actually remembered or not, that in a post-war Britain were
evidenced in the massive amount of destruction visible in most British cities and towns.50
The Wall was conceived by Waters as a stage production and an album. Weinstein (2002)
observes, ‘Waters’ allusions to war pervade all periods of his work. For Waters, war is both a
concrete reference and a metonym for human relations in a more general sense.’51 Therefore,
it is relevant to look at the flm of the album to get a sense of what was in Waters’ mind when
writing the lyrics. In the flm version, this segment is animated by Gerald Scarfe and it is bleak.
Here is a summary of it,

A white dove (which begins as live action) on a lawn, is scared by a cat, and takes fight.
Flying peacefully up, the dove suddenly explodes, having been torn apart by a black Nazi
eagle (Reichsadler).
The Nazi Eagle slowly opens its wings engulfng the entire frame. The Eagle turns into a
solid object, a plane.
Below we see a forest and rice felds (a.k.a. Vietnam) and bombs exploding.
Above, in a dark sky the solid eagle transforms back into a bird, with talons out.
It swoops down and grabs a large chunk of earth . . .
. . . fies of, leaving blood trailing behind it, above London (we see the Tower Bridge).
It is now a plane again.
But then it transforms into a grotesque monster, a warlord
with planes fying in formation above,
with scenes of search lights, followed by bombing of the rice felds
. . . with napalm,
. . . missiles and
. . . cluster bombs.
Next, strange misshapen humans, wearing gas masks, run for cover as in the background
searchlights scan the sky.
Among the searchlights hundreds of planes fy across the sky and transform into crucifxes.
Back on the ground, a human, looking like a skeleton, falls to the ground in a devastated
landscape reminiscent of First World War battlefeld.
This fades into a Union Jack flling the frame, and as the camera pans backward, we see it
hangs on the cross of a grave. The Union Jack breaks into pieces, falls to the ground, leaving a
bleeding cross; the blood runs into the earth.
The eagle appears as a building, with fames all around it before we see the mangled remains
of buildings.

67
 Chris Hart

From the devastated landscape of the bloody cross, the dead human rises up with others as
ghosts, as the dove takes of and fies among the buildings, over the ghosts and then among crosses
that have replaced the ghosts. The fnal scene shows a single cross, blood running down it into
a drain.

The line ‘The fames are all long gone, but the pain lingers on’ is sung as we see the mangled
remains of buildings. The pain is, presumably, the trauma created by the remembrance of the
events. The visual storytelling is made more powerful and meaningful with the lyrics in which
the fear of the bombs and consequences of war are made clear. This is not a telling of what
Waters experienced but a statement of the collective emotional memory of a generation and,
importantly, a warning from history on behalf of that generation.52
As an aside and conclusion to this section, Richard Wright recalled his frst thoughts upon
hearing Waters’ demo tapes for The Wall: ‘Oh, here we go again – it’s all about the war, about
his mother, about his father being lost.’53 Wright was not wrong. Expressing such an amount of
trauma resonated with audiences worldwide, as The Wall is one of the best-selling albums ever.

Conclusions
Running all through the work of Pink Floyd are a number of meta-themes in which a number
of sub-themes can be detected. Nostalgia, for example, encompasses ‘sentimentality,’ ‘wistful-
ness’ and ‘recollection.’ Lament, for example, encompasses ‘sadness,’ ‘yearning’ and ‘mourning.’
And trauma, for example, encompasses ‘mental pain,’ ‘anger’ and ‘disassociation.’
Nostalgia, with the exception of one song, ‘Wots . . . Uh the Deal’ (1972), is the dominant
theme in the Syd Barrett Phase and then reappears in the Gilmour Phase. Trauma characterised
the Roger Waters Phase – The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983) saturate the listener with
traumatic messages and images, while lament runs through all phases of the band, dominating
the Classic Phase.
In the beginning, Barrett, it could be argued, set in motion the vision of using themes for
Pink Floyd songs. It seems, at frst glance, that remembering childhood play and places, friends
lost along the way and the death of a parent have provided much of the substance and signif-
cance for Pink Floyd songs since 1967. For example, in ‘Flaming’ (1967), Syd Barrett fondly
remembers his childhood, playing in the green meadows by the River Orb (Cambridge) and
‘Lazing in the foggy dew.’ On Ummagumma (1969) Roger Waters’ song ‘Grantchester Meadows’
is about the same riverside Barrett so fondly remembered in some of his songs, with lyrics such
as, ‘Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon/Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city
room.’ This is not surprising as both were childhood friends; both grew up in post-war Cam-
bridge. Similarly, Richard Wright invokes a nostalgic view of his youth in ‘Remember a Day’
(1968) while lamenting the loss of childhood freedom, singing: ‘A day when you were young/
Free to play alone with time.’
To survive without Barrett, their main songwriter, the remaining band members began
to learn the drill. Musically and technically Wright, Gilmour, Waters and Mason learnt their
trade. And if the relative success of their frst album was largely based on a theme, then, faced
with the challenge of fnishing a second album, why change the formula? A Saucerful of Secrets
(1968), along with gigs and creating music for cinema flms, got the band to the next level of
performance profciency and creative confdence. From the beginning of the Learning the Drill
Phase, the Pink Floyd that emerged from 1968 was now sufciently skilled to develop themes
of their own and, given what had happened to them, lament for a absent band member became

68
 A cartographical companion

the dominant one. If there is a common theme running through the works of Pink Floyd across
the albums and decades, then it is lament.
The use of lament began, however, not with sadness over Barrett but with Waters’ ‘Corpo-
ral Clegg’ (1968). This song is about war and injury – a theme that Waters would return to in
1983 with Final Cut when his lament had turned into using the theme of trauma. From the two
post-Barrett albums of 1970 and 1972, the lament theme is a major resource and can be seen as
a logical progression from Barrett’s reminiscences of childhood.
By the time of The Dark Side of the Moon (DSOTM), in 1973, nostalgia had fully given way
to lament. The Classic Phase and lament go hand in hand. Several songs on DSOTM express
sorrow and remorse. For example, ‘Time’ laments getting older and not fulflling your dreams
and includes the lyric: ‘And then one day you fnd ten years have got behind you/No one told
you when to run, you missed the starting gun.’ ‘Brain Damage,’ written by Waters, is about
mental illness but also expresses lament about what happened to his friend Syd Barrett, with
the lyrics: ‘The lunatic is on the grass/Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.’ Sub-
themes such as ‘death,’ ‘mental illness,’ ‘adolescence,’ ‘getting older’ and more are related to the
theme of lament – and in such ways to make the 1973 Pink Floyd a global force in rock music.
The Classic Phase also includes Wish You Were Here (1975) and the seeds of disillusionment
and dissatisfaction among some members of the band. On Wish You Were Here (1975), the
mental decline and absence of Syd Barrett form the basis for three songs: ‘Shine On You Crazy
Diamond I–V,’ ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond VI–IX’ – combined,
these songs are the album. The latter records the happier times with Syd but nonetheless laments
his absence, remembering the charismatic, life-loving person he once was.
Lament is not one-dimensional, and by the time of The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut
(1983), Roger Waters had taken the theme in a diferent direction, in what I have called the
Roger Waters Phase: Politicisation of the Know-How, Waters with ‘Vera’ (1979) takes the lis-
tener back to the Second World War, with memories of childhood and the iconic Vera Lynn
song ‘We’ll Meet Again.’ But it is on The Final Cut that Waters embraces the use of lament to
express his stance on war, dictatorships, nuclear weapons and end of humankind. Waters laments
through four songs on The Final Cut how things have become and how the post-war dream has
been taken away by politicians.
With the exit of Waters, who had given the band successful albums, from Pink Floyd, things
become a little lighter and less traumatic, musically, lyrically and personally speaking. This was
the beginning of the David Gilmour Phase in which the ‘know-how’ was ‘reimagined.’ In A
Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), the frst post-Waters Pink Floyd album, David Gilmour
brings back the use of nostalgia, and occasional lament, in some of the songs. Again, childhood
seems to be the referent in songs such as track 1, ‘Signs of Life,’ with the line: ‘When the child
like view of the world went, nothing replaced it . . . nothing replaced it . . .’. The last of the
Pink Floyd albums with lyrics,54 The Division Bell (1994) sees Gilmour (and his writing partners)
return to expressing feelings of loss and sadness over personal relationships, the environment
and politics. But within the gloom there are signs of optimism such as Track 5 – ‘A Great Day
for Freedom’ – which claims: ‘On the day the wall came down/The Ship of Fools had fnally
run aground.’
The lightness of A Momentary Lapse of Reason and environmental message of The Division Bell
contrast sharply with The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983). By the time of The Wall (1979),
there was a measurable move from the expression of lament to the expression of trauma. The
gradual decline of ‘Pink’ (the main character in The Wall) into paranoia and isolation is contex-
tualised as trauma, with repeated references to Pink’s remembrances of the Second World War

69
 Chris Hart

and death of his soldier father. The Final Cut (1983) is, like The Wall, a Roger Waters project,
and the expression of trauma remains a continuing theme. The anti-war message of The Final
Cut makes, once again, direct references to the death of Waters’ father in the Second World
War; at the same time contemporary politics and war are invoked with lyrics such as: ‘In derelict
sidings the poppies entwine/With cattle trucks lying in wait for the next time.’
This brief survey of albums released by Pink Floyd merely illustrates what most seasoned
listeners to these albums could deduce for themselves; there is nothing new here. The aim
of this chapter was to provide a companion for the newcomer to the diferent themes that
have been used by the difering incarnations of Pink Floyd: that there is no Pink Floyd but
diferent Pink Floyds. But a key point in this chapter is that whatever the emotion expressed
across the decades in the songs of the difering Pink Floyd(s), it may be that the artistic range
we have here represents a constellation of emotions that are common across cultures and
generations.55 Without the early events in the lives of the band members, of childhood, the
post-war dream, youth and loss, many of these songs may not have had the sense of intelli-
gence that they exhibit. In addition, they may not also have had such universal appeal because
they would have not have dealt so directly, and consistently, with the essence of the human
condition.

Notes
1 Ryle, G. (2009 [1949]). The Concept of Mind. 60th anniversary edition. London: Routledge.
2 Tanney, J. (2009). ‘Rethinking Ryle: A Critical Discussion of the Concept of Mind. Introduction’, in
Op. cit. Ryle (1949):xlii.
3 Ibid:xlvii.
4 Ibid:xlix.
5 Ibid:xxxvi.
6 Natanson, M. (1970). ‘Phenomenology and Typifcation: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz’,
Social Research, 37(1), Essays in Commemoration of Alfred Schutz (Spring 1970):1–22. Also see, Kim,
K. and Berard, T. (2009). ‘Typifcation in Society and Social Science: The Continuing Relevance of
Schutz’s Social Phenomenology’, Human Studies, 32, Article number: 263.
7 Silverstein, M. (2003). ‘Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life’, Language & Com-
munication, 23:193–229.
8 Op. cit. Ryle (1949):8.
9 See ibid:44–50 on learning ‘how.’
10 Op. cit. Ryle (1949):49.
11 Ibid:44, 49.
12 This takes us back to ibid:30, 95.
13 Op. cit. Ryle (1949):44.
14 Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe, G. E. M. (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
15 See Holak, S. L. and Havlena, W. J. (1992). ‘Nostalgia: An Exploratory Study of Themes and Emotions
in the Nostalgic Experience’, Advances in Consumer Research, 19:380–387; Sedikides, C., Wildschut,
T. and Baden, D. (2004). ‘Nostalgia: Conceptual Issues and Existential Functions’, in Greenberg, J.,
Koole, S. and Pyszczynski, T. (eds.), Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology. New York: Guil-
ford Press, pages 200–214.
16 See Batcho, K. I. (1998). ‘Personal Nostalgia, World View, Memory, and Emotionality’, Percept Mot
Skills, 87(2):411–432; Batcho, K. I. (2007). ‘Nostalgia and the Emotional Tone and Content of Song
Lyrics’, American Journal of Psychology, 120(3):361–381; McCann, W. H. (1941). ‘Nostalgia: A Review
of the Literature’, Psychological Bulletin, 38:165–182.
17 See, ‘Letter to Robbie Ross’, 26 July 1917. Sassoon Papers. London: Imperial War Museum; Seigfried,
S. (1981). The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. London: Faber & Faber; Barker, P. (1991). The Regen-
eration Trilogy. London: Viking; Regeneration, flm based on Pat Barker, directed by Gilles Mckinnon.
18 See, Webb, T. E. (2006). ‘Dottyville’ – Craiglockhart War Hospital and Shell-Shock Treatment in the
First World War’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99(7), July:342–346; Hemmings, R. (2008).

70
 A cartographical companion

Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
19 Shepherd, J., Horn, D., Laing, D., Oliver, P. and Wicke, P. (2003). Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular
Music of the World: Performance and Production. Vol. 2. London: Continuum, pages 292–293.
20 Op. cit. McCann (1941).
21 Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press; Op. cit. Holak and
Havlena (1992):380–387; Stern, B. B. (1992). ‘Historical and Personal Nostalgia in Advertising Text:
The Fin de siècle Efect’, Journal of Advertising, 21(4), December:11–22; Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C.,
Arndt, J. and Routledge, C. (2006). ‘Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions’, Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 91(5):975–993; Sierra, J. J. and McQuitty, S. (2007). ‘Attitudes and Emotions as
Determinants of Nostalgia Purchases: An Application of Social Identity Theory’, Journal of Marketing,
Theory and Practice, 15:99–112.
22 Holbrook, M. B. and Schindler, R. M. (1991). ‘Echoes of the Dear Departed Past: Some Work in
Progress on Nostalgia’, in Holman, R. H. and Solomon, M. R. (eds.), Advances in Consumer Research
Volume 18. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, pages 330–333. acrwebsite.org/vol-
umes/7181/volumes/v18/NA-18. page 332.
23 Childhood is in itself an idealisation. Books such as The Secret Garden (1911), Wind in the Willows
(1908) and The Railway Children (1906) are not books for children so much as books for middle-class
adults wanting to believe the world was better in the past. For more about this, see Sampson, F. (1999).
Childhood and Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature. London: Routledge, which argues childhood is a
fairy-tale for adults experiencing the pressures and demands of the world.
24 There are many studies on nostalgia.
25 Freud, S. (1917). ‘Morning and Melancholia’, Collected Papers, Vol. IV, pages 152–170. www.columbia.
edu/itc/hs/medical/clerkships/psych/misc/articles/freud.pdf.
26 Ibid:322.
27 Watch a rare performance of ‘Remember a Day’ at, youtube.com/watch?v=BTlpFr3jd4s. Note the
odd laughter of the band members and that Wright is largely out of camera.
28 Miller, J. (1968). ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, Rolling Stone’s 26 October. Mason was not the drummer on the
album track; producer Norman Smith was.
29 See veojam.com/watch/1325601840 for Gilmour’s rendition of ‘Remember a Day’ in remembrance
of Richard Wright.
30 Bergson, H. (2001 [1910]). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London:
Dover Publications.
31 See, Valdés (1991). Valdés, M. J. (ed.). (1991). ‘Narrated Time’. A Ricoeur Reader: Refection and Imagina-
tion. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
32 van Dijck, J. (2006). ‘Record and Hold. Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory’,
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23(5):357–374.
33 All popular children’s games in the 1950s, often based on popular television programmes such as Dixon
of Dock Green, Gunsmoke, and the Lone Ranger.
34 Schutz, A. (1946). ‘The Well-Informed Citizen. An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge’,
Social Research, 13(4):463–478.
35 See Gufey, E. (2006). Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion, page 20, for more on this.
36 Op. cit. Davis (1979):34–35.
37 Pickering, M. and Keightley, E. (2006). ‘The Modalities of Nostalgia’, Current Sociology, 54(6):919–941.
38 Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Gaertner, L., Routledge, C. and Arndt, J. (2008). ‘Nostalgia as Enabler
of Self-Continuity’, in Sani, F. (ed.), Self-Continuity: Individual and Collective Perspectives. New York:
Psychology Press, pages 227–239.
39 The religious and art music/classical music has received attention regarding lament. See for example,
Keller, M. S. (2013). ‘Expressing, Communicating, Sharing and Representing Grief and Sorrow with
Organised Sound (Musings in Eight Short Segments)’, in Wild, S., Roy, D., Corn, A. and Martin, R.
L. (eds.), One Common Thread – The Musical World of Lament – Thematic Issue of Humanities Research, Vol.
XIX, No. 3. Canberra: ANU University Press, pages 3–14.
40 See for example, Alexiou, M. (1974). The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press; Holst-Warhaft,  G. (1992). Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature.
London: Routledge; Westermann, C. (1981). Praise and Lament in the Psalms. Westminster: John Knox.
41 See for example, classicalmusiconly.com/lists/works/sacred-music/mass-requiem.

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 Chris Hart

42 Quoted in Parsons, J. (2010). Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd: Dark Globe. London: Plexus, page 407.
43 Quoted in Cooper, G. and Sedgewick, N. (1975). Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here Songbook: An
Interview with David Gilmour. London: Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd, page 21. Also see www.pink-
foyd.org/artint/100.htm for the Waters interview.
44 Quoted in Rose, P. (2015). Roger Waters and Pink Floyd. The Concept Albums. Madison: Fairleigh
Dickenson University Press, page 48.
45 Levine, P. A. (2005). Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program to Restore the Wisdom of Your Body. Boulder:
Sounds True, page 3. Also see Levine, P. A. (with A. Frederick) (1997). Waking the Tiger-healing Trauma.
Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
46 Corsini, R. J. (2002). The Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Brunner-Routledge, page 1019.
47 The traditional view of trauma begins with Freud’s (1895) Studies on Hysteria  that held the event was
not traumatic but the remembering of an event. By the 1990s the traditional trauma model, based
on Freud, advocated by researchers such as Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press hold that ‘traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suf-
fering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an
absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness’, page 92.
48 Kirmayer, L. (1996). ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation’, in Antze, P. and
Lambek, M. (eds.), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pages
173–198. The quotation is on page 191.
49 Authors such as the following have all tried to explain intergenerational trauma, Yehuda, R., Schmei-
dler, J., Elkin, A., Houshmand, E., Siever, L., Binder-Brynes, K., Wainberg, M., Aferiot, D., Lehman,
A., Guo, L. S. and Yang, R. K. (1997). ‘Phenomenology and Psychobiology of the Intergenerational
Response to Trauma’, in Danieli, Y. (1998). Intergenerational Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of
Trauma. New York: Plenum Press; Op. cit. Levine (1997); Fossion, P., Rejas, M., Servais, L., Pelc, I.
and Hirsch, S. (2003). ‘Family Approach with Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’, American Journal
of Psychotherapy, 57(4):519–527.
50 The Blitz – a sustained aerial bombing of British cities and towns – began in September 1940 and lasted
until May 1941, leaving 43,500 civilians dead. Bombing continued throughout the war and involved
the whole of the United Kingdom.
51 Weinstein, D. (2002). ‘Progressive Rock as Text: The Lyrics of Roger Waters’, in Holm-Hudson, K.
(ed.), Progressive Rock Reconsidered. New York: Routledge, page 101.
52 Perry writes (1999:18): ‘Creative artists have always played the role of ‘emotional’ memory for a culture.
In ways that standardised recording of simple facts and fgures cannot convey, a painting, poem, novel,
or flm can capture the emotional ‘memory’ of an experience.’ See Perry, B. D. (1999). ‘Memories of
Fear: How the Brain Stores and Retrieves Physiologic States, Feelings, Behaviours and Thoughts from
Traumatic Events’, childtrauma.org. Originally published in Splintered Refections: Images of the Body in
Trauma. Goodwin, J. and Attias, R. (eds.). New York: Basic Books. And for an interesting take on this,
see Brave Heart, M. Y. H. and De Bruyn, L. (1998). ‘The American Holocaust: Historical Unresolved
Grief among Native American Indians’, National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental
Health Research Journal, 8(2):56–78.
53 See Blake, M. (2008). Comfortably Numb. The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo,
page 261.
54 Endless River (2014) has one track with some lyrics.
55 See Jung, C. G. (1973). The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings. Collected Woks of C.G. Jung. Complete
Digital Edition. Vol. 18. Alder, G. and Hull, R. F. C. (trans. and ed.). Princeton: Princeton University
Press, especially page 542.

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 2
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS
Pink Floyd, free improvisation and
collective composition

John Encarnacao

Introduction
The history of Pink Floyd is one of phases and transitions. However, although he was only in
the band for three years and left during the recording of their second album, guitarist/singer/
songwriter Syd Barrett casts a shadow over the group’s entire career. It is commonly understood
that Barrett led the band during his tenure, while from early 1968 – when he was replaced
by guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour – Roger Waters assumed leadership through writing the
bulk of the group’s material. Eventually, Waters’ dominance led to the ejection of founding
member and keyboardist/songwriter Richard Wright during the recording of The Wall (1979).
Ultimately, Waters would himself leave the group after The Final Cut (1983), which was all but
a Waters solo record, assuming that the group identity would be dissolved. However, Gilmour
and founding drummer Nick Mason (the only individual to contribute to every Floyd album)
pressed on with further recordings and tours into the mid-1990s, and after a hiatus of nearly two
decades, a fnal album in 2014, The Endless River.
So, the common understanding of the group’s history is one of changing leadership – from
Barrett in the earliest years, to Waters through a period of rebuilding and then the group’s
phenomenal success from 1973 through to the early 1980s, and thence to Gilmour after Waters’
departure. I intend to challenge that understanding with this chapter. My contention is that
Pink Floyd, at least until The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), operated as a creative collective.
Although Waters can be acerbic and hyperbolic in interviews, essentially he agrees with this
assessment:

We were working shoulder-to-shoulder up to and including Dark Side. . . . From that

point on we weren’t. We’d achieved what we set out to achieve together and the only
reason we stayed together after that was through fear and avarice.1

The period in which the group composed music collectively, from the Barrett era up until
Wish You Were Here (from 1975, on which Waters, Gilmour and Wright collaborated on the
composition of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’), was also its most prolifc, with eight albums
released in seven years.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-5 73
 John Encarnacao

The idea of the creative genius is one seeded in the Romantic era. It is much easier for us
to think of a chain of leaders in Pink Floyd than to consider that their strength and uniqueness,
at least for the frst decade, came from collective endeavour. Sociologist Jennifer Lena (2012)
writes that we need ‘thick histories’:

A thick account of history defocalizes the actions of individuals . . . and shifts our
attention toward social structures and collective action. . . . In most histories of music,
the focus is placed on individual actors: genius performers, opportunistic promoters,
or divisive wives. By attributing credit for bold innovations to single individuals, we
have a fragile, thin explanation for the very complex worlds in which these innovators
lived. By defning acts of invention or providence . . . as the product of individual
genius and serendipity, these accounts suggest that creativity and innovation operate
despite societal infuence and social interaction.2

Another part of my argument is that it is the practice and ethos of free improvisation that
was fundamental in establishing the modus operandi of collective composition in the group. As
improvising musician and historian of improvisation David Toop (2016b) puts it:

Since improvisation is fundamentally cooperative, closer to group mind than singular-

ity, it will exhibit entirely diferent characteristics, many of which will be out of step
with the hierarchical, logocentric traditions of European pedagogy and its critical
canons of genius.3

Anthropologist and musician Georgina Born (2017) argues for the importance of consid-
ering the social mediation of music.4 She suggests a conceptual framework comprised of four
planes of social mediation:

In the frst plane, music produces its own diverse socialites – in the immediate
microsocialities of musical performance and practice and in the social relations embod-
ied in musical ensembles and associations. It is this frst plane that is most apparent in
all the performance arts. In the second plane, music has powers to animate imagined
communities, aggregating its listeners into afective alliances, virtual collectivities or
publics based on musical and other identifcations. In the third plane, music refracts
wider social relations, from the most concrete to the most abstract of collectivities –
music’s instantiation of the nation, of social hierarchies, or of the social relations
of class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. In the fourth plane, music is
bound up in the broader institutional forces that provide the basis for its produc-
tion, reproduction, and transformation, whether elite or religious patronage, market
or non-market exchange, public and subsidized cultural institutions, or late capitalism’s
multi-polar cultural economy.5

To my mind, Pink Floyd might be seen in terms of Born’s (2017) frst, second and fourth
planes of social mediation, particularly with respect to the fact that free improvisation was part
of their practice and that collective composition was an outcome of that practice. This chapter
examines aspects of the ‘immediate microsocialities’ of Pink Floyd’s collective practices as a
corrective to the more common focus on supposed leaders of the group at any given point in
their history. It seems to me that the idea of ‘imagined communities’6 is relevant to Pink Floyd’s
output, especially in the period when they were a large-ish cult group (1968–72, the frst half

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 A saucerful of secrets

of the Gilmour-Mason-Waters-Wright era). The avant-garde practices of the group included

extended forms, studio manipulations and their tendency towards improvisation (free and oth-
erwise). Along with recordings that were often instrumental or downplayed the vocal element
expected in rock and pop and, in large measure, avoided tropes of virtuosity endemic to their
progressive rock peers, they engendered ‘afective alliances.’ From personal experience that is
commonplace and a simple articulation of subcultural capital, knowledge of Pink Floyd’s output
beyond their blockbuster mid-1970s albums allowed for particular kinds of social connections to
be made which certainly encouraged a perception of broader imagined communities.7 Regard-
ing Born’s (2017) third plane, while I am sure that Pink Floyd’s music might be understood to
‘refract . . . abstract collectivities’ such as that of nation, class and gender, I will not engage with
those ideas here. However, the fourth plane, of ‘broader institutional forces that provide the
basis for [the music’s] production, reproduction and transformation’ will be apparent in the fnal
section of this chapter. It is my contention that while I would not attribute the presence of free
improvisation in rock music (limited though it is) solely to Pink Floyd’s infuence, I do think in
terms of bringing certain avant-garde musical practices to the mainstream, the group has been
hiding in plain sight and has not been given the acknowledgement it deserves.
Also, too often the focus on the group has been on the song-oriented compositions, and
yes, looking at the records, Barrett wrote most of these in the releases of 1967 and Waters more
than any other member of the group in the period that followed. However, many of the group’s
most signifcant early pieces were group compositions: ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ ‘A Saucerful of
Secrets,’ ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene,’ ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ ‘Echoes.’

Free versus other types of improvisation

Improvisation is a contentious word. It is used in many contexts to mean a range of things,
musical and otherwise. I do not purport to ofer a defnitive outline of various types of musical
improvisation here but to delineate free improvisation as a distinct type of practice. In the con-
text of Pink Floyd this is especially important, as their work contains several types of improvisa-
tion, some of them much more common in rock music than the free improvisation that they
and only a handful of other prominent rock acts have ever practiced. One caveat I make here is
that it is arguable that much of what I identify as free improvisation in the work of Pink Floyd
would not be considered as such by many of its practitioners. My argument is that vestiges of free
improvisation formed a vital part of their working process. Their ofcial discography is the best
evidence we have of their work, and by necessity these versions of pieces became considered
defnitive structures that are then used as the basis of live iterations of the work going forward.
Perhaps what is most confusing about defning free improvisation is that those artists best
known for it seem inclined to reject the term. Australian saxophonist/fautist Jim Denley (2009),
English improviser and author David Toop (2016a) and the late English guitarist Derek Bailey
(1992) tend to describe what they (and others) do as simply improvisation.8 It seems that to them
the ‘free’ is superfuous. Bailey (1992), in his pioneering work frst published in 1980, Improvi-
sation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, suggested that rather than the term free improvisation, a
distinction could be made between idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation. In his words:

Idiomatic improvisation, much the most widely used, is mainly concerned with the
expression of an idiom – such as jazz, famenco or baroque – and takes its identity and
motivation from that idiom. Non-idiomatic improvisation has other concerns and is
most usually found in so-called ‘free’ improvisation and, while it can be highly stylised,
is not usually tied to representing an idiomatic identity.9

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Thus, Charlie Parker soloing in a bebop style is idiomatic, as is Kirk Hammett of Metallica
soloing in a thrash metal style, as is a bagpiper improvising within a Scottish or Bulgarian folk
music context. In each of these examples the playing of the improviser is born in, and must be
considered an iteration of, an existing musical idiom. Of course, by participating in a musical
idiom there is the potential to build upon it, to contribute something that causes it to change
in some way. For the purposes of rock music, our focus here, idiomatic improvisation is quite
often blues based, as exemplifed by guitarist Eric Clapton.10 In the specifc case of Pink Floyd,
it is instructive that although the group cut its teeth on the same rhythm and blues as many of
their peers – indeed, as late as the second half of 1966, the group were playing ‘R&B, things
like “Louie Louie” and “Dust My Broom”’ alongside free improvisation11 – their improvisations
in the period 1967–1972 were largely removed from the blues as idiom.
It should be noted that although the distinction between idiomatic and non-idiomatic
improvisation works for me, musician and experimental music scholar David Grubbs (2014)
describes Bailey’s (1992) formulation of non-idiomatic improvisation as ‘problematic.’ ‘[S]urely
music emerges from this process. . . . How does the rhetoric of idiom sit with the musical results
of free improvisation?’ he asks. There is a danger, as Grubbs (2014) writes, drawing on the work
of historical musicologist George E. Lewis (1996), that an insistence on the idea of free improvi-
sation as non-idiomatic might serve to ‘downplay its borrowings from jazz improvisation and
to exclude African American musicians from its genealogy.’12 This is certainly not the intention
here, as I hope to make clear later in the chapter.
If blues-based improvisation still dominates rock, and particularly the guitar solo in rock,
Pink Floyd (along with the Grateful Dead) were signifcant in establishing drone-based improvi-
sation in rock. One might say that this is a sub-type of idiomatic improvisation, and I would
agree, except to make the distinction that drone-based improvisation cuts across musical genres
and traditions. In the context of rock music in the mid-late 1960s, it has a lot to do with the dis-
semination of classical Indian music by Ravi Shankar and its appropriation in certain recordings
by The Beatles, as well as the alternate tunings and interest in Eastern modes of folk guitarists
Davey Graham and Bert Jansch, as appropriated by Led Zeppelin and others. But it also has to
do with the modal turn in jazz, most obviously represented by Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959).
As Anna Murray, friend and fatmate of Syd Barrett, attests: ‘We were listening to the Beatles,
Doors, Bob Dylan and then a lot of blues and jazz . . . Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charlie
Parker.’13
So far, free improvisation has been defned by what it is not. What, in fact, is it and how is
it done? Without intending to set frm guidelines for the practice, or to prescribe its features
so precisely that it would become, itself, an idiom,14 here are two defnitions from Toop – that
it is: ‘[A] state of beginning to play without knowing what will be played, how it will develop,
how long it will be played, what form it will take, how it will end and how it will be resumed,’15
and more fulsomely how it is approached and diferentiated from other types of improvisation:

to make a music without score, notation, image or text, composer, director or con-
ductor; a music spurning reliance on tradition, established forms or hierarchies of
labour; lacking in plans, rules or protocols of any kind other than the act of playing
through listening. . . . [U]topian aims separate this type of improvisation . . . from
more or less codifed, often very ancient styles of idiomatic improvisation that hold
varying degrees of importance in jazz, blues, Indian Hindustani raga, Arabic maqam,
Korean sanjo, street musics of the world, celebratory, shamanistic and folk musics of
many kinds, along with rock, R&B, African American gospel or any other music not
wholly tied to the strict instructions of a composer.16

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It is difcult to defne free improvisation positively when idiomatic improvisation is so com-

mon or, to be more clear, non-idiomatic (free) improvisation is relatively uncommon. To paint
in broad strokes, if a piece of music has an identifable pulse and tempo, it is likely to be based
on a pre-existing idiom. The same goes for any kind of harmonic organisation – and by har-
monic, I am referring to the selection of notes to construct any key or mode. Working within
a key or mode usually involves harmonic progressions. Although they can be improvised, this
is a level of organisation arguably at odds with non-idiomatic playing, so rich and long is the
history of the harmonic organisation of music. The use of a tonal centre as the basis of a drone
in a context where there are no chord sequences (such as found in some Indian classical music
and many folk musics) allows, in theory, great freedom in harmonic organisation. In practice, in
rock music, there is a tendency towards the Mixolydian (major with fattened 7th) and Dorian
(minor with raised 6th) modes, or a blues pentatonic variant in which thirds, ffths and sevenths
are routinely bent for expressive purposes. Regardless of whether you, the reader, have the
specialist training to decipher the last couple of sentences – and that training is not necessary
in order to understand what follows – it should be understood that any of those schemes of
harmonic organisation imply, and will usually be infected to align in some way with, a pre-
existing musical idiom.17
Further to this, while the organisation of most music – rock, pop and otherwise – is predi-
cated on harmonic and rhythmic patterns, free improvisation is often more concerned with
an exploration of timbre (the quality and gradations of sound in and of itself) and texture (the
way in which individual parts in a musical experience interact, overlap or remain disjunct). Of
course, timbre is crucial to the reception of any music; the timbre of instruments plays a huge
role in delineating genre. Musicologist and cultural historian Nadine Hubbs (2000) recounts a
conversation with Walter Everett where they discussed the question of whether Kurt Cobain’s
guitar timbre or the harmonic content are most defnitive of songs such as ‘Lithium’ and ‘Smells
Like Teen Spirit’; she asserts that both timbre and harmonic content are crucial and that to
dismiss one or the other as being of lesser importance would be misguided.18 Similarly, the way
in which individual instrumental layers interact is fundamental to any group music-making or
recording. Yet in the vast majority of cases, the way in which this is done is idiomatic, whether
it is the deft rhythmic interplay of instrumental parts in a James Brown funk track; the cut-and-
thrust of well-chosen samples and beats in a Timbaland production; or the interplay of harp,
vocal and other instruments in the work of Joanna Newsom.
Of course, harmonic and rhythmic elements are at play in freely improvised music.
Though the harmonic terrain of much free improvisation is inscrutable, the alignment or non-
alignment of notes and their distribution on the frequency spectrum remains signifcant. Simi-
larly, freely improvised pieces often play with a range of densities of articulation and contrasts
between sound and silence. Either can have something like a rhythmic efect, even though the
environment is likely to be pulseless. It might be best to express the situation by saying that
the listener’s concentration or focus can be drawn more to matters of timbre and texture in
non-idiomatic music because of the lack of familiar rhythmic and harmonic tropes that orient
us in idiomatic music.
This concentration on timbre in free improvisation often manifests in what is called extended
techniques, which means to coax sounds from an instrument using non-traditional performance
practices. Before it became ubiquitous in rock, using feedback for expressive purposes would
have been considered an extended technique. The cries, screams and ululations of Yoko Ono
on her rock recordings of the late 1960s and early 1970s (such as Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
[1970] and Fly [1971]) are extended techniques. In the case of early Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett
and Richard Wright were, uncommonly for the time (from early 1966) using ‘echo,’ what we

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might think of as delay. To fesh out the earlier quote from Peter Jenner, who would go on to
co-manage the group:

[W]hat intrigued me was that instead of wailing guitar solos in the middle [of songs],
they made this weird noise. For a while I couldn’t work out what it was. And it turned
out to be Syd and Rick. Syd had his Binson Echorec and was doing weird things with
feedback. Rick was also producing some strange, long, shifting chords.19

Barrett combined the use of the Echorec with timbral (rather than melodic) use of slide,
which obliterates the usual hierarchies of pitch organisation – this is heard clearly on ‘Remem-
ber a Day’ from A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) – as well as distortion and feedback. Rock historian
Rob Chapman notes that ‘he had been incorporating radical and untutored slide techniques
into his playing . . . running a Zippo lighter up and down his guitar as early as 1963.’20 Video
footage shows Roger Waters making a high clicking noise with his bass, perhaps forcing the
strings against the pickups. This is heard distinctly in the recording of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’
(2:20–3:40) included on Pink Floyd’s debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967, hereafter
Piper). Barrett was also fond of detuning his guitar strings while playing them in improvisations –
we hear this clearly right at the end of the Piper recording of ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ also in
‘John Latham Version 9,’ and see and hear it on the footage of ‘Nick’s Boogie,’ recorded in Janu-
ary 1967.21 All these might be considered extended techniques. Nick Mason’s habit of playing
his tom toms with mallets rather than more conventional kick-snare-hi-hat patterns with sticks
may not qualify as an extended technique but displays a similar experimentation with timbre in
the context of rock music practice of the mid-1960s.
In the immediate context of Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett’s guitar playing, most sources see
a connection to guitarist Keith Rowe of improvising group AMM. AMM formed in London
in 1965, and Rowe was known for his ‘table-top’ guitar. Like Barrett, he was a painter as well
as a musician, and saw laying the guitar down on a table as a way to break with the past of
guitar playing in a similar way to American painters of the period who ‘had to ditch or lose
European easel painting techniques.’22 At the time of taking on Pink Floyd, Peter Jenner was
already involved with AMM and would soon organise the recording of AMM’s debut album;
in fact, Pink Floyd appealed to him as a pop music articulation of the avant-garde.23 Chapman
writes that ‘AMM played several signifcant gigs with Pink Floyd between March  1966 and
February 1967.’24 Although Rowe’s infuence on Barrett should not be overstated – as noted
previously, Barrett’s guitar experimentation began in his Cambridge days – Barrett can be seen
playing the guitar on his lap and hitting it with steel objects in both hands at one point, during
the footage of ‘Nick’s Boogie’ mentioned earlier. Rowe asserts (and a comparison of the tracks
bears this out) that ‘Flaming,’ from Piper, is so named to acknowledge the similarity between
the freely improvised texture of its introduction and AMM’s ‘Later During a Flaming Riviera
Sunset’ from their debut, AMMMUSIC 1966,25 the sessions for which Barrett is said to have
attended.

Types of improvisation in Te Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)26

The study of the types of improvisation found on Pink Floyd’s debut album – the only one
recorded with Syd Barrett participating throughout – serves as a foundation to understand-
ing much of the group’s work through to the early 1970s. The broader context is that nearly
all rock music contains idiomatic improvisation; even the most tightly rehearsed and faithful-
to-the-recording live performance (whether by the original artist or in a cover version) is likely

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to contain some embellishment of a vocal line, a drum fll the drummer has never quite played
the same way before, a melodic line bridging a chord progression by the bassist on the spur of
the moment, not to mention guitar and keyboard ad libs and solos. In fact, this recreation in
every performance or iteration helps to make rock music (and other vernacular musics from
which rock developed, such as jazz, blues, gospel and Anglo-American folk musics) what it
is, setting it apart from, for example, classical music, where interpretations of individual pieces
can difer widely, but in the main the tradition is to be absolutely faithful to the score. So, the
amount of improvisation on Piper is not all that extraordinary, though some of the types of
improvisation, and combinations of idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation, are unusual not
only for the time but in the context of the history of rock music more broadly.
To situate the album historically, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was released in August 1967,
some two months after the debut LP of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced and
The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For a couple of months, Piper and Pepper
were being recorded in adjacent studios in the EMI complex that would later become known
as Abbey Road. Chapman (2010) writes that the tracks on Piper ‘fell into two distinct styles;
the lengthy improvisations featured in the band’s live act, “Astronomy Domine”, “Interstellar
Overdrive”, “Pow R. Toc H.”, and “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk”, and the shorter
songs that Syd had penned, mostly . . . during the summer and autumn of 1966.’27
If we look at the structure of the album, it begins with ‘Astronomy Domine,’ a Barrett com-
position that opens out into improvisation, and ends with the sound efects of ‘Bike.’ So, the
album is bookended with freak-outs (if you will), but beyond this, there is a palindromic aspect
to its structure that is clearly seen just by referring to the songwriting credits. The record starts
with four Barrett compositions and ends with four Barrett compositions. At the centre is Waters’
‘Stethoscope,’ either side of which are the group compositions ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ and ‘Interstellar
Overdrive.’ ‘Stethoscope’ is a strange piece, with the verses made up of assaultive three-syllable
lines; the vast bulk of the track is a modal, and quite wild, improvisation over a drone. So, the
efect of the album structure is of a progression of relatively stable song forms, a central section
of the three most improvisatory pieces, and then four more contained song structures. In the
original LP confguration, there is a breath to turn the record over before the epic climax of
the improvisation set, ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’ Although it is unanimously reported that Barrett
was the only member of the band taking LSD,28 one might say the album structure mirrors the
experience in condensed form, with a build-up of disorientation to the peak of the trip during
the free improvisation at the heart of ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ followed by a gentle comedown
through the pastoral succession of ‘The Gnome,’ ‘Chapter 24’ and ‘The Scarecrow.’
In something of a contrast to Chapman’s delineation between the band’s live repertoire, full
of improvisation, and the pop song forms written individually by Barrett, Jenner says – referring
to producer Norman Smith – that:

Syd did essentially write standard pop song structures, but then live they would impro-
vise these long instrumental breaks. When Norman got hold of them, he thought this
ain’t gonna work and I don’t think anyone minded because they all – especially Syd –
listened to pop music. Live they were all like ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’ Norman heard
the songs and he made sure the songs came through.29

While the contrast between the relatively compact Barrett compositions and the more expan-
sive songs geared towards live performance is apparent in Piper, there is no doubt that Smith
tightened up some of the arrangements; both ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Matilda Mother’ are
shorn of sections if compared to the live versions of the period that we are able to access.30 It is

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fundamental to an understanding of early Pink Floyd that Syd Barrett did not play guitar solos
in the traditional sense. David Gilmour would take that role on a few years later – for example,
the slow chord progression-oriented improvisation of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ (Wish
You Were Here, 1975) has more in common with the blues tropes of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Since I’ve
Been Loving You’ than any of the early Pink Floyd’s forays into free improvisation. Consider
the guitar playing in the central section (an instrumental verse) of ‘Astronomy Domine.’ There
is nothing virtuosic about it – or rather, traditionally virtuosic. The unselfconscious abandon of
the playing, and the way in which it forms part of an improvisatory web with the drums and
organ (however tenuously anchored to the chord progression by the bass) largely avoids rock
techniques and vocabulary. At a couple of points, we hear Barrett go for bluesy bends around
the ffth of a chord before swerving away. Notably, this is in the context of the emergence of
guitar heroes such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, Peter Green
of Fleetwood Mac and the more primitive pyrotechnics of Pete Townshend, to mention some
of those most prominent.
If collective playing, rather than the taking of solos, is an attribute of free improvisation
(more of this later), on Piper we hear both. Wright takes solos on ‘Matilda Mother,’ ‘Pow
R. Toc H.’ and ‘Chapter 24’; Waters takes a bowed bass solo on ‘Lucifer Sam’;31 Barrett takes
something of a solo on ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ (from 2:00) but notably it is pretty much bending a
single note. Elsewhere Barrett’s guitar is feetingly prominent during the collective improvisa-
tions of ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Stethoscope,’ audacious in its unorthodoxy, the instrument
often deployed towards timbral ends, with registral swoops, arrhythmic repetitions and percus-
sive attacks with minimal note content melding with his use of slide and echo to create an
idiosyncratic, self-taught technique. Collective improvisation is also heard in parts of ‘Flaming,’
‘Pow R. Toc H.’ and, of course, ‘Interstellar Overdrive.’ Improvisation on the record, collective
or in the taking of solos, is generally idiomatic in the sense of taking place in the context of 4/4
rock rhythms (unorthodox as their articulation sometimes is) and the harmonic context of a
chord progression (‘Astronomy Domine’) or single-chord drone/vamp (‘Matilda Mother,’ ‘Pow
R. Toc H.,’ ‘Stethoscope’).
As acknowledged earlier, those particularly invested in free improvisation might object to
me invoking the term in the context of Pink Floyd. And yes, although Grubbs (2014) allows
for ‘compositions with open or indeterminate forms as well as pieces that explicitly combine
composition and improvisation’ in his defnition,32 it may be more correct to note the infuence
of free improvisation on the group than to assert it is something they do. ‘Interstellar Overdrive’
certainly combines composition and improvisation. In fact, in the broadest terms, its form is
similar to that commonly found in jazz – head-solos-head – except that between the two state-
ments of the theme, the improvisation is free and collective rather than a succession of solos
over a chord progression. We might say that ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ is basically a frame for
free improvisation. The piece lasts nearly ten minutes on Piper but apparently could be double
that length or more in concert. Although it would not be true to say that this was the only
example of this kind of playing on a rock record in 1967, the seven-to-eight minutes of free
playing unmoored to a constant rhythm or harmonic context on ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was
very uncommon.

Free improvisation in Pink Floyd’s recordings, 1967–1971

Put bluntly, in the Pink Floyd catalogue there are very few instances of pieces that are, from
start to fnish, freely improvised. ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was a signifcant work for the band – it
seems it was played at virtually every show of the Barrett-era group and, in terms of their live

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performances, defned them. ‘Nick’s Boogie’ was apparently generated spontaneously, based on
a Mason mallets-on-toms pattern in 4/4 not unlike that later used for ‘Set the Controls for the
Heart of the Sun.’33 From the latter part of Barrett’s involvement with Pink Floyd is the John
Latham recordings of 20 October 1967, fnally released in 2016.34 Although listed as nine ‘ver-
sions,’ it is in fact a single 30-minute performance track-listed as nine sections and the freest
improvisation the group ever put to tape. This music might be said to be truly non-idiomatic.
Heard in isolation, there is nothing to align it to rock music except the instrumentation, though
we know it to be made by a rock band. Instruments are used for their timbral properties rather
than to harmonic or rhythmic ends. Extended techniques, particularly the percussive use of
guitar and bass, are utilised to the extent that at times it is difcult to decipher the origins of
particular sounds. The keyboard can be somewhat dominant, and at times brings to mind the
experimental organ textures of Sun Ra’s work of the 1960s,35 but overall, the playing is collective,
the efect being of the total sound rather than a showcase for any of the individuals making it.
There are several pieces from the Gilmour-Mason-Waters-Wright period that incorporate
free improvisation. Notably, there’s the 12-minute title track of Pink Floyd’s second album A
Saucerful of Secrets, a structured piece of three main sections. The second section is based on a
drum loop, which underpins free playing, and the third is a stately chorale based on a typically
lovely Wright chord sequence. The frst section, however, is freely improvised. Mason writes of
the way in which the piece was put together:

One starting point was a sound that Roger had discovered by placing a mike close to
the edge of a cymbal and capturing all the tones that are normally lost when it is struck
hard. This gave us a frst section to work from, and with four individuals contributing
freely, the piece developed quickly. The middle section – or ‘Rats In The Piano’ as it
was sometimes more familiarly labelled by the band – was a development of sounds
that we used in improvised sequences in earlier shows, probably lifted from a John
Cage piece, while the rhythm was supplied by a double-tracked drum loop.36

‘Quicksilver,’ from the soundtrack to the flm More (the group’s third album, from 1969) would
also appear to be a piece of free improvisation. It begins with a minute or so of sounds of inde-
terminate origin. Initially it sounds as if a big piece of metal furniture is being dragged across
the foor in a highly resonant space. This morphs into sounds that probably come from playing
the inside of a piano and continues to evolve slowly, with gong, vibraphone and organ each
increasingly evident. The music is pulseless and without a tonal centre. Sounds of indeterminate
origin are commonly found in free improvised music, with its concentration on timbral experi-
mentation and extended techniques. Also, there is no sonic signature of any individual, aside
from the probability that the organ is played by Wright. It remains a beautiful and eerie piece.
‘Seabirds,’ unearthed on The Early Years: 1969 Dramatis/ation (2016), is from the same session,
but the combination here is a gong, vibraphone, organ and slide guitar. It is possible that some
unidentifable sounds on ‘Quicksilver’ are made by slide guitar. In any case, these two pieces
show a group well adept at non-idiomatic improvisation.37
A live (though edited) TV broadcast, reputedly from December 1970, gives an intriguing
insight into Pink Floyd’s improvisatory practice, its relationship to their group compositional
process and the idea of a set of improvisatory modules or states that inform the work of the
group, particularly in the period 1969–71. The piece, labelled ‘Corrosion,’ is a known part of
the group’s live repertoire around 197038 and, given the instrumental forces, seems like it might
be a development of ‘Quicksilver.’ It begins with cymbals, gong, whispering and organ. The
whispering is part of a technique that I refer to as ‘found voices,’ deployed as a disorienting tactic

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across many of Pink Floyd’s recordings, from ‘Careful with That Axe Eugene’; ‘One of These
Days’; as an important quasi-narrative element across The Dark Side of the Moon; and even in the
post-Waters era, on ‘Keep Talking,’ which features the voice of Stephen Hawking.39 ‘Corrosion’
also includes the nonsense, percussive vocalising (with echo) from Waters (and here Gilmour)
as found in Waters’ pieces ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ and ‘Several Species of Small
Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict,’ and group composition
‘Pow R. Toc H.’
At around 1:35, Mason jumps up from his kit and makes his way through the middle of the
set of the TV studio. Although it is not immediately apparent, he goes to the piano to pluck the
strings from the inside. Meanwhile, Waters switches from his gong (and microphone) to play
the kit’s cymbals. Eventually, Wright fnds his way from the organ to the piano keyboard, and
he and Mason play the instrument together for a brief period. This demonstrates the fexibility
in the band’s lineup with respect to experimentation and instrumentation. There are several
edits in this footage, and it is a shame that we are unable to see the entire performance. From
4:12 the group is grooving in 4/4 in E minor, the playing overlaid by the ‘electronic seagull’
sound that opens and helps defne their epic ‘Echoes.’ Waters takes the music through a 12-bar
blues pattern, which the others follow. That being said, and despite assertions made on the
cultural blog Dangerous Minds, this piece does not segue through ‘Embryo,’ ‘Heartbeat Pigmeat’
or ‘Several Species . . .’ but is a distinctive piece in its own right. The pulsed section from 4:12
has perhaps something in common with ‘Careful . . .’ but does not feature that piece’s defnitive
two-note octave bass rif.
These instances of free improvisation, or structured pieces which contain free improvisation,
are credited to all the members of the group. It seems to me that the free improvisation of the
Barrett-Mason-Waters-Wright era evolved naturally into the collective composition which was
vital to the Gilmour-Mason-Waters-Wright era.

Pink Floyd and collaborative composition

One aspect of free improvisation underlined by many theorists and practitioners is that it is
inherently collective. Denley’s (2009) summary of improvised music activities in Australia in
the period of 1972–2007 documents both distinctive individual approaches and voices and
collective utterances. There is often an emphasis on the fusion of individuals, whether it is the
‘collectivity on a massive scale’ of The Splinter Orchestra or the ‘never manic, and always collec-
tive: there are no solos’ ethos of pioneering early 1970s group Teletopa.40 Toop (2016a) writes:

Improvisation articulates collectivism, a sounding out of group listening and respond-

ing. Its ethos is at odds with the principles of single authorship embodied by the majority
of books. Improvisation develops not through a singular argument; its form emerges,
as John Stevens once claimed, from the mutual engagement of all participants .  .  .
it is not a coven of seekers dominated by masters, nor is it an exercise in hidden control
so much as an unspoken contract.41

Both Toop and philosopher Gavin Rae (2011) invoke Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the ‘group-in-
fusion’ with respect to improvisation. As Rae (2011) writes: ‘The group-in-fusion is the name
Sartre gives to an organic, spontaneous, group formation in which each member works towards
the attainment of the same end.’42 Yet perhaps this is not so good a ft for what we understand
of the context of free improvisation in rock music, because ‘[T]he group-in-fusion is not a col-
lective entity or consciousness . . . claiming such collective action creates, emanates from, or

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sustains a collective being that transcends individual praxis would place the individual under the
being of another’;43 it is also exceedingly rare for groups in rock to be ‘spontaneous formations,’
predicated as the genre is on developing repertoire and recordings. My impression of what exists
of a community of free improvising musicians is that long-standing improvising groups, such
as Australia’s The Necks, are anomalous; much more common are almost chance encounters
between musicians seldom if ever to be repeated. Toop sets this up right at the beginning of
his book, describing preparation for a performance with ‘one member . . . who I have never
met before .  .  . [and] another member who I  have known for forty years but never get to
see.’44 These sorts of encounters do seem to resonate with the group-in-fusion, where working
together in short bursts means that the identity of individuals is not submerged in the same way
as in an entity such as Pink Floyd, which has long been more of a global brand than a collective
of four musicians as it was in its frst decade.
As much as the lack of idiomatic content, this collectivity sets free improvisation apart from
much improvisation in rock music – the guitar solo, the keyboard solo, the focus on the indi-
vidual. The same might be said for much jazz, where there is often a rotation of soloists, though
as Lewis (1996) argues, in the 1940s, bebop ‘provid[ed] models of both individual and collective
creativity that were adopted and extended during later periods in improvised music,’45 and cer-
tainly a broad range of jazz – from the tradition of Dixieland jazz to Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz
(1961), to the compositions and performances of Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago –
explores collective improvisation.
Table  2.1 illustrates the importance of collective composition to the Gilmour-Mason-
Waters-Wright line-up. Note that although there are no group writing credits for Wish You
Were Here, the pivotal, epic track ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is (as stated earlier) credited to
all the members except Mason. The table also illustrates the dominance of the group by Waters,
beginning somewhat with The Dark Side of the Moon but consolidated by Animals.
During the period of 1968–1971, many of Pink Floyd’s most signifcant pieces were group
composed. ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ continued to be performed in concert through to the end
of 1971. ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ (basically a dynamic vamp in E minor), frst released
as a single B-side in 1968, more widely distributed in a live version on Ummagumma, and then
in original form on the Relics compilation of 1971, was a concert staple through to the end of
the Dark Side tour in late 1973. ‘Saucerful’ survived in the set through 1972, only retired for the
1973 Dark Side tour. ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echoes’ were each major, multi-section works
in excess of 20 minutes in duration, the former performed some 150 times over two years, the
later some 240 times from 1971–1975 and brought back to the live repertoire by Gilmour in
the post-Waters period.46
Another major group work was The Man and the Journey, an elaborate, theatrical concert pres-
entation comprising 15 pieces and running about 75 minutes, performed some 30 times across
the United Kingdom and Europe.47 It was the major undertaking of the group in 1969, a busy
year in which they also released two albums. In fact, various sections of The Man and the Journey
ended up as stand-alone tracks on More and Ummagumma; group compositions ‘Careful with
That Axe Eugene,’ ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ were also repurposed for the
show. The remaining half a dozen pieces, some incidental, some more substantial, are credited
to the whole group in the representation of the piece released in 2016 on 1969: Dramatis/ation.
Though Barrett is generally considered the leader of the band during the period of his
involvement, Cavanagh quotes associates of the group to support the idea that Waters was often
the member of the group driving the more experimental aspects.48 Peter Whitehead, who took
them into the studio in January 1967 to make music for his flm Tonight Let’s All Make Love in
London, said that ‘I didn’t feel there was any principal force there . . . they were just completely

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 John Encarnacao

Table 2.1 Group compositions on Pink Floyd’s albums, 1967–1983

Line-up Albums Group Notes

compositions

Barrett-Mason- The Piper at the ‘Pow R. Toc H.’

Waters-Wright Gates of Dawn ‘Interstellar
(1965–January 1968) (1967) Overdrive’
Gilmour-Mason- A Saucerful of Secrets ‘A Saucerful of Three tracks feature
Waters-Wright (1968) Secrets’ performance contributions
(1968–1978) from Barrett, and one was
composed by him
More (1969) Six of the 13 tracks
Ummagumma (1969) ‘Careful with That Record 1 is live. Record 2
Axe, Eugene,’ ‘A comprises half a side by each
Saucerful of Secrets’ member of the band.
Atom Heart Mother ‘Atom Heart ‘Atom Heart Mother’ (23:44)
(1970) Mother’ ‘Alan’s is a suite that constitutes the
Psychedelic entire frst side of the album.
Breakfast’
Meddle (1971) ‘One of These ‘Echoes’ (23:31) is the entire
Days,’ ‘Seamus,’ second side of the album.
‘Echoes’
Obscured by Clouds ‘When You’re
(1972) In,’ ‘Absolutely
Curtains’
The Dark Side of the ‘Time’ Waters wrote or co-wrote
Moon (1973) eight tracks, Gilmour four,
Wright four, Mason three.
Wish You Were Here ‘Shine On You Crazy
(1975) Diamond,’ (Parts I–IX),
constitutes more than half the
album’s running time and is
credited to Gilmour-Wright-
Waters. This is the frst album
for which Mason has no
composing credit.
Animals (1977) Composed by Waters except
‘Dogs’ by Gilmour/Waters.
This is the frst album for
which Wright has no
composing credit.
Gilmour-Mason- The Wall (1979) Twenty-six tracks, all written
Waters (1979–1983) by Waters except three
co-writes with Gilmour and
one with producer Bob Ezrin.
The Final Cut All tracks written by Waters.
(1983)

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 A saucerful of secrets

welded together.’49 Jenner furthers our understanding of Pink Floyd as creative collective, insist-
ing that Wright was the only technically profcient member of the group in their early days:

Rick was the musical backbone. He was the one who could help fnd the harmonies,
who could sing in tune, who could tell what notes they should be playing . . . Syd was
intuitive. Nick, when all’s said and done, was not a very good drummer, but he was
a very good Pink Floyd drummer. . . . Again, he was absolutely part of the favour.
You can’t imagine The Pink Floyd without those tom-toms and the beaters, that’s the
sound. That’s what’s so extraordinary: within all their capabilities and limitations, it’s
how it all worked. . . . It was a refection of using what they had, I mean, they were
amateurs!50

Upon replacing Barrett, it seems Gilmour was quick to intuit the strengths of the band and not
overwhelm them with his musical profciency. He was more than capable of the ‘wailing blues
solo’ that Barrett had neither the technique, nor it seems the interest, in playing, but in the
early years these types of solos only appear occasionally – on ‘Biding My Time,’ collected on
Relics but initially a part of The Man and the Journey, and uncharacteristic tracks from More such
as ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘More Blues.’ The dominant sound of Pink Floyd through the frst half
of the Gilmour-Mason-Waters-Wright period was of an almost wilful amateurism, or perhaps
restraint, in the playing – think of ‘One of These Days’ (1971), another group composition that
like ‘Careful . . .’ manages to make maximum efect of a foreboding musical atmosphere with
the barest of musical elements. There was a kind of virtuosity, perhaps even innovation in the
way in which epics such as ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echoes’ were put together, but The Dark
Side of the Moon was the ultimate proof of the value of their approach. The construction of the
album as a unifed suite of tracks, with its subtle concept of life’s stresses (such as time, money
and mental illness) is proof of consummate skill. Notwithstanding the 7/4 time signature of
‘Money’ and the subtleties of Wright’s chord progressions on ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ and ‘Us
and Them,’ the individual songs are relatively simple for progressive rock. One need only put
it next to contemporaneous releases by Yes or Genesis to understand why, of all the progressive
rock albums, this one managed to appeal to such a huge audience.
Despite there being only one track credited to the whole group, The Dark Side of the Moon
is very much a collective efort, with members of the group collaborating in various combina-
tions. As Mason recalls, ‘we would turn up for every session, everyone anxious to be involved
in whatever was happening,’ with mixes achieved via several pairs of hands, some belonging to
band members, poised over buttons and faders.51 It was never to be like this again.

A handful of fellow travellers and some ripples in the pond52

In the punk/post-punk era, collective songwriting credits became much more common. To
name just a few examples, groups such as U2, Pere Ubu, The Slits, The Raincoats, Sonic Youth
and R.E.M. all credited their compositions this way. These groups identifed with punk rock
and punk aesthetics in idiosyncratic ways, but perhaps crediting their compositions collectively
was in part a reaction to the star system, to the deifcation of creative geniuses that punk wished
to sweep away. It also had to do, no doubt, with the self-taught nature of many of these groups,
where music was created communally as members of a group taught each other and wrote
material as a process of discovery – ironically, much like Pink Floyd, one of the pariahs from
the old guard.

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 John Encarnacao

Of Pink Floyd’s contemporaries in the late 1960s, there are relatively few known to have
engaged with free improvisation or to have credited their compositions to the whole group.
Chapman compares ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ to The Velvet Underground’s ‘European Son,’ released
around the same time on The Velvet Underground & Nico,53 and ‘Sister Ray’ from the following
year’s White Light/White Heat. While the two groups were certainly working in relative isola-
tion – Pink Floyd in London and The Velvet Underground in New York – each was connected
to creative communities composed of artists from a range of disciplines. It is interesting to note
that both Pink Floyd and The Velvet Underground developed an improvisatory practice at least
partially in tandem with a live performance context that incorporated lights and projections –
for Velvet Underground, this was the Andy Warhol-conceived The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
While not exhaustive, the list of rock-oriented or rock-connected artists of the late 1960s
and 1970s that incorporated free improvisation into their practice includes The Stooges, Tim
Buckley, Can, Faust, Henry Cow and on occasion King Crimson. Though The Grateful Dead
are thought of as an improvising group, from my (admittedly incomplete) knowledge of them,
their music is rarely if ever freely improvised but rather works with drones and tropes from folk,
country and the blues. Birmingham’s Swell Maps and New York’s Sonic Youth are among the
prominent post-punk groups who incorporated free improvisation in their work. In the early
2000s there was a scene of groups in (but not necessarily from) New York City fusing free
improvisation, rock instrumentation, experimentation with electronics, and occasionally song
forms that included Gang Gang Dance, Animal Collective, Black Dice and Akron/Family.
While I am not arguing that Pink Floyd directly inspired all of this activity, I do think that
they put this kind of collective practice, born of and incorporating free improvisation, into the
mainstream. Even in what seems in retrospect like the group’s doldrum days with respect to
commercial success (1968–1972), the group’s albums never failed to reach the Top 10 in the
United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. Atom Heart Mother, an unwieldy album whose
side 1-length title track employed choral and orchestral forces, was a UK number one. Their
chart placings in the United States were respectable and their live following there substantial,
despite a lack of support from their record label until a change of management at Capitol
Records coincided with negotiations for the release of The Dark Side of the Moon.54
To my mind this is the articulation of Born’s (2017) fourth plane of social mediation – not
so much the group’s success itself and the ways in which it may have shaped industry practices
but the slow seepage of avant-garde elements into the soil. The fowers continue to bloom in
bedrooms, garages and studios around the world. Pink Floyd’s massive success and their uncom-
promising back-catalogue that precedes Dark Side of the Moon means that the infuence of their
collective, improvisational approach, while not ubiquitous, has become institutional.

Notes
1 Simmons, S. (1999). ‘Troubles behind the Wall’, MOJO, December. Transcribed at inkfoydz.com/
interviews/pink-foyd-troubles-behind-the-wall-mojo-magazine-december-1999/.
2 Lena, J. C. (2012). Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, pages 2–3.
3 Toop, D. (2016). Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom. New York and
London: Bloomsbury, page 19.
4 Born, G. (2017). ‘After Relational Aesthetics: Improvised Music, the Social, and (Re)Theorizing the
Aesthetic’, in Born, G. and Reinharz, J. (eds.), Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, pages 34–58. Quote is on page 33.
5 Ibid:43.
6 The concept of ‘imagined communities’ is probably extrapolated from the work of Benedict Anderson
(Imagined Communities, 1991), though Anderson is not mentioned in Born’s (2017) paper.

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7 When about 18, I was at what seemed to me a quite adult and hip gathering. A conversation about
Pink Floyd ensued at one point, and a woman maybe ten years older than I  ofered this: ‘Put on
Ummagumma while you’re tripping and you don’t know where you are!’ At my naïve age, it was easy for
me to believe that we were both part of an enlightened and alternative strata of society that took drugs
and listened to far-out music such as Pink Floyd; the reference to a relatively obscure album clinched
the deal.
8 See, Denley, J. (2009). ‘Networks, Playfulness and Collectivity: Improv in Australia, 1972–2007’,
in Priest, G. (ed.), Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, pages
135–153; Op. cit. Toop (2016); Bailey, D. (1992). Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, revised
edition. Boston: Da Capo Press.
9 Op. cit. Bailey (1992):xi–xii.
10 Eric Clapton would play lead guitar on Roger Waters’ frst solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking
(1984), perhaps underlining the transition from the non-idiomatic improvisation of Pink Floyd’s early
days to a practice deeply embedded in the idiom of rock.
11 Peter Jenner quoted in Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. Dodd, P. (ed.).
London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, page 31.
12 Grubbs, D. (2014). Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties and Sound Recording. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, pages 111–112.
13 Cavanagh, J. (2003). The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. 33 1/3 series, #6. New York and London: Blooms-
bury, page 11.
14 This – that the abandonment of known rhythmic, harmonic and timbral tropes itself constitutes an
idiom – is sometimes the reading made by students of free improvisation in a tertiary setting, in my
experience at least. See Encarnacao, J., Smyly, B. and Brooks, M. (2020). ‘Free Improvisation: What
Is It, Can It Be Taught, and What Are the Benefts?’, in Encarnacao, J. and Blom, D. (eds.), Teaching
and Evaluating Music Performance at University: Beyond the Conservatory Model. London and New York:
Routledge.
15 Op. cit. Toop (2016):3–4.
16 Ibid:15.
17 And these are indications rather than absolutes; I have been involved with freely improvised music that
has drifted through pulsed sections and tonal centres.
18 Hubbs, N. (2000 [2008]). ‘The Imagination of Pop-Rock Criticism’, in Everett, W. (ed.), Expression in
Pop-Rock Music: Critical and Analytical Essays. New York and London: Garland, pages 215–238.
19 Jenner quoted in Op. cit. Mason (2004):31.
20 Chapman, R. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London: Faber and Faber, page 99.
21 The video footage of ‘Nick’s Boogie’ is included in the DVD and Blu-Ray of The Early Years: 1965–67
Cambridge St/ation (2016), and the John Latham session is on CD 2 of the same box set. ‘Nick’s Boogie’
and an early version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ were recorded for Peter Whitehead’s flm Tonight Let’s
All Make Love in London, though only very short passages were used. This music was not ofcially
released until 1991, as Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London . . . Plus by the See For Miles label.
22 Rowe quoted in Op. cit. Chapman (2010):98–99.
23 Op. cit. Mason (2004):31.
24 Op. cit. Chapman (2010):99.
25 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):49–50.
26 This consideration of improvisation in Piper builds upon on my analyses (2013). Punk Aesthetics and
New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road. London and New York: Routledge, looks not only at early
Pink Floyd in this respect but releases from the same period by Patty Waters, John Fahey, The Incred-
ible String Band, and Tim Buckley.
27 Op. cit. Chapman (2010):142.
28 Ibid:106; Op. cit. Cavanagh (2010):43, 83.
29 Jenner quoted in Op. cit. Cavanagh (2010):20.
30 For example, the live version of ‘Matilda Mother’ from a concert in Stockholm from The Early Years:
1965–67 Cambridge St/ation and the live-in-the-studio version of ‘Astronomy Domine’ taped for the
BBC’s Look of the Week found on the same box set’s DVD and Blu-Ray.
31 The use of a bow on the bass here is roughly contemporary to Jimmy Page’s better-known similar tech-
nique on the guitar with the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin, but after The Creation’s Eddie Phillips.
Buckley, P. (ed.). (2003). The Rough Guide to Rock. London and New York: Rough Guides, page 246.
32 Op. cit. Grubbs (2014):111.

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 John Encarnacao

33 Previous references to ‘Nick’s Boogie’ are to the edit contained on the Early Years 1965–67: Cambridge
St/ation collection. The full audio of the session, with live-in-the-studio footage intercut with other
period footage (assumedly from Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London), is available at youtube.com/
watch?v=ofEd6zSGeSc. It is a remarkable and very early document of Pink Floyd’s improvisatory prac-
tice, consisting of two performances (‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Nick’s Boogie’) that together run for
half an hour.
34 On The Early Years 1965–67: Cambridge St/ation, CD 2. The music was made for Latham’s flm Speak
but was just one of a number of musical options that Latham declined to use. See Op. cit. Toop (2016).
35 It is quite possible that members of Pink Floyd were exposed to Sun Ra’s work through the connec-
tions between New York’s ESP record label and the hip bookshops – Indica and Better Books – that
were underground hubs in London in the mid-1960s. See Op. cit. Mason (2004):38, and Weiss, J.
(2012). Always In Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’ [sic]: The Most Outrageous Label in America.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, page 281. Steve Stollman, the brother of ESP’s Bernard
Stollman, was based in London for a time, and curated the events known as The Trip, at which Pink
Floyd played some early shows. He invited Peter Jenner, thus resulting in the latter co-managing the
band – see Op. cit. Mason (2004):26–27 (though Mason gets the brothers confused).
36 Op. cit. Mason (2004):118–119.
37 The composition of ‘Seabirds’ is credited to Waters alone. Online chatter indicates a broadly held
belief that ‘Seabirds’ is actually another take of ‘Quicksilver’, which is reasonable given the similarities
in instrumentation and if we understand ‘Quicksilver’ as some kind of framed (rather than completely
free) improvisation. There is an unauthorised YouTube clip of what purports to be ‘Seabirds’ (youtube.
com/watch?v=Myu5_VhKJpU), posted in 2013, years before the release of 1969: Dramatis/ation. The
song heard in the background of the flm’s dialogue features singing. Perhaps this is the song ‘Seabirds’
written by Waters, and the track on the box set is misnamed. This would explain the apparently errant
credit.
38 The YouTube clip is here: youtube.com/watch?v=I4Ydr7MZLHw; the piece is briefy
discussed here: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/corrosion_in_the_pink_room_little_known_
pink_foyd_performance and here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unreleased_songs_recorded_by_
Pink_Floyd#%22Corrosion_in_the_Pink_Room%22.
39 See Op. cit. Encarnacao (2013):143–145, for a fuller exposition of the use and efects of found voices
in recordings.
40 Op. cit. Denley (2009):150, 138.
41 Op. cit. Toop (2016b):27.
42 Ibid:19; also see Rae, G. (2011). ‘Sartre, Group Formations, and Practical Freedom: The Other in the
“Critique of Dialectical Reason”’, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 3(2):183–206, especially
pages 192–193.
43 Op. cit. Rae (2011):193. Rae is glossing Sartre here.
44 Op. cit. Toop (2016b):3.
45 Lewis, G. E. (1996). ‘Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’, Black
Music Research Journal, 16(1):91–122. The citation is on page 95.
46 Setlist statistics are from setlist.fm/stats/pink-foyd-13d6adc5.html?
47 Kopp, B. (2018). Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to the Dark Side of the Moon. Lanham, Boulder,
New York and London: Rowman and Littlefeld, page 92.
48 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):58–64.
49 Ibid:77.
50 Jenner quoted in Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):95–96.
51 Op. cit. Mason (2004):168, 172.
52 Recordings by Swell Maps, Tim Buckley and Animal Collective (among others) that feature free
improvisation are analysed in depth in my (2013) Punk Aesthetics and New Folk.
53 Released in March 1967 in the United States but not in Europe until October 1967. It is worth noting
that the album was completed in August 1966. See, Witts, R. (2006). The Velvet Underground. Icons of
Pop Music series. London: Equinox, page 115.
54 Op. cit. Mason (2004):82–183.

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 3
DAVID GILMOUR
Defning the ‘melodic’ guitarist

Richard Perks

Introduction
David Gilmour is frequently referred to by fans, journalists and musicians alike as the quintes-
sential ‘melodic’ guitarist. He has been the subject of countless guitar magazine interviews, tel-
evision documentaries and tuition materials,1 addressing both his approach as a guitarist and his
role within Pink Floyd. In a column entitled ‘The Greatest Guitarists of All Time,’ The Telegraph
asserts that ‘Gilmour’s elegant solos, by turns dreamy and melodic, buoyed Pink Floyd’s music.’2
This is a bold statement; nonetheless, it indicates that Gilmour’s guitar contributions are consid-
ered by many a central aspect of the band’s identity. Rolling Stone echoes this sentiment, claiming
‘his sprawling, elegant, relentlessly melodic solos were as bracing a wake-up call as those alarm
clocks on The Dark Side of the Moon,’3 and Total Guitar magazine once hailed him as ‘the god-
father of melodic lead guitar playing.’4 In an interview with Guitar Interactive magazine,5 Jamie
Humphries – former guitarist with The Australian Pink Floyd and tutor behind multiple instruc-
tional DVDs on Gilmour’s playing – comments,67 ‘what set Gilmour head and shoulders above
other guitarists for me were his melodies. His solos were extensions of the songs; melody lines in
their own right.’8 Gilmour also acknowledges this trait in his playing himself; when previously
asked to list his strengths as a guitarist, he answered, ‘Oh, I’d say my sense of melody.’9 Each of
these positions infer that this ‘sense of melody’ forms a substantial and distinguishable attribute
of Gilmour’s playing style; there is little doubt of the consensus amongst guitar afcionados, and
furthermore, we know it is a quality valued from his emic perspective as performer. But what
exactly do we mean by describing him as a ‘melodic’ guitarist?10
Gilmour’s output with Pink Floyd – comprising over 15 studio albums and live releases – has,
over the years, encompassed and combined multiple idioms (including rock, blues, folk, funk,
ambient soundscape and so forth), each carrying their own style-specifc conventions, to form
the band’s eclectic, progressive sound/s. Furthermore, Gilmour’s function as guitarist in Pink
Floyd is manifold, ranging from the provision of foundational rhythm guitars and textural aug-
mentation to contrapuntal lead-lines, prominent solos and exploratory improvisations. What,
therefore, does ‘melodic’ symbolise in relation to Gilmour’s clearly varied role as guitarist in
Pink Floyd? Are his guitar solos the primary source of consideration? Or is there a signifcance
to the many underpinning and connecting guitar parts? Do we identify ‘melodic’ passages
purely in terms of isolated successions of pitch? Or do the rhythmic properties determine each

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-6 89
 Richard Perks

phrase’s efcaciousness? Are we moved by the nuanced infections which embellish individual
lines? Or instead do we respond more to their physical placement within the framework of
the song? Do we favour the inclusion of repeated, recognisable – ‘singable’ – motifs? Or does
the manipulation of tension and release play an equally crucial role? The list goes on. When
pondering these questions, and those they subsequently evoke, one can quickly appreciate that
the meaning of ‘melodic’ in this context becomes ambiguous. More pertinently, the answers to
them are almost certainly subjective, depending on the combined musical preferences, expec-
tations and responses of the listener.11 The purpose of this investigation, of course, is not to
establish a universal defnition of melody (such a task would warrant its own – somewhat large –
academic study) but rather to determine the contributing factors which led to Gilmour’s playing
being considered ‘melodic’ – encompassing both the musical aesthetic as well as his performative
approach as a guitarist – and explore the extent to which his ‘melodic functionality’ impacts the
music of Pink Floyd.
This chapter will consider Gilmour’s guitar playing from his initial musical infuences
through to his prominent position within Pink Floyd, contemplating how his highly individual
style manifests itself within the milieu of the band. Comprising a musicological and aesthetic
discussion, a detailed examination of Gilmour’s use of sound/s and equipment, phrasing, note
choice, playing technique and compositional strategies will be presented to unpack the notion
of the ‘melodic’ guitarist and draw conclusions as to why Gilmour is considered by so many –
particularly within the guitar community – the paragon example.

Infuences and learning to play

Gilmour has been described as ‘a fery, blues-based soloist in a band that hardly ever played the
blues.’12 On listening to his extensive output with Pink Floyd, however, this seems somewhat
simplistic, as there clearly appear to be other sources of inspiration inhabiting his guitar work.
To formulate a deeper understanding of Gilmour’s playing style, therefore, we must frst con-
sider his musical infuences, as well as his approach/es to learning – and advancing on – the
instrument.
Gilmour is predominantly a self-taught guitarist and cites The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide by
Pete Seeger – an instructional record with accompanying booklet – as his ‘only actual instruc-
tion,’13 from which he learnt to tune the guitar, play basic chord shapes and sing. His early
afnity for blues is made clear when he states, ‘When I  was young I  actually sat down and
learned many of the classic blues solos by Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix as well as studying
old Howlin’ Wolf records.’14 He reiterates the impact of this idiom on his playing later in an
interview with Guitar World, where he openly exclaims ‘all my guitar playing is rooted in the
blues.’15 Interestingly however, when asked by Billboard if there is ‘something of a blues guitarist’
in him, he replies:

I am a lover of all sorts of diferent music. I love blues and every piece of music that
I have listened to has become an infuence. But you’re right, there’s a distinct blues
infuence within what I do but at the same time I am not frightened to step out of
that. I don’t even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right
at the moment.16

Gilmour’s response implies that he does not reduce his musical identity to that of a single
label – ‘a blues guitarist’ – rather, his playing has been shaped by a broader range of infuences,
and he readily embraces them all. He suggests that what he plays is determined by the musical

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context – drawing from whatever aspects of various musical language/s are at his disposal that
he ‘feels’ are appropriate to the situation – rather than by a commitment to adhere to any sense
of stylistic authenticity. This is confrmed in a later interview, when he says:

I think the same sources are there that have always been there at the heart of every-
thing I do. . . . Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was the frst single that I bought
and Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was a major thing as well. . . . But there are a
thousand other infuences that have sort of gone together – folk music, Pete Seeger,
Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, John Fahey, Joni Mitchell – there are thousands of
players and singers who have directly infuenced the music that I make and who have
sort of created the bedrock of what you might call my style.17

In addition to his obvious attraction to the guitar-centric styles of blues and rock ‘n’ roll, the
fact that Gilmour emphasises the infuence of folk music here provides an inkling of his deep-
rooted appreciation of song. He also lists Bob Dylan amongst his early musical infuences, about
whom he says ‘the melodies and the words just shoot out like an arrow,’18 highlighting the efect
that powerful songwriting had on him in his formative years. This idea is reafrmed once again
when he claims, ‘from the beginning of learning the guitar, I was learning singing as well . . .
erm . . . and singing is just as important to me.’19
When asked specifcally about other guitarists he admires, he reveals, ‘I do like Eddie Van
Halen’s playing a lot. Of course, I can’t do that at all. I don’t have the fngers for it.’20 He also
cites Jef Beck as his ‘sort of guitar hero,’21 before continuing:

He’s the one that I think pushes the boundaries. He’s consistently exciting. Jef can
play damn fast, he can do speed, but he chooses not to most of the time and that’s
what impresses me. It’s what he chooses to leave out rather than what he chooses to
stick in.22

On his personal approach to practise, he confesses ‘I don’t have a very disciplined approach
to practicing or anything . . . about once a year I have sort of an attack of a guilty conscience
about my abilities, so then I’ll sit and run through a couple of scales. But generally, I’m not
too ambitious about that sort of thing.’23 He reiterates this point some years later, adding ‘I can
practice for months, and I don’t get any quicker. I’ve given that up years ago. And I can’t be
bothered with too much practicing, I’m afraid. I should, but I’m terribly lazy about it.’24 His
musical priorities become even clearer when considering his declaration:

I like to approach every track and every solo I do with an open mind. I don’t really
have any kind of general philosophy of playing, I don’t think . . . I don’t really approach
anything with any great plan, except that I work on the sound until it sounds right
to me.25

From these remarks, it appears that Gilmour is profoundly more concerned with exploring
the sonorities the guitar has to ofer – and how they might feed into a specifc track, or guitar
part, within the overall musical space – than with realising his ‘virtuosic’ potential. Gilmour’s
eclectic perspective, his negation of technical virtuosity as a personal goal and the notion that
guitar playing is somehow inseparable from song therefore collectively provide a signifcant
insight into his approach to the instrument and perhaps together form the ‘genome’ of his
ingrained ‘sense of melody.’

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 Richard Perks

Sound
Gilmour’s ‘sound’ is the envy of many a guitarist.26 It is perhaps the quality most admired by his
peers and successors, elevating him to the rank of ‘guitarist’s guitarist’ – a guitar hero amongst
guitar heroes. In a discussion of his ‘top 10 guitarists,’ Dweezil Zappa describes Gilmour as ‘one
of those guitarists whose tone can be easily recognized,’ later adding, ‘Gilmour’s tone is one
of the most relaxing guitar tones ever.’27 Dave Mustaine, lead guitarist of Megadeth, further
claims ‘David Gilmour can do more with one note than most players can do with the whole
fretboard,’28 and Guitar Player Magazine once praised him as ‘Tone God’ on the front cover of a
special edition.29 So, what makes Gilmour’s sound so distinguishable? How does he achieve it?
And to what extent does it relate to the conception of his ‘melodic’ guitar playing?
Whilst predominantly famous for playing Fender Stratocasters,30 Gilmour’s selection of gui-
tar to suit each track – and even each part – has seen him use of an array of instruments in the
studio, spanning everything from the legendary ‘Black Strat’31 to a 1955 Les Paul, a Martin
D-35 to a Gibson J-200 Celebrity acoustic and nylon-sting Classical guitars to Weissenborn
and Fender lap steels. In an interview with Guitar World, on preparing to record lead-guitar
parts, he asserts, ‘I try to live with the track for quite a long time before I even touch a guitar
that’s going to play a solo on it . . . when I go for a solo, I try to make sure the sound is really
together and well thought out, because very often the frst take is the best take.’32 His choice of
guitar in a live setting is equally considered, and his arsenal of touring instruments has evolved
substantially over time. The Dark Side of the Moon touring rig (1974) included multiple Fender
Stratocasters, a Fender Telecaster, a Bill Lewis custom model and two Fender 1000 twin-
neck pedal steels; by the time of The Wall tour (1980–81), the rig had seen the addition of a
Fender Esquire, Gibson Les Paul Goldtop, Fender Baritone VI, Jedson lap steel, an Ovation
1619–4 acoustic, Ovation 1613–4 nylon-string, a Martin 12-string acoustic and numerous
extra Stratocasters.33
Although this indicates a conscious contemplation of which guitar to use in advance of
recording and performing live, in an interview with Rolling Stone – discussing the auctioning of
120 pieces from his guitar collection for charity in 2019 – Gilmour rejects the notion of needing
the ‘right guitar’ to perform a certain song:

If I need a particular guitar, I’ll go out and buy another one. They are the tools of
my trade. They have given me music, but in the end, they are the tools that I use. . . .
Guitars are special in what they give you, but I’m not overly sentimental about the
qualities that some people think become imbued in one particular instrument itself.
The guitars that I play on a lot tend to be the ones that are closest.34

He later adds, ‘I’ve got one or two of my own more recent Fender-issue Black Strats, which
are brilliantly good, and I’m happy when they hop into my fngers. Sometimes I can’t even tell
whether I’m playing the frst original one or these other ones.’35 This outlook suggests that, for
Gilmour, whilst the type and/or model of guitar might be important to inject a certain guitar-
specifc character – for example, the use of a Stratocaster on a track for the ‘tone of a Strat’ – he
doesn’t believe in individual instruments possessing overtly ‘defnitive’ timbral properties.
In addition to choice of guitar is that of the periphery equipment used for augmentation,36
more specifcally amplifers and efects pedals. Phil Taylor – Gilmour’s guitar technician for over
20 years – stresses the importance of direct amplifcation to Gilmour when he remarks, ‘He likes
to start with a very clean, undistorted guitar sound. All distortion, delays, compression, choruses

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 David Gilmour

and so on are added via various efect pedals.’37 Studio engineer Alan Parsons corroborates this
when discussing the recording of The Dark Side of the Moon:

David was very much in control of his sound system. We rarely added efects to his
guitar in the control room. Generally speaking, the sound on the album is pretty much
what came out of his amp. As I recall, he used a Hiwatt stack, a Fuzz Face and Italian-
made delay unit called a Binson Echorec.38

A notable quality of Gilmour’s electric guitar sound, both live and recorded, stems from the
fact that he works at high volume. His standard live setup for many years with Pink Floyd used
colossal amplifcation, combining: a mid-seventies Alembic F2-B bass preamp, the power stage
of six 100-watt Hiwatt heads, two WEM and two Marshall 4x12 cabs and three custom-built
rotating speaker cabinets. He confrms this when refecting on the live performances with Pink
Floyd: ‘You know, once you’ve had that guitar amp up so loud on the stage, where you can lean
back and the volume will stop you from falling backward, that’s a hard drug to kick.’39 Likewise,
in the recording studio, he often used 1970s Hiwatt combos – renowned for being especially
loud and having high ‘headroom.’40 In a discussion about the recording of The Dark Side of the
Moon, Gilmour stresses, ‘to get that kind of singing sustain, you really need to play loud – at or
near the threshold.’41 Using highly powered valve amplifcation dramatically afects the respon-
siveness of the instrument, directly informing the player’s touch, which in turn impacts the
aesthetic character and tone generated. By playing at high volume, therefore, Gilmour actively
alters the ecological afordance of his guitar setup to achieve his desired ‘sound.’42
Gilmour is also celebrated for his use of efects pedals to create diferent timbres, enriching
the soundscape/s and textural aspects of the band. This can be clearly heard across Pink Floyd’s
studio output, from the ambient tremolo and reverbs of ‘Echoes,’43 to the psychedelic phasing
of the opening guitars to ‘Have a Cigar,’44 the talk box emulation of animal squeals in ‘Pigs,’45
to the strong rhythmic delays in ‘Run Like Hell.’46 His ‘standard’ live efects setup initially com-
prised a Dunlop Fuzz Face, a Dunlop ‘Cry Baby’ Wah-Wah, a Univox Uni-Vibe and a Binson
Echorec II but over time expanded to incorporate many more.47 The 1977 Animals tour saw
the frst addition of the famous Pete Cornish efects-board to Gilmour’s live rig.48 This pro-
vided him with an interface to negotiate a larger assortment of efects more easily, giving him
greater control over sound-transitions on stage; he subsequently used Cornish efects-boards
on many Pink Floyd recording sessions and live tours.49 His efects setup has been through a
multitude of substantial modifcations and/or re-designs over the years and has included the use
of multiple pedalboards, large rack-mounted units and sophisticated routing systems. It can be
safely assumed therefore, that experimentation with efects has – to some degree – informed
Gilmour’s ‘sound.’
On incorporating efects into his sound, Gilmour comments:

I don’t have a very precise method of doing anything. . . . I don’t have any magical
efects or anything that helps me to get my particular sound. . . . I just keep fddling
with the little knobs on diferent boxes until it sounds right to me.50

He reafrms this far from alembicated, ‘trial-and-error’–based approach when he admits ‘I

also will use any gadget or device that I fnd that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the
guitar that I want to get.’51 On a discussion of his use of a DigiTech Whammy pedal in later Pink
Floyd tracks, such as ‘Marooned,’52 Gilmour claims it creates a ‘whole extra dimension’53 and

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confesses ‘I love driving people crazy. They come and say “How the fuck did you do that? I’ve
been working for months trying to get that” and I say, “It’s just a pedal”.’54 Further examples of
his experimentation can be found in: ‘Take It Back,’55 where he uses what he describes as the
‘pretty bizarre confguration’ of an EBow on an acoustic guitar – processed through a Zoom
efects pedal – to create a textural loop of ambient volume swells;56 and ‘Keep Talking,’57 where
he includes a talk box efect towards the end of the track. Table 3.1 illustrates his appetite for
varied guitar timbres, providing a basic overview of the guitars and efects used on Pink Floyd’s
1994 album, The Division Bell.
Each guitar type in Table 3.1 has a designated symbol;58 the combination of efects used in
conjunction with each guitar are listed under each track title; if a similar guitar type is used on
the same track with a diferent combination of efects, it is shown in another shade. Whilst the
precise settings of each of the efects pedals, guitar pickups and so forth cannot be determined
from this diagram, it can be seen clearly that Gilmour uses an array of timbres across the album,
as well as within individual songs, and it is evident that he does not favour any one ‘fxed’ guitar
timbre, comprising a specifc combination of guitar and efects.
Another variable which afects guitar tone, though comparatively minor, is choice of string
gauge. Since the recording of The Wall, Gilmour has exclusively used a customised string-set on
his Stratocasters (GHS Boomers, gauge 0.010–0.048),59 in which the bottom three (wound) strings
are notably heavier than those found in a regular pack. This provides more ‘warmth’ in lower reg-
isters (i.e. greater bass and low-mid frequency response) whilst still allowing comfortable bending
on the top three (plain) strings. Furthermore, the second and third strings are slightly lighter than
those found in a regular gauge – perhaps to help facilitate his penchant for wider string bends (see
‘Playing Technique’) – thus increasing the overall ‘brightness’ in higher registers.60
Despite his unquestionable interest in advancing his sonic palette, encompassing a wide-
ranging selection of guitars and amplifers, an experimental use of efects and so forth, Phil
Taylor maintains that the primary source of Gilmour’s distinctive sound is Gilmour himself:

I think it’s just pretty much him. He is obviously using a couple of efects, like a Big
Muf and a delay, but it really is just his fngers, his vibrato, his choice of notes and how
he sets his efects. I fnd it extraordinary when people think they can copy his sound
by duplicating his gear. In reality, no matter how well you duplicate the equipment,
you will never be able to duplicate the personality.61

Gilmour also adopts this position, asserting:

One thing about my guitar sounds – I think I could walk into any music shop any-
where and with a guitar of the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound
just like me. There’s no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound. It
comes of my fngers.62

He reiterates this view in an interview with Guitarist magazine, afrming, ‘My sound is what
it is because of the way my hands and fngers are made, and due to my musical taste as well.
I can’t sound like anything else. That’s just how I sound.’63 He ofers further insight in an inter-
view with the BBC (speaking whilst demonstrating minute string bends), when he explains:

It’s the tiniest little things, which is what makes the guitar . . . sort of . . . so personal,
that you can add a hundred diferent tiny infections to . . . to what you’re doing all the
time. And that, I guess is what gives people their individual tone, sound.64

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 Table 3.1 Timbral variation of guitar tracks throughout The Division Bell

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Cluster What Do Poles Apart Marooned A Great Day Wearing Take it Coming Back Keep Talking Lost for High
One You Want for Freedom the Inside Back to Life Words Hopes
from Me Out

Electric
Type of Guitar

Steel String Acoustic

Nylon String Acoustic

Lap/Pedal Steel

Clean

Reverb*

Chorus
95

(as applied to each guitar type)

Delay(s)/Echo

Phaser/Flanger
Effects/Trimbers

Gain(crunch)

Gain(Fuzz/Distortion)

Tremolo

Whammy

Talk Box

Slidet†

EBow
* Reverb is added to most individual track, as well as globally, in mixing and mastering stages; what is indicated here is the use of reverb on the guitar sound as an obvious
textural addition.
† Whilst the slide and EBow are devices used for articulation, rather than effects, their impact on the timbre is significant so have been included here.
 Richard Perks

It is clear then that Gilmour deliberately employs multiple ‘tools,’ utilising whatever ‘device’
is necessary, to tailor his guitar timbre/s to suit each song, album, or tour, and he exerts ‘artis-
tic licence’ over his setup when establishing the sonic environment he requires in each case.
He maintains, however, that, regardless of whichever confguration of equipment he uses, his
‘sound’ remains tangible and perceptible throughout. Evidently, therefore, for Gilmour, ‘sound’
defnes something more than the mere sonic qualities of the guitars, amplifers and/or efects
used; it signifes the product of a combination of elements from a more complex ‘performance
ecosystem,’65 comprising instrumental tone, peripheral equipment, volume, string-gauge, tech-
nique, infection, nuance, micro-timing and so forth – at the heart of which lies physical touch.
Furthermore, if we assume the delineation of a player’s sound as the gestalt of various subjective
material, corporeal and ‘micro-musical’ properties, it follows that it must form an integral sub-
component of their broader musical vernacular, informing all facets of their performance on
that instrument. Thus, one may rationally deduce that it is in fact Gilmour’s individual sound
that forms the basis – the essence even – of his ‘melodic’ playing style.

Lead-lines and solos: characteristics and content

Gilmour’s lead guitar work stands out to most listeners – almost certainly to fellow guitarists – as
one of Pink Floyd’s primary ‘calling cards.’ His seamless interweaving of lyrical lines juxtaposed
against edgy, raw, powerful outbursts provides an assortment to satisfy the most ardent guitar
critic. This section will examine various aspects of his lead guitar playing in terms of musical
substance, and consider how each may contribute to his ‘melodic’ embodiment.

Phrasing
Gilmour consistently constructs musical phrasing that resonates with the listener. The origins
of such phrasing lay in the blues and rock ‘n’ roll conventions of his early musical infuences,
which he has subsequently mapped into the more eclectic and transformative context of Pink
Floyd; aspects such as ‘call and response’ and the inclusion of pre-learned motifs – ‘licks’ – are
clearly discernible in many of Gilmour’s lead guitar contributions to the band. A suitable refer-
ence is the guitar solo to ‘Money’ (3’06”),66 where the chord structure comprises an altered and
expanded (24-bar) blues in B Aeolian. The opening passage is notated in Figure 3.1.67
This solo continues to explore blues-infused phrases, with the notion of call and response
present throughout. In every pass of the 24-bar chord progression, the band perform a 2-bar
phrase in unison (bars 19–20), which is emphasised by Gilmour via his solo – each time in dif-
ferent registers, using various articulations – suggesting a more holistic awareness of melodic

Figure 3.1 Opening of guitar solo to ‘Money,’ illustrating ‘call and response’

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interaction. An alternate form of call and response, native to older blues styles, is one where
each vocal line is ‘answered’ by an improvised guitar fll. Gilmour applies this device to vari-
ous Pink Floyd songs, even when the overall style of the track is not of an overtly blues nature.
A standout example can be heard throughout the verse sections of ‘What Do You Want from
Me,’68 where over the slow funk-oriented groove in E minor, he replies to each vocal phrase
with a markedly blues-infused guitar lick.
Gilmour’s lead guitar phrasing, however, encompasses more than a simple re-hash of blues
vernacular; in an interview with Guitar World Magazine, he stresses:

Blues lines as such are fairly specifc. It’s like, you’ve got a series of things that you can
put together in diferent combinations but there aren’t that many moves you can make.
Instead, I try to approach things . . . from a more melodic standpoint and just work on
it until it sounds . . . nice. . . . I try not to be too tied down by rules and regulations.
So the blues infuence may come out at times but I like to think that I come at it from
a diferent angle.69

This reafrms the idea that, for Gilmour, the creative focus when constructing guitar parts
is on the global musical efect relative to the song or performance context rather than pertain-
ing to stylistic conventions. Furthermore, Gilmour takes advantage of motivic development
within certain solos, where a fragment of musical information (for example, a rhythmic cell,
pre-learned lick, entire phrase etc.) reappears, expands and/or evolves throughout – notable
examples include: ‘Time,’70 ‘Dogs’71 and ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.’72 This exhibits a
diversity in his approach to phrasing and again suggests a wider pool of idiomatic infuence.
In addition, there is frequently a vocal-esque (or ‘lyrical’) quality to his lead-line contribu-
tions, a conscious aspect to his approach, about which he says, ‘I just try and make nice, sort of,
melodies with it, like try to make it sing, I try to imagine that the guitar’s kind of singing.’73 The
lead guitar phrasing in ‘Speak to Me/Breathe’ typifes this idea,74 in keeping with the nature of
the title; see Figure 3.2 from the opening section (1’31”).
Created via an overdubbed combination of guitar (with Uni-Vibe and volume pedals) and a
pedal steel, the net efect is that of ambient, vocal-esque melodies, which reinforce the underly-
ing harmony. The main guitar lines continue throughout the track and, after the vocal enters,
create contrapuntal complementation (again resembling a type of call and response) which
interlaces with the structural fabric of the song. A  similar approach can be heard over two
decades later in the lap steel solo to ‘High Hopes’ (5’07”) where, again refecting the title of
the track, he adds tension and thematic development by playing in an increasingly high register
whilst continually signalling – ‘calling back’ – to previous phrases.75 Though somewhat sty-
listically removed when compared to ‘Speak to Me/Breathe’ – and providing a very diferent
musical function – it demonstrates Gilmour’s lasting commitment to making the guitar ‘sing’

Figure 3.2 Excerpt from ‘Speak to Me/Breathe,’ illustrating ‘vocal-esque’ phrasing

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when formulating his lead-guitar parts and his afnity to an overriding ‘lyrical’ playing style. His
attraction to vocal-esque phrasing is further revealed by his use of the guitar to underpin main
vocal lines, playing in unison (for example, the verse sections to ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part
2’)76 and, conversely, on occasion in live settings, when he concurrently vocalises the guitar solo
melody (for example, ‘Wish You Were Here’).77

Note choice
Considering the infuence from blues and rock’n’roll guitarists mentioned previously, it is not
surprising that many of Gilmour’s solos gravitate primarily around the minor pentatonic scale.
Interestingly, however, in accordance with the band’s ostensible preference towards Dorian and/
or Aeolian harmony, Gilmour routinely adds the second/ninth scale degree to phrases played
over the tonic chord (Im), generating a hexatonic note-pool. The following excerpts illustrate
his use of minor pentatonic to ‘blanket-cover’ the harmonic sequence, with the addition of the
ninth when playing over the tonic.
The guitar solo from ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ provides a suitable point to start
(see Figure 3.3).78 Three bars after the entry (2’10”), the ninth (E) is emphasised as part of a
two-tone bend, which is gradually released back to the seventh (C) and is referenced again as
part of the scalic run in bar 5.
The outro section of ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones)’ (10’21”),79 provides a further example. In
this excerpt the ninth (F#) is emphasised either side of the minor third (G), before resolving to
the root note (E) – The E♭ at the end of the phrase acts as a chromatic passing note and again
refects his blues-esque infuence (see Figure 3.4).
Incidentally, Gilmour rarely ratifes the sixth scale degree over minor tonic chords, advocat-
ing an air of ambiguity between Dorian and Aeolian sensibilities, perhaps to allow for more
fuid transitions when modal interchange between the two key centres occurs. His penchant
for adding the ninth most likely stems from aural absorption; the fact that this interval is

Figure 3.3 Opening section of guitar solo in ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’ illustrating use of 9th
over tonic minor chord

Figure 3.4 Excerpt from outro guitar solo in ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones),’ illustrating use of 9th on tonic
minor chord

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 David Gilmour

Figure 3.5 Opening four bars of frst guitar solo in ‘Comfortably Numb,’ illustrating use of arpeggiated
triads

Figure 3.6 Excerpt from guitar solo in ‘Time,’ illustrating an alternative use of arpeggiated triads

accommodated within both Dorian and Aeolian key centres, and that it yields a similar degree
of melodic tension in either case, provides him with a relatively ‘safe’ – aurally instinctive –
option to complement minor pentatonic based phrases over the Im chord.
Another illustrious trait of Gilmour’s soloing is his use of arpeggiated triads. Their incorpo-
ration in his phraseology creates more pronounced vertical movement, which is often straddled
by scalic embellishment. This approach is epitomised in the opening to the frst guitar solo in
‘Comfortably Numb’ (2’05”),80 see Figure 3.5.
This solo is performed over an abridged version of the chorus chord sequence in D major (a
modulation from the relative minor, B Aeolian, used for the verse sections). Gilmour opens with
a ‘raked’ tonic triad, landing boldly on the major third (F#) on the frst beat of bar 1, and after a
brief departure via the fourth (G), pre-empts chord V in bar 2, over which he plays a decorated
descending A major arpeggio. This phrase is echoed in bars 3 and 4, with slight rhythmic varia-
tion and further scalic embellishment of the splayed arpeggio over the V chord. The IV(b) chord
towards the end of bar 4 acts as a suitable pivot to the ♭VII chord which follows in bar 5 (C major –
efecting modal interchange to D Mixolydian), over which the lead line again emphasises a chord
tone (G). Gilmour continues in a similar vein throughout, incorporating arpeggiated triads and
chord tones which correspond directly to the underlying harmonic structure. Melodic tension is
created by the inclusion of diatonic fourths, sixths and ninths – which act as temporary suspen-
sions, invariably resolving a single scale degree down to a chord tone – as well as through the
continual rhythmic interplay created by switching between triplets and semiquavers.
An alternative use of arpeggiated triads can be found in the second half of the guitar solo to
‘Time’ (at 4’27”) (see Figure 3.6).
In this instance the Im triad (from the parent key of F# Aeolian) is played over the ♭VImaj7
chord. By spelling out the tonic triad over a diferent diatonic tetrad, Gilmour accentuates a sub-
set of the underlying chord tones (in this case: the 3rd, 5th and 7th of D major7 – not the root)
whilst simultaneously preserving a sense of F# Aeolian as the ‘global’ scale. The Im triad is once
again decorated by the fourth (B) and ninth (G#) – which together yield the upper extensions

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 Richard Perks

of D major13#11 – creating a harmonically ‘richer’ overall tonality; the inclusion of the G# also
anticipates the subsequent repose to the A major7.
The regular insertion of arpeggiated triads – and emphasis of chord tones – illustrates Gilmour’s
proclivity for reinforcing the harmonic structure of the piece within his solos. It also demonstrates
a marked stylistic diference when compared to the minor-pentatonic-based phrasing described
earlier;81 this is perhaps again refective of his wider-ranging musical tastes and infuences.

Dissonance
When decoding Gilmour’s ‘melodic’ features as a guitarist, it is important to also mention
his use of ‘organised dissonance’ as a means to create tension, release and textural juxtaposi-
tion. A suitable example of this can be found in the opening to the fnal guitar solo of ‘Dogs’
(13’28”),82 where Gilmour’s playing precariously interweaves the harmonic progression (based
loosely around D Aeolian/Harmonic minor),83 until he arrives at the abruptly positioned,
overtly non-diatonic, A♭ (sus2/sus#4) chord. He accentuates this jarring tonality by playing a
faster descending three-note sequence (13’58”) – overdubbed and harmonised in three parts –
such that ‘the tonal fog of a whole-tone scale immerses everything,’84 before assertively resolving
back to the tonic triad (14’02”) – where the efect on the listener is one of elation and relief. At
this point the pulse changes to half-time-feel, which Gilmour also salutes by playing a standout
fourish of bends and legato in a lower register before moving on to the next section.85
He says of the irregular chord progression to ‘Dogs,’

for guitar solos they [chords] were great because you could play nearly any note. So
you can zoom around anywhere and not worry about what frets you hit or anything
because almost anything you do hit if you do it deliberately enough will sound alright.86

Figure 3.7 outlines the trajectory of this solo passage, comparing pitch against time; the grey
and white vertical segments indicate four-bar sections.87 It is interesting to note how Gilmour

Figure 3.7 Graphic representation of pitch against time for frst 20 bars of fnal guitar solo in ‘Dogs’

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seemingly changes the direction of travel as he traverses each chord, producing an almost con-
sistent sinewave contour, only interrupted by the climactic whole-tone decent (depicted by the
jagged line). In this instance, Gilmour’s aural navigation of each chord demonstrates his ability
to construct a guitar solo which compliments the overall dynamic of the piece without studi-
ously acknowledging its more complex harmonic properties. This ‘freer’ approach contrasts
with the previous examples – where the underlying chord sequence is explicitly referenced by
his note choice – nevertheless, his empathetic emphasis of dissonance and its timely resolution
here, coupled with an innate aptitude for crafting shape, reafrms his global appreciation of
musical form and structure; one may even go so far as to argue that the ‘melodious’ nature of
this solo is enhanced by these ‘rougher’ aesthetic qualities.

Playing technique
It’s a magical thing, the guitar . . . as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes,
draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which
even a piano can’t do.88

The apparent simplicity of Gilmour’s work – in technical or conventional virtuosic terms –

is counterweighed by his tasteful musical expression. Gilmour has clearly spent time perfecting
certain expressive techniques which themselves contribute to his distinctive voice on the instru-
ment. His use of vibrato, bends, slides, tremolo-bar work, rakes, volume swells and so forth
assists the creation of discernibly fuid lines, laying the foundations to his ‘melodic’ soloing style.
A detailed account of every type of articulation or ornamentation used by Gilmour would be
vast and therefore lies outside the scope of this work; however, for completeness, several of his
more characteristic playing techniques should be mentioned.
Gilmour’s vibrato comes from both fnger movement and tremolo-bar work, depending
on the track or passage. A  particularly sublime example of the latter can be found in the
introduction to the 1994 live version of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond,’89 where he plays
the iconic four-note phrase – allowing the notes time to layer amongst the ambient delay and
reverb – then subtly ‘nudges’ the tremolo-bar, resulting in vibrato being applied to the entire
chord.90 About his vibrato technique, Gilmour asserts ‘I’ve tried to approach my vibrato in the
same way a classically trained singer does: you bend a note, hold it for a couple of seconds,
then shake it.’91 Though discussing a technique, this once more reinforces the premise that he
consciously adopts the performative qualities of vocalists in his guitar soloing, which in turn
informs his phrasing.
His intonation is exceptionally accurate when performing string bends, where he draws
upon a range of intervallic negotiation, combining semi-tone bends (see Figure 3.4 and 3.5);
tone-wide bends (see Figures 3.3 and 3.5), minor third bends (e.g., outro solo to ‘Comfortably
Numb’: 4’41”) and even two-tone bends (often performed as a pronounced ‘extension’ of a
tone-wide bend; see Figure  3.3).92 The speed, attack and release of his bends vary, depend-
ing on whether they are employed to create smoother articulation within lines, to accent the
opening or resolution of key phrases or to provide subtle grace-note embellishments. A similar
consideration of pitch-based nuance can be observed in his pedal/lap steel work, about which
he claims: ‘There are places between the notes where I like to go. And you can really go there
on slide instruments.’93
Gilmour also frequently accentuates notes using ‘rakes’ (see Figure 3.5) – a technique where
the plectrum is scraped vertically across multiple strings immediately prior to the execution of

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a note. The pitches of the notes/strings hit en route vary in clarity, depending on the amount
of pressure applied by the fretting hand, and it often results in a more aggressive – or ‘noisy’ –
sounding attack. This technique has its origins in the blues; however, Gilmour employs it indis-
criminately between both ‘edgy’ blues-rock style solos and clean ambient passages. Its function
is essentially to draw attention to a specifc note, highlighting its importance within the phrase.
Interestingly, this ‘clumsy’ sounding embellishment is often juxtaposed alongside his meticulous
approach to string bending.
In sum, we have seen that Gilmour’s lead guitar work combines elements of various idi-
omatic vocabularies with nuanced articulation to form vocal-esque phrasing. His note choice
invariably refects the harmonic structure of the piece, either explicitly or aesthetically, and
his solos are frequently well-shaped and form a clear trajectory, all of which contribute to his
eminent ‘sense of melody.’

Approaches to composition
As one of the primary writing forces in Pink Floyd, it is necessary to include some observa-
tions about Gilmour’s compositional approaches, strengths and preferences and, more specif-
cally, their relation to his guitar contributions. Discussing Gilmour’s joining of Pink Floyd in
1967, Nick Mason refects that ‘alongside his inventiveness he also added a more thoughtful,
structured approach, with the patience to develop a musical idea to its full potential.’94 Mason
also claims that ‘he was absolutely into form and shape, and he introduced that into the
wilder numbers we created.’95 In the works which followed,96 Gilmour’s guitar solos increas-
ingly functioned as structural ‘markers,’ contributing to the overarching shape of the songs.
Gilad Cohen asserts that ‘More than the sung sections, the guitar solos provide an overall
sense of direction by outlining the contour in energy level of the song, articulating its struc-
ture, and leading it to its peak.’97 This idea is typifed by the incorporation of ‘pre-composed’
guitar solos, which invariably introduce new (or expand existing) thematic material, vital to
the song’s structure and identity. In such instances, when performing live, Gilmour faithfully
replicates the recorded version, thus highlighting the signifcance of the solo as a compo-
sitional feature. The frst solo from ‘Comfortably Numb’ (2’05”), once again, serves as a
suitable case in point;98 as Gilmour verifes, ‘the solo in the middle of “Comfortably Numb”
is worked-out, so I always do that the same.’99 This section introduces new thematic mate-
rial which not only refects the narrative but is resolutely recognised by listeners as a critical
moment in the song in and of itself. Comparable examples include the opening guitar solos
to ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 1)’ (2’14”),100 ‘Wish You Were Here’ (0’59”)101 and
‘Coming Back to Life’ (0’18”).102,103 A  further illustration of a guitar solo contributing to
a song’s structural development can be found towards the end of the outro solo of ‘High
Hopes’ (6’33”),104 where the lap steel guitar phrasing is echoed by the piano and strings, then
repeated once again by the lap steel, establishing compositionally embedded interaction.
When performed live, this call-and-response section is emphasised, confrming its necessity
as a compositional signifer.105
Another important consideration is the use of the recording studio by Pink Floyd as a
compositional tool. This enabled the band to engage and indulge in cutting-edge techniques
of the time, such as unlimited overdubbing, the layering of tracks, the splicing together of
multiple takes to form a cohesive part and so forth. This approach to creating music – which
Brian Eno terms ‘in-studio composition’ – allowed musicians to revise, edit, physically relo-
cate and remove recorded material, having listened to it in context frst.106 On this subject,

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Gilmour explains how the ‘main’ solo from ‘Comfortably Numb’ (4’32”) was put together in
the studio:

I just went out into the studio and banged out fve or six solos. From there I just fol-
lowed my usual procedure, which is to listen back to each solo and mark out bar lines,
saying which bits are good. In other words, I make a chart, putting ticks and crosses on
diferent bars as I count through: two ticks if it’s really good, one tick if it’s good and
cross if it’s no go. Then I just follow the chart, whipping one fader up, then another
fader, jumping from phrase to phrase and trying to make a really nice solo all the way
through.107

Gilmour describes compiling this post-extemporisation ‘collage’ of takes as his ‘usual proce-
dure,’ thus providing us with greater insight into the creative process behind (a noteworthy por-
tion of) his guitar solos. He claims to have used the same technique to record the lead guitar part
to the instrumental track ‘Marooned.’108 When asked how much of the track was improvised, he
answers: ‘Pretty much all of it. I probably took three or four passes at it and took the best bits
out of each.’109 These examples demonstrate how Gilmour’s use of improvisation in the studio
functions as a generative compositional device through which he assembles a single cohesive
passage by amalgamating his ‘preferred’ fragments of multiple guitar solos. Interestingly, when
these solos are performed live, Gilmour tends to adopt a more ‘open’ improvisatory approach –
compared with the pre-composed material discussed previously, that is – though he still often
references the recorded version by reproducing various ‘key’ motifs to guide and shape the solo.
He confrms this when he states,

I never play live solos exactly the same way they appeared on the record. I tend to start
with the same thing that’s on the album and take of from there. Every once in a while
I’ll remember a bit from the record and fall back on that.110

He reafrms and elaborates upon this approach in a much later interview:

my tendency is to start of pretty much like the record and then see how I’m feeling. If
I move of it and it feels good, inspired and original, then I’ll stay of the beaten track.
But sometimes I realize, I’m of the beaten track but it’s just dull. Then I’ll go back
into the safety net of playing pretty much the original solo.111

This suggests that when playing live, Gilmour has an approximate, subconscious, awareness
of what was performed on the recorded version and, whilst not governed by it, is able to recall
certain phrases and thus preserve the original feel, dynamic and intention behind the solo. This
type of guitar solo might be referred to therefore as ‘part-pre-composed’ – in that what starts as
a series of improvised takes in the recording studio gets collated into a ‘defnitive product’ as the
album version, which, when subsequently performed live, is on the one hand disregarded yet
on the other used as an indispensable yoke back to the original. Here Gilmour is able to take
advantage of the various improvisatory freedoms a live performance environment afords whilst
simultaneously anchoring himself – and the listener – to familiar territory. Steve Howe – lead
guitarist with Yes – echoes this sentiment when discussing his own reproductions of studio-
based improvisations at a later stage (i.e. live), where ‘it turns into a piece of music, a tune.
It’s now a melody. It changes from the idea of being an improvisation to playing a melody.’112

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Examples of ‘extended’ live solos – where Gilmour notably expands the form beyond that of
the album version – do exist (for example, live versions of ‘Mother,’113 ‘Any Colour You Like’
and ‘Comfortably Numb’),114 though they occur far less often than those which adhere to a
relatively predetermined structure.
It seems therefore that guitar solos are included by Gilmour not only as an opportunity to
explore instrument-based expression but also to enhance and navigate compositional exposition
and development within the music. Furthermore, he appears to favour the formation of well-
cogitated guitar parts, including the pre-composition of identifable ‘thematic’ solos. Where
improvisation occurs, it does so either in the recording studio at the ‘input’ stage, generating
material which is later amassed to create the fnal album edit, or, in a live setting, forming an
organic transmutation of various distinguishable – ‘quasi-thematic’ – fragments. Each of these
approaches again highlights Gilmour’s commitment to the song as the ‘bigger picture’ and
reveals the refexive relationship between his compositional perspective and his guitar playing.
By pre-composing or part-pre-composing guitar solos in this manner, Gilmour advocates a con-
sistency in Pink Floyd’s live performances and thus injects a further facet of ‘melodic’ gravitation.

Conclusion
We have seen that Gilmour’s guitar contributions to Pink Floyd are substantially varied; they
navigate idioms, combine an array of timbres and appear tailored to serve diferent purposes
appropriate to each song. It has been suggested that his ‘sense of melody’ has likely devel-
oped from an amalgam of his musical infuences, consideration to sound, eclectic approach to
phraseology and global appreciation of musical form and shape. This fnal section shall review
the interrelationship between these qualities to provide further insight into the true meaning
behind Gilmour’s ‘melodic’ playing style.
To form a suitable model for comparison and analysis, I have divided the properties of Gil-
mour’s guitar playing into multiple sub-categories based upon the melodic function they perform
within the context of a song/piece. These melodic functions have then been arranged into three
primary categories refecting the level of impact they typically exert upon a work’s overall identity,
termed ‘micro-melodic,’ ‘meso-melodic’ and ‘macro-melodic.’
Figure 3.8 illustrates a system for categorisation of the properties found in Gilmour’s guitar
playing in terms of ‘melodic function’ and their corresponding ‘level of impact’ on a song/
piece’s identity. At its core is the micro-melodic level, where the ‘primordial’ melodic func-
tions and associated properties reside. It is made up of sound (this has already been examined in
detail and comprises instrumental timbre, touch, ecology and so forth), expression (this includes
aspects of phrasing and articulation as well as the use of certain expressive techniques or devices,
for example: legato, slides, bends, vibrato, volume swells, tremolo-bar, metal-slide/tone bar,
Whammy pedal, EBow, talk box and so on) and ornamentation (that is, the embellishment of
melodies using grace-notes, trills, rakes and so forth). Whilst the melodic functions found at this
level may not often impact a song/piece’s identity in an obvious way, they consistently provide a
qualitative bedrock which informs and underpins those located in the two levels above.
The meso-melodic level contains the more ‘conventional’ melodic functions, as regularly
ascribed to guitar playing within a band setting: melodic shape or contour may be injected
throughout the course of a solo (which either develops independently as a stand-alone guitar
part or enhances the dynamic of piece); ‘non-solo’ lead guitar lines may provide unison or
counterpoint within certain passages (forming compositional support and/or emphasis); tension
and release may exist in either the top-line (main guitar melodies/solos), secondary lead-lines
or rhythm guitar parts; refection of idiom (for instance, the inclusion of stylistically relevant

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Figure 3.8 ‘Melodic functions’ and ‘levels of impact’ assumed by Gilmour

vocabulary or improvisatory conventions) or of the overall sonic aesthetic (for example, tex-
tural augmentation, development of ‘soundscape’ and so on) may enrich that particular aspect
of the song/piece; ‘complementary’ solos or interludes (these consist of non-thematic material
and often serve as a temporary departure from the narrative and/or a special lead-guitar show-
case/feature);115 and fnally, guitar phrases which provide interconnectivity and interaction (for
instance, call and response, reactive improvisations, rhythmic interplay, motivic development
and so forth).
The melodic functions at the macro-melodic level envelop those from both the micro and
meso levels but have metamorphosed so as to govern the identity of the song/piece. We have
repeatedly seen that, more than providing surface-level additions to the songs/pieces, Gilmour’s
lead guitar contributions are deeply ingrained in the material, forming a vital aspect of its com-
positional fabric. His authoritative playing style can result in the solos not merely enriching but
dictating the overriding dynamic or trajectory of the music. Also, his frequent reference to the
underlying harmony or structure allows his playing to emphasise, enhance and develop these

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compositional aspects on a global scale, in real time. With the assistance of the recording studio
as a tool, he produces part-pre-composed solos – where his improvisations initially function as
part of the generative process behind the piece’s composition – yielding ‘quasi-thematic’ mate-
rial, which he later re-quotes in a live context to evoke the sentiment of the original. Last, we
fnd the regular inclusion of pre-composed, well-thought-out, ‘thematic’ guitar solos which
ultimately become inseparable from the song’s identity.
Whilst the melodic functions and properties outlined are used by many guitar players across a
variety of sub-idioms, it seems that what separates Gilmour – particularly though his work with
Pink Floyd – is that he frequently traverses all three levels of impact within the confnes of a single
song. Of course, I am not suggesting he encompasses every single melodic function, nor each
individual musical characteristic, within every piece of music; more that he consistently draws
aspects from each level – whether in real-time performance or as part of the generative com-
positional process before a piece is ‘fnalised’ – in a substantial portion of his outputs with the
band. Furthermore, these melodic functionalities appear to have been nurtured, developed and
honed over time, manifesting as well considered, measured and (likely) employed with intent.
In addition, his frequent use of the guitar – primarily lead guitar – in a macro-melodic capacity
arguably further diferentiates him from other guitarists working in similar territories. At this
level, he creates abundant guitar-oriented material which becomes regarded by the listener as
equally important as any other key aspect of the song/piece (for example vocal, narrative, struc-
ture, groove or aesthetic), if not more so. The role of guitar performance is fexible, therefore,
serving as often as a compositional device as a textural augmentation or instrumental extension.
Thus, more than simply ‘serving the song’ – where a performer might aptly refect the nature of
the music – I contend that Gilmour’s guitar contributions to Pink Floyd in many cases go one
step further, inducing the creative direction and thus determining the nature of the music.
In conclusion, in his work with Pink Floyd, Gilmour’s guitar playing is consistently and
inextricably linked to the identity of the music from a foundational level. It encapsulates mul-
tifarious melodic functions, from his considered sound through to his refned compositional
approach, and frequently traverses diferent ‘levels of impact.’ Gilmour, therefore, exhibits a kind
of ‘melodic density’ which enables him to transcend subjective defnitions of ‘melodic,’ allowing
him to appeal to a wider range of listeners’ musical preferences and expectations – thus elucidat-
ing the rationale behind him being revered by so many as the melodic guitarist.

Sources for the music excerpts

Figure 3.1 ‘Money’ (1973), from the album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Composed by Roger Waters; excerpt transcription by R. Perks.

Figure 3.2 ‘Speak To Me/Breathe’ (1973), from the album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Composed by Nick Mason/composed by David Gilmour, Roger Waters,  & Richard Wright; excerpt
transcription by R. Perks.

Figure 3.3 ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ (1979), from the album The Wall.
Composed by Roger Waters; excerpt transcription by R. Perks.

Figure 3.4 ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones)’ (1977), from the album Animals.
Composed by Roger Waters; excerpt transcription by R. Perks.

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 David Gilmour

Figure 3.5 ‘Comfortably Numb’ (1979), from the album The Wall.
Composed by David Gilmour & Roger Waters; excerpt transcription by R. Perks.

Figure 3.6 ‘Time’ (1973), from the album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Composed by David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, & Richard Wright; excerpt transcription by
R. Perks.

Notes
1 These include guitar tablature books, ‘in the style of ’ publications, guitar tuition DVDs, online guitar
lessons and so forth.
2 The Telegraph. (2015). ‘The Greatest Guitarists of All Time, in Pictures’, The Telegraph. www.telegraph.
co.uk.
3 Rolling Stone. (2015). ‘100 Greatest Guitarists’, Rolling Stone. Retrieved from www.rollingstone.com/
music/music-lists/100-greatest-guitarists-153675/david-gilmour-2-158663/.
4 Total Guitar. (2018). ‘Melodic Masters – 05 David Gilmour’, Total Guitar, November, pages 50–66.
Retrieved from www.pressreader.com.
5 This David Gilmour ‘Special Issue’ also provides detailed transcriptions of songs from his solo project
work as well as a comprehensive guide to his equipment and setup.
6 The Australian Pink Floyd Show is regarded as one of the world’s top tribute acts. For more informa-
tion, see: Green, T. H. (2009). ‘The Australian Pink Floyd Show: Shine On, You Crazy Aussies’, The
Telegraph. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk.
7 See Lick Library instructional DVD series, by Jamie Humphries: ‘Learn to Play Pink Floyd vol. 1’
(2006); ‘Learn to Play Pink Floyd vol. 2’ (2007); ‘Learn to Play Gilmour – The Solos’ (2011).
8 Humphries, J. (2017). ‘Unpicking the Legend’, Guitar Interactive, issue 47 (David Gilmour Special
Tribute Issue). Retrieved from www.guitarinteractivemagazine.com. See page 19.
9 Gilmour, D. (1988, July). ‘David Gilmour: Absolute Sound’. Interview by Bill Milkowski. Guitar
World. Reprinted in Di Perna, A., Kitts, J. and Tolinski, B. (eds.). (2002). Guitar World Presents Pink
Floyd. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, pages 48–52, reference is on page 50.
10 The term ‘melodic’ guitarist is considered here specifcally in the context of mainstream popular music
and does not refer to guitar practices based upon alternative aesthetic conventions, such as classical,
famenco, jazz and so forth.
11 See, for example: Hargreaves, D. J., Messerschmidt, P. and Rubert, C. (1980). ‘Musical Preference
and Evaluation’, Psychology of Music, 8(1):13–18; Huron, D. B. (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the
Psychology of Expectation. Boston: MIT Press, amongst others.
12 Op. cit. Rolling Stone (2015).
13 Gilmour, D. (2015a, 14 November). David Gilmour: Wider Horizons. [Television Broadcast]. London:
BBC. Executive Producers (Lesley Douglas and Alan Yentob). Retrieved from www.bbc.co.uk/pro-
grammes/b06pyrbs; see Seeger, P. (1961). The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide. [Record and Booklet]. New
York City. Folkways Records and Service Corp.
14 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):50.
15 Gilmour, D. (2006a, May). ‘Interview by Guitar World’, Guitar World, 27(5):56–60, 92–94. Refer-
ences is on page 94.
16 Gilmour, D. (2006b, 21 February). ‘Q&A: David Gilmour’. Interview by Billboard. Billboard.
Retrieved from www.billboard.com/articles/news/59640/qa-david-gilmour-continued.
17 Gilmour, D. (2015b, October  7). ‘ “Such a Perfect Fit”: David Gilmour and Polly Samson on
20  Years of Collaboration’. Interview by Jonathan Dick. The Record. Retrieved from www.npr.
org/sections/therecord/2015/10/07/446578761/such-a-perfect-f it-david-g ilmour-
and-polly-samson-on-20-years-of-collaboration.
18 Gilmour, D. (2006c, 3 March). Interview by Emma Brockes. The Guardian.
19 Op. cit. Gilmour (2015a).
20 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):51.
21 Gilmour, D. (1995, September). ‘Inside the Mind of Pink Floyd: David Gilmour’. Interview by Gui-
tar Magazine. Guitar. 12(11). Retrieved from www.pink-foyd.org/artint/guisep95.htm.
22 Ibid.

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23 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):50.

24 Op. cit. Gilmour (1995).
25 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):50–51.
26 It is important to note that in discussions about guitarists’ distinct musical voice, the terms ‘tone’ and
‘sound’ are often used interchangeably. I have favoured the use of sound here, where possible, as to
avoid confusion with either: 1) the ‘tone’ commonly ascribed to a particular make or model of guitar/
amplifer or 2) the various ‘tone controls’ on guitars, amplifers and efects pedals used to alter/flter
frequency output.
27 Zappa, D. (2011). ‘My Top 10 Guitarists’. Retrieved from www.dweezilzappa.com. Accessed 2016.
28 Dave Mustaine in Kitts, J. and Tolinski, B. (eds.). (2002). Guitar World Presents the 100 Greatest Guitar-
ists of All Time. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, page 190.
29 See front cover of Guitar Player (January 2009).
30 The Fender Stratocaster frst became commercially available in 1954 and went on to become one of
the most popular and iconic guitars of the twentieth century. It has been played by many infuential
blues and blues-rock guitarists, including Jef Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, to name just a
few. For more information about this guitar, see: Hunter, D. (2013). The Fender Stratocaster: The Life &
Times of the World’s Greatest Guitar & Its Players. Cambridge, MA: Voyageur Press.
31 See Taylor, P. (2008). Pink Floyd: The Black Strat: A History of David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster.
London: self-published.
32 Op. cit. Gilmour (2006a):93.
33 Visit Bjorn Riis’ comprehensive fan website www.gilmourish.com for extensive details of Gilmour’s
live equipment rigs.
34 Gilmour, D. (2019, 29 January). ‘David Gilmour on Why He’s Selling 120 Guitars: “Everything
Has Got to Go”’, Rolling Stone. Retrieved from www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/
pink-foyd-david-gilmour-interview-guitar-charity-auction-779721/.
35 Ibid.
36 Lähdeoja, O., Navarret, B., Quintans, S. and Sedes, A. (2010). ‘The Electric Guitar: An Augmented
Instrument and a Tool for Musical Composition’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies, 4(2):37–54.
37 Taylor, P. (1994, September). ‘Welcome to the Machines’. Interview by Brad Tolinski. Guitar World.
Retrieved from web.archive.org/web/20110724013318/www.pinkfoydfan.net/t11634-phil-taylor-
welcome-machines-guitar.html.
38 Alan Parsons in Op. cit. Kitts and Tolinski (eds.). (2002):143.
39 Gilmour, D. (2011, October  13). ‘Pink Floyd: Journey to the Dark Side’. Interview by Brian
Hiatt. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pink-foyd-journey-
to-the-dark-side-106349/.
40 ‘Headroom’ is the amount of power an amplifer can provide before the signal starts to distort.
41 David Gilmour in Op. cit. Kitts and Tolinski (eds.). (2002):143.
42 See Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifin.
43 See Pink Floyd, Meddle, Harvest Records SHVL 795 (1971).
44 See Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, Harvest Records SHVL 814 (1975).
45 See Pink Floyd, Animals, Harvest Records – Columbia SHVL 815 (1977).
46 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Columbia SHDW 411 (1979).
47 Visit www.gilmourish.com for more details regarding Gilmour’s equipment usage on various studio
recordings and live tours.
48 Gilmour had previously used the Pete Cornish efects-board to record the Animals studio album in
1976; following several minor tweaks, it was used immediately after on the corresponding 1977 Ani-
mals live tour.
49 Visit www.petecornish.co.uk and www.gilmourish.com for further details regarding Gilmour’s use of
Pete Cornish efects-boards and their development.
50 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):50.
51 Op. cit. Gilmour (2006b).
52 ‘Marooned’ won the 1995 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance; see Pink Floyd, Divi-
sion Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
53 Op. cit. Gilmour (2006a):93.
54 Ibid.
55 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).

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56 Gilmour, D. (1994, September). ‘David Gilmour Discusses Guitars, Blues and “The Division
Bell”’. Interview by B. Tolinski. Guitar World. Retrieved from www.guitarworld.com/gw-archive/
david-gilmour-discusses-guitars-blues-and-division-bell-1994-guitar-world-interview.
57 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
58 For the purposes of this table, guitars have been reduced to ‘type’ (i.e. electric, steel-string acoustic
etc.), rather than providing a complex list including exact makes and models for each track; the same
approach has been applied to the use of efects pedals.
59 See Op. cit. Taylor (1994).
60 A regular set of ‘10-gauge’ strings have diameters: 0.010, 0.013, 0.017, 0.026, 0.036, 0.046 (inches);
Gilmour’s custom GHS Boomers set has: 0.010, 0.012, 0.016, 0.028, 0.038, 0.048 (inches). See www.
ghsstrings.com for more information.
61 See Op. cit. Taylor (1994).
62 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):51.
63 Op. cit. Gilmour (1995).
64 Gilmour, D. (2014). BBC Imagine: The Story of the Guitar. [Television Broadcast]. London: BBC.
Executive Producer (Janet Lee).
65 As considered by Waters, S. (2007). ‘Performance Ecosystems: Ecological Approaches to Musical
Interaction’. Paper presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network EMS-07 Proceedings,
Leicester. Retrieved from www.ems-network.org/spip.php?article278.
66 See Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest Records SHVL 804 (1973).
67 For clarity in harmonic analysis, due to the frequent occurrences of modal interchange and bor-
rowed chords in Pink Floyd works, all chords in the examples presented here are labelled using capital
Roman numerals; their scale-positioning is indicated in relation to the major scale; and ‘m’ is added
to distinguish minor chords. For example, in the key of D Aeolian, the sequence: | Dm7 | B♭ | C |
Dm | would be labelled: | Im7 |♭VI | ♭VII | Im | and so forth.
68 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
69 Op. cit. Gilmour (1988: 2002):50.
70 See Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest Records SHVL 804 (1973); see Brown, J. (2006,
May). ‘Sorcerer Full of Secrets’, Guitar World. San Francisco, V27(5):62–66.
71 See Pink Floyd, Animals, Harvest Records – Colombia SHVL 815 (1977); see Cohen, G. (2015, June).
‘Expansive Form in Pink Floyd’s Dogs’, Music Theory Online: Journal of the Society for Music Theory, 21(2).
72 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Colombia SHDW 411 (1979); in this solo – at 2’51” – a
key motif from the opening section is repeated but articulated in a diferent manner (refer to Example 3).
73 Op. cit. Gilmour, D. (1984, 6–8 April). ‘About Face’. Interview by Charlie Kendall. The Source. NBC,
New York. Executive Producer (Denny Somach), Producer (Sean McKay), www.pink-foyd.org/
artint/28.htm.
74 See Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, Harvest Records SHVL 804 (1973).
75 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
76 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Columbia SHDW 411 (1979).
77 See Pink Floyd, Pulse, EMI Records (1995).
78 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Columbia SHDW 411 (1979).
79 See Pink Floyd, Animals, Harvest Records – Columbia SHVL 815 (1977).
80 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Columbia SHDW 411 (1979).
81 Incidentally, for the second solo in ‘Comfortably Numb’, Gilmour revisits his minor pentatonic blues-
based vocabulary (performed over B Aeolian/natural minor).
82 See Pink Floyd, Animals, Harvest Records – Colombia SHVL 815 (1977).
83 Note: The ♭VI (B♭) chord includes an added natural 4 (E♭), which implies it is borrowed from the
parallel mode of D Phrygian; adding to this chord progression’s inherent harmonic instability.
84 Op. cit. Cohen (2015):Paragraph 1.
85 Ibid:Paragraph 37.
86 Op. cit. Gilmour (1984)
87 This fgure is included for illustrative purposes and depicts an approximation of pitch against time; the
jagged line represents the lowest pitch-line (voice) of the three-part harmonised whole-tone run. For
a complete transcription of this guitar solo, see Op. cit. Cohen (2015).
88 Gilmour, D. (2015c, 17 September). ‘A Pink Floyd Reunion? Impossible’. Interview by Neil
McCormick. The Telegraph. Retrieved from www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/david-gilmour-
interview-ahead-of-uk-tour/.

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 Richard Perks

89 See Pink Floyd, PULSE, EMI Records (1995).

90 From the 1984 About Face tour onwards, Gilmour has primarily used custom tremolo-bars in his
Fender Stratocasters. Gilmour’s custom tremolo-bars are approximately 4.25 inches in length (notably
shorter than the standard 6 inches). This allows him to maintain his preferred right hand position
whilst accessing the tremolo-bar. See www.gilmourish.com for more information.
91 David Gilmour in Op. cit. Kitts and Tolinski (eds.). (2002):75.
92 Two-tone bends require greater fnger strength and accuracy, and as such feature less often in the
lexicon of many guitarists. Gilmour, however, is renowned for using them frequently.
93 Op. cit. Gilmour (2006):94.
94 Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page
115.
95 Nick Mason in Harris, J. (2006). The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece.
New York: Harper Perennial, page 48.
96 Particularly from The Dark Side of the Moon onwards.
97 Op. cit. Cohen (2015):Paragraph 31.
98 See Pink Floyd, The Wall, Harvest Records – Colombia SHDW 411 (1979).
99 Gilmour, D. (1993). 111 (‘Interview’) Guitar World by DiPerna, A. np.
100 See Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here, Harvest Records SHVL 814 (1975).
101 Ibid.
102 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
103 Live performances of these examples occasionally contain slight interpretive diferences and/or addi-
tional embellishments, but in each case the vast majority of the solo remains true to the album version.
104 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
105 See, for example: Pink Floyd, PULSE, EMI Records (1995).
106 Eno, B. (2006). ‘The Studio as a Compositional Tool’, in Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds.), Audio Cul-
ture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum, pages 127–130. Quotation is on page 129.
107 Op. cit. Gilmour (1993).
108 See Pink Floyd, Division Bell, EMI Records 7243 8 28984 1 2 (1994).
109 Op. cit. Gilmour (1994); studio technology would have been digitalised by this point, but the underly-
ing method of recording, editing and splicing of various takes remains almost identical.
110 Op. cit. Gilmour (1993).
111 Op. cit. Gilmour (2006a):92.
112 Howe in Bailey, D. (1993). Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
Press, Inc., page 41.
113 See Pink Floyd, Is Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81, EMI Records (2000).
114 See Pink Floyd, Pulse, EMI Records (1995).
115 This is standard practice in much rock-infuenced music, and Pink Floyd also incorporate guitar solos
to this end.

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 4
PLANET FLOYD
Te evolution of Pink Floyd’s live performances
David Pattie

Introduction
Pink Floyd’s live work has been compendiously documented by Glenn Povey (2007) in Ech-
oes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Thanks to Povey, it is easy to fnd out the name of the
last track ever played on a Floyd tour, for instance; the honour falls to ‘Run Like Hell,’ which
closed the band’s 15-night run at Earls Court on the October 29 1994.1 (The Live 8 reunion
in 2005 is an interesting performance, but it is an atypical one.) There is no extant footage of
this gig, but the one played nine days before, on October 20, 1994, was flmed and released
on the Pulse DVD the following year.2 ‘Run Like Hell’ is a rather conventional way to fnish
a gig. It is fast, loud and based on a very distinctive musical phrase (descending chords played
over an open D string, which serves the song as a hook); it is relatively short; and it comes from
one of the band’s most successful albums. In performance, it also gets the kind of staging that
declares, emphatically, that this will be the end of the night. As is customary in large-scale gigs
by famous bands, the resources of the stage are fully employed. The varilights revolve, the stage
foods with colour, the shuttered bank of lights at the front of the stage fash in sequence, the
pyrotechnics explode – and at the end of the song, the central circular screen bursts into smoke
and fame. It is the kind of scenographic overdeclaration that we might expect at the end of an
arena performance; arena shows that employ complex staging technologies tend to work to a
pattern – the staging reveals itself, becoming more impressive as the show goes on. However,
in this particular performance, something is missing. To make sure that they imprint themselves
on venues that can seem overly large and impersonal, most bands will integrate live-streamed
footage of the musicians into the gig. Pink Floyd’s performance, though, contains no such foot-
age. During ‘Run Like Hell,’ the stage performs: the session musicians drafted in to fesh out the
sound perform (indeed, Guy Pratt on bass looks like a more conventional frontman than David
Gilmour); the original band themselves look as they always looked – rather difdent participants
in a public spectacle to which they are only partially committed.

How to disappear completely

As noted previously, ‘Run Like Hell’ is the last song performed by Pink Floyd as a touring band.
It is, therefore, the fnal illustration of a paradox that had been part of the band’s performative

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-7 111

 David Pattie

life since its earliest days. Pink Floyd had always been associated with technologically complex
performances (and were one of the frst bands to create for themselves a bespoke environment
that would remain the same from venue to venue). However, rather than using that technology
to foreground the star status of the band, Floyd tended to use technology as a mask: something
that would intervene between the musicians and the audience, something that would allow the
band members to absent themselves from the usual business of music performance.
The band, with the occasional exception of Roger Waters, were static to the point of self-
efacement. At a time when the nature of the performance event was changing (when new
touring circuits were opening up, when technology gave performers increasing control over the
event and when the event itself came to be constructed around the central fgure of the dynamic
performer or performers), Pink Floyd moved to absent themselves. As Kimi Kärki (2005) put
it, they were in many ways a ‘faceless band.’3 What is, however, particularly intriguing is that
they seem to have actively sought this status and to have maintained it even into a stage in their
careers where one might expect they might be happy, fnally, to step forward and accept the
adulation of their long-term fans.4 Conversely they would, of course, end up behind a very
physical Wall.
In performance, then, Floyd represent something of a paradox. Alongside Led Zeppelin,
they are the most successful rock band of the 1970s. Their live shows played a key role in
establishing the idea of the live music event as gesamtkunstwerk – an event in which all the sonic
and design elements within the control of the band or artist were designed to create a unique,
bespoke environment for their music. And yet they did not take advantage of the technologies
they helped pioneer to declare themselves, unambiguously, to be stars. Instead, they allowed
themselves to disappear behind the images they created; in fact, as I will go on to argue, the
stage technologies they employed came to stand in for the band in performance. These technol-
ogies, in turn, took their place in a wider set of images constructed by and for the band; these
images were, themselves, so powerfully presented as to make the usual focus of live music per-
formance – the energised, engaged performer – redundant. In performance, Pink Floyd could
do something that few other bands, before or since, could achieve; they could allow themselves
to fade, almost entirely, from sight.5

Let there be more light

In an article on the staging and flming of The Wall, Zeno Ackermann (2012) argues that the
progressive rock genre, with its emphasis in extended musical composition and technical virtu-
osity, marked a shift away from forms of popular music that relied on the idea of direct contact
with an audience:

The flm Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, directed by Adrian Maben and released in 1972,
betrays the ideal role attributed to the audience in this kind of rock: Maben shows the
band playing in an empty amphitheater. However, it is not only the audience who are
relegated to the background in Live at Pompeii. The soundscape of the music and the
(architectural) landscape in which it is performed predominate over the musicians, too.6

Live at Pompeii (currently available in two versions; a shorter one that gathers together foot-
age shot in Pompeii with studio performances of shorter tracks, and a longer version, which
intercuts these performances with footage of the band recording The Dark Side of the Moon) is
a rather strange document of the band in the early 1970s. As Ackermann suggests, the band
perform with the same kind of difdence as they do in contemporaneous concert footage

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(recently gathered and released on the Pink Floyd: The Early Years sets). They do so, however, in
an environment that is as diferent from the type of performance venue as it could possibly be;
bare, ruined, drenched in sunlight. As the camera pans in at the beginning of the flm, one can
see that the band’s technicians have set up the equipment as if this were a normal gig. There is a
backline: Nick Mason’s drumkit is set up at the centre of the amphitheatre, with the gong that
featured prominently in early shows behind him; Wright’s keyboards are set up to the audience’s
right; Gilmour is placed to the drumkit’s left. In the opening minutes of the performance, the
most dynamic movement (aside from the camera’s slow zoom) comes from Waters, who walks
around the keyboard, picks up his bass and starts playing. Shorn of the elements that normally
structure live performance (a defned stage area, the interplay of light and darkness, the presence
of the audience), the band look like goldfsh in an unexpectedly large bowl. They stick to the
performance setup they know rather than exploring this new, more open environment. And
yet, as noted previously, footage of the band performing in the early 1970s shows no discern-
ible diference either in their positions or their demeanour when those elements are actually in
place. It is as though, as Ackermann says, the audience is entirely unnecessary.
Ackerman (2012) has a point; one of the features of a type of music that relied on composi-
tional complexity and technical virtuosity was that the musicians performing it needed, in many
instances, either to be still or at the least to be less active than musicians in other forms. Mick
Ronson, playing guitar for David Bowie, could be a key performative foil for the star performer.
He could match Bowie, step for step; he could take centre stage for solos; he and Bowie could
mime fellatio onstage, because the music he played relied on a comparatively simple set of
chords and lead lines. Steve Howe, playing guitar for Yes, could not play with the same type of
performative freedom; for example, simply counting the beats in the second section of ‘Close
To The Edge’ required concentration, and the tightly integrated lead lines in ‘Long Distance
Runaround’ would slide out of key and time if Howe had aped Hendrix’s fourishes or Pete
Townsend’s windmilling arm. However, this was not true of all progressive musicians: Keith
Emerson, of ELP, would vault over his keyboards and jam knives into the keys of his Hammond
organ. It is hard to argue that Pink Floyd’s music (either at the time or subsequently) was as
technically complex as that of other progressive bands. Rhythmically, the band tended to settle
into common time; sections in longer compositions such as ‘Atom Heart Mother’ or ‘Echoes’
would fall into a set pattern – a rhythmic and harmonic framework would be established, and
either Gilmour or Wright would solo over it.
It is, therefore, not always true that performers in progressive rock were unaware of the need
to entertain the audience; certainly it is not true that the music Pink Floyd played required the
same type of attention as that played by Yes, King Crimson or Gentle Giant.
The live performance of progressive rock, unlike performances in other genres at the time,
did not rely on the presence of a key, central, dynamic or signifcant central fgure. Rather,
progressive bands presented themselves as integrated ensembles; in practice, that meant not
only that having a key central performer was less important but also that at certain points in
the performance, each musician could adopt that central role. It also meant that the band’s lead
singers would periodically fade back into the ensemble, during the long instrumental passages
that didn’t involve them. Dynamic front men such as Peter Gabriel in Genesis (from 1969 to
1975), Ian Anderson in Jethro Tull or indeed Barrett himself in the frst incarnation of Pink
Floyd were rare. In performance, this meant that the visual impact of the band was not centred
in one fgure; performers merged into an ensemble, and the staging of performances came to
emphasise the group rather than the individual.
The more successful progressive rock bands had a vested interest in exploiting the scenographic
resources available to them. The staging could do what the musicians could not; it provided a

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source of compelling and (as far as was possible at the time) fexible performance environments
that would hold the interest of the audience during even the most complex musical passages.
It could also do something that ftted the ethos of the genre perfectly. It could create a visual
symbol of the band’s music, an extension of the visual codes established in lyrics, on album cov-
ers, posters and T-shirts, into the performance space. For Genesis, this meant choosing staging
that masked the hardware of performance (in 1973, the band performed in front of a gauze
which concealed their amplifers) and choosing lighting states that drew the audience’s atten-
tion to Gabriel (who would dress in costumes derived from the world of the band’s songs). For
Yes (on the Topographic Oceans Tour), it meant the creation of large fbreglass sections of stage
furniture, reminiscent of the strange rock formations on the album cover. For Emerson, Lake
and Palmer, staging tended toward the technologically famboyant – drum risers rotated, synths
exploded, and Keith Emerson played a series of piano improvisations on a fying, spinning grand
piano. Jethro Tull turned the concept albums Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play into full-blown
stage shows (as did Genesis, with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway). Elaborate staging, it could
be said, was a vital mediating factor between musicians and audience; it expressed the band,
their music and the sign systems within which both operated in a way that the audience would
fnd easy to accept and use.
Pink Floyd were one of the originators of this type of staging. In their early residences in
London clubs associated with the late 1960s underground scene, the band developed a style
of performance that was based on improvisation – partly, as the band later admitted, as a way
of covering up the musical inadequacy of a group of young, inexperienced musicians. This
was a fortunate choice, in two ways. First of all, it allowed the band to explore the process
of creating long-form compositions by varying tone and dynamics rather than by introduc-
ing elements that radically changed the music. Genesis created long compositions by stacking
together a series of linked, composed passages; Pink Floyd did it through the subtle variation
of elements arrived at through the process of group composition. A good example of this is the
track ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene,’ which frst appeared on the B-side of the single ‘Point
Me at the Sky.’ ‘Eugene’ became a staple of the band’s live work; a version of it appeared on
the live section of the album Ummagumma, and the box set Pink Floyd: The Early Years contains
13 versions of the track. Each version is identifable; each one is based around a metronomic
bassline, playing octaves in D; each one builds to the whispered line, ‘careful with that axe,
Eugene’; each one climaxes on a scream, delivered by Waters; and each one fades back down
into silence. However, each iteration is diferent, because none of the elements within this
structure are completely fxed. As the band’s career developed, and as composed music replaced
improvisation, Floyd’s live performances tended toward the more-or-less faithful reproduction
of tracks that the audience had heard on their albums. It is fair to say, though, that even then,
the band’s more composed tracks frequently replicated the compositional style of a track like
‘Eugene.’ ‘Echoes,’ ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Dogs,’ for example, do not rely on the
sharp compositional transitions that Yes might use on tracks like ‘The Gates of Delirium.’ They
evolved, gradually, in the manner of the improvisations of the band’s early days. Edward Macan,
in Rocking the Classics (1997), fnds it relatively easy to treat all of the Wish You Were Here album
as a single composition rather than as a set of discrete songs; given the way the various musical
elements in the album fow into each other, his judgement makes a great deal of sense.
Second, this gradual, evolving improvisatory style suited the band’s frst dedicated fan base.
Much has been written about the sensory distortions caused by LSD; Syd Barrett’s use of the
drug has been well catalogued (even if some of the more lurid stories of his escalating intake have
been debunked),7 and some of the band’s early material deals directly with the LSD experience
(most notably ‘Flaming’ on Piper at the Gates of Dawn). LSD is a profoundly synaesthesic drug;

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characteristically, sensory information is dispersed – experienced simultaneously through several

senses, in a way that distorts the original signal. The sensory efect is, in other words, decoupled
from the physical cause. People who were part of the underground scene in London in the
late 1960s (the scene that nurtured and supported Floyd) saw, in the band’s early performances,
something which ran parallel to the LSD experience. The band had experimented, from its
earliest days, with light as a compositional spur; they produced improvised music for their art
tutor, Mike Leonard’s, forays into lighting design. In clubs like UFO, the band performed in
front of rudimentary lighting equipment that could not, by design, provide the kind of tailored
response to particular moments in the music that lighting designs later in the 1970s provided as
standard. In a 1967 Melody Maker interview, Waters discusses this use of lighting:

With us, lights were not, and are not a gimmick. We believe that a good light show
enhances the music. Groups who adopted lights as a gimmick are now being forced to
drop them, but there’s no reason why we should.8

In the same interview, Barrett added:

We have only just started to scrape the surface of efects and ideas of lights and music
combined; we think that the music and the lights are part of the same scene, one
enhances and adds to the other. But we feel that in the future, groups are going to
have to ofer much more than just a pop show. They’ll have to ofer a well-presented
theatre show.9

A journalist from Queen catches the atmosphere of an early Floyd gig when reviewing a
show at the Marquee on the January 5 1967. They would seem to concur:

The Pink Floyd are the most committed psychedelic group I have yet heard in this
country. Other groups have been dabbling with light and back projection, but the
Floyd have gone into it in some kind of depth and their visuals make a reasonably logi-
cal connection with the music. When I caught up with them at the Marquee recently,
their apparatus took up more of the club than the audience but the results were quite
impressive. There was a giant screen at the back of the stage and the images projected
on to it were like something out of Fantastic Voyage, great blobs of red and white and
purple and blue that difused and switched and exploded. The efect was like an end-
less series of action paintings.10

To create and maintain this lighting setup, the band employed a number of technicians – Joe
Gannon, who had worked with Mike Leonard, then Peter Wynne-Wilson, who was in turn
followed by John Marsh. The idea of a technician providing a bespoke light show was relatively
unusual in the late 1960s; that they employed one is a clear sign that Pink Floyd thought of the
visual aspects of their show as a crucial part of their identity as a band. The technology used
in performance, however, was ramshackle, hard to control, and sometimes simply dangerous:

One of [Peter Wynne Wilson’s] . . . creations used a movie light, pushed beyond the
recommended limits to achieve maximum brightness. In front of this was mounted a
coloured glass wheel spun at extremely high speed . . . With two wheels the possibili-
ties were not just doubled but squared. By adjusting the speed of both wheels colours
could be produced that could only be sensed. . . . But the uneven temperatures, the

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shaking and banging, and the wildly spinning colour wheels, meant the glass had an
alarming tendency to run out of control and shatter noisily, sending vicious shards of
glass fying into the band at very close quarters.11

Lighting efects like this simply could not be fexible enough to respond to specifc changes
in the music: and in any case, many of Pink Floyd’s tracks worked without specifc, predictable
changes. Both the lighting design and the music were generative rather than choreographed;
links between them relied on the audience making ‘reasonably logical’ connections between
sound and image – connections that could not have been intended either by the musicians or
the technicians.
Taken together, these two elements suggest an approach to music and to staging that did
not automatically consider composition frst and live realisation second. They also suggest that
the band themselves were simply one component of the event rather than the centre of it.
Such footage as survives from the band’s earliest days bears this out: the individual members of
the band are bathed either in strong light or in the shifting rainbow colours cast by heated oil,
pressed between two sheets of glass and placed in front of the projector beam. The link between
the lighting state and the music is something that can only be inferred by the audience (although
the term inferred suggests a more distanced, objective response than would actually be the case).
The Floyd and their audience – in venues that could facilitate the rudimentary lighting rigs
associated with the band and the subculture – had taken their frst steps toward, in Katherine
Graham’s phrase, ‘scenographic lighting’:12

This is light that moves beyond supplying atmosphere or mood and becomes an active
contributor to the complex processes of meaning-making in performance, and there-
fore aligns with contemporary defnitions of performance design. Scenographic light
is creative rather than responsive; while it may operate constructively with other ele-
ments within performance, it is actively expressive in its own right.13

For Graham:

Rather, it is to claim that scenographic light becomes expressive through its active role
in performance, and that this expressivity is a process of doing. Diamond’s concept of
continual drift is important here; each moment of performance is a kind of thing done
that immediately recedes into a doing as the next emerges. Similarly, each complete
lighting state, or cue, is both a thing done and a point in transition to the next.14

This could function as a good description of the general lighting state of most live music
performances; in Floyd’s case, however, light was used from their early performances onwards
not as a way of identifying the band as the most signifcant part of the event but as a way of
creating a shared environment for both band and audience.
In his preface to the collection Scenography Expanded, Arnold Aaronson (2017) defnes
expanded scenography as the extension of scenographic elements – light, design, and so on –
beyond the confnes of the proscenium arch stage:

Viewed in this way, scenography serves as a tool .  .  . for understanding Carnival,

theme parks, art installations, site specifc performances, ritual and festival perfor-
mances, sporting events, architecture, processions and parades, political events and
even urban streetscapes. . . . But it goes even further. The visual, spatial and aural felds

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(and occasionally the olfactory and tactile components) serve to organise – through
intentional creation or by the active foregrounding of perception – the relationship of
spectators to an event, space or object.15

Aaronson’s defnition fts habitual scenographic practices in live music; scenography in live
music performance tends to work to include the audience, either by providing them with
constantly changing visual and spatial information or by breaking or blurring the dividing line
between the artist and the audience. The scenography of live music performance is, it could
be said, expressive from the outset, and it is expanded from the outset. That is, within the
unfolding of a live music event, scenographies are simultaneously a thing done and a doing
(that is, a series of images that are in transition from the moment they are established), and
they are also expanded – designed to organise both through intentional creation and the active
foregrounding of perception – the relationship of spectators to the performance.

Planet Floyd
Pink Floyd were one of the frst bands to embrace the idea of an expressive, expanded sce-
nography in gigs, but also, as noted previously, they did so not to create an environment that
foregrounded them as performers but rather to create an environment in which the band could
hide – efectively using the spectacle to mask their own roles in the unfolding event. However,
as they did so, their live performances served to establish and re-enforce a clear visual identity
for the band; gradually, the scenographic elements themselves became part of the history of
Floyd – standing in, it could be said, for the charismatic, dynamic performances that the band
themselves did not feel they could provide.
Floyd’s earliest tours were hampered by the multiple inadequacies of performance venues in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Touring with their own equipment exposed them to the vagaries
of power supplies, venue confgurations and stage sizes. Moreover, audiences outside of London
could not be guaranteed to follow the band’s more experimental pieces. As Waters said in 1967:

we could probably start a number and improvise on it for an hour and a half but that’s
not on. For us, the most important thing is to be visual, and for the cats watching us
to have fun. This is all we want. We get very upset if people get bored halfway through
smashing the second set. Then all of a sudden they hear ‘Arnold Layne’ and they fip
all over again.16

Boredom was one of the hazards; another was more active dislike. Waters recalled being hit on
the forehead by a penny, thrown by someone in the audience, when the band played a club in Eal-
ing that year. The aleatory nature of the band’s music made sense, as noted previously, in a perfor-
mance environment that was both expressive and extended. The clubs they played in London gave
them that environment and a culture that would actively support this type of performance. Floyd
therefore had a strong vested interest in creating bespoke staging; as Waters recognised, the band
needed a performance space that responded, visually and sonically, to the music they produced.
On tour, though, there was initially only so much that the band could do. In the frst years
of their touring lives, what money the band had to spare for live performance was spent on
PA systems that could do two things – frst, convey the band’s music as clearly and dynamically
as possible and, second, immerse the audience in the musical world the band created. To this
end, the band invested in systems that gave them the ability to pan music around the perfor-
mance space. The earliest of these was given an appropriately psychedelic name – the Azimuth

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Co-ordinator – designed by Bernard Speight;17 a box with two joysticks to control the volume
and distribution of sound, enabling the band members to pan between speakers placed around
the hall. The audience were now completely surrounded by the band’s music and by the vari-
ous sound efects the band chose to illustrate and punctuate the tracks. Nick Mason explains:

If the joystick was upright, the sound was centered, but moving it diagonally would
dispatch the sound to the speaker in the equivalent corner of the hall. . . . Rick could
send his keyboard sounds swirling around the auditorium, or make footsteps – supplied
from a Revox tape recorder – apparently march across from one side to the other.18

The Azimuth Co-ordinator was frst used at the appropriately named ‘The Massed Gadgets
of Auximenes – More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd’ – a gig held at the Royal Festival Hall
on April 14 1969. Despite being banned from the Royal Festival Hall because of the accusation
that the bubbles used stained the venue’s new seating, this gig remains a successful experiment;
the band took a simplifed version of it on tour with them, and audiences were able to hear the
music reproduced on a quadraphonic speaker system.
Moving forwards, sonic innovation remained a key part of the band’s appeal; a reviewer,
writing about their performance at George Washington University on the November 16 1971,
noted approvingly that:

Echo and reverberation units, time delivery devices, synthesisers, and taped sound seg-
ments were all part of the act. They played a 32 channel mixing panel that relayed the
joy into a public address system completely circling the audience. Any given instru-
ment, by these means could be ‘placed’ at any position in the hall and could be mixed
with all kinds of taped wonders such as chirping birds and high volume white noise.
They did not worry too much with the usual content of music. When they sang, the
vocals were not important as words with meanings but rather as aspects of an exciting
tension that you could hear in the process of creation.19

The PA system, in efect, submerged the audience in a 360-degree aural environment cre-
ated by the band. It served the role that lighting had done in the band’s early club performances
(a role that lighting couldn’t necessarily fulfl on tour, given the embryonic state of performance
technologies in the early 1970s). In doing so, it helped establish the idea that Pink Floyd’s per-
formances were based on the organisation of technical elements on stage, more than they were
on the fgure of the dynamic, physically engaged musician.
It took a while for the visual elements of the show to catch up. Early showcase gigs, such as
the Royal Festival Hall show in 1969 mentioned previously, included crude bits of staging; in
that concert, for example, a man in a sea monster outft, spray-painted dull silver, walked up
the aisle and perched himself on stage next to the band. However, this side of their live work
remained undeveloped: in an interview in 1971 (on the CD/DVD The Early Years 1971 Rever-
ber/Ation), the band were asked if they wanted to develop the theatrical aspect of their work:

Mason: Yes, but we don’t really know what we want to do. There’s a very vague concept of
what we’d like to do in terms of, if it’s known amongst ourselves as ‘the theatre
project.’
Wright: There’s a very strong feeling that we should do it.
Mason: Yes, but we’re a little short on –
Wright: We’re not really sure how we’re going to go about doing it.20

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The group’s uncertainty was understandable; creating theatre from the work of a band whose
live shows were (as far as the musicians were concerned) almost anti-performative was liable to
be something of a challenge. Fortunately, Pink Floyd were already linked to a company whose
work downplayed the conventional representation of musicians in favour of easily identifable
visual tropes and iconic images. The design company Hipgnosis had been associated with the
band from its earliest days; Storm Thorgerson, one of the co-founders of the company, had
grown up in Cambridge with Waters, Barrett and Gilmour, and Hipgnosis’ frst publicly avail-
able piece of design was the appropriately psychedelic front cover of Floyd’s second album A
Saucerful of Secrets. This featured a small, circular portrait of the band, in amongst all the kabbalis-
tic paraphernalia of the later 1960s. Other album covers also downplayed the physical presence
of the ban: Ummagumma treated them as interchangeable elements in a regressive pattern, and
Atom Heart Mother replaced them with a cow. Meddle’s (1971) inside cover contained the last
image of the band for 16 years, until Gilmour and Mason appeared in the artwork for A Momen-
tary Lapse of Reason (1987), while the album’s main cover was an aquamarine-tinged close-up of
a submerged ear. Images like this helped to establish Pink Floyd as a faceless band: a band whose
visual presence was a matter of carefully chosen images, behind which the band itself could hide.
By the time the band played for Roland Petit’s ballet company in 1972, the main compo-
nents of the Pink Floyd stage set had coalesced. This mirrored changes in the wider ecosystem
of touring; bands and artists found themselves performing on touring circuits made up of civic
halls, old theatres and cinemas, larger night clubs and university venues – and in each they were
expected to put on something like the same show. This meant that, if they could aford it, bands
would tour with lighting rigs and bespoke PA systems so that they could guarantee their audi-
ences something like the same performance from night to night. As noted, during this period
Floyd put most of their cash into developing their sound, but the various elements that were to
defne their stage image also began to fall into place. A large gong stood behind Nick Mason’s
drumkit; it can be seen on the back cover of Ummagumma, placed on the roof of the band’s
touring van. By 1971, the gong was not only a key part of the staging but had also become a
stage prop; its outer rim was doused in fuel, and Waters would set the gong alight during gigs.
The idea of having a circular object as the centre point of the band’s stage design started with
the gong; in later stage sets, other objects fulflled the same function – the mirrorball, which frst
appeared in the early 1970s and lasted through until the Division Bell tour in 1994; a giant bal-
loon, on which was projected the surface of the moon; a circular revolving disc (which refected
light out into the audience); and the circular screen frst used at the Empire Pool, Wembley,
in 1974. The circle provided a strong onstage focus; it was fanked by lighting towers, which
themselves had settled into a particular confguration by 1974. There were four in all: two on
each side of the centre circle, two on either side of the stage. In addition, the band used smoke
bombs, smoke machines and dry ice; later tours, for Wish You Were Here in 1975 and Animals in
1977, used giant infatable props, one of which (the fying pig from Animals) made guest appear-
ances both on the Division Bell tour and on Roger Waters’ Us + Them tour in 2018.21
Pink Floyd reached their commercial peak in 1973–4, with the release of The Dark Side of
the Moon – an album whose artwork barely featured the musicians (their faces appeared on a
poster included in the packaging). By this stage in their career, the band had developed a trademark
stage confguration that was stable enough to act in the same way as Hipgnosis’ album covers: it
could stand as a metonym for the band. Its ubiquity as a signifer for Floyd meant that versions
of this basic stage confguration turned up both on the band’s own tours and on Gilmour’s and
Waters’ solo tours after the band’s live work had stopped. The disposition of the elements might
change (the Division Bell tour encased the lights in a semi-circular rig, with the giant projec-
tion screen dominating the centre of the stage), but the basic organisation of the stage picture

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remained constant – so constant that Pink Floyd tribute bands have felt compelled to adopt it.
However, the set was as notable for the things that it did not do as it was for the things it could.
The position of the lights, for example, meant that very frequently the band’s faces were masked
or shadowed; spotlights picked out the person singing or the person playing a solo, but when
those spotlights were dimmed, light tended to fall on the musicians’ backs or on one side or
other of their bodies. Moreover, lighting washes (in strong, dominant tones of red and deep
blue) tended to blend the bodies of the musicians into the set. Even though bands had started
taking live feeds of the show and projecting them on stage from 1975 (Led Zeppelin at Earls
Court were the frst band to do this), the footage projected onscreen during Floyd’s gigs illus-
trated the music, and because of the relative scale of the screen (which had to be huge, given
the size of the spaces in which the band were now performing), they drowned out the physical
presence of the band. The stage set was a physicalisation of the album covers Hipgnosis created
for Floyd: an iconographic representation of the group, but one that did not foreground them
as expressive individuals.
What it did do, however, was conform to the kind of expanded, expressive lighting and sce-
nography described by Aaronson (2017) and Graham (2016). Pink Floyd’s stages performed; they
were the clear precursors of contemporary concert design, not because they were necessarily
complex in layout or in the number of elements on stage but because they worked to create an
immersive environment for both the band and the audience. The Azimuth Co-ordinator, and
the various PA systems that followed in its wake, the lighting towers and the flms (and other
elements – the infatables, the plane that few over the audience’s heads to crash against the side
of the stage) should be thought of as part of an attempt to create an expressive scenography –
one that was, in Graham’s phrase, both a being and a becoming. Lighting states and visuals did
not emphasise the band; rather, they worked to create what one reviewer, writing in 1972 about
a show at the Empire Pool, Wembley, called ‘Planet Floyd.’22 Voeglin (2010), in Listening to Noise
and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, makes the point that:

Every sensory interaction relates back to us not the object/phenomenon perceived,

but that object/phenomenon fltered, shaped and produced by the sense employed in
its perception. At the same time this sense outlines and flls the perceiving body, which
in its perception shapes and produces his sensory self.23

The point can be extended from sound alone to every scenographic element in the band’s
performances. What Voeglin describes is a type of sensory immersion which is so powerful as
to blur the boundaries between the stimulus, the perceiving body and the space shared by both.
Given a sufciently strong stimulus, the perceiving body loses any sense of a division between
stimulus and response. The louder or the more all-embracing the sound and light, the more
likely it is that the audience’s sensual perception of the event will be shaped and produced by
them (as Voeglin notes). The Floyd’s sceonography, in other words, aimed to food the sensory
perceptions of the band’s audiences, efectively placing them in the midst of an environment
created in performance by the group and by the lighting and sound technicians that the band
employed. It aimed to be expressive, rather than illustrative, and it did not place the band within
the event as stars, or even as the sole focus of the audience’s attention.
This aspect of the band’s scenography derived directly from the lighting states they had
employed in the late 1960s. However, from The Dark Side of the Moon onward, the nature of the
band’s music changed; the tracks took on a more regular structure – or at least one that did not
lend itself so easily to improvisation, and the subject matter shifted, as Waters took on a greater
role in the composition of the tracks. His abiding theme was the alienating efect of modern life

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on individuals who were at the mercy of social and political forces they could not control. As
a worldview, it was bleak and frequently pitched into full-blown dystopia, and it had an impact
on the visual presentation of Floyd gigs. In the midst of lighting designs that were as expressive
(in Graham’s sense of the word),24 the circular screen projected images that were either sharply
satirical (the politicians used in the flm accompanying ‘Brain Damage,’ from 1974) or which
took a particularly jaundiced view of 1970s Britain (the montaged images of wealth and poverty
accompanying ‘Money,’ the endless fow of watches in ‘Time,’ the fight imagery in ‘On the
Run’). When Gerard Scarfe began to design visual elements for the band’s live shows (for the
1975 tour supporting ‘Wish You Were Here’), dystopia turned into full-blown nightmare. The
cartoon that accompanied ‘Welcome to the Machine,’ for example, began with a giant metallic
insect lumbering over a red desert. Later, stark white geometric buildings cracked and bled, and
a man was decapitated by a screaming snake (and his disembodied head wore itself down to a
skull). The general impression given by these new elements was of one type of social organisa-
tion (the immersion of band and audience in a shared community created by and responding to
the music) being replaced by another (the theatre event the band discussed in the early 1970s,
which worked to create a divide between the musicians and the audience).
As these elements came to predominate, they changed the nature of Floyd’s live perfor-
mances. For one thing, the pre-set elements (the flms, the operation of props like the infatable
pig) had to be cued with greater precision, and the more of those elements the band employed,
the more likely they were to break down at some point during the tour. Their operation on
stage also demanded more of the musicians; Nick Mason had to play to a click track to make
sure that his playing stayed in sync with the flms. However, these new elements did not replace
the previous live incarnation of the band; rather, they conformed to the general confguration
that the band had already established. This confguration lasted up to the performances of The
Wall in 1979–80, as Kärki (2015) notes:

The idea of The Wall was born out of frustration. By July 1978, during the last North
American leg of the Pink Floyd Animals In the Flesh tour, in support of the Animals
album (1977), Waters grew increasingly frustrated with playing live. The idea of build-
ing a wall between the band and the audience had already occurred to him, during a
1975 North American tour: Waters did not enjoy the screaming mass audiences which
had, after the commercial success of The Dark Side of the Moon, replaced their earlier,
and more introspective, fan base.25

In other words, the concept of The Wall marks a point at which the previous iterations of the
Pink Floyd stage set had proved themselves inadequate. This in itself helps explain the dynamic
of the stage show. When the audience entered the auditorium, they saw a version of the Floyd
stage set as it had been since the early 1970s. The centre screen was there, as were the lighting
towers with a variation; some of the lights could be raised and lowered during the show (these
new lights made a dramatic entrance, as ersatz helicopters at the beginning of ‘The Best Days of
Our Lives’). The set was designed by Mark Fisher, who created the infatables for the In the Flesh
tour in 1976 and now designed a new series – including a pig-like family, a fridge bursting with
food, a television and the famous fying pig – all circling high above the audience. The wall itself
was built during the frst half of the show; efectively, a stage set initially designed to facilitate the
creation of a shared environment for band and audience was transformed into the clearest pos-
sible indication of Waters’ growing alienation from his fans (the frst half fnished with Waters’
half-sung, half-spoken ‘Goodbye Cruel World’; then the last panel in the wall was ftted, the
stage blacked out, and the houselights rose on an audience symbolically banished from planet

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Floyd. Strikingly, the frst song of the second half (‘Hey You’) was performed entirely behind
the wall; the audience could see the lights changing on the top half of the circular screen – as
though a Floyd gig was taking place in the venue without them. By this point in the band’s
career, the stage set had become in itself an iconographic representation of the band; in the Wall
shows, therefore, Waters did not need to foreground a specifc character or to try to play Pink
himself (as Bowie had done with Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke). The stage was the
band; therefore, in the context of The Wall, the stage was Pink – isolated behind an apparently
immovable barrier.

Afer Floyd
After the extremely acrimonious court cases of the 1980s, Pink Floyd went back on tour. The
set they chose in 1987 was modelled on the stage sets of the early 1970s. Like them, it was an
example of extended, expressive lighting and scenography; like them – but with the expanded
capabilities of digital technology and a vastly increased budget – the set simultaneously down-
played the performative importance of the band themselves while establishing an immersive
environment shaped by the band’s music. The experience of the 1987 tour informed the even
more elaborate staging used in 1994. This set was again designed by Mark Fisher and looked
like nothing so much as a giant eye – the circular screen hung at the centre of a giant, hemi-
spherical stage. The tour redeployed some of the band’s most iconic stage techniques: a plane
few down across the auditorium and crashed against the back of the set; the screen showed
footage from the 1974 Dark Side tour; giant pigs with spotlights for eyes appeared high up on
either side of the stage; the screen itself could be tilted, raised and lowered, just like the lighting
towers during The Wall; and, at the climax of ‘Comfortably Numb,’ spotlights in the audito-
rium illuminated a giant mirrorball that split into petal-shaped, refective sections at the very
end of Gilmour’s solo.
Waters, who had by 1994 begun a solo career that was productive, but not as successful as
the rest of the band, also found himself falling back on the Floyd’s performative history. By
the time of the In the Flesh tour, Waters had defaulted back to a type of staging that strongly
suggested The Wall: a giant backdrop, stretching across the stage, carried images and video
material – much of it frst used in Pink Floyd shows in the 1970s and 1980s. Waters then
revived The Wall for a very successful tour between 2010 and 2013. The staging now beneft-
ted from all of the advances in live technology that had taken place between 1980 and 2010;
the show was slicker, more practical and more reliable (on the other hand, Waters’ attempts
to integrate directly political messages with the original narrative was rather jarring). More
recently, the Us + Them tour (2017–18) took the idea of a cross-stage wall behind the band
and extended it out into the audience. At the beginning of the section of the show devoted
to Animals, two screens descended from the lighting rig, forming a t-square with the main
stage. Fittingly, the frst image both screens carried was a sectional view of Battersea power
station, with chimneys belching smoke at each end of the screens. Waters’ predilection for
stage sets drawn from the history of his previous band has been shared by other band mem-
bers: David Gilmour’s 2016 concert in the Pompeii amphitheatre used a giant circular screen,
and Nick Mason’s current Saucerful of Secrets tour overtly references the Floyd’s earliest psy-
chedelic light shows.
It seems as though, in whatever incarnation, the members of Floyd fnd that the con-
fgurations established in their earlier live work still function as they did: as moments of
expressive scenography (that can counter the performances of notoriously unexpressive

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musicians) and as an iconographic representation of the band. This last function did not
arise because the band self-consciously chose design elements that directly refected a pre-
established identity. Rather, Pink Floyd responded to the pressures of touring by developing
an extended, theatrical and performative mode of staging that came to stand in not only for
the band themselves but for the band and the audience. It did so because from the frst it was
expressive – it did not simply show of the performers but worked to create an environment
that expressed the band’s and the audience’s common awareness of the cultural import of
the music. It also extended the band – it moved the performance past the boundary of the
stage, creating a sonic and visual representation of the music that explicitly embraced the
audience. In doing so, it could be said that they turned Ackerman’s implied negative – that
the scenography of Pompeii overwhelmed the band – into a very strong positive. Live, Pink
Floyd were not the stars, held up to the audience for adoration. Rather, it could be said that
in concert, Pink Floyd were the sum of the scenographic choices the band and their techni-
cians and designers created. So strong, so iconic were those choices that they provided a set
of overwhelming sensory environments – large enough, and powerful enough, to subsume
both audience and band.

Notes
1 The Division Bell Tour, 1994. Live album, Pulse, released 1995. ‘Run Like Hell’ was one of three songs
played as part of the encore.
2 Pulse DVD (1995), directed by David Mallet, Sony Music Entertainment.
3 Kärki, K. (2005). ‘Matter of Fact It’s All Dark’: Audiovisual Stadium Rock Aesthetics in Pink Floyd’s
The Dark Side of the Moon Tour, 1973’, in Reising, R. (ed.), ‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s
The Dark Side of the Moon. London: Ashgate, pages 15–27, page 27.
4 This disconnect between band and audience was perhaps at its most marked at the Olympic Stadium,
Montreal, Canada on July 6, 1977, when an altercation between Roger Waters and a member of the
audience saw Waters spit in the face of the main culprit. This incident led Waters to conceive of a wall
between band and audience.
5 The same can be said of the various musicians and singers who have performed with Pink Floyd
including Clare Torry, Gary Wallis, Durga McBroom, Tim Renwick and many more – including Guy
Pratt, Pink Floyd’s bass player since 1987.
6 Ackermann, Z. (2012). ‘Rocking the Culture Industry/Performing Breakdown: Pink Floyd’s The Wall
and the Termination of the Postwar Era’, Popular Music and Society, 35(1):1–23, the quotation is on
page. 6.
7 See the exhaustive Barrett biography, Chapman, R. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London:
Faber & Faber.
8 Walsh, A. (1967). ‘Hits? The Floyd Couldn’t Care Less’, Melody Maker, 9 December.
9 Ibid. Also quoted in Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains (2017). London: V&A Publishing, page 122.
10 Quoted in Povey, G. (2007). Echoes. The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Bucks, UK: Mind Head, page
51.
11 Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out. A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pages
70–72.
12 Also see, Graham, K. J. (2018). ‘Scenographic Light: Towards an Understanding of Expressive Light in
Performance’, Ph.D. thesis, The University of Leeds.
13 Graham, K. J. (2016). ‘Active Roles of Light in Performance Design’, Theatre and Performance Design,
2(1–2):73–81, quotation is on page 74.
14 Ibid:75.
15 Aaronson, A. (2017). ‘Preface’, in McKinney, J. and Palmer, S. (eds.), Scenography Expanded. An Intro-
duction to Contemporary Performance Design. New York: Bloomsbury.
16 Mabbett, M., Miles, B. and Mabbett, A. (eds.). (1995). Pink Floyd: A Visual Documentary. Omnibus
Press. 2nd revised edition (1995), n.p. This book does not have page numbers.

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17 Op. cit. Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains, page 122, Figure 74, shows an Azimuth Co-ordinator.
18 Op. cit. Mason (2004):76.
19 Povey, G. (2007). Echoes. The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Bucks, UK: Mind Head, page 151.
20 Sleeve notes interview, Pink Floyd, The Early Years: Reverber/ation, Pink Floyd Records, 2016.
21 Waters made a flm of the Us + Them tour with Sean Evans that went on release in October 2019. It
was flmed in Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome in 2018 and is described by Waters as a ‘flm that inspires with
its powerful music and message of human rights, liberty and love.’ See rogerwatersusandthem.com/ for
details.
22 Povey, G. (2007). Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Bucks: Mind Head Publishing, page 171.
23 Voeglin, S. (2010). Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. New York: Blooms-
bury, page 3.
24 Op. cit. Graham (2016):74.
25 Kärki, K. (2015). ‘Evolutions of the Wall: 1979–2013’, in Halligan, B., Fairclough, K., Edgar, R. and
Spelman, N. (eds.), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment. New York: Bloomsbury,
page 58.

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 5
BACK TO THE UFO
Pink Floyd, Te Division Bell tour (1994)
and the retrofed aesthetics of psychedelia

Kimi Kärki

Introduction
In the mid-1960s The Pink Floyd played in local community centres, student union bars and
town halls – anywhere they could get a gig. In 1993 The Division Bell tour demonstrated just
how powerful the Pink Floyd brand had become despite the changes to the line-up. Sutclife
(1995) provides the basic but necessary details,

Product of last year’s The Division Bell tour, which sold 5.3 million tickets in 77 cities
and grossed £100m from 110 shows, it’s a double CD (triple in vinyl coming up
soon), proudly overdub-free, spifly presented in state-of-the-art Q Sound, and bear-
ing the frst ever (ofcial) full concert recording of The Dark Side Of The Moon. It
should take them comfortably past the 150 million mark in worldwide album sales,
which may be a comforting thought on a windy night.1

By the 1990s, Pink Floyd had become one of the most well-known entertainment brands in
the world, and their live performances had become legendary and proftable. When they chose
to tour their The Division Bell album, there indeed was no fnancial risk, just artistic, despite the
huge scale of things; they needed Skyship 600 aircraft – and later A60 – for the crew and two
Boeing 747 cargo planes just to transfer the tour from the United States to Europe.2 The band
were expected to break new boundaries with their touring spectacles, at least in terms of scale.
This time they chose to look back to their roots.
Only a few bands have had such a long and unexpectedly interesting career and history
as Pink Floyd. They started pretty much simultaneously with the English version of the hip-
pie movement, in 1965, and became the house band of ‘Swinging London’ by 1967. Their
performances at the time, UFO-club, 24  Hour Technicolour Dream in Alexandra Palace,
Albert Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, to mention a few, have become legendary for their
synaesthetic quality, mixing music and psychedelic lighting in an innovative and era-defning
way. the psychedelic experience was a combination of music, lights, other artistic visuals and,
sometimes, the efects of hallucinogenic drugs.3 Psychedelia can also be seen as an art movement
that associates wildly, mixing surrealist heritage, childlike – very much purposeful – naïveté and
countercultural activity. With psychedelic aesthetics I, then, refer to the usage of audio-visual
technologies that have been utilised to produce the artistic experiences in this vein.
DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-8 125
 Kimi Kärki

Te 1990s and Te Division Bell (1994)

Roughly 30 years after touring in a van, there was a notable look back to the audio-visual quali-
ties of the sixties Pink Floyd. The seminal release of the post–Roger Waters line-up of the band
was The Division Bell (1994). The record was themed around communication, and the name was
the idea – picked from the lyrics of ‘High Hopes’ – of satirical science fction author Douglas
Adams. The Division Bell is located in British Parliament and used to summon the members for
votes.4 The record was followed by a massive arena and stadium tour in 1994, which seems to
be the last big tour Pink Floyd ever did, only followed by a brief live set at Live 8 (2005), where
David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason played together one last time. The
mentioned tour was followed by live-album P.U.L.S.E. (1995), and the footage from the tour’s
Earl’s Court concert of October 20, 1994, was also released as VHS (1995) and later on DVD

Figure 5.1 Poster advertising two additional performances at Earls Court, London, 1994

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 Back to the UFO

(2006). The VHS release of P.U.L.S.E. is the main target of my inquiry, as it was the contempo-
rary version of the concert, and possibly the audio is less edited. Even if The Wall remains the most
ambitious concert experience by Pink Floyd, for its pioneering theatrical ambition, once could
say that The Division Bell tour was the zenith of the technological aspirations of the band, utilis-
ing the state-of-the-art technological solutions of the early 1990s.5 This tour remains one of the
most ambitious media spectacles to date.6 Figure 5.1 is a poster promoting the fnal two shows.7
Paradoxically, at the moment of such technological triumph, the band turned their gaze back
to their early roots in London’s psychedelic clubs, partially to tap into nostalgia, partially to
make a massive modernised version of the impressive late-1960s psychedelic aesthetics the band
originally helped to create and defnitely also pioneered in the United Kingdom. In the middle
of these two distinctive eras – 1960s and 1990s – the most successful period of the band in the
1970s provided the release of 15 of the songs, in comparison to 6 from the later Gilmour era
and none from the early years. The album version had ‘Astronomy Domine.’ Special emphasis is
on a live version of The Dark Side of the Moon, which was played in its entirety.

Te random psychedelic bliss of the late 1960s

The best thing was Friday night, when you could dress up like an old flm star, drop
acid, go down to UFO, see all the likewise people, get a stick of candy foss and
foat around until the Floyd came on. They were the frst authentic sound of acid
consciousness. I’d lie down on the foor and they’d be up on stage like supernatural
gargoyles playing their spaced-out music, and the same colour that was exploding over
them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.8

This is how Jenny Fabian, the author of the autobiographical novel Groupie (1969), remem-
bered a typical synaesthetic Pink Floyd experience at the UFO. The band began to be associ-
ated with ambitious audio-visual technology in the very beginning of their career. During the
early days of their London underground club gigs, Pink Floyd performed with some of the frst
psychedelic lightshows in Britain, assisted by lightmen Mike Leonard and Peter Wynne-Wilson.
This is when the moving image was introduced to their performances, with of-beat flm pro-
jections and liquid (heated oil) slides adding to the random psychedelic experience.9
During this era, Pink Floyd’s music had developed from rhythm and blues to long arty,
psychedelic and predominantly instrumental pieces, with otherworldly titles such as ‘Interstel-
lar Overdrive’ or ‘Astronomy Domine.’ The live aesthetic was similar to their surreal and psy-
chedelic album cover aesthetic, created by band’s friend Storm Thorgerson and his company
Hipgnosis. The live aesthetic of the band was directed to creating an alternative reality, and
thus the early days of the band were very much less political – even if they were defnitely the
house band of the countercultural hippie movement in London – than what would follow in
the 1970s. The audience was meant to go into a trance-like state, to move away from external
aggression to internal journey, to lose themselves to the multisensory waves of sound and light.
This was indeed the psychedelic experience, very much associated with the intensity of hal-
lucinogenic drug experience.10 According to Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s frst ‘audio-visual’ gig
was at Essex University, with a flm being projected behind them. This was considered by the
band an excellent way to enhance their show. Soon afterwards they witnessed a really spectacu-
lar background, when someone used bubbles and oil to create a psychedelic pulsating efect
at Powis Garden.11 John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, one of the most well-known underground fgures
of Swinging London, claims that the frst real psychedelic lightshow was seen at the Interna-
tional Times magazine launch party, which took place October 15, 1966: ‘And these Americans

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 Kimi Kärki

I knew called Joel and Toni Brown, who were friends of Timothy Leary, did some slide projec-
tions to go with what the Floyd were doing.’12
Joe Gannon, Pink Floyd’s frst light man, told The Herald about the slides and lights Pink
Floyd used already in 1966:

I design the slides, basing them on my idea of the music. The lights work rhythmically.
I just wave my hand over the micro-switches and the diferent colours fash. We have
only been using the lights for one month. But before that, we were concentrating on
starting with the right equipment. The lighting is so much a part of the group that it
had to be good before it could be blend properly with the music.13

According to Syd Barrett biographer Julian Palacios, it’s really difcult to determine who did
what frst when discussing the use of light and backdrop images in England. Dozens of people
had been working with light already in the 1950s, with diferent purposes. It seems – in the
context of the psychedelic era – that at least Mark Boyle, Peter Wynne-Wilson, John Marsh,
Mike Leonard and Joe Gannon must be considered when listing the essential early lightmen of
London.14 Each and every one of them also worked for Floyd, mainly between 1966 and 1967,
the hottest period of London underground, with John Marsh staying on the longest, through-
out 1966–1968.15
The audio-visual innovations introduced during the reign of Syd Barrett–fronted Pink Floyd
were numerous. The main feature were the pulsating oil slides. Another feature that was intro-
duced in 1967 were the ‘Daleks,’ lighting towers named by drummer Nick Mason after exter-
minator robots of the TV series Doctor Who, ‘for their robotic nature, and obvious hostility to
humanoids.’16 These were movie lights in maximum, with two spinning colour wheels in front
that could be rotated in varying speed, producing ‘silvery purple metallic colours.17
But how was this technological psychedelic aesthetic translated in the 1990s? Was it just a
nostalgic throwback, or did the arena-size ofering of The Division Bell tour have something new
to add to ever-widening possibilities of rock performance? At least the conceptual song struc-
tures, so prevalent in post-1960s Pink Floyd, had almost zero randomness and chaos. Perhaps
the throwback was partly an efort to introduce something wild into the gargantuan live Pink
Floyd arena spectacles. But also, the concert design had a nostalgic retro element to it; one of
the truly huge rock dinosaurs was ‘addicted to its own past.’18 But Pink Floyd was also still very
much attaching itself to the same surreal audio-visual ‘language’ as back in the 1960s. This sur-
realism, being ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ ‘reality,’ was at the core of the intended concert experience:
to create a connection between dreaming and waking stages.19

Technological retro-nostalgia
The production costs of The Division Bell tour were enormous, which is not surprising con-
sidering the sheer size of the operation. The tour staf alone needed eight buses and 18 trucks
for the 161 people involved, the three full stages, two giant pigs, 400 Vari-Lites, 300 speakers,
power supplies and other needed additional services, such as catering. Already before the frst
note was played live, the band had spent 4 million dollars, and the running cost of the tour was
25 million on top of that.20
The stage design was a collaboration by architect Mark Fisher and lighting designer Marc
Brickman. Fisher had designed stages for Pink Floyd already since the mid-1970s. Brick-
man had worked with Pink Floyd already in the early 1980s and The Wall and also with,
for example, Bruce Springsteen.21 Their special innovation was the arched roof of the stage

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construction, a combination of steel structures and refecting surfaces. Brickman had seen Pink
Floyd play Hollywood Bowl in the 1970s and remembered the beautiful lighting possibilities
that the arched roof design provided: ‘I thought it just looked so beautiful and so simple. The
band also felt that was one of the greatest gigs they ever did, so I said, why don’t we take the
Hollywood Bowl on tour?’22 This, then, provided Mark Fisher with the ideal architectural
model. All in all, Fisher’s arena designs are part of a larger phenomenon of portable or mobile
architecture.23
Brickman started to think about the lighting and special efects, with the early synaesthetic
Pink Floyd light shows in mind. For this reason, he contacted lighting designer Peter Wynne-
Wilson, who had provided the lighting for those early live shows. Together they decided that
they could re-create the psychedelic light show, but with the latest high technology. One of
the things they came up with were new versions of the ‘Dalek’ lighting towers. This time the
lighting towers were obviously much bigger but also safer than the ones that in the late 1960s
nearly decapitated the operators, those days mainly Wynne-Wilson himself. In order to actualise
the best possible technology to achieve similar efects in arena surroundings, Bricman contacted
Hughes Corporation, a company famous for Cold War–era military technology. The civilian
versions of the designs originally developed for the army had become a growing area of produc-
tion for them, even if the actual conversion to rock spectacle was not exactly simple.24
Simultaneously, Fisher started to develop his idea of the arena as a ‘dream landscape, inhib-
ited by the people.’25 The original sketches had included ideas of a massive robotic arm that
would have provided spotlights, able to reach all stage areas from its point of attachment at the
highest point of the arc. This design was even prototyped before it was realised that the arm
would be too complex for easy transportation between cities. Another abandoned idea was
gigantic metal insects that would have moved on wires between the PA-towers on both sides of
the stage and the mixing tower at the centre of the arena.26 Furthermore, they could not realise
the globe that would cover the stage before and after the show, as the audience should have been
moved further away from the front of the stage. This was one of the last arena tours to use the
traditional monitoring system, where monitor speakers were placed in front of the musicians.
In-ear monitoring was still being pioneered at the time, and the band decided to go with the
old, more reliable system.27
The fnal stage design – or the three of them that leapfrogged from city to city to keep up
with the tour schedule – was 60 meters wide, 23.5 meters high, and 22 meters deep. The steel
construction weighted 700 tonnes and took three days to build, 18 hours to set up for live show,
7 hours to take down, and two days to pack into the 22 trucks in each case. Thus, the tour was a
continuing cycle of one stage being built, one being performed on and one being taken down.28
Before the start of the tour there was not only the usual concert rehearsal, with all sequencing
of the songs, visuals and special efects, but also the packing rehearsal. The staging needed to be
ftted into the tiniest possible space in shortest possible amount of time. Even saving one truck
for the duration of nine-month tour saved a decent amount of money.29
All this was preceded by a computerised simulation at Mark Fisher Studios. All stage con-
structions were created as 3D models, where one could witness the variety of staging elements
at their right places. These were, at least by 1997, also animated and sequenced with music.

Te concert
Films, projected on a circular screen behind the stage, ooze with heavily symbolic images, and
webs of laser light criss-cross the darkness. Figure 5.2 only captures a basic representation of the
spectacle.30 Lights explode and die away in exquisite rhythmic fux as fowers, clocks, eyes and

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Figure 5.2 Earls Court, Division Bell tour 1994. Original concert ticket

spiralling computer-generated sequences take us deep into the Floydian universe. Soon it all
fuses together in a giant electric fsh tank of light and sound: a trip for people who don’t trip.31
Journalist Clif Jones was present at Earls Court, but I need to rely on the released foot-
age. I still have my cherished VHS version of P.U.L.S.E. (1995) but also the later DVD release
(2006). There is diference in audio-visual quality because of the medium. The following are
my impressions, observing the concert now, 24 years after it was performed, and with the added
emphasis of thinking of it in terms of return to psychedelic aesthetics. The line-up was ‘beefed-
up’ Pink Floyd, obviously without Roger Waters at that time. David Gilmour, Nick Mason and
Rick Wright were each supplemented by an additional player – Tim Renwick, Jon Carin and
Gary Wallis, respectively. The rest of the band at this point was Guy Pratt on bass; Dick Parry
on saxophone; and Durga McBroom, Sam Brown and Claudia Fontaine on backing vocals.32
The frst thing to note is the venue itself. Instead of releasing a concert recording from a
stadium, Pink Floyd used Earl’s Court arena, a favourite of David Gilmour. And one could
tell it was favoured indeed; the last 14 concerts of the tour were performed at Earl’s Court,
October 13 to 29, 1994.33 What Gilmour was after – in the unavoidably massive Pink Floyd
scale – was intimacy:

I am aiming at intimacy believe it or not. How that gets across . . . we have got the best PA
system in the world, we’ve got wraparound sound, but no it’s not a club, the audience isn’t
seeing me up close like you are now. It’s not that kind of intimacy, I know. I’m not terribly
attracted to the idea of tiny venues. I fnd them more frightening than huge venues. My
ideal is to mix them up to quite a degree, 10,000-seaters and 100,000-seaters. On this last
tour, for some reason, perhaps me not listening because of concentration on the record, it
seemed that we played pretty much exclusively outdoor stadiums. I didn’t like it. Playing
in the small intimate atmosphere of Earls Court was a great way to close it.34

Intimacy must be considered in comparison to stadiums. According to Robert Kronenburg’s

typology, venues can be divided to adopted spaces, adapted spaces, dedicated spaces and mobile

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spaces.35 Both arena and stadium concerts belong under mobile spaces, as the structures travel
fully with the band. But in terms of scale, despite the staging being the same, it makes a big
diference to scale down to the arena level: this could mean 20,000 people instead of 60,000 in
one single show.
The concert starts with ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ from the Wish You Were Here album.
The quiet and hypnotic synthesiser drone is, after two minutes, accompanied by Gilmour’s
signature clean guitar intro that goes on for fve minutes. Both delay and a very subtle phaser
efect colour the guitar tone. A starry space landscape unfolds from the centre of the stage arc,
and the round central screen shows a video, provided by Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis. The
flm is a mixture of beautiful everyday English landscapes, but as the song continues, the mood
becomes more and more surrealistic: a jump into a swimming pool leads a man into a bottle,
through a giant yin-yang-symbol, a colourful spiral, to the bottom of an empty swimming pool
that is then cleaned at the end of the song.
The staging is obviously gigantic, and so is the lineup. Two guitar players, a bass player,
drummer, percussionist, two keyboard players, three backing vocalists and a saxophone
player.36 This song has been described as a ‘sonic cathedral,’ fttingly constructed by musicians
that used to study architecture. As a slowly building song, it is a perfect starter for a Pink
Floyd concert.37
What follows, is a potpourri of 1980s and 1990s Pink Floyd songs. It is obvious that the past
glories would not do alone, and the current Gilmour-driven lineup had fresh material. Not
everyone would have necessarily liked these songs, or, as journalist Clif Jones expressed in his
concert review: ‘But the newer sounds lack the fuid lyrical angst of the Waters material; they
sound too damned happy.’38
‘Learning To Fly’ (Momentary Lapse of Reason) starts, with pink light and more, lasers, beams
of lights. The song is a percussive 1980s power rocker, but the lush soundscapes of the quieter
middle part bow to ambient music that also features a video of a gigantic passenger airplane
taking of, accompanied by the sound of jet engines. During the guitar solo by Tim Renwick,
the images featured are from above clouds. Learning to fy, indeed. Thematically this follows
the pattern established in the previous Momentary Lapse of Reason tour.39 The staging, as so many
times before with Pink Floyd, took attention away from the band and emphasised the holistic,
dreamy, surreal and psychedelic audio-visual experiences. In relation to this, Andrew Goodwin
saw the ‘Learning To Fly’ video as a good example of ‘arty’ images being utilised instead of
showing the musicians or their live performance.40
‘High Hopes’41 is the monumental closing track of The Division Bell album. Starting with
the quiet bell that intertwines with a piano arpeggio, the song is a nostalgic return to youth,
even childhood, with majestic fantasy of a ‘Cambridge’ Englishness and references to Gilmour’s
and Pink Floyd’s past. The video, indeed shot in Cambridge and Ely, again by Storm Thorg-
erson, shows gigantic people – perspective of a child? – pastoral academic and nature idylls and
surreal white balloons, like something out of The Prisoner TV series from 1967–1968, but less
ominous – here named ‘The White Balls of Hope.’42 Gilmour sings the lyrics penned by his
partner Polly Samson about how the grass was greener, the light brighter, the taste sweeter.
This perfectly captures the term nostalgia that comes from two Greek words, nostos (νόστος),
homecoming, and algos (άλγος), pain, sufering. The youth is a place of no return; hence the
pain and longing. The video perhaps references Alexander the Great, in the form of a gigantic
statue. Or it might be Syd Barrett, captured and remembered as a youthful fgure, being towed
away. The tributes to the original Pink Floyd frontman Barrett, who was consumed by mental
illness, have been a constant building block of their mythos. The song is longing for the youth-
ful and hopeful idealism of psychedelia, combined with the popular surrealism of Hipgnosis that

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references the melting clocks of Dali and the changing perspectives and measures of objects,
echoing the painting style of René Magritte. With this Thorgerson aimed for childlike visual
understanding.43
‘Take It Back,’ ‘Coming Back to Life’ and ‘Sorrow’ feel a bit like fllers, even if there is an
ecological theme going on in the frst-mentioned U2-style arena anthem. After them, ‘Keep
Talking’ feels again more poignant for the chosen theme of communication. After a short intro,
the ‘voice’ of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking flls the air or, rather, his speech synthesiser:
‘For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which
unleashed the power of our imagination: they learned to talk.’ The whole background is flled
by massive horizontally moving symbols, like an alphabet of a lost language. Firmly in the call-
and-response tradition of Afro-American music, the backing vocalists ask: ‘Why don’t you talk
to me?’ And again, Hawking gives the answer: ‘It just has to be like this: all we need to do is
make sure we keep talking.’44
Most likely the most well-known Pink Floyd song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ (The
Wall) starts with helicopter sounds that rotate around the arena. The surround sound efects are
something that Pink Floyd pioneered back in the 1960s, already in the Queen Elizabeth Hall
Games for May concert May 12, 1967. The band had speakers placed all around the venue, and
the sound efects were controlled by Rick Wright with a ‘joystick’ device the band named the
Azimuth Co-ordinator.45 The helicopters were accompanied by searchlights in the audience.46
‘One of These Days’ (from Meddle) is the oldest song of the whole concert flm – on the
P.U.L.S.E. CD, there was a throwback all the way to the frst album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn,
the opening song ‘Astronomy Domine.’ Considering the whole idea of the concert audio-visual
design being a nod to the early psychedelic days of the band, the exclusion from the audio-
visual recording is strange. One possibility is that the footage turned out darker than intended.
At least, observing the bootleg video, this seems to be the case. It is truly a shame, as the throw-
back is indeed glorious in all the psychedelic haze that can be produced in arena surroundings.47
‘One of These Days’ is nostalgic in the sense that the original songs utilised the Binson Echorec
disc delay unit in a very distinctive way; the song is dominated by bass P.U.L.S.E. that is doubled
by the delay. In the quiet middle part there is a musical reference to the Doctor Who theme,
with two pulsating rings on the screened, P.U.L.S.E. synched to the tempo of the bass. Percus-
sive efects and a recorded announcement followed – ‘One of these days I’m going to cut you
into little pieces!’ As the song explodes to full speed again, the tops of both PA-towers expose
two giant pig heads that have searchlights as eyes. The full 1960s-style psychedelic lightshow
is evident here but extended with groups of synchronised Vari-Lite-lamps and precisely timed
explosives in front of the stage. Every bit is carefully timed for maximum theatrical efect. This,
along with the scale of the arena performance, is the biggest diference from the 1960s Pink
Floyd random psychedelic lightshow.48
The second half of the show was dedicated to the full live treatment of The Dark Side of the
Moon album (1973), save the three last encore songs. Whiteley (1992:104–118) sees the album,
as well as its diferent performances, as part of the psychedelic aesthetic. But instead of childlike
innocence, this collection of songs ofers dystopic and alienated takes on the (then) contem-
porary world. Whiteley even compares it to Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima and The Beatles’ ‘A Day in Life,’ where ‘synthesised sound is used to create a hal-
lucinogenic nightmare.’49
Reising (2005) considered this the supreme and ‘defnitive’ version of The Dark Side of the
Moon, at least live, went on to declare that it ‘might be the greatest concert video ever made’
and continues: ‘P.U.L.S.E., as a flm, gives viewers every possible best seat in the house for
every possible musical and visual moment.’50 Obviously, this is what director David Mallet might

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have wanted to achieve in the editing stage. In comparison to the often-uncomfortable concert
experience, with limited visibility, P.U.L.S.E. indeed ofers the intended concert experience
and highlights every climax. If the concert was a run-through of Pink Floyd history, also the
accompanying flms – and they were indeed shot and shown on proper flm – were a mixture
of the old and new.51
The intro, ‘Speak to Me,’ already firts with the psychedelic aesthetic both in the sound
collage of Chris Adamson and Jerry Driscoll talking about madness. The accompanying flm
sequence used in 1973–1975, and again in 1994, features cardiograph heartbeat that blends into
a close-up of an eye. ‘As the view gets closer, stars and the moon form in the black of the eye,
until the moon flls the entire screen.’52 The intro leads directly to ‘Breathe,’ a song about people
being like rabbits, bound by routines, commitments, circular temporality and death. It’s far from
the psychedelic hippie dream.53
‘On the Run’ starts with the spiralling synthesiser melody and another flm by Storm Thorg-
erson. The flm features a psychotic young man on a hospital bed, hearing voices and seeing
balls of light. Finally, the bed starts to move in the hospital hallways and then on a runway, taking
of. At times we get to witness that the bedbound man is still in a hospital. But the sequence
ends with an aircraft diving from the back of the arena and crashing to the stage, a prop that
Pink Floyd had used already during The Wall tour (1980–1981).54
‘Time’ starts with the ringing clocks, also seen in the animations, followed by an ambient
guitar sequence with roto-tom percussion. The visuals move from the original 1970s anima-
tions by Iaen Eames to new computerised ones by Storm Thorgerson, which take place in the
‘Castle of Chronos.’55 Another song about time running out, an essential part of the cultural
pessimistic concept of the album. This is also the frst song of The Dark Side of the Moon to
feature the full band, the dystopic thematic emphasised by the backing vocalist now dressed in
black instead of the white that was featured in the frst half of the show. It also returns to the
theme in the beginning, with ‘Breathe Reprise.’56 This is followed by the instrumental ‘The
Great Gig in the Sky,’ which starts as a quiet piano ballad, but grows into an orgasmic vocal
performance by the three backing singers, who take turns on lead vocals. This time the video
portrays water; we stay beneath the waves, and the intensity of the water movement and lighting
is varied – blue for quiet parts, red, oranges and yellow for the peak moments.57 The feeling is
more abstract, serene and perhaps meditative – this might be the most successful throwback to
the psychedelic sublime nature experience.
One of the best-known Pink Floyd songs, ‘Money,’ starts with the iconic chime of the cash
register and the 7/4 beat bass rif. The lyric is about wealth and greed, and the accompanying
video features coins, gold, furs, private jets, villas, speedboats and other symbols of luxury. Even
if the song is obviously satire, it was thought to be a positive song about money, cars, caviar
and buying a football team. The solo sections feature more modest lighting efects, notably to
highlight the players. This is song is also a transition from personal and individual tones of the
previous songs towards something more communal and political.58
The anti-war song ‘Us and Them’ starts with a slow, dreamy arpeggio. The flm features
people walking, miners working and travelling with a train. This is a dynamic flm; it has move-
ment, and its aesthetic resembles that of a propaganda flm. It could also be seen as a parody of
such flms.59 But the moments when the ‘ordinary’ people feature on the screen invite consider-
ations on the nature of ‘us’ as a crowd, and this seems to extend to the concert audience as well.
The song could thus be interpreted to be about individual alienation and crowd experience
but also ideological and political critique. The lyric is about war and otherness, about creating
borders and oppositions. War is the epitome of the insanity, generals moving pieces on the map
and people dying as a result, lines on the map moving from side to side.60 The song segues into

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another instrumental, ‘Any Colour You Like,’61 which is the clearest visual reference to the late
1960s, with the clear resemblance of liquid oil slides. This is a moment of pure nostalgia, but as
it’s interleaved with more organised audio-visual moments, the whole event becomes ‘nothing
less than a totalizing vision, a history of sorts, of psychedelic concert production, from the sim-
plest experiments of the mid- and late sixties to the perfectly synchronized light, flm, and laser
sophistication of the 21st century.’62 This totalisation can be seen to be part of an even longer
trend in staging that was highlighted already with Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.63
‘Brain Damage’ is the most direct political commentary in the whole concert. The song
about lunatics and madness features a long list of political fgures in its video, flmed by Caroline
Wright:64 George H. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton – with a saxophone, Saddam Hus-
sein, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, John Mayor and Yasser Arafat appear as the residents of
a musical madhouse. The central screen features explosion; the soldiers are running, replaced by
tombstones. Insane taped laughter flls the air.65 ‘Eclipse,’ the closer of The Dark Side of the Moon,
starts directly with a drum fll and descending guitar arpeggio. The video shows the sun slowly
eclipsed by the moon, just like in the lyrics. Even in the end, the tranquil moment is flled with
fear of madness. The whole stage construction seems to be covered by the surface of the moon,
with dust and craters. The voice of a man ends the conceptual song cycle, the speaker being the
Irish doorman of Abbey Road studios, Gerry O’Driscoll.66 ‘There’s no dark side of the moon
really, matter of fact it’s all dark.’67
Performing The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety feels justifed and poignant, even if it
could be seen as a cynical act of tapping into the nostalgia felt by the generations of Pink Floyd
fans. And despite the emphasis on nostalgia and musicianship, frst and foremost in the post–
Roger Waters years of the band, the cultural pessimism of the original recording still comes
through. None of the darkness or satire has been toned down; the live performance is surpris-
ingly loyal to the original album version. This, however, is one central feature of ‘classic rock’:
the original album has become so iconic that the music has to be performed as loyally to it as
possible – it’s the new classical music, where everything has its right place and tone, and the
possible changes are more nuances than improvisation or actual departures from the original.
The band, according to Nick Mason, regretted not having released a live version of the album
already in the 1970s.68
The concert did not end here. After retreating from the stage for a while, Pink Floyd was
back for encores. Starting with ‘Wish You Were Here,’ an acoustic ballad about Syd Barrett, the
spectacle is toned down for a calm and ‘intimate’ – for an arena gig – moment. The lighting is
stable, like fower buckets of light, with laser beams rising from the stage, moving slowly and
elegantly.69
The second encore, ‘Comfortably Numb,’ from The Wall, is performed with a less theatrical
style in comparison to the original live performance, where Gilmour used to sing the chorus
from the top of the wall. But the technological and psychedelic spectacle reaches its zenith dur-
ing the solo sections. First Gilmour is bathed by the Vari-Lite spotlights surrounding the central
screen above. The screen itself turns down towards Gilmour, like a giant magnifying glass ema-
nating solar beams. After a while, the mixing tower at the centre of the arena reveals a gigantic
fve-meter-diameter rotating mirror ball that rises up above the audience with a Tomcat Starlift
retractable tower, to 21 meters in all, and starts radiating light in all directions. The whole arena
is flled with the light, like starry sky projected upon the audience. This is the ‘Dream World,’
designed by architect Mark Fisher to be the visual highlight of the concert, involving the whole
arena in the experience. The arched staging was, according to Fisher, a gateway to another
world, the musicians being the interpreters between the diferent dimensions. The attention

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of the audience was directed from the stage towards the light patterns and night sky.70 To add
one more step to this collective and ‘utopian’ technological experience, the mirror ball opens
to reveal glittering petals, like a gigantic fower of fre that foods the arena with psychedelic
changing beams of light; it is as if it is interacting with the stage lighting, an audio-visual feast
emphasised by the extended guitar solo by Gilmour.71
The last song of the concert, ‘Run Like Hell,’ yet another favourite from The Wall, ofers
an interesting comparative element to the original performance of the song. In the P.U.L.S.E.
version, the rocker is performed with the full psychedelic arsenal from the staging, starting from
darkness, with strobe lights and lasers cutting through in synch with improvised delay guitar
efects by Gilmour. The dreamlike quality follows well from the overblown explosions of light
that preceded the moment, and it is yet another clear throwback to 1960s psychedelic aesthetic.
Here the ‘popular avantgarde’ of Pink Floyd is married to the lighting aesthetic of Marc Brick-
man, giving a clear and direct bow to the early days of the band. This is followed by the song,
another feast of light and explosions.72 If we compare this start of the song to the original The
Wall tour performance, the diference between Waters and Gilmour as entertainers becomes
evident. Waters starts the song by addressing the audience, framing the rocking song as a parody
of ‘good times’ in a concert: ‘Aaaaghhh! Are there any paranoids in the audience tonight? Is
there anyone who worries about things? Pathetic! This is for all the weak people in the audi-
ence. Is there anyone here who’s weak? This is for you, it’s called “Run Like Hell”.’73
This is a clear provocation, a theatrical and raging performance by Waters. In comparison,
Gilmour appears shy and modest in his communication. ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ being
his standard reaction to the ovations and loving cheers from the audience. The original The
Wall tour lost money, and the audio-visual feast that is captured in P.U.L.S.E. made a lot of it.
To be more exact, here are two examples of the fgures: Miami, March 30, 1994, $1,975,665
(Joe Robbie Stadium, 54,738 people); Columbus, May 29, 1994, $2,406,920 (Ohio Stadium,
75,250 people).74 Evidently pioneering an ambitious piece of rock theatre is not as fnan-
cially rewarding as creating something nostalgic and entertaining. Obviously also the times had
changed by the early 1990s, stadium rock having become a frm branch of cultural industries.
But Pink Floyd did well in that regard already in the 1970s – they just took more creative risks.

Conclusion
They thrive on a cult of un-personality, a weird, anonymous chic. Think of Floyd and
the images that come to mind aren’t of people at all but of walls and prisms, pigs and
power stations. They’ve cleverly recycled three or four vague themes over the years –
insanity, loneliness, the angst of modern living – so all the punter has to do is assemble
the clues and bingo, they’ve constructed something profound. In this way Floyd are all
things to all men. Of course, I know they are really sages of sod all, but I’m a sucker
all the same. Pink Floyd cornered the market in nostalgia long ago: not just for some
imagined childhood idyll but for a collective adolescence too.75

The Division Bell tour, and the recordings of it, released as diferent versions of P.U.L.S.E.,
is a full-blown nostalgic and technological spectacle. Nothing is left to chance, as the careful
sequencing and the state-of-the-art audio-visual technology provide a modern version a Wag-
nerian unifed and totalising work of art. This tour was really not about theatrical ideas and
clever intellectual concepts but rather about technologically sublime audio-visual entertain-
ment, to the point of exaggeration. Or, as drummer Nick Mason expressed it when discussing

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the idle post-Cold War military technology ofered to them: ‘Unfortunately in spite of the
wonderfully cheap deals available we were unable to think of anything to do with a Sidewinder
missile.’76
The tour was also the culmination of the commercialisation of the Pink Floyd brand, high-
lighted by their sponsorship deal with Volkswagen. The car manufacturer logo was well visible
in the press conferences, and there was a special ‘Pink Floyd Volkswagen’ available for the people
who liked the band and cars. At least the car was a version of relatively environmentally friendly
Golf series, not a sports car.77 Gilmour was, in hindsight, not very proud of jumping into the
corporate sponsorship wagon:

We took sponsorship by Volkswagen for the frst time on this last tour. I confess to
not having thought it through entirely and I was uncomfortable with it. Meeting and
greeting Volkswagen people. I  was not a popular chappy with Volkswagen. I  don’t
want them to be able to say they have a connection with Pink Floyd, that they’re part
of our success. We will not do it again. I didn’t like it and any money I made from it
went to charity. We should remain proudly independent, that’s my view, and we will
in the future.78

Gilmour’s reaction is revealing. It is connected to his personal views and charity work but
also to rock authenticity and the idea of not selling out to rock business – surely a paradox by
that time because of the kind of huge brand Pink Floyd had become. Rick Wright had actually
sold ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ – a song he had written – to a Neurofen advert but had to record a
separate version, as Gilmour again didn’t want Pink Floyd directly associated with commercial
products.79 The shunning of the corporate side of rock, even so mildly, could perhaps be seen as
one last nod to the hippie ideals of the late 1960s, when independence meant counterculture,
and corporations were an enemy of grassroots creativity. Pink Floyd was still frmly rooted in
the same surreal audio-visual aesthetic but also an understanding of the related idealism. It is
more than obvious that there was also real nostalgia towards those early years from within the
band. P.U.L.S.E. remains a bombastic statement that reaches back to the roots of Pink Floyd.

Notes
1 Sutclife, P. (1995, July). ‘The 30 Year Technicolor Dream’, Mojo Magazine, n.p.
2 Blake, M. (2013 [2007]). Pink Floyd. Pigs Might Fly. Fully Updated with New Chapter. London: Aurum,
page 363.
3 Whiteley, S. (1992). The Space Between the Notes. Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge,
pages 61–81.
4 Fitch, V. (ed.). (2001). Pink Floyd. The Press Reports 1966–1983. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s
Guide Publishing, page 357.
5 Inside Pink Floyd: A Critical Review. (2004). DVD. Rock Express (B0002NRRVU).
6 On the notion of ‘Spectacle’ in the context of arena rock performance, see Kärki, K. (2015). ‘Evolu-
tions of the Wall, 1979–2013’, in Halligan, B., Fairclough-Isaacs, K., Spelman, N. and Edgar, R. (eds.),
The Arena Concert. Music, Media and Mass Entertainment. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pages 57–70,
and Kärki, K. (2018). ‘The Technological Reach for the Sublime On U2’s 360° Tour’, in Calhoun, S.
(ed.), U2 and the Religious Impulse. Take Me Higher. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pages 107–119.
On ‘Media Spectacle’ see Jones, C. (1994). ‘Pink Floyd: Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre, London’,
MOJO. Pink Floyd.
7 From the collection of Chris Hart.
8 See Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: W&N, pages 46, 50.
9 Cunningham, M. (1999). Live & Kicking. The Rock Concert Industry in the Nineties. London: Sanctuary
Publishing Ltd, page 15.

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 Back to the UFO

10 In Holding, E. (2000). Mark Fisher. Staged Architecture. Architectural Monographs No 52, Chichester:
Wiley-Academy, pages 31, 33.
11 Op. cit. Fitch (2001):77.
12 See Williamson, N. (2001). ‘Notes from the Underground’, Uncut, 54:54–62. And Fitch, V. (1997).
The Pink Floyd Encyclopedia. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing, page 355.
13 Quoted in Op. cit. Fitch (2001):10–11. Original is from The Herald, Kent, U.K., 23 November 1966.
14 See Palacios, J. (1998). Lost in the Woods. Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd. London: Boxtree, page 81.
15 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):43, 112, 171, 186, 345–346.
16 Op. cit. Mason (2004):72.
17 Ibid:71–72.
18 For a detailed discussion on ‘retromania’ and popular culture see, Reynolds, S. (2011). Retromania. Pop
Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber & Faber.
19 Op. cit. Holding (2000):45.
20 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):86; Op. cit. Blake (2013):363.
21 See Op. cit. Mason (2004):256. And for a more detailed description on the planning and actualisation
of the staging, see Gottelier, T. (1994). ‘Tales from the Pink Floyd Locker Room’, Lighting+Sound
International, June:51–57; McHugh, C. (1994). ‘Welcome to the Machine’, Lighting Dimensions, Sep-
tember:55–61, 92; Op. cit. Holding (2000):30–45.
22 The Division Bell Tour Program (1994).
23 Op. cit. Holding (2000). Also see and Kronenburg, R. (2012). Live Architecture: Venues, Stages and Arenas
for Popular Music. London: Routledge. Siegal, J. (2002). ‘The Mark Fisher Studio’, in Siegal, J. (ed.),
Mobile. The Art of Portable Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pages 78–89.
24 Op. cit. Mason (2004):325, 328; Op. cit. Holding (2000):39 and Op. cit. Blake (2013):363–364.
25 Op. cit. Holding (2000):35.
26 Mark Fisher Studio (www.stufsh.com/project/division-bell). See also Op. cit. Siegal (2002).
27 Op. cit. Mason (2004):324.
28 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):86.
29 Op. cit. Mason (2004):329.
30 From the collection of Chris Hart.
31 Op. cit. Jones (1994).
32 The Division Bell Tour Program (1994); also see Reising, R. (2005). ‘On the Waxing and Waning:
A Brief History of The Dark Side of the Moon’, in Reising, R. (ed.), Speak to Me: The Legacy of Pink
Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, page 21.
33 The concert on October 12, 1994 in Earls Court, London was stopped and then cancelled when a
grandstand collapsed; the date was rescheduled for October 17.
34 See Sutclife, P. (1995). ‘The 30 Year Technicolour Dream’, Mojo, (20):64–80.
35 See Kronenburg, R. (2012). Live Architecture: Venues, Stages and Arenas for Popular Music. London:
Routledge.
36 Pink Floyd (1995). P.U.L.S.E. Pink Floyd In Concert 1994, Earl’s Court, London. Director: David Mal-
let. Music: Pink Floyd. Producer: Lana Topham. EMI. VHS. PMI MVD 491463 (01325–01832)
(00030–01325).
37 Op. cit. Inside Pink Floyd (DVD 2004):0315–0340.
38 Op. cit. Jones (1994).
39 Op. cit. Pink Floyd (1995). P.U.L.S.E. (01325–01832).
40 See Goodwin, A. (1993). Dancing in the Distraction Factory. Music Television and Popular Culture. London:
Routledge, page 113.
41 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):01906–02710.
42 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):85.
43 Op. cit. Holding (2000):45.
44 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):05122–05847; Op. cit. Blake (2013):360.
45 July 2017 – in Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition at Victoria and Albert Museum, London –
curator of the exhibition, Victoria Broackes.
46 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):05915–10550.
47 See youtube.com/watch?v=0siszbObCcw [Referenced 2 November 2018]
48 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):10550–11220.
49 Op. cit. Whiteley (1992):105.
50 Op. cit. Reising (2005):20–21.

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 Kimi Kärki

51 Op. cit. Holding (2000):45.

52 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):283–284; P.U.L.S.E. (1995):11245–11426.
53 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):11427–11705.
54 Ibid:11705–12034.
55 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):85.
56 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):12045–12720; Op. cit. Reising (2005):21–22.
57 Ibid. (1995):12425–13310.
58 Ibid. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):13322–14200; Op. cit. Reising (2005):22.
59 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):85.
60 Ibid. Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):14200–14910; Op. cit. Reising (2005):23.
61 Op. cit. Fitch (1997); Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):14911–15225.
62 Op. cit. Reising (2005):23.
63 See, in terms of ‘rock liveness’, Auslander, P. (2005). Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture.
Abingdon: Routledge, pages 51–52; Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics. English Progressive Rock and
the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 11.
64 Op. cit. Fitch (1997):85.
65 Ibid. Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):15225–15610.
66 Op. cit. Mason (2004):172.
67 Op. cit. Fitch (1997); Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):15611–15750.
68 Op. cit. Blake (2013):368.
69 Op. cit. Fitch (1997); Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):15930–20445.
70 Op. cit. McHugh (1997):57, 93; Op. cit. Holding (2000):45.
71 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1995):20520–21435.
72 Ibid:21500–21635; Holding (2000):33.
73 ‘Run Like Hell’, Pink Floyd (2000). Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live. Pink Floyd 1980–81.
Limited edition. EMI. LC0542 7243 5 23562 2 5 (5 23563–4 2).
74 Op. cit. P.U.L.S.E. (1997):84–85.
75 Op. cit. Jones (1994).
76 Op. cit. Mason (2004):325.
77 Ibid:330.
78 Op. cit. Sutclife (1995): unpaginated. See also Op. cit. Blake (2013):363.
79 Ibid. Op. cit. Sutclife (1995).

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 PART II

Media, reception and fandom

 6
ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACKS
Pink Floyd in the movies

Philippe Gonin

Introduction
The period between Barrett’s era (1966–1967) and the beginnings of The Dark Side of the Moon
(early 1972) was, for Pink Floyd, ultra-creative; their quest took them in various directions,
producing music for flms and a ballet, to generally experimenting with sounds and vision and
taking part in numerous collaborations.
On four occasions between 1967 and 1972, Pink Floyd was asked to compose an original
soundtrack for cinema flms. The frst one was Peter Sykes’ underground movie The Committee
(1968).1 In 1969, they composed original music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point
(1970)2 and for Barbet Schroeder’s More (1969).3 If the frst one rejected many of their works,
Schroeder asked them for a second contribution for La Vallée (1972)4 which was to be their last
contribution as flm music composers under the banner ‘Pink Floyd’ until La Carrera Panameri-
cana.5 Waters, Gilmour and Mason would all contribute to several projects in the 1970s under
their own names.
This chapter aims to survey the ways in which diferent flm directors worked with the band
and look at how they used their music in their productions. We also take an interest in the crea-
tive process itself – in the movement from moderately successful touring band to writers of flm
scores. The chapter is not, however, about flm studies or flm music studies, as such. It will
solely look to provide an historical survey of the ways diferent flmmakers worked with what
was then an underground rock band about to have ‘stratospheric’ success.
If we set as time limits the years 1967–1972, we will, however, exclude from this contribu-
tion a major flm: Adrian Maben’s Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (1972),6 not because it is not a
cinematographic work stricto sensu, however, but because it is a movie whose specifcities require
broader developments. Indeed, although Pompeii is a real cinematographic creation and not a
simple recording of a concert, it is a flm of the music Pink Floyd in the Roman theatre, without
an audience. The interpretations of Pompeii hardly difer from those of the band’s concerts dur-
ing this period (circa 1969–1972), and it ofers no ‘original’ music. Despite its cinematographic
qualities, it also difers signifcantly from the objectives of this text: the soundtracks composed
by Pink Floyd for the cinema.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-10 141

 Philippe Gonin

It is for a similar reason that music for exhibitions such as The Body7 has not been included –
this was a score of a documentary flm signed by Waters (with Ron Geesin). This soundtrack
cannot be considered Floydian work.
Also excluded is San Francisco (1968),8 a flm featuring music by Pink Floyd (in this case, a
1966 recording of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’) and built on the rhythm driven by music. However,
the recording of the band was not intended for this flm. For similar reasons also excluded is
Peter Whitehead’s underground flm Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967)9 – flming the
band playing ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Nick’s Boogie.’10

Why Pink Floyd?

Why did movie directors such as Sykes, Antonio and Schroeder choose to employ Pink Floyd?
There is something in the phrase being in the right place at the right time and being seen by
the right people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Pink Floyd represented among infuential
art circles a certain ‘underground’ counter-culture. Blake (2016) writes ‘By now, the band had
also come to the attention of flm directors wanting to tap into the underground pop culture.’11
They frst had an occasion to record music for a short flm directed by John Latham: Speak.12
Latham (1921–2006)13 was an experimental artist who made some appearances in some London
‘happening scenes’ in the sixties, working with Pink Floyd for the ‘Music in Colour’ festival on
January 17, 1967. On various occasions, the flm was shown while the band was playing live, yet
there was no real synchronisation between the music and the pictures. This is why Latham frst
asked Pink Floyd to provide a dedicated soundtrack. The studio sessions, produced by Norman
Smith, took place in October 1967. The band failed to produce something satisfying; therefore,
Latham never used their music.14 Pink Floyd’s contribution was unpublished until its reappear-
ance in The Early Years box set (2016).
The musical score Pink Floyd produced for Speak, however, shows how the typically free(ish)
improvisation the band had developed could be used across diferent visual contexts in flms
such as The Committee (a kind of ‘Kafkian’ atmosphere), More (tracks like ‘Quicksilver’), Zabriskie
Point (‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’) or La Vallée (‘Mudmen’). But what is the role of this music score
and what made Pink Floyd’s approach so fexible? There are two approaches to this. There is
diegetic – onscreen – music, heard by the characters and non-diegetic – or incidental – music,
not heard by the characters. Antonioni, Schroeder and Sykes would use the music of Pink Floyd
in very diferent ways. For Schroeder, Pink Floyd’s music is mostly used as an internal element
in the action (onscreen music) and is therefore diegetic: it is put into a situation. Antonioni used
both; Sykes only used music in an non-diegetic way.

Te Committee (1968)
Directed by Peter Sykes, based on a short story by Max Steuer entitled Nightmare (1966), with
a screenplay by Sykes and Steuer, produced by the latter and featuring Manfred Mann’s singer
Paul Jones, The Committee is less than an hour long. Filmed in black and white, it was shown in
theatres a few times in 1968. The flm is infuenced by

‘anti-psychiatrist’ arguments of R.D Laing and his thesis stating that our society is sick,
and that crime and schizophrenia are the only sane responses to this sickness. Laing
claims (1967). ‘What we call “schizophrenia” was one of the forms in which, often
through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our
all-too-closed minds.’15

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Synopsis
The flm is about a hitchhiker, who because he is bored with the driver’s conversation, beheads
him when the latter tries to repair his car. The scene takes place in a wood. After a while, the
hitchhiker decides that he should put the head back on the driver’s body (the ‘victim’), who
wakes up. As the hitchhiker says that he does not want to be driven anymore, the victim (the
driver) leaves without him.
We are now (a few years later?) in a building (which is, in fact, the London School of Eco-
nomics, where the flm is partly located). We learn that a strange committee has been created.
It consists of nearly 300 people. They all meet in a kind of manor house in the countryside. We
do not know why this committee exists. People are there, playing chess, swimming and so on.
The hitchhiker feels paranoid at the thought that the committee was called in order to ask him
to justify and explain his actions.
He fnally spends time with the director of the committee, who weirdly collects a blood
sample. The scene leads to a discussion between both characters until the end of the movie.
The hitchhiker fnally leaves the place with a woman. All of this is perplexing. This may be the
intent: to leave the viewer with questions about what has happened and why.

From Syd to Roger: creating the soundtrack

‘We started by working with Syd Barrett. Alas, this was not a viable option,’ producer and
author Max Steuer said (from The Committee DVD).16 He added: ‘Roger was not involved at all
in that frst try with Syd. Syd read the story and said he would do the flm. This seemed fne by
me.’ It was around late 1967–early 1968 that the project materialised. Steuer had known Pink
Floyd’s manager Peter Jenner since they were at the London School of Economics and wanted
to book the band for the soundtrack. The band declined the ofer; Barrett, however agreed
to do the music. Steuer and Barrett met each other to talk about the flm. Syd seemed to be
enthusiastic – Peter Sykes, the flm director, booked a ten-hour session in a studio in London
(David Parker17 found a session-sheet mentioning January 30, 1968, as the studio booking date,
a session which was postponed to February 7).
Working with Syd was not easy. Max Steuer remembered that the musician came into the
studio without his guitar, eating a sandwich, asking for musicians to play with him – it seems
that Brian Davidson, from The Nice, was on drums and Steve Peregrine Took (Tyrannosaurus
Rex) on bass guitar. In an interview published in the fanzine Late Night, Steuer recalled that
Barrett asked the producer, author and director to leave them alone. Therefore, they did so.
After a while, they came back to the studio. The musicians had completed about 20 minutes of
music. Asking if they could listen to the music, Syd said that they should listen to the tape back-
wards. Steuer and Jenner found it interesting yet fnally decided that the tape was not enough to
be considered a defnitive work. What happened to Syd’s contribution? Steuer said that he gave
the original tapes to Peter Jenner; however,

As far as I know, I am not in possession of these tapes, I might have been given a copy,
but surely not the masters. . . . It was indeed Max Steuer, and he may have given us
the tapes. But I do not remember them. But many things disappeared with the sudden
collapse of Blackhill. My recollection is that they were less than amazing.18

Sykes and Steuer found themselves with a flm edited without any soundtrack.19 Finally,
Waters suggested Pink Floyd could do the work. In April 1968, taking some time of during the

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recording sessions for A Saucerful of Secrets (for which frst sessions had begun in January 1968),
the band spent four days in Michael and Marion Kidner’s apartment20 on Belsize Square, Lon-
don, recording the soundtrack. Barrett, as is well known, had ‘left’ the band a month earlier
(ofcially, March 1, 1968). Steuer said, ‘I am so glad [the band] did. It was absolutely wonderful
working with them, and the outcome could not be better.’21 He also remembered that the band
knew what they were about to play. They recorded tracks while the flm was being played. The
whole soundtrack was made to synchronise with the scenes. Despite a track which sounds like
an improvisation on a few chords, and the presence of the frst known version of a track which
later became ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’, their contribution, according to Mason (2004),
‘had been more a collection of sound efects than music.’22

Using the Floyd’s music

The whole movie is rather ‘poor’ in musical terms (less than 15 minutes), with the exception of
the songs called ‘Nightmare’ and ‘Fire’ performed by Arthur Brown. The movie begins with 50
seconds of efects (the tape is played backwards – remembrance of Syd’s project?); however, the
entire scene leading to the crime and the sewing of the head was edited without any music.23
The second appearance of the Pink Floyd’s contribution is the link created between both situ-
ations (‘in the wood’ then ‘at the committee’s building’). A theme, which could be called the
‘Committee Main Theme,’ frst appears at the very end of the ‘in the wood’ sequence, played on
the organ in a choral style. The chord sequence is C♯m/F♯/B/E/A/D/G♯. Then, 30 minutes
without music lead to the last part of the flm, a dialogue between the ‘central character’ and
the director of the committee. Sound efects mainly accompany the last ten minutes, adding
ambience to the discussion between both characters. The discussion and sound efects (music)
were intended to refect R. D. Laing’s philosophy of modern society; ‘some people think that
the criminals and the mad are the real heroes.’24
Once again, no real surprise in these sound efects in this last section of the flm. The music
recorded for Speak does not difer from the free improvisations made of sounds the band had
already done on stage or during studio sessions (guitar sound efects, ‘prepared’ piano, organ
chords and so on) sometimes mixed with onscreen sounds (like the bell at the beginning of the
last sequence).
The end of the sequence is musically more interesting: it consists of a 2’38” piece, which
would become ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene,’25 though not the entire track, just the begin-
ning, cut before the crescendo and Waters’ famous screaming.
The last track is a variation on the ‘Committee Main Theme.’ It begins when the central
fgure is about to leave the country estate with a girl and continues during the end credits.
Until its publication in the Early Years box set, this soundtrack had remained unavailable –
while often bootlegged. Both versions of the ‘Committee Main Theme’ are the only two tracks
from The Committee ofcially published in the box set: the original master tapes seem to have
been lost, and the only available source is the flm itself. The dialogue, sounds and music are
all mixed and therefore cannot be split, explaining why even the frst ‘Careful’ version remains
unpublished.

More (1969)
Working with Barbet Schroeder was diferent. Coming from Les Cahiers du Cinéma and Nouvelle
Vague, Schroeder, a former assistant of Jean-Luc Godard, had his own way of thinking about
music as a soundtrack. It seems that Schroeder did not need non-diegetic music for his flm.

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What he wanted was music and songs which could ft in the action. When he approached the
band, the flm had already been edited. Jones (1996) says ‘[He] explained the themes to them
and drew up a written brief for the scenes in which he would use their music.’26 Blake (2016)
writes that ‘[Pink Floyd] followed Schroeder’s instructions and produced music that was part of
the flm rather than just an incidental score.’27
Each member of the band was paid £600 for eight days’ (equivalent to £9,000 in 2020)
work. More was Schroeder’s frst flm and his frst of two collaborations with Pink Floyd.

Synopsis
Featuring Mimsy Farmer as ‘Estelle’ and Klaus Grunberg as ‘Stefan,’ More is about the fall of a
young German student, who,

in search of adventure and himself on his way to the Sun, hitchhikes to Paris. He meets
an idle young American girl, Estelle, who introduces him to drugs. Lovers, in search
of strong sensations, meet in Ibiza, to live their dangerous passion. Both captives of
desperate love, drugs and Estelle’s former friend, their only way out is tragic.28

If Barbet Schroeder evokes the myth of Icarus (which could explain the image of the sun
during the opening credits), we can also read between the lines the image of the ‘femme fatale’
and the myth of Circe:29

The daughter of Helios and Perse, Circe was a powerful enchantress versatile in the

arts of herbs and potions and capable of turning human beings into animals. She did
just that to Odysseus’ sailors – a.k.a. Ulysses in Latin mythology – when they reached
her dwelling place, the secluded island of Aeaea. Odysseus, however, managed to trick
her with the help of  Hermes  and, instead of becoming an animal; he became her
lover for a year. The couple had three children, one of whom, Telegonus, eventually
killed Odysseus.30

Schroeder did not add much else when he said years later: ‘[Estelle’s character was] like the
Albertine of “Lost Time”. We couldn’t fgure out what she was doing, so she was driving you
crazy. Besides, if she injected you then it became a vampire.’31

Music
Composed and recorded in a week at London’s Pye Studios with engineer Brian Humphries
and made between many other projects (including the Ummagumma studio sessions), Music from
the Film More is signifcantly diferent from the previous soundtracks, whereas the way they
worked is mostly the same as they did for The Committee.
Sixteen tracks were recorded. From these, 13 tracks were published on the album. Some of
the tracks remain soundscapes (‘Quicksilver’), while More also featured real songs like ‘Cymbaline,’
‘Green Is the Colour,’ ‘Crying Song,’ ‘The Nile Song’ and ‘Cirrus Minor.’32 As Mason (2004) says,

A lot of moods in the flm . . . were ideally suited of the rumblings, squeaks and sound
textures we produced on a regular basis night after night. There was no budget for a
dubbing studio with a frame-count facility, so we went into a viewing theatre, timed
the sequences carefully . . . and went into Pye studio in Marble Arch.33

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It seems that More was the beginning of Pink Floyd’s break from Syd Barrett’s infuence and
the sign of Waters’ rise as a leader and a real songwriter. It is also, in large part, the sign of the
rise of David Gilmour as the main singer of the band.

Te ‘Seabirds’ mystery
Three tracks were never released34 until their publication in the Early Years box set outtakes from
More: ‘Hollywood’ which begins with the same chord sequences as ‘Cymbaline.’ We can also
hear diferent outtakes of ‘Main Theme (Beat Version)’ and ‘More Blues’ (the latter is, in fact, a
longer version of the one published on the album, with an alternative mix, including Wright’s
organ part, the version heard on the flm).
‘Seabirds’ was a long-time track known as a Roger Waters song that is heard in the flm yet
unavailable on the album.35 In the 17-volume bootleg entitled A Tree Full of Secrets, ‘Seabirds’ is
listed as a song played in the flm during a party in Paris (just after we hear Stefan saying: ‘I fell
in love at frst sight’ circa 12’). The Early Years box set revealed another version. What we hear
is instead a variation of the beginning of the ‘Main Theme.’ A question remains: what is this
3’50” song heard in the movie?

Music that fts well

Barbet Schroeder (1969), in an interview published in the French magazine Rock & Folk, said:

Pink Floyd made me absolutely ideal music. I showed them the flm and asked them
for music that was according to the situation, without giving them any instructions.
They found an amazing magic element and especially the sense of space. . . . It’s really
music, much more than just songs. So much so that often I had to lower the volume
because the quality of the music literally destroyed certain scenes! For the record-
ing, the Pink Floyd composed their music in the afternoon while watching the flm,
then recorded in the evening, fve days in a row, between midnight and nine in the
morning.36

As mentioned earlier, they worked on a silent and already edited version of the flm, which
means that the characters, especially when they are dancing to the music played through a
record player or a k7 player (compact cassette player) were probably flmed with temporary
tracks. Other than this, we do not have any information about these temporary tracks. It is evi-
dent that the Floyd had to ft their music into the rhythm imposed by the action being shown
on the screen. More than this, they probably composed at least one track to be seen and heard
– as a group of musicians seen onscreen play ‘Party Sequence.’
Schroeder always used Pink Floyd’s music as on-screen music. ‘When a character turned
on a radio or put on a record at a party it was Pink Floyd they heard. This itself set the music
apart from a conventional soundtrack.’37 With the exception of the ‘Main Theme,’ heard during
the opening credits, the music is mainly heard in bars (‘Ibiza Bar,’ ‘Hollywood,’ ‘More Blues’
or ‘Green Is the Colour’) or at parties (‘Nile Song,’ ‘Party Sequence’), coming through a radio
or a record player. When Stefan arrives in Estelle’s hotel room (around 19’25”), for example,
where he is going to smoke grass for the frst time, she plays a record. The song heard is ‘Cym-
baline.’ ‘It’s groovy,’ Estelle says while turning up the volume of the record player. We could
even say that one of the main ‘characters’ during Estelle and Stefan’s stay in Ibiza is a k7 player.
We see it at 54,’ playing ‘Green Is the Colour’ while Estelle is dancing to the music. Again at

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1:17’: Stefan is smoking grass, listening to ‘Cirrus Minor.’ At 1:25,’ it is ‘Crying Song.’ An angry
Stefan changes the tape side, and then we hear ‘Up the Khyber.’ The only non-Floydian music
is a German song sung by Stefan with Wolf (Estelle’s dealer and ex-Nazi who found refuge
in Ibiza).
Schroeder sometimes uses the music in an ambiguous way. It is sometimes difcult to tell
if the music is onscreen music or not. An example is the scene showing a narghile seemingly
accompanied by ‘Quicksilver’ as the musical tune. In this scene Estelle and Stefan talk about
horse (a word for heroin). Estelle tries to convince Stefan to take his frst fx. We have to wait for
the camera to zoom in on the tape player to know that this time, again, the music is a piece of
on-screen music. There are two other sequences (during two heroin trips) where we cannot say
if the music is onscreen or not. The frst one is circa 1:15,’ the second one (very short) at 1:33’.
With the exception of these examples, the music is always onscreen.

Music from the Film More: the studio album

The album, with re-recorded versions of the tracks, was released on July 27, 1969, in the United
Kingdom.38 EMI did not consider Music from the Film More a real Floyd album, which gave them
the opportunity to record in another studio, with another sound engineer (other than Norman
Smith) named Brian Humphries, and to attain higher royalties than was the case with their
previous albums.
Well received in France, Jones (1996) observes, ‘the flm was savaged by the critics [in the
UK]. The most stinging criticisms were directed at Schroeder’s script.’39 It seems that Schroed-
er’s script editor was not an English native and did not understand English well enough

to prevent clichéd youth speak from creeping into dialog. ‘They were saying things
like ‘Groovy man, let’s get high,’ commented Gilmour at the time. ‘Schroeder . . .
didn’t know the subtle diference between what slang was acceptable and hip and
what wasn’t’.40

While the album was well received in France, the UK musical press were more critical. In
the June 21, 1969, issue of the Record Mirror,41 the reviewer says,

At least the Floyd haven’t deserted the music that brought them fame.  .  .  . This is
a sophisticated psychedelic LP with everything from noisy rock (‘The Nile Song’)
to some neo-jazz numbers. Pretty songs here too. And it must be great for stoned
listening, although there are enough records like that already. But, they’ve tried very
hard, and mostly this LP comes of well – should sell. Yet it does lend to sound a little
dated.42

The New Musical Express (June 21,1969) also had something to say,

Strong drum beats with overriding startling melodic sounds dominate ‘Main Theme’;
raving blues-rockers are ‘Nile Song’ and ‘Ibiza Bar’. ‘Quicksilver’ is weird, out of the
world music, and there are birds singing (as well as the Floyd) in ‘Cirrus Minor’. There
are Spanish sounds, folk sounds and jazz sounds – all interesting.43

Did Pink Floyd feel happy with this music? Several years later, Schroeder admitted that the
members of the band felt angry at the success of the soundtrack. Schroeder (2005) said, ‘They

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were furious that this record . . . was as successful as the records they worked so hard for a
year on.’44
We notice that most of the songs from More were never played live, with the exception
of ‘Cymbaline’ (also known as ‘Nightmare’), which became a part of The Man & the Journey
concert/concept in late 1969-early 1970, alongside ‘Green Is the Colour,’ which segued into
‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene.’ We also notice that ‘Up the Khyber’ became (or maybe was
extracted from) a part of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ from 1969 to 1970.

Zabriskie Point (1970)

In the mid-sixties, Michelangelo Antonioni signed a contract with the Metro-Goldwin-Mayer
studio and the Italian producer Carlo Ponti. Antonioni had to make three flms for MGM. Blow
Up (1966) was the frst released of this American trilogy and the only fnancial success for the
flmmaker. The flm won the Palme d’Or in Cannes and was nominated for Oscars for best
director and best screenplay.
Despite the fact that Herbie Hancock composed some of the music for the flm, Blow Up45
the flm had no real soundtrack in the normal sense. Rather than accompanying the movie, the
music mostly tries to represent the excitement of Swinging London and the music scene. The
most famous scene was perhaps the concert of The Yardbirds featuring Jimmy Page and Jef
Beck, the latter destroying his guitar because a buzz in his amp annoyed him.

Synopsis
The action of Blow Up takes place in the Swinging London of the mid-sixties, but Zabriskie
Point leads us to California. The flm had the ambition to be a protest against consumerism,
capitalism and materialism and appeared to be an acerbic criticism of the American way of life.
The flm opens as if a documentary, showing a discussion between students and members of
the Black Panther movement.46 Antonioni’s flm, writes Bradshaw (2014), ‘was a countercul-
ture adventure with something in common with Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde.’47 The flm
is not only about counterculture; it is also a brief and tragic love story for which Antonioni
chose non-professional actors to play the main characters (Mark and Daria). Bradshaw (2014)
summarised the story as follows:

Mark Frechette plays an armed student radical on the run from police. Stealing a small
plane, he lights out for the stark beauty of Death Valley, where he meets Daria (Daria
Halprin), a hippie chick with whom he has a sexual epiphany, psychodramatised
as an orgy. Daria has an afair with Lee (Rod Taylor), a corporate real-estate exec,
whose company, Daria belatedly grasps, is despoiling the desert with its bourgeois
developments.

Music48
The recording sessions took place in Rome in December 1969. In an interview he gave (along-
side Nick Mason) to Connor McNight (1973), Waters recalled that:

We went to Rome and stayed in this posh hotel. Every day we would get up at about
4:30 in the afternoon, we’d pop into the bar, and sit there until about seven. Then
we’d stagger into the restaurant, where we’d eat for about two hours, and drink. By

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about halfway through the two weeks, the guy there was beginning to suss out what
we wanted; we kept asking for these ridiculous wines, so by the end, he was coming
up with these really insane wines. Anyway, we’d fnished eating – the crepes suzettes
would fnally slide down by about a quarter to nine.49

Waters also recalled that they could have ‘fnished the whole thing in fve days.’ However,
the collaboration with Michelangelo Antonioni was not easy. ‘[He] would listen and go – and
I remember he had this terrible twitch – ‘Eet’s very beautiful, but eet’s too sad,’ or, ‘Eet’s too stroong.’
It was always something that stopped it from being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong,
and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell, sheer hell.’50 In Mason’s (2004) opinion:

The problem was that Michelangelo wanted total control, and since he couldn’t make
the music himself, he exercised control by selection. Consequently, each piece had to
be fnished rather than roughed out, then redone, rejected and resubmitted. . . . Anto-
nioni would never take the frst efort, and frequently complained that the music was
too strong and overpowered the visual image. . . . He ended up using an assortment
from other musicians.51

Only three tracks of Pink Floyd’s recording remained in the original soundtrack of the flm.
Antonioni fnally chose to use other pieces of music by other artists including The Rolling
Stones, Roy Orbison (neither appear on the record of the original soundtrack), Patti Page, The
Kaleidoscope, The Youngbloods, The Grateful Dead, Roscoe Holcomb and John Fahey.
Of Pink Floyd’s remaining tracks is ‘Crumbling Land.’ Jones (1996) notes, ‘The upbeat coun-
try style was at Antonioni’s insistence’, while Gilmour (1996) said, ‘He could have got it done
ten times better by numerous American groups at the time.’52 The verses, built on two chords
(A/G), played in a picking style, present a two-voice vocal line. The choruses, with a more
complex chord sequence, could be Wright’s signature playing.53
The album version ends with street sounds recorded in Rome by Nick Mason. The song was
not used in its entirety and only appeared as a piece of onscreen music for less than one minute.
The opening track, ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’,54 is a sound collage using several sounds coming
from diferent sources (unidentifed music, dialogue, etc.) randomly inserted. We can hear an
atmospheric Farfsa organ played by Wright, with Waters’ voice whispering and Mason’s drums
loop (with delay), which try to recreate a kind of heartbeat (The Dark Side of the Moon is not far).

‘Come in Number 51, your time is up,’ or the ‘explosion sequence’

Alongside the ‘love scene’ for which Antonioni chose a guitar improvisation recorded by Jerry
Garcia from the Grateful Dead instead of the compositions by Pink Floyd (at least six diferent
ones, including a blues piece and a beautiful piano piece by Wright), the most signifcant scene
is the explosion sequence at the end of the movie. In this scene, Antonioni used a Pink Floyd
composition entitled ‘Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up,’55 which is nothing but a new
‘avatar’ of ‘Careful with That Axe Eugene’56 played on an E drone instead of a D.
The sequence is almost the last of the flm. Leaving her boss in his sumptuous house in the
desert, Daria, listening to the radio, learns that Mark was killed by the police as he landed at
the LA airport. Profoundly shocked by the death of Mark, Daria turns into a revolutionary girl
who dreams of destroying this world. She stops the car and imagines the explosion of the house.
There is no sound before the explosion, flmed in a multi-angle mode by Antonioni as if the
explosion starts over and over again. There is silence. Then the music begins. We see explosions

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of ordinary objects, food, books, all that could represent consumerism and the modern way
of life. The whole sequence is solely underlined by ‘Come in Number 51 . . .’ (no sound of
explosions whatsoever, only the music). A sudden cut – the track is not yet fnished – and the
dream is over. Daria is alone, and only silence remains. She gets back into the car and leaves
the place. A  new song, ‘So Young’ by Roy Orbison, then begins. The sun goes down as if
Zabriskie’s dream is over.

Unused tracks
Several tracks were recorded by Pink Floyd during these Rome sessions but were not used
by Antonioni. The most famous track was the one called ‘Violent Sequence,’ which became
‘Us and Them’ on The Dark Side of the Moon. Other tracks appeared on the 1997 Rhino reis-
sue of the soundtrack: ‘Country Song,’ ‘Unknown Song’ (which appeared on several bootlegs
under the title ‘Rain in the Country’) and ‘Love Scene’ (take 4 – piano solo – and 6 – a blues
track). ‘Love Scene’ #1, 2 and 7 also appeared, along with some variations of already published
tracks like ‘On the Highway’ (‘Crumbling Land’), ‘Auto Scene, v.2’, ‘The Riot Scene’ (‘Violent
Sequence’) – all are on The Early Years box set (1970 Devi-ation). Some of these tracks are truly
unknown themes (like ‘Take Of’ or ‘Aeroplane’).
Apart from ‘Violent Sequence,’ the unpublished ‘Unknown Song’ retains our attention not
only because of its resemblance to ‘The Narrow Way, Part 1’ but because of the bass guitar rif
heard in the middle of the piece. This rif is the one they would use a few weeks (days?) later
composing the section called ‘Funky Dung’ from Atom Heart Mother (1970). Similarly, The
Dark Side of the Moon (1973) not only recycled an unused song from Zabriskie; it is evident that
this particular fnal footage of explosions (including slow-motion footage) was in everybody’s
mind when the concert flmmakers directed the movie accompanying ‘Brain Damage’ and/or
‘Eclipse’ during the 1974 and 1975 tours.
Guy Flatley (1970) wrote in the New York Times, ‘The critics’ verdict on the following day
was not so much negative as just plain catastrophic – a blistering blend of shock, disillusionment
and old-fashioned outraged patriotism.’57 Flatley quoted Vincent Canby, saying that

[he] kept his cool but nevertheless considered one of the flm’s most ambitious scenes –
a graphic sex orgy in Death Valley – to be ‘unintentionally funny’. Another spectacular
scene – the blowing up of an obscenely modern house symbolizing soulless, afuent
America – struck Canby as ‘absurd’.

Antonioni tried to defend his flm:

It’s very easy for an American to say to me, ‘You’re an Italian; you don’t know this
country. How dare you talk about it!’ But I wasn’t trying to explain the country – a
flm is not a social analysis, after all. I was just trying to feel something about America,
to gain some intuition. If I were an American, they would say I was taking artistic
license, but because I’m a foreigner, they say I am wrong. But in some ways, a for-
eigner’s judgment may be . . . not better, necessarily, but more objective – illuminating
precisely because it is a little diferent.58

Nonetheless, as Chatman and Duncan (2008) say, ‘The second Antonioni flm for the MGM
[was] a complete commercial disaster. While it cost seven million dollars, fve times more than
‘Blow Up,’ it brings in less than 900,000 dollars. . . . Overall, the criticism is negative.’59

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La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds) (1972)

The second and last collaboration with flm director Barbet Schroeder, La Vallée (a.k.a.
Obscured by Clouds)60 is also the last flm soundtrack recorded by Pink Floyd before Waters’
ofcial departure in 1985. As Pink Floyd, the band recorded their last flm score for La Carrera
Panamericana (1992), which is a documentary about a car race taking place in Mexico (this
soundtrack contains original tracks alongside with already recorded tracks, only released on
video/DVD).61

Synopsis
More was about the use of drugs leading to death, and La Vallée is about the quest for a lost
paradise leading to nothing. Interviewed for a French TV show (Pop2, aired on French TV in
1972), Schroeder explained that

there are three main characters in La Vallée. First, there’s Bulle [Ogier],62 who’s playing
the role of a French consul’s wife in Australia . . . who changed little by little. [There’s
Jean-Pierre Kalfon]63 who plays the role of someone who leads a group of friends
seeking a valley that is paradise.

The third main character is an Englishman played by Michael Gothard, but, Schroeder said,
‘he’s not interested in actually reaching the valley.’ After thinking that they are near the valley,
they fnally realise that it does not actually exist ‘but is probably present inside themselves.’64
Several years before La Vallée, Schroeder had directed a short documentary called Maquil-
lages about a Papua New Guinean tribe called Mapuga. The same tribe appeared in the flm
in a long sequence of a ritual ceremony (featuring the famous Mudmen) without any music
or sounds but ‘true’ recordings of the tribe. Pink Floyd’s music has nothing to do with this
particular sequence. Its absence and the way Schroeder decided to shoot this part of the flm
gives it a documentary look. In the frst sequence of Zabriskie Point, the flmmaker, as a fol-
lower of the French ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ seems to integrate an aesthetic which was called ‘le
cinéma-vérité’ (‘truthful cinema’). Le cinéma-vérité is named after the work of Jean Rouch
(Chronique d’un été – 1961 – with Edgard Morin) – a ‘French flm movement of the 1960s
that showed people in everyday situations with authentic dialogue and naturalness of action.’65
Schroeder’s flm evidently aims to provide le cinéma-vérité. This can be seen in the scenes in
which pigs are sacrifced by the tribe, while the actors seem to be participating freely in the
ceremony. The original soundtrack only comes back at the end of the flm, underlining the
heroes’ failure.
It is also difcult to say if the music is really a piece of onscreen music or not. With the
exception of the credits, the primary use of the music begins at 10 minutes into the flm. When
Olivier (Michael Gothard) and Viviane (Bulle Ogier) arrive at the camp, we hear a song; how-
ever, Schroeder does not show the source of the music. We guess that the characters hear the
music, yet there is no clue like the record player or the tape recorder we saw in More. Schroeder
did the same around 15’ (‘The Gold It’s in the . . .’) and when Olivier and Viviane make love
(‘Wot’s . . . Uh the Deal’). The same equivocality results just before they meet the ‘magician
who never speaks’ – and at around 32,’ the music we hear is ‘Mudmen,’ which seems to be
unheard by the characters. At 24,’ ‘Childhood’s End’ is played, and around 1:00,’ ‘Free Four’ is
played. We can also see that the main characters are in a Land Rover. We guess that the music
is being heard through the radio in the Land Rover.

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Te music
In Schroeder’s mind, the choice of Pink Floyd was clear – ‘What was interesting for me, is that
Pink Floyd’s music is space music and actually for me, cinema is the art of space, and their music
fts very well with my conception of the scenes.’66
Recorded at the Château d’Hérouville (Elton John’s ‘Honky Chateau’ where Bowie, T. Rex
and bands such as the Bee Gees also came to make records), Obscured by Clouds was written,
composed and recorded over two separate weeks. Schroeder was also in the studio with the
members of the band. However, his attitude was radically diferent from Antonioni’s. Schroeder
explained:

What I like about cinema is to let people free, not only the actors but also Pink Floyd.
For instance, when we’re recording here in the recording studio, I’m not a maniac
about details, telling them to add this or that. I give a general feeling, an image if you
prefer like the image of a feather of a bird of paradise that I show them, and from the
image, they compose something.67

Strangely, the music created by the band was less atmospheric compared to what they did
for More. The main diference between More and Obscured by Clouds is that the latter presented
itself as a collection of songs. If More, with songs like ‘Green Is the Colour’ or ‘Cymbaline’ cre-
ate an atmospheric feel, tracks such as ‘Quicksilver’ and ‘Main Theme’ in Obscured by Clouds
do not. The exceptions are ‘When You’re In,’ and ‘Mudmen’ (a kind of instrumental variation
on ‘Burning Bridges’). Even ‘Mudmen’ is not an atmospheric track but rather a song without
words. The last track (‘Absolutely Curtains’), is the only ‘soundscape’ in Obscured by Clouds,
including – in the album version – a recording of tribal chanting.
Like Music from the Film More, there are two diferent mixes of Obscured by Clouds. It was the
French sound engineer and musician Dominique Blanc-Francard who did the mono mix for
the flm. Pink Floyd went to another studio (in England) to make the stereo mix for the album.
Whereas the soundtrack from More was published under the title Music from the Film More,
this album was not presented in the same way:

It’s not billed as a soundtrack, probably because the picture is by a little-known direc-
tor (here anyway), Barbet Schroeder, no well-known acting names, and is not yet set
for release. But with this music, they’re already halfway to a good flm.68

The Record Mirror’s review added, ‘as usual for the Floyd, the music’s highly evocative, with
or without a flm.’ Rather well received in the United Kingdom, the album was shot down in
the French music magazine Rock & Folk (1972):

The English band composed an ‘empty’ and dull music, stripped of any external truth:
ordinary English pop music by a band that becomes (on this record) no much so.
Barbet Schroeder used this music very little, for the credits, for the last shot; some
snippets in the body of the flm. What we hear best is what is really the Floydian track,
‘Obscured by clouds’, where the work on sounds, the movement of a saturated sound
from one channel to another, recalls the band’s best spatial compositions. The rest,
short songs, melodies, harmonies, mawkish and boredom. . . . It is certain that the
band’s fans will fnd hidden resonances in it, whereas this album is only the result of a
contract flled without passion.69

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Nevertheless, Obscured by Clouds, although followed by The Dark Side of the Moon, is under-
rated. Only ‘Obscured by Clouds’ and ‘When You’re In’ were played a few times on stage in
1973 – ‘Childhood’s End’ was also played but less than fve times in March 197370 – until Mason
with his Saucerful of Secrets (2018) tour reintroduced the track in his set list. Gilmour, in his 2006
tour, played ‘Wot’s . . . Uh the Deal’; however, ‘Free Four,’ which was edited as a single,71 was
never played live even by Roger Waters.
The Valley Obscured by Clouds failed to reach its goal, probably because of the characters, who
are not sufciently committed to their quest (especially the character played by Bulle Ogier). In
1981, Janet Maslin wrote:

The Valley Obscured by Clouds must have been a far more exciting flm to envision and
execute than it is to watch. Unlike other flms by Mr. Schroeder, such as Idi Amin
Dada and The Education of Koko, the Talking Gorilla, this one seems slightly at odds with
its subject matter. Mr. Schroeder is neither this time an observer of nor a participant
in his material, and the middle ground he inhabits remains ill-defned. His flm is, by
no means, uninteresting, yet it lacks the clear vision that might have turned it into a
genuine act of exploration.72

Beyond Pink Floyd

La Vallée was the last contribution of Pink Floyd for cinema as a band (until Panamericana, which
is a documentary of their own participation in a car race). Nonetheless, members of Pink Floyd
composed soundtracks for several flms, documentaries, TV series and commercials. The frst
of them was Roger Waters, who contributed, with Ron Geesin, to the soundtrack of a docu-
mentary called The Body in 1970. In 1978, he renewed his contribution with Adrian Maben
for a documentary on René Magritte (Monsieur René Magritte, the flm also featured music by
Bela Bartok). Eight years later, he composed the original soundtrack of When the Wind Blows,73
an animated flm directed by Jimmy Murakami based on Raymond Briggs’ comic book of the
same name, which talks about a nuclear holocaust. The soundtrack also featured music by David
Bowie, Genesis, Paul Hardcastle, Squeeze and Hugh Cornwell. Waters recorded this soundtrack
with his Bleeding Hearts Band.
We fnd his name (essentially for one song for which he wrote the lyrics) in the credits of
The Legend of 1900,74 a Giuseppe Tornatore flm featuring Tim Roth, with music by Ennio
Morricone. Waters’ contribution appears during the end credits, singing ‘Lost Boy Calling.’ We
also fnd a contribution in The Last Mimsy,75 an American science fction flm directed by Rob-
ert Shaye (2007). Waters performs the song ‘Hello (I Love you)’ that he wrote with flm music
composer Howard Shore. The lyrics make some ‘clin d’oeil’ to Pink Floyd (‘Hello I love you/
Is there anybody in there?’ or ‘You can make your peace/On the dark side of the moon/I’ll see
you there’ and even ‘Have you heard/It was on the news’ which reminds us of the last verse of
‘Dogs’ – ‘Have you heard the news/The dogs are dead’) or to his own solo albums (‘We’ll fnd a
short-waved frequency/The wave connecting you and me’) which reminds us of Radio KAOS.
After an album written by Carla Bley, called Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports, Mason began col-
laboration with Rick Fenn (from 10cc). They published an album (Profles) and contributed to
several TV commercials for various brands such as HMV, Rowenta, Rothmans, and Barclays.
They also composed one soundtrack for the flm, White of the Eye (1987), a thriller directed by
Donald Cammell.76
Gilmour also contributed to several projects. In 1990, he partly composed the music for a
documentary, Endangered Species. He also composed music for the television programme The

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Last Show on Earth, a programme about drugs produced and directed by Storm Thorgerson
(Drug-Taking and the Arts a.k.a. The Art of Tripping, 1993)77 and a piece of music for a flm about
fractal geometry, The Colours of Infnity. These contributions are still unreleased on CD.
We might conclude by saying the non-album work of Pink Floyd in the form of soundtracks
for all kinds of media reveals another side to the band. In their early years the payments were,
no doubt, welcome additions to their restricted funds. In later years the work they did was more
for the cause of the project rather than for the money – with the exception of providing music
for advertisements. What both show, however, is the extensive fexible scope in music ability of
the band as a band and as individuals.

Notes
1 Steuer, M. (producer) and Sykes, P. (director). (1968). The Committee [DVD, Blu Ray, Early Years Box
Set Edition]. London, UK: Pink Floyd Music. (2016).
2 Ponti, C. (producer) and Antonioni, M. (director). (1970). Zabriskie Point [DVD]. Unknown: Warner
Bros (2008).
3 Kaplan, M. (producer) and Schroeder, B. (director). (1969). More [Blu-Ray]. Paris, France: M6 Vidéo.
(2016).
4 Schroeder, B. (Producer & director). (1972). La Vallée [Blu-Ray]. Paris, France: M6 Vidéo. (2016).
5 McArthur, I. (producer & director), O’Rourke, S. (executive producer). (1992). La Carrera Panamericana
[VHS]. London, UK: EMI.
6 Arnaud, M., Moritz, R. (producer) and Maben, A. (director). (1972). [DVD]. Pink Floyd Live at
Pompeii (The Director’s Cut). Paris, France: Universal Pictures Video (2003).
7 Battersby, R. (producer & director). (1970). The Body [DVD]. London, UK: Network. (2013).
8 Stern, A. (1968). San Francisco. London: BFI.
9 Whitehead, P. (producer & director) (1967). Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London [DVD]. London, UK:
Network (2017).
10 These early works are available on the following, Pink Floyd (2016). The Early Years Box Set (Vol. 1–7)
[CD, DVD, Blu-Ray]. London: Pink Floyd Records/Legacy Records. Pink Floyd (2016). The Early
Years Box Set, Volume 7: Continu/ation [CD]. London: Pink Floyd Records/Legacy Records.
11 Op. cit. Blake (2016):2.
12 Latham, J. Speak (with the original Latham soundtrack). Retrieved from vimeo.com/159652068.
13 Latham, J. Speak (synchronised with the Floyd’s music). youtube.com/watch?v=FBMor-V2HXA.
14 Instead of that, Latham later made a soundtrack on his own, placing a microphone on the foor to
record the sound of a circular saw.
15 Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and the Birds of Paradise. London: Penguin Books, page
107.
16 Fouray, R. (2017). ‘Pink Floyd: Les inédits (1967–68 A Saucerful Era)’. Retrieved from rarepinkfoyd.
pbworks.com/w/page/94999373/Pink%20Floyd%20%3A%20Les%2nédits%20(1967–68%20A%20
Saucerful%20Era) [online, 20 October 2018]. Also see the DVD Committee (2005): Basho – this DVD
contains a section on ‘the making of ’ the flm with insight into the music, Barrett and Gilmour. Max
Steuer also talked about Barrett in the fanzine Late Night (no 5).
17 Ibid.
18 ‘An Interview with Peter Jenner’, The Holy Church of Iggy the Inuit: Birdie Hop Website, 25 April 2014.
Retrieved from http://atagong.com/iggy/archives/2014/04/an-innerview-with-peter-jenner.html.
19 Except for the Crazy World of Arthur Brown sequence.
20 Who played in the flm.
21 Op. cit. Fouray (2017).
22 Mason, N. (2004). Pink Floyd. Inside Out, a Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld  &
Nicolson, page 126.
23 Except the short unidentifed song sung by the driver.
24 Peter Syke quoted in, Tynan, K. (1968). ‘Shouts and Murmurs’, The Observer, 9 June, n.p.
25 Also known as ‘Murderistic Woman’ at that time.
26 See Jones, C. (1996). Echoes. The Stories behind Every Pink Floyd Song. London: Omnibus Press, page 41.

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27 Blake, M. (2016). ‘Booklet’, in Early Years Box Set Vol. 1967–1972 Continu/ation. London: EMI,
page 3.
28 Retrieved from www.allocine.fr/flm/fcheflm_gen_cflm=1367.html.
29 I would like to thank my colleague Bernadette Mimoso-Ruiz, who made me think of this relation
between the character of Estelle and Circe.
30 www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Circe/circe.html.
31 Simonin, P. (2005). ‘L’invité: Barbet Schroeder’, TV5 Monde, May  2005. Retrieved from youtube.
com/watch?v=PTunmvKFB0A. 8:05.
32 The fnal chord sequence, in the end, a typical Richard Wright signature, is nothing but a copy of the
‘Celestial Voices’ at the end of A Saucerful of Secrets.
33 Op. cit. Mason (2004):28–29.
34 Except for bootlegs.
35 Even Vernon Fitch wrote, in his Pink Floyd Encyclopedia (2005), that ‘Seabird’ is Roger Waters song.
36 Paringaux, P. (1969). ‘Barbet Schroeder: More’, Rock & Folk, n°32, September:32–34.
37 Op. cit. Blake (2016):3.
38 Pink Floyd (1969). Music from the Film More [LP]. London: Columbia.
39 Op. cit. Jones (1996):42.
40 Ibid.
41 All the reviews cited here were found on a fan page, which seems to now be unavailable. The refer-
ences are indicated here as they were on this page entitled: A recollection of albums reviews as published in
the press at the time of their release.
42 Jones, P. (1969). ‘The Pink Floyd: More’, Record Mirror, 21 June 1969, n.p.
43 Evans, A. (1969). ‘Spanish, Folk and Jazz Floyd’, New Musical Express, 21 June 1969:10.
44 “L’invité” TV5 Monde, May 2005. youtube.com/watch?v=PTunmvKFB0A [online, 18 August 2018].
5’.00.
45 Ponti, C. (producer) and Antonioni M. (director) (1966). Blow Up [DVD]. Unknown. Warner Bros
(2004).
46 The Black Panthers was a political organisation originating in California in the early 1960s. See history.
com/topics/civil-rights-movement/black-panthers.
47 Bradshaw, P. (2014). ‘Zabriskie Point Review – Antonioni’s Counterculture Headtrip of a Film’, The
Guardian, 23 October.
48 Various Artists (1970). Zabriskie Point (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [lp]. London, UK: MGM
Records. And, Various Artists (1970). Zabriskie Point (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [CD]. United
State of America: Rhino Movie Music (1997).
49 McNight, C. (1973). ‘Roger Waters & Nick Mason Interview’, Zigzag, n°32, 1973. Retrieved from
pinkfoydz.com/interviews/roger-watersnick-mason-zigzag-interview-1973/.
50 Ibid.
51 Op. cit. Mason (2004):130.
52 Op. cit. Jones (1996):60.
53 Wright was the one who composed this kind of chord progression, as already heard in the fnal section
of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, ‘Cirrus Minor’ and the future ‘Breast Milky’ from the ‘Atom Heart Mother
Suite’ or ‘Shine On, You Crazy Diamond – Part IX.’
54 American slang. Pigmeat refers to ‘the term American kids used to describe those who were brutalised
by the police at Kent State’ (Jones, 1994:59).
55 According to Jones (Jones, 1994:61), the title song refers to Spike Milligan’s frst Q TV series for the
BBC. ‘Mulligan would regularly end his surreal sketches with a megaphone, through which he’d shout,
“Come in Number 51, your time is up!”’.
56 Played live in Ummagumma (1969) the studio version of ‘Careful . . .’ was released as the b-side of the
single ‘Point Me at the Sky’ on December 17, 1968.
57 Flatley, G. (1970). ‘Antonioni Defends “Zabriskie Point”’, The New York Times, 22 February 1970.
Retrieved from nytimes.com/1970/02/22/archives/antonioni-defends-zabriskie-point-i-love-this-
country.html [online, 7 October 2018].
58 Ibid: Flatley (1970):15.
59 Chatman, S. and Duncan, P. (eds.). (2008). Michelangelo Antonioni, Filmographie Complete. French edi-
tion. Köln, Germany: Taschen, page 59.
60 Pink Floyd (1972). Obscured by Clouds [lp]. London: Harvest.

155
 Philippe Gonin

61 La Carrera Panamericana is a flm of a motorcar race that took place in Mexico in 1992. Gilmour, Mason
and Pink Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke participated in the race. The flm is available on DVD,
published by Sony Music Video, 2 June 1992. Noteworthy is the material for the video composed
by Richard Wright on his return to the band he was a founding member of before being ousted by
Waters.
62 French actress who was Schroeder’s wife at that time.
63 French actor who also played in a rock band called Kalfon Rock Chaud, playing at the frst punk fes-
tival in Mont-de-Marsan (1976).
64 Aired on French TV programme, Pop 2. 4 March 1972.1’15.
65 britannica.com/art/cinema-verite [online, 22 September 2018].
66 Op. cit. Pop 2 (1972):7’04”
67 Ibid.
68 ‘Floyd Still Floating on Film’, Record Mirror, 17 June 1972, anonymous review, n.p.
69 Dister, A. (1972). ‘Echoes’, Rock & Folk, 30 December 1972, n.p.
70 It may be due to its resemblance to ‘Time’ from The Dark Side of the Moon, which was played at the
same time.
71 With ‘The Gold It’s in the . . .’ as a B-side in Europe, ‘Stay’ in the United States and ‘Absolutely Cur-
tains’ in Japan.
72 Maslin, J. (1981). ‘Schroeder’s “Valley Obscured by Clouds”’, The New York Times, 17 May. Retrieved
from the New York Times’ archives: nyti.ms/29RdMTZ. n.p.
73 Coates, J. (producer) and Murakami, J. T. (director). (1986). When the Wind Blows [DVD]. London: Bf
(2018).
74 Chimenz, M., Fattori, L. (executive producers) and Tornatore, G. (director). (1998). The Legend of
1900. (La Leggenda del Pianista sull’Oceano). [Blu-Ray]. Chapsworth, California (USA): New Line
Home Entertainment (2002).
75 Phillips, M. (producer) and Shaye, B. (director). (2007). [DVD]. The Last Mimsy. Chapsworth, Califor-
nia (USA): New Line Home Entertainment (2007).
76 Baden-Powell, S., Elwes, C., Kastner, E. and Wyman, B. (producers) and Cammell, D. (director). White
of the Eye (1987). [DVD]. London: Arrow Video (2014).
77 Blain, J. (producer) and Thorgerson, S. (director). (1993). Drug-Taking and the Arts a.k.a. The Art of
Tripping. [VHS]. London: TVF (1993). Part 1 retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=mmjp-itVni0 and
part 2 retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=MP5oG6onVXs.

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 7
‘US AND THEM’
Pink Floyd and the British music media

Simon A. Morrison

Introduction
Pink Floyd have enjoyed – or rather, endured – an intriguing relationship with the British music
media. This chapter will interrogate that relationship, tracking the dialectical experience the
band enjoyed with the press from the very beginnings of their story. This research has revealed
an extremely close, but combative, relationship – two sine waves running parallel along the
trajectory of time but crossing at particular moments – such as the early days of the band and
the controversies surrounding members leaving. The chapter will conclude that whatever band
members might say about their relationship with the press – at times fractious, at others non-
existent – the truth is rather more opaque.1
This research has focused on three diferent ways the band have had their story told by the
British music media over three consecutive decades of their existence. First, emerging at the
same time as the counterculture in mid-1960s London, the media was used for the communica-
tion of ideology and Pink Floyd’s unconventional use of technology, as though the print media
was a way of disseminating manifestos from the band. Second, and perhaps most obviously,
reviews of the band’s music – both live and recorded – have featured prominently in the British
music press through the 1970s. Finally, we can see how the media has been complicit in the
process of both detailing, and also attempting to make sense of, the controversies within the
band, with the departures of band members Syd Barrett but particularly that of Roger Waters
in the 1980s, although the chapter will ultimately resolve with press reports that surrounded the
band’s own (partial) reconciliation at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, London, on July 2, 2005.
This relationship itself can be seen as one in continual evolution. It would be an interesting
adjunct, for instance, to trace the point where the media abandoned the defnite article and The
Pink Floyd (or even The Pink Floyd Sound) became Pink Floyd, and later still, The Floyd, in
more colloquial terms. However, the importance of the press – and the origins of this enduring
relationship – can be traced to one particular moment, early on in the story of the band. After
a handful of gigs in 1965, the members of Pink Floyd (still students at this point) dispersed for
the summer, after the conclusion of the academic year. Roger Waters and Rick Wright went
to Greece (where they took acid for frst time), Nick Mason to America (where he saw The
Fugs and Thelonious Monk play). In New York, Mason bought a copy of the countercultural
publication the East Village Other, or EVO, which included a report on the underground scene

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-11 157

 Simon A. Morrison

in London by the writer Barry Miles, including a mention of his nascent band. In Inside Out:
A Personal History of Pink Floyd, Mason reports:

Finding this name check so far from home really gave me a new perception of the
band. Displaying a touchingly naïve trust in the fact you can believe everything you
read in the newspapers, it made me realise that the band had the potential to be more
than simply a vehicle for our own amusement.2

Miles argues this was ‘the frst press coverage the Pink Floyd ever had outside the Poly stu-
dent paper,’3 and further contends, with some justifcation, that it might be argued it was actu-
ally the media’s perception of the band, and the potential seen in the band by the media, that
drove them back towards one another once the summer was over. In this reading, the impor-
tance of the media was so fundamental to this story of Pink Floyd, in fact, that Mason failed to
appreciate he was actually part of something until he saw it in black and white, in a magazine
on the other side of the Atlantic.

Te 1960s: origins
A central argument of this chapter is that Pink Floyd enjoyed a close and mutually benefcial
relationship with the British music media at the times when it suited them, and the band
needed the channels of communication aforded by the fourth estate. Initially, press attention
was welcomed, in order to provide a platform for mediating their rather complex technological
and performative ideologies. Obscured not by clouds but the lighting of the stage when they
played live in their early days, and competing for audience attention with heated oil moving
around on a projector slide, they needed, and used, the press as a vessel for communicating the
band’s ontology.
In an evidently pre-digital age, here we are considering the printed press: the so-called inkies,4
more particularly the countercultural voice of the London underground press in the mid-to-late
1960s, whose emergence precisely dovetailed with the early days of the band itself. Pink Floyd
were at the epicentre of the swirling vortex of mid-to-late 1960s countercultural evolution, (per-
haps unwittingly) the in-house band of the counterculture, playing for the underground press
and at the same time being reported upon in the same press. To interrogate these contingencies,
the opening section of this chapter will consider Pink Floyd in relation to the London under-
ground scene, for instance, their early residency at the UFO Club but more particularly their
intimate connection with the International Times. In so doing, it will reafrm the interweaving of
music and media at their very genesis, in a way that perhaps no other band enjoyed.

London underground
Pink Floyd needed the media in their very early days for a very simple reason. This was a band
committed to light shows in their early live performances, and while this was experimental in
terms of an approach, it also meant that the band members were rendered anonymous, obscured
by the oil projections, washed out into one wave of psychedelic colour. Pink Floyd co-manager
Peter Jenner recalls: ‘It was just an accident but it enhanced the mystery of the band. Who were
these people?’5 The media at this stage therefore provided the necessary platform for the band
to ofer the ideological context for their cultural rationale: in other words, to explain themselves
and let their music, and the live presentation of that music, stand as something much more
artistic and inventive.

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A key person in the story of these early days is Barry Miles (more commonly known as
Miles) who, along with John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, drew together the varied strands of art, lit-
erature, music and media that would form the basis of the London underground. Miles man-
aged the back room of Better Books and then the Indica Gallery on Southampton Row, an
experimental and intermedial hub for poets, illustrators, musicians and cultural visionaries.
Spontaneous events came from this meeting and melding of minds, for instance, the Interna-
tional Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, the Notting Hill Free School and
Sunday events at the Marquee Club, where ‘the Pink Floyd sound’ played for the frst time on
March 13, 1965.6 The band played only six shows at that venue but already, for Miles: ‘The Pink
Floyd Sound became the public face of the London underground scene.’7 At this time, Peter
Jenner was looking for a ‘a far out, electronic, freaky pop group’ to manage,8 adding:

we couldn’t do much with the Free School without some money: to pay for the maga-
zine, generally to get the word around. So how do you raise money? You have socials,
as they used to be called. So there we were, the local community group, and we got
the local church hall for a social. All Saints Hall. And I was now managing the Floyd
so I thought: let’s put on some gigs. And that’s where they started and they instantly
went of like a rocket. They started in September and by Christmas we’d had centre-
page spreads in Melody Maker about the Pink Floyd.9

Interestingly, even at this early stage the music press were starting to pick up on the fact there
was something happening in London, although Miles feels that the band were not authentically
underground . . . with the exception of Syd Barrett. The other members, it is suggested, were
more reserved and more interested in cars, cash and the trimmings of the popstar lifestyle, an
opinion reinforced by band themselves.10 Roger Waters, for instance, comments: ‘You’d hear
about revolution, but it was never terribly specifc. I don’t know . . . I read International Times a
few times. But, you know, what was the Notting Hill Free School actually all about? What was
it meant to do?’11 There was a sense that the London underground was really only happening
for a few psychedelic souls; for the rest, it was like an actual Underground train: full of chaos
and purple haze, passing through your own particular station but not stopping.
Miles reports: ‘Hoppy and I were very impressed with the energy and enthusiasm of these
people and wondered what we could do to bring them together. We envisaged a newspaper,
something along the likes [sic] of New York’s Village Voice.’12 The result, International Times
(shortened to IT after a legal action by the rather more overground Times newspaper) was
Europe’s original underground newspaper – frst published on October 14, 1966 – and it was
with this title that the importance of media on the band was forged. Music, clubs and the press
all came together – and all with the prefx ‘underground.’

IT launch party at the Roundhouse

A fund-raising event was arranged to launch this new underground newspaper on October 15,
1966. The Roundhouse – a storage area for the winding equipment for locomotives – was hired
for £40, and Pink Floyd took top billing, on the basis of their light show. Miles recalls: ‘It was
grimy and very, very cold, cos it was October. We had the Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine.
The Floyd got £15 because they had a light show and the Soft Machine only for £12/10. It
was the frst big gig for both of them.’13
Picked as the chosen band for this key event, and thereby intimately associated with the birth
of a new media, critiques of the performance will be explored later in this chapter. However,

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it is interesting to note, at this juncture, the presence of various key voices, from whose varied
perspectives on the event we can assemble a complete picture of the night. For instance, we
fnd American writer Kenneth Rexroth at the event, who, in his report for the San Francisco
Examiner, details ‘awful squawking noises.’ Musician and music writer Mick Farren (2001) was
also there, and in his memoir Give the Anarchist a Cigarette he usefully adds his own perspective
on proceedings, reporting: ‘The place was defnitely a ruin, but I recognised that I’d lucked into
something exciting, new and maybe magical.’14 Farren is rather negative about Floyd in general,
however, and their appearance that night, recalling that:

Although equally out there, the next band up, obliquely named Pink Floyd, were
located more in what I recognized as the current forms of rock ‘n’ roll. Back then,
they had yet to lay the bricks in their wall, or develop a taste for gloomy pomp and
circumstance. They sounded like one continuous Pete Townshend guitar solo, but
without the physical famboyance. Their one advantage over the Soft Machine was an
extensive use of reverb and repeat echo, which was greatly enhanced by the monster-
movie acoustics of the cavernous building. They also brought their own lights, which
gave them a defnite visual edge as the shape of things to come.15

UFO
Everything was coming together as 1966 drew to a close, and all of it needed fnancing. Need-
ing a more regular club space, Hopkins and music producer Joe Boyd hired a venue called The
Blarney Club, holding 600 people in a cellar on Tottenham Court Road. UFO (pronounced
You-Fow), frst landed at the venue through the Christmas of 1966 and into 1967. Although
they only played there a handful of times, Pink Floyd became synonymous with the club,
where they would start to generate their frst real press. Paul McCartney, himself busy with The
Beatles, recalls how:

You’d go down to UFO and see the early incarnation of the Floyd. They’d be
down there, a lot of projections, lots of people sort of wandering about, that was
nice. It was all like a trippy adventure playground really. Chaplin flms going here,
Marx Brothers here, Floyd up there, conjuror over here or something – just a nice
circus-cum-adventure playground.16

However, it can be gleaned – from comments from the band members themselves – that it
was not always an easy ft. In a Sounds magazine interview from October 1972, Nick Mason
recalls of the UFO:

I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Peter and Andrew and the kind of Joe Boyd
fgures that were around then were probably part of it in a way that I certainly wasn’t.
All four of us, we were the band, that’s all, rather bizarre, sometimes very inward
looking people who lived in a world of their own. There was no community spirit,
whatsoever. All we were interested in was our EMI contract, making a record, being
a hit. At UFO, we felt like the house band.17

IT would be on sale, of course, and the crowd from another underground newspaper, Oz,
would also come down. At this point the band were also appearing on John Peel’s Top Gear

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show, and we can see how the relationship between the band, and the print and broadcast media
was intrinsic in terms of the dissemination of music text and the ideological context surround-
ing that music. By the end of 1966, the UK music magazine Rave was able to report in their
‘Rave-Elations: The Ones to Watch’ feature that ‘Pink Floyd will be a name to watch in the
New Year.’18
However, it was in rather more established British media that the story would take an inter-
esting turn, as the battle lines became drawn between the supportive environment of the under-
ground press and the more combative stance of the mass media, more concerned with stoking
moral panics. Articles about UFO appeared in The Sunday Times and even The Financial Times.
The People tabloid sent in an undercover reporter who rather confusingly seemed delighted to
report he had witnessed someone smoking a ‘joss stick.’ The licensee of The Blarney Club, a
Mr Gannon, was ofered money to talk to the press, and with this media attention – notably an
article about UFO in the News of the World of July 30, 1967 – Mr Gannon asked for the night
to end, and UFO returned to The Roundhouse.
Never was the gulf between the kaftans of the underground and the pin-stripes of the world
‘above ground’ so marked and vast. However it was a gulf Pink Floyd would themselves straddle
as they signed to EMI, parted ways with ‘Arnold Layne’ producer Joe Boyd and saw their fee
rising at the same rate that they, too, rose up from the underground. Pink Floyd were to be the
key attraction at the next outpouring of the London underground – the 14-Hour Technicolour
Dream, held at Alexander Palace on April 29, 1967 – and then the International Love-In, held
at the same venue on July 29. By this stage, however, Barrett was already on a diferent trajec-
tory to the rest of the band,19 so much so that in one interview Waters claims, (despite some evi-
dence to the contrary elsewhere) that Barrett was not even present at that latter gig. Determined
to let their music do the talking for them, this period marks the emergence of the band from
the underground, alongside a relationship with the media that evolved from the underground
press to the more established British weekly music media, the ‘inkies.’ It would also mark a less
harmonious, and more combative, period for relations between the two.
Melissa Chassay of the Bryan Morrison Agency – who assisted the band in this early stage –
recalls ‘they had this extraordinary thing which was based on Roger’s communist upbringing:
no interviews, no personality stuf; if you like the music that’s what you’re going to get,’20
and yet throughout their career we encounter endless interviews with all members of the
band, including Waters, as though compelled, despite their best intentions, to use the media
to make their feelings clear. For instance, we can trace this (at least attempted) withdrawal
from media engagement as early as 1970. In an article titled ‘The Pink Think with the Floyd’
in the University of Regina Carillon Student Newspaper in Canada, Roger Waters com-
ments: ‘Every interview I’ve ever seen has vanished, generally, with a very glazed expression
that people get when they’ve smoked a lot of dope, like you people have got, and their tape
recorder breaks.’21
This antagonism remained a constant through the 1970s. In an interview with the French
magazine Rock and Folk around the release of Wish You Were Here, Waters reafrms his frustra-
tions over his interactions with journalists, commenting ‘I don’t think it’s essential to institute
a dialogue with the rock critics, there are more interesting minorities. . . . I don’t care about
appearing arrogant in the eyes of rock critics. They are not an explanatory medium between
us and public.’22 An interesting argument, notwithstanding the fact that Waters is, in fact, say-
ing all of this to a journalist in an interview. All band members would at some stage make
similar comments. For instance, music journalist Chris Charlesworth, in the Melody Maker of
November 16, 1974, interviews Richard Wright in an article entitled ‘Floyd: All Wright Now!,’

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Wright commenting (once again to a journalist) on ‘the distance the band puts between itself
and the media,’ Charlesworth describing how:

Conversation switched to the low-key approach the group has towards the media, and
Rick agreed that this was a deliberate policy. ‘We are not trying to sell ourselves, just
the music. Right from the start we adopted this policy. We have never had a publicity
agent and we’ve never found one necessary’.23

On the subject of Syd Barrett, Waters continues: ‘For my part I’ve never read an intelligent
piece on Syd Barrett in any magazine. . . . They make me laugh, these journalists with their rub-
bish. In actual fact, I wrote that a song “Shine On” above all to see the reactions of people who
reckon they know and understand Syd Barrett.’24 It is revealing how Waters concedes he uses
his songs to conduct a proxy war with the fourth estate. He goes even further when claiming
the track (at this stage) called ‘Gotta Be Crazy,’ which would go on to become ‘Dogs’ on 1977’s
Animals, is ‘a reply to the English press.’
As a popular music academic your work is to function almost as a cultural archaeologist,
turning a page, digging down into media history.25 In the process of digging you might fnd a
modest, yet signifcant, mention of the band, marking one night in the relatively early days of
a band. For instance, if you open the copy of an International Times that I own (February 28–
March 13, 1969) you will fnd, on page 20, that there is a listing for Pink Floyd, playing live at
the Kee Club, Bridgend on Saturday March 15. It is especially interesting to revisit these reports
in the objective space that the passing of time might allow – revisiting what music journalists
made of Pink Floyd’s music, in terms of both their live concerts and recorded releases, at the
time that those moments occurred. Pink Floyd are unlikely to play Bridgend again (in an age
where even the Australian Pink Floyd – a tribute band – have been celebrating their own 25th
anniversary tour). Therefore, in a post-digital landscape we need to remember the importance
the print media had for disseminating information about such appearances, in an age where
information was prized and news of the band’s activities was not at everyone’s fngertips.
Equally, this was a band who have received incredibly varied reviews in the media, provoking
the kind of diametrically polarised responses few other bands have generated. While no one,
either producer or consumer of music, would ever beneft from an unfltered hagiography, it
is interesting to note just how vitriolic that critique could be. Indeed, this is a relationship that
became so poisonous it compelled Waters to quote titles of magazines in his lyrics and, as we
shall see, attack certain journalists in interviews. Their essential ‘diference’ marked Pink Floyd
out, from the very beginning, as a band of interest to music journalists working the circuit in
the mid-1960s. An early example, for instance, comes from Nick Jones, writing about a Pink
Floyd gig at All Saints Church Hall for the October 20 1966 issue of Melody Maker. His report
reveals the issue journalists had in fnding the vocabulary to describe what was starting to hap-
pen in the London underground scene:

Last Friday the Pink Floyd, a new London group, embarked upon their frst ‘happen-
ing’ – a pop dance incorporating psychedelic efects and mixed media – whatever that
is! The slides were excellent – colourful, frightening, grotesque, beautiful – and the
group’s trip into outer space sounds promised very interesting things to come.26

A little later the band were back, this time in a December 1966 issue of Melody Maker’s great
rival NME, who reported ‘the slides were excellent, colourful, frightening grotesque, beautiful,
and the group’s trips into outer-space sounds promised very interesting things to come.’

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If the previous section of this chapter outlined the signifcance of Pink Floyd’s appearance at
the launch party for International Times, this section should also ofer an indication of the critical
response to that performance. Such press reports were actually rather wide-ranging, indica-
tive of the slightly schizophrenic relationship the band enjoyed (or rather, endured) simultane-
ously with both the underground ‘niche’ and overground ‘mass’ media. For instance, there was,
not surprisingly, a review in IT itself, in the issue published October 21, 1966. Although the
reporter is unnamed, the commentary on the event – ‘mainly atmospherics: two and half [sic]
thousand people dancing about in that strange, giant round barn’ – is immediately redolent. Of
the band, the writer comments:

The Pink Floyd, psychedelic pop group, did weird things to the feel of the event with
their scary feedback sounds, slide projections playing on their skin (drops of paint ran
riot on the slides to produce outer-space/prehistoric textures on the skin), spotlights
fashing in time with a drum beat . . . more about them next issue.27

Of course there would be much more about Pink Floyd in the media to come – both in the
‘next issue’ of IT and the broader media landscape beyond.
At the other end of this underground/overground dichotomy, for instance, there were also
reports in the broadsheet media. Hunter Davis – a writer closely associated with The Beatles
and still commenting on music today – was in attendance and reported his fndings back, via
that more austere of publications, The Sunday Times. Miles argues that this marks the band’s frst
national press review, Davis reporting:

At the launching of a new magazine IT the other night a pop group called the Pink
Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre coloured shapes fashed on a
huge screen behind them. Someone had made a mountain out of jelly and another per-
son had parked his motor-bike in the middle of the room. All apparently psychedelic.28

Davis’ article specifcally mentions LSD and includes an interview with Roger Waters in
which Waters adds: ‘It’s totally anarchistic. But it’s a co-operative anarchy if you see what I mean.’
This very underground-overground trajectory was discussed at the event Underground-
Overground: the Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing 1968–85, held at Birkbeck College in
May 2015.29 At this symposium, music journalist Charles Shaar Murray recalled: ‘Seeing Pink
Floyd or Arthur Brown on Top of the Pops when three months earlier they’d been playing
the Middle Earth Club, I thought this was absolutely brilliant,’30 while music writer Jon Sav-
age pointed out how a July 8, 1967, issue of Disc and Music Echo ran a feature on Pink Floyd,
describing them as: ‘The people who put colour into the pop scene.’31 They would feature on
the cover of Disc only weeks later.

Into the 1970s: representations and misrepresentations of Pink Floyd

in the music media
This chapter will now move on to consider one or two further examples of interactions between
band and media in this key decade for Pink Floyd. Finding commercial success in the 1970s, it
is certain that moving into a new decade, the band felt their music could communicate in its
own aural immanence, withdrawing – to a certain degree – from the media, as much as they
withdrew from the notion of the ‘hit single.’ However, this chapter will demonstrate that this
withdrawal was only partial, and this relationship between band and media endured – even as

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it soured – before, ultimately, it was tolerated. This relationship between Pink Floyd and the
British music media in the 1970s will now be analysed predominantly by reference to one live
performance, and the reaction to that performance from band members and critics alike, and
one album released around the same time.
Emerging from the warm cocoon of the 1960s underground exposed Pink Floyd to the
more acerbic barbs of the commercial British music media, at that point in its so-called ‘Golden
Era.’ Music journalism is, of course, built entirely on subjective responses to music, and such
responses should not be managed or mediated. It is therefore perfectly understandable, even
desirable, that the same piece of music elicit oppositional responses from diferent critics. Inter-
estingly, for a band who themselves used mixed media to ofer a more holistic experience,
rather than the more prosaic, paidian relationship of band and audience, the media – in the fnal
reckoning – ofered mixed messages. However, as a music writer and academic, and someone
concerned with digitally mining decades of music journalism, it is interesting to return to these
reports that still cling to the original event with the authenticity and veracity that can only come
from proximity and without the baggage of historical interpretation and hagiographic adoration
that comes with the passing of time.
Responses to the album Obscured by Clouds (1972), for instance – largely a soundtrack to
the Barbet Schroeder–directed flm La Vallée of the same year – is indicative of this polarising
response to the band. While The Daily Telegraph described how ‘its elegant instrumentals point
the way to Dark Side,’ Rolling Stone described it as a ‘dull flm soundtrack.’ The album The Dark
Side of the Moon (1973) would form a high watermark in the story of the band – a marvellously
hypnogogic, contemplative concept album that marked the moment when true, global success
arrived – but even then, critical responses were not universally favourable. The Montreal Gazette,
for instance, reported that it is ‘the band’s biggest disappointment artistically yet,’ further accus-
ing the album of the great crime of sounding like the Moody Blues.32 Equally, in the May 1973
issue of Circus, Janis Schacht perhaps speaks for many troubled Floyd fans when struggling to
marry this sound with the Barrett-era band. Given a rating of ‘one ear, one mouth’ (for ‘a special
taste’), she writes ‘Floyd is almost a completely diferent group,’ continuing: ‘Has one of the
original underground progressive bands gone commercial on us?’33 It would be intriguing – as
an exercise in music journalism scholarship – to return to these reviewers and invite them to
reassess their opinion in the light of time passing and the perennial commercial success of the
album and its extended residence in the album charts. But one is left wondering if it is, in fact,
even possible now – with the ubiquitous status of The Dark Side of the Moon – to return to the
kind of ur-state necessary for a truly objective response to the music? This was a time without
the internet, and therefore without the ability to plug into a kind of global hive mind where
all opinions might be harvested and aggregated, shared and discussed, so that it is hard to even
conceive of such an important album not registering immediately in critical purview of a music
journalist. Of course the passing of time allows for a certain ossifcation – these now-iconic
albums settling in and cooling, solidifying to become part of the so-called rock canon.34

Dull diamonds in the empire pool

A 1977 Sounds magazine review of a Pink Floyd gig in Staford in support of the album Ani-
mals makes the interesting argument that the gig was better because it was away from London
and the press ‘generally didn’t like Pink Floyd,’35 interesting, in part, because in the previous
decade the band had only really worked in the comforting cocoon of the capital and its warm
underground. But in the 1970s, that situation seemed to have reversed. Indeed Animals was
actually much better received at its initial release than Dark Side (Record Mirror pointing out in

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their review that it was the record reviewers themselves that were characterised as sheep).36 This
chapter will now work towards a key point in time for the music analysed in this section – the
1975 release of the album Wish You Were Here and the live gigs running up to the release of
that album. Here, it is once again interesting to note the divergence in critical opinion. While
the NME and Records and Recording, for example, reviewed the record positively, and Billboard
declared it the best album since Atom Heart Mother, Allan Jones in Melody Maker described it as
lacking imagination and being predictable,37 with Rolling Stone suggesting ‘they might as well be
singing about Roger Waters brother in law getting a parking ticket.’38
Other responses – such as those of music journalist Nick Kent to the live experience of
Pink Floyd at their apparent creative apogee – are rather more coherent, and consistent, in
their pejorative, barbed nature. Nick Kent was a key commentator through the 1970s for the
NME, amongst other titles. Proceeding along a route roughly in line with the New Journalism
and Gonzo Journalism pyrotechnic aesthetics of American journalists such as Lester Bangs and
Hunter S. Thompson, Kent would become so intimately embroiled with the punk scene he
reported upon that he would, briefy, be part of The Sex Pistols, a position that might instinc-
tively put him in opposition to one of the biggest bands from what was rather lazily becoming
gathered together as the progressive (or prog) rock scene. The NME duly dispatched Kent to
the Empire Pool (later Wembley Arena) to review Pink Floyd on the evening of November 14,
1974, a transitional period between playing The Dark Side of the Moon and working up the tracks
that would ultimately appear on Wish You Were Here (1975). His response to the evening is as
unequivocal as it is excoriating, Kent (1974) commenting: ‘I left the hall possibly more infuri-
ated over what I’d just witnessed than I can ever remember being over any other similar event.
Angry and rather depressed. It was hell.’39 Kent reports on Gilmour’s greasy hair and Waters’
sixth-form lyrics, and then there’s the frst song, which Kent reveals to be a ‘new composition.’
Kent (1974) writes:

It is very slow, rather low on melodic inventiveness, each note hanging in that arche-
typically ominous stunted fashion that tends to typify the Floyd at their most unin-
spired. The song itself is dully revealed to be of very slight mettle; the chords used are
dull, as is the pace. The song distinctly lacks form.

If Gilmour’s guitar playing is, here, under attack, then Waters’ lyrics are equally open to
Kent’s broadside: ‘The lyrics are not very good, you see. Pretty much like sixth form poetry –
prissy, self-conscious and pretentious.’ Kent’s further comment on these lyrics now reveals to us
the song’s identity:

‘Come on you raver, you seer of visions/Come on you painter, you piper, you prophet,
and shine,’ sings Roger Waters at one point, his voice mottled by a slightly squeamish,
self-consciousness of timbre, not to mention the fact that he also appears at this point
to be somewhat fat.

Notwithstanding the subjective vagaries of opinion, or the function of the rock critic to be
visceral in their deconstruction of music, it is remarkable to read this savage attack on what is,
of course, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond,’ now one of the tracks central to the rock canon.
Perhaps Kent’s reaction to the slow pace of the song and way notes ‘hang’ (in a way that
is now, of course, more likely to be adored by guitar musicologists) is indicative of his own
turning towards the short, sharp shock of distorted anger that would fnd its voice with punk
and the hot summer that would follow, only six months later. At that point, there would be a

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sudden and even more seismic shudder and separation between Floyd and punk bands like The
Sex Pistols.40 Again it would be interesting to see, with the passing of time, if Kent’s opinion
has shifted (as, indeed, has John Lydon’s); however, we do have further sources that suggest he
would likely cleave close to his frst, instinctive opinion. The frst source is further journalism by
Kent himself. In once again tearing into Pink Floyd when reviewing The Wall concert for the
NME of August 16, 1980, it seems none of his anger has diminished, Kent recalls how ‘six years
ago, I witnessed Pink Floyd at Wembley giving a performance so wretchedly lackadaisical, that
the consequent review stabbed into the whole shambolic, utterly condescending endeavour.’41
Secondly, and underpinning the veracity of Kent’s instinctive kick of a reaction, David Gilmour
himself – in an interview he gave with Kent’s colleague at the NME, Pete Erskine a day after the
concert – reports that the previous night’s gig was the ‘worse we’ve done on the whole tour.’42
One might argue that the loose, ramshackle nature of their live performances (dating back to
chaotic gigs with Syd Barrett) actually revealed in fact a less slick, more serrated, and, dare one
argue, ‘punk’ approach to their shows. It was also at one of these nights at Empire Pool that,
as the band were tuning up, someone in the crowd shouted ‘Get on with it!’ at Roger Waters.
Waters responded ‘We’re going as fast as we can,’43 but already the fault lines were opening
between band and audience, band and critic, and indeed . . . between the bandmates them-
selves. Overwhelmed by these tectonic shifts, in a 1977 interview with the NME Waters begins
talking about a wall between crowd and band, hinting of his own withdrawal into the character
Pink, and an artistic response encapsulated in the statement album The Wall, with its depiction
of a rock star in complete, solipsistic isolation and chemically fuelled entropic collapse . . . not
answering the door, not answering the phone . . . and certainly not talking to journalists.

Controversies in the 1980s: Would you sell your story

to Rolling Stone?
However, Pink Floyd’s retreat into this perceived state of media lockdown was by no means
exclusive or comprehensive, and this chapter will now analyse how the band (or rather, indi-
vidual members of the band) returned to press activity when they needed to use the media as a
something of a canon to fre munitions at one another, notably when the group disbanded (or,
more accurately, Roger Waters left). Of course there have been controversies surrounding Pink
Floyd – all gleefully detailed in the music press – dating back to the very outset of the band
and the transvestite lyrical subject of their frst hit single ‘Arnold Layne’ (1967). However, this
chapter will detail, and attempt to make sense of, two particular moments in the band’s history,
when key members left, and how those instances were mediated in the British music press.

Roger 1 leaving
Of course there was to be a controversial departure before the 1980s, with the band’s split from
their creative and visionary engine, Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett. Often perceived as ‘Syd’s band’ – a fact
reinforced by the decision of the band’s management Blackhill Enterprises to proceed with Syd
as a solo artist, post-split – this was a seismic moment for Pink Floyd. While the rhythm section
of the band may well have been more caught up in girls, football and real ale rather than the
machinations of the cultural underground, Barrett was the one member of Pink Floyd who did
indeed follow Alice . . . all the way down the rabbit hole.
Increasingly eccentric and erratic, Barrett’s psyche seemed to dissolve like the oil projections
that accompanied the band’s early shows, his contribution to live gigs ultimately so problem-
atic it was ‘decided’ he should leave. The solution was to draft in a friend of Barrett’s from

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Cambridge – David Gilmour – and ease Barrett out. The frst mention of Gilmour uncovered
in the course of this research is found in Disc and Music Echo who report – in an issue of Janu-
ary 27, 1968 – that ‘21-year old singer/guitarist David Gilmour has joined Pink Floyd.’44 It was
not a smooth transition, further complicated by the friendships amongst band members predat-
ing the band itself and the fact that Gilmour would also contribute to Barrett’s frst solo work.
The remaining members of Pink Floyd were always gracious about their former colleague in
the media,45 and of course Wish You Were Here was conceived as an ode to their fallen comrade,
notwithstanding the July 26, 1975, issue of Melody Maker reporting on the infamous moment
Barrett appeared at Abbey Road studios as the band recorded that album.46
Forced to comment on Barrett throughout their career and yet perennially reticent to do
so, Gilmour was evidently furious when he read Nick Kent’s review of the Empire Pool gig
mentioned previously. Taking time out to phone NME journalist Pete Erskine and annoyed at
Kent’s hagiographic perception of ‘Barrett-era Floyd’ (Gilmour begins ‘I’ve just read the piece
and I’m very angry about it’). Kent’s review, then, did serve to fnally draw out one of the band
members in the press, a conversation that also ofers a more honest appraisal of what exactly
happened when the friends swapped places in the band. Erskine’s subsequent reporting of the
conversation in the NME of January 11, 1975 – entitled ‘Dirty Hair Denied’ – saw Gilmour
begin by claiming Kent went looking for audience members matching his description of Gil-
mour’s appearance. Gilmour says:

Well, I just don’t believe it of Nick Kent. I really don’t. He’s still really involved with
Syd Barrett and the whole 1967 thing.47 I don’t even know if he ever saw the Floyd
with Syd. He goes on about Syd too much and yet, as far as I can see, there’s no rel-
evance in talking about Syd in reviewing one of our concerts.48

Evidently feeling compelled to defend himself by putting across his side of the story, and
recollection of events, Gilmour recalls:

The band just before Syd departed had got into a totally impossible situation. No one
wanted to book them. After the success of the summer of 1967 the band sank like a
stone. The gigs they were doing at the time were all empty because they were so bad.
The only way out was to get rid of Syd, so they asked me to join and got rid of Syd.

What is of interest here is that, when pushed – as Gilmour feels he has been – all members
of Pink Floyd are not beyond using the media to articulate their point of view on an issue,
even going as far as instinctively reaching for a phone and demanding a right of reply. Indeed,
Gilmour evens responds to accusations that he copied some of Barrett’s guitar style, using the
interview to put the record straight and explaining it was actually he who taught Barrett ‘one or
two things’ when they were learning the guitar as teenagers in Cambridge.

Roger 2 leaving
If the mediation of Barrett’s departure was rather muted, nearly 20 years later, the next departure
was far more incendiary. With Rick Wright relegated to a waged musician rather than full band
member, and 1983’s The Final Cut really standing as a Roger Waters solo album,49 the harmony
and holistic immanence of the band was at an all-time low. When Waters then left the group,
he presumed, as lead songwriter at that point, that Pink Floyd would not continue as an entity
without him. However, as is now well known in popular music history . . . they did. And at this

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 Simon A. Morrison

point Waters – self-diagnosed as media abstainer – returned to the fourth estate, and more par-
ticularly the pages of the new breed of British glossy music monthlies, in order to use the press
as a mechanic for fring muddy salvos in what became something of a dirty war, waged by proxy
through both the media and the law courts. As the focus of this chapter is the relationship of
Pink Floyd and the media, our concern is with the former, and the chapter will therefore home
in on three examples in Q magazine, where this media recluse now comes out of the bunker to
be more direct in his attacks aimed at both his erstwhile band and the music media itself.
Chronologically, the frst article, ‘Over The Wall: An Interview with Roger Waters,’ was
conducted by music journalist Chris Salewicz50 and published in the August 1987 issue of Q.51
Waters was candid in the interview regarding his take on the entropic collapse of a band that
had dominated the previous decade:

We were all fghting like cats and dogs. We were fnally realising – or accepting, if
you like – that there was no band. It was really being thrust upon us that we were
not a band and had not been in accord for a long time. Not since 1975, when we
made Wish You Were Here. Even then there were big disagreements about content and
how to put the record together.

At this stage, in 1987, it was becoming clear the remaining members of Pink Floyd were, minus
Waters, indeed back together as a band, recording what would become A Momentary Lapse of
Reason (1987) and preparing to tour that album around the world. Guy Pratt, Pink Floyd’s current
bass player, explains that this would see the perplexing situation of Pink Floyd arriving in a town to
play the local stadium while Waters was nearby in the arena, touring the Radio K.A.O.S. album.52
Three years later, the September 1990 issue of Q led with a cover featuring David Gilmour
over an image from Waters’ own tour of The Wall. The coverline reads: ‘Don’t Mention the
Wall!: Pink Floyd’s Cold War Isn’t Over.’ Indeed, it was far from over. Two years later still, the
Q of November 1992 featured the article ‘Roger Waters: Who the Hell Does He Think He
Is?’ and an interview conducted by Tom Hibbert. It is clear, from the following exchange, that
Waters’ relationship with the media had not mellowed. In response to reviews of his 1992 solo
album Amused To Death, Waters, it seems, is not amused at all, and is prepared (and knowledge-
able enough) to single out journalists by name:

‘I’ve been reading the nonsense that’s been written about  Amused to Death. Adam
Sweeting [music journalist who said, in The Guardian, that the LP wasn’t much cop],
well, he’s a complete prat. Always was, always will be.’
I protest. Adam Sweeting is not a prat; he’s entitled to his opinion and a very nice
man to boot, I say.
Waters will have none of this.
‘Sweeting is not a nice man. I don’t know him but I know him. He says I write
twaddle. He’s wrong! He’s one taco short of a Mexican meal. Sweeting is not the only
arsehole: there’s other cunts like Andy Gill and Charles Shaar Murray.’
‘Andy Gill and Charles Shaar Murray. They write for Q.’
‘Do they? Who gives a fuck who they write for when they can’t fucking write?’

Te 2000s: reprise . . .

However, this rather unfortunate story – of the deteriorating relationship of friends, band mem-
bers and band and media – was to experience something of (an admittedly brief) reconciliation.

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Somewhat ironically, their reunion was to be engineered by a self-confessed non-fan of the band,
the actor who played Pink in the flm of The Wall, Bob Geldof. Geldof knew he needed a story
to sell the follow-up to the iconic Live Aid concert of 1985 and that he would get that story if
he could persuade the four members of Pink Floyd to reunite for the follow-up Live 8 event in
July 2005.53 It was a potentially risky endeavour – as exemplifed by the awkward group hug at
the end of the set – but it was to prove something of a resolution, and an opportunity for the
British press to say, once again, positive things about this living relic of the 1960s London under-
ground. For instance, a review by Gavin Martin published in the Daily Mirror of July 4, 2005,
gave the band only one of three 10/10 reviews (the other two for UB40 and The Who), Martin
commenting: ‘The 24-year wait for this reunion was not in vain: beautiful vocals by Dave Gil-
mour, masterful poise and genuine emotion from Waters, excellent visuals. We will truly never
hear or see the like again.’54 So, a resolution – of sorts – and a melodic note to end the sometimes
atonal story of this band and their contrapuntal relationship with the British music media.

. . . and fade to grey

This chapter set out to explore the by turns fractious and fascinating relationship between the
band Pink Floyd and the British music media. At times accusatory, at others celebratory, this
is a relationship itself initially born of the subterranean rumblings of the London underground
and its countercultural media and therefore one more closely entwined than any other band of
their era. Moving through the decades, the band was able to use the music media as a mechanic
to explain their ideological, technological, musicological and indeed ontological perspectives
and platforms. Once more established, the live and recorded output of Pink Floyd was at turns
feted and reviled, at times quite understandably, at others not at all. Finally, the band used the
media to establish positions and clarify historical moments when controversy surrounded the
departure of key band members.
However, from 1966 through to 2005 – the chronological bookends of this study – whether
working together and in harmony or argumentative and disharmonious, that relationship
between band and media has existed, and persisted, alongside the evolution of the group itself.
At all the key moments in the story of this band, the media have provided subjective context to
musical text, telling the story of the band, critiquing the music they have released and ofering
interpretive commentary and exposition on their live performances. This chapter has interro-
gated how this almost familial relationship between band and media was – and indeed remains –
a lifecycle journey (band members still feature regularly in the music monthlies and are still
asked the same questions). The relationship began as a joint birth from the womb of the London
underground as the counterculture, in both its music and its media, appeared together. Then,
as siblings, music and media squabbled and then parted, withdrawing to their respective rooms.
What followed was a gradual reconciliation, when Live 8 formed the platform for their fnal
absorption into the cultural fabric of the nation. The story of Pink Floyd, then, is the story of the
British music media: growing old and decaying within what is now called the dead tree media,
the fading pages of the UK music monthlies such as Mojo and Q and, to quote a Floyd lyric,
‘waiting for the worms’, seeking, instead, perpetuity in a preserved, digital afterlife.

Notes
1 As a music journalist, I can attest to a certain power dynamic between a journalist and the subject of
their study.
2 Miles, B. (2006). Pink Floyd: The Early Years. London: Omnibus Press, page 64.
3 Ibid.

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 Simon A. Morrison

4 Collective noun for the UK music weeklies such as Melody Maker, NME and later Sounds. So called
because of the paper quality and the newsprint that left ink on the fngers.
5 Chapman, R. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London: Faber & Faber, page 114.
6 Op. cit. Miles (2006):56.
7 Ibid:57.
8 Ibid:62.
9 Green, J. (1998). Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961–1971. London: Pimlico,
page 103.
10 Mason now owns one of the most expensive cars on the planet, a Ferrari 250 GTO with numberplate
‘250 GTO.’ The author has seen Mason driving this car around the Oulton Park circuit at the Carfest
festival.
11 Op. cit. Miles (2006):65.
12 Ibid:1.
13 Op. cit. Green (1998):120.
14 Farren, M. (2001). Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. London: Jonathan Cape, page 71.
15 Ibid:74.
16 Op. cit. Green (1998):136.
17 Quoted in Fitch, V. (n.d.). Pink Floyd: The Press Reports. Collector’s Guide Publishing, page 142. The
original article is in Sounds, 28 October, 1972:22.
18 Savage, J. (2017). ‘A Long-Term Prospect’, in anon, Pink Floyd – Their Mortal Remains. London: V&A
Publishing, page 57.
19 Barrett’s mental collapse was confrmed in a conversation I had with Joe Beard, of The Purple Gang,
who was recording the track ‘Grannie Takes a Trip’, with Joe Boyd, at the same studio where Floyd
were, at that time, recording ‘Arnold Layne.’
20 Op. cit. Green (1998):11.
21 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):88.
22 Ibid:210.
23 Charlesworth, C. (1974, 16 November). ‘Floyd: All Wright Now!’, Melody Maker. Retrieved 14
November 2019, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pink-foyd-all-wright-now.
24 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):212.
25 Crucial, therefore, to tracing contemporaneous responses to the band has been Vernon Fitch’s The Press
Reports, alongside the rich archive preserved in digital amber, in Rock’s Backpages, as well as the physi-
cal collection of print music magazines held in the Simon Warner Music Archive, at the University of
Chester.
26 Jones, N. (1966, 20 October). ‘Pink Floyd: All Saints Church Hall, London’, Melody Maker.
Retrieved 3 August  2020, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pink-foyd-all-saints-
church-hall-london.
27 Uncredited writer (1966). ‘2500 Ball at IT Launch’, International Times. Retrieved 3 August 2020, from
www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/2500-ball-at-iiti-launch.
28 Miles, B. (1988). Pink Floyd: A Visual Documentary by Miles. London: Omnibus Press, page 11.
29 I was at this event, although quotes are taken from the book that came from the symposium: Sinker,
M. (ed.). (2018). A Hidden Landscape Once a Week: The Unruly Curiosity of the UK Music Press in the
1960s–80s, in the Words of Those Who Were There. London: Strange Attractor Press.
30 Ibid:129.
31 Ibid: Savage quoted in.
32 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):145.
33 Reising, R. (ed.). (2005). ‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.
Aldershot: Ashgate, pages 232–233.
34 This term is used for simplicity, although I accept it is a loaded term and problematic.
35 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):234.
36 Ibid:224.
37 Allan Jones would later write a negative review of a Pink Floyd show at Earls’ Court during The Wall
tour, leading Roger Waters to call him a ‘stupid shit’ from the stage.
38 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):207–209.
39 Kent, N. (1974, 23 November). ‘Floyd Juggernaut . . . The Road to 1984’, NME. The full article is
retrieved 26 March  2020, from https://geirmykl.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/article-about-pink-
foyd-from-new-musical-express-november-23-1974/.

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40 This schism is explored in depth in Martin James’ chapter in this collection. I reached out to Kent in
the process of researching this chapter, with a view to the writer returning to his writing – to review
his review – and see, in the passing of time, whether his opinion had mellowed, in the light of this ‘new
composition’ now gaining so much cultural, canonical mass. Kent has, for instance, edited his original
journalism when using it for his collected works. However, no response was forthcoming.
41 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):264.
42 Ibid:92.
43 Op. cit. Kent (1974):n.p.
44 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):40.
45 I was at a Roger Waters concert in 1987, for instance, which featured phone boxes in the auditorium
for fans to phone the stage. One call to Waters featured an audience member who claimed ‘Roger, it’s
Syd.’
46 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):204.
47 Certainly Kent would track Barrett’s career, penning articles such as ‘The Cracked Ballad of Syd Bar-
rett’, published in an NME of April 1974. Interestingly, in his Barrett biography A Very Irregular Head,
music writer and contributor to this book Rob Chapman is easily able to disassemble claims in Kent’s
article, including the claim Barrett wrote the song ‘Efervescing Elephant’ at the age of 16.
48 Op. cit. Fitch (n.d.):194.
49 The album was, in fact, credited to Roger Waters, and David Gilmour is rumoured to have asked to
be removed from writing credits.
50 I asked Salewicz to return to this interview for further comment, but we have yet to have that
conversation.
51 All quotes from Salewicz, C. (1987, August). ‘Over the Wall: An Interview with Roger Waters’, Q.
Retrieved 3 August  2020, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/over-the-wall-an-
interview-with-roger-waters.
52 I booked Guy Pratt for the music/literary event Louder Than Words in November 2018 and enjoyed a
drink with him afterwards. I saw both Roger Waters and this iteration of Pink Floyd around this time
in the 1980s.
53 The author of this chapter was at this event. A fan of Pink Floyd, and concerned how they would go
down after the energetic performances of Robbie Williams and Madonna et al., the performance was,
indeed, beautiful, the soft soundtrack to the fading light of a London summer’s day.
54 Martin, G. (2005, 4 July). ‘Who Was the Gr8est at Live 8’, The Daily Mirror. Retrieved 3 August 2020,
from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/who-was-the-gr8est-at-live-8.

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 8
VISUAL COVERSCAPES
Why Pink Floyd album covers don’t have types

Cinla Seker with Chris Hart

Introduction
Traditionally recorded music, in order to be distributed, needs a medium onto which it can be
made available for reproduction and sale. Throughout the twentieth century, there were many
formats used by diferent record companies and audio manufacturers.1 Most did not last beyond
the 1950s. By the 1990s the main formats for the domestic market were the 12-inch long-player
(LP), the 45-rpm single, the compact cassette tape and the CD ROM. But by this time the art
and craft of album art was nearly dead, with the most memorable cover art being relegated to
nostalgia. The rise of the CD ROM in the early 1980s marked the beginning of the end, but
according to Aubrey Powell, ‘it was punk music.’2 Whatever the cause, the rise of MP3 player
in the late 1990s and music streaming around 2007 did see the end of the album sleeve artwork
as it had been known for nearly 50 years. The 12-inch (or 30.5-cm) square canvass had been
replaced by tiny 20-mm screens on which the artwork once used on the vinyl was displayed,
even if you needed a magnifying glass to see it correctly.
The way we think about these types of traditional packaging is usually in terms of the
‘cover’ or ‘sleeve’ displaying a unique image promoting the album. Traditionally, however, the
word ‘album’ refers to a means of storing a collection of similar things and not a single item.
Hence, the album was originally a means of safely storing the fragile recordings of an artist.
As collections of recordings by individual artists became available on one long-playing record,
then those records became known as albums in their own right. The paper sleeve holding the
record was placed, for protection, into a cardboard cover. It was this outer cover that eventually
became the ‘record cover.’ In keeping, however, with the original defnition of an album, as a
‘blank table’ onto which information could be inscribed, the album cover became the blank
onto which design and typography elements could be printed to identify the artists and their
kind of music.
This was, of course, not always the case. Up until the 1930s, the record as a physical disc was
protected by a paper or cardboard cover. Such packaging was minimalist because it saved money.
That is, it saved the record company money. Initially, record companies began to ofer albums,
like physical photographic albums. A leatherette ‘album’ could hold a dozen records. While a
practical solution to the protection of the easily damaged records, the album was a bland and
non-informative solution to both visual design and musical style.

172 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-12

 Visual coverscapes

However, an added advantage of the packaging that was not used for some time was that it
provided the perfect medium to communicate the name of the artist. Furthermore, when it
was realised this could be done, it was only done by typography; only later were images used.3
In the late 1930s Alex Steinweiss, at Columbia Records, changed all of this. He took the
plain brown wrappers and, in their place, put bright, colourful designs on the outer sleeve – he
used the cover as a canvas with limitless possibilities.4 Inglis (2001), in his discussion of The
Beatles album covers, captures the essence of this when he says cover (or sleeve) art could help
potential buyers get a sense for the music on the record they were looking at in record shops.
The words and images helped to communicate the genre and nature of the music. Similarly,
Rivers (2003) says the artwork can act as ‘a creative representation of the music.’5 The main
word here is ‘can,’ for not all album artwork is equal; much is good, some is excellent and much
is terrible (or at best mediocre) at communicating anything.
If, as Inglis (2001) suggests, the sleeve art has the role of visualising the music it protects,
then that art needs to have the power to project the artist as a particular brand. This is important
given the crowded marketplace for popular music, especially in the golden era of music buying
between the 1960s and 1980s. But representing music through two-dimensional design is as dif-
fcult as describing a fragrance. The easy way to achieve this in music is to state the name of the
band on the sleeve along with the name of the particular album, with pictures of the members
of the band and an image representing the name of the album. For example, The Beatles’ Yel-
low Submarine has cartoons of the four members of the band, plus there is a picture of a yellow
submarine. Even the minimalist White Album has the two words The Beatles on the front cover.

Figure 8.1 Alex Steinweiss cover, Nat King Cole’s The King Cole Trio album cover, 1945 (original in
bright primary colours)

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 Cinla Seker with Chris Hart

But just in case you still did not know who The Beatles are, the inside cover (fold) has photo-
graphs of the band members. This kind of information structure has been an integral part of
the branding of an artist. It helps promote the artist in the marketplace, and if it has been done
well, it becomes a visual extension of the artist in popular consciousness. Particular covers, that
is, become associated with a specifc album by a particular artist.
But back to Steinweiss.6 His innovation was followed by many other talented artists who
produced designs for album covers.7 Like Steinweiss, the following list of names and organisa-
tions are mostly unknown to the general music-listening public, yet their work on designing
album covers is widely recognised. Take, for example, Charles Murphy, Reid Miles (Blue Note
Records), Hipgnosis, Jamie Reid, Barney Bubbles, Vaughan Oliver, Art Chantry, Bob Cato,
Roger Dean, Cal Schenkel, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Andy Warhol, Stanislaw Zagorski,
Jim Flora (Columbia Records), Erik Nitsche (Decca Records), Mike Doud, Mick Haggerty,
Daniel Clowes, Gary Burden, Ashby Design, Marcus James: are all album cover designers. And
if we think about albums such as The Beatles’ Sgt. Peppers’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles,
Abbey Road and Revolver or The Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord, Carol King’s Tapestry,
The Sex Pistol’s Nevermind the Bollocks, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in
the USA, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, The Rolling Stone’s
Sticky Fingers and Nirvana’s Nevermind – the album cover is what our mind perceives.
The pioneering album cover designs of Alex Steinweiss and the artists just mentioned
brought life and gave dynamism to the work of musicians and singers. The album cover has
become a symbol of style, a signifer of genre and era – turning something functional into what
are now historically recognisable statements of music artistry,8 so much so that not only have
they become an ‘indissoluble part of the larger realm of popular culture, often epitomizing vital
trends or ofering a visual shorthand for the cultural zeitgeist,’9 they are also much sought-after
pieces of art in their own right.
Around the world today, whether sought after as a piece of wall art for display or not, the
hundreds of millions of 12-inch LPs, with their covers, mean millions of us own a small piece of
album art. And if you are one of the 40-plus million who bought Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
on vinyl, then you have something iconic.

Album covers as data

There are plenty of books on the art of album covers. Most include images of the usual suspects
such as Dark Side of the Moon (1973). Most are illustrated with lavish reproductions of the covers,
and some have informative contextual information. What is largely missing from these books is
an analysis of the sonic descriptions intended by the cover designs themselves. Take, for exam-
ple, Grønstad and Vågnes (2010), one of a few purportedly academic studies of album cover
aesthetics, who not only dismiss covers such as Wish You Were Here (1975) as ‘unfathomable’
but have, like Russell Reising’s (2005) popular text, little to say on what makes for an iconic
album cover – from a design perspective. However, Grønstad and Vågnes (2010) do recognise
that cover art can ‘engender a semiotic confguration and an aesthetic experience that is not
reducible to music alone.’10
It is as if academic studies to date have conveniently given nodding reference to the album
cover and done nothing else. Hence, this section will begin by looking at covers from a design
perspective.11
According to Shill (2014), album covers are graphic design products created by organising
visual elements according to visual design principles. Hence, analysis of cover art can be done

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by examining how design principles have been used to produce album covers.12 The starting
point for this examination is to recognise that graphic design has six basic principles. These are:
(1) balance, (2) unity/harmony, (3) hierarchy, (4) scale/proportion, (5) dominance/emphasis
and (6) similarity/contrast.13 In addition, the following elements are available to the graphic
designer: dot, line, shape, texture, colour, tone, size and location.14
The application of design needs a surface onto which a design can be reproduced for the
mass market. For functional reasons album covers are square; the round record (or CD ROM)
necessitates a square package to minimise production costs and allows for stacking multiple
units.15 The square also provides the graphic designer with an opportunity to play with illus-
tration; it is a blank canvas onto which the principles of design can be applied. According to
Poulin (2012), the viewer needs to see balance in the visual elements, either in a symmetrical
or asymmetrical organisation of the elements.16 Symmetric and asymmetric balance is achieved
by dividing the surface into two halves with an imaginary horizontal line. If these two halves
are equal, like in a mirror refection, as size, shape, colour, tone or location, this means that
there is symmetrically achieved balance. On the contrary, when the two halves balance each
other with unequal characteristics as size, shape, colour, tone or location, this means that there
is an asymmetrically achieved balance. According to Wood (2014) the unity/harmony principle
means that the components of a design should have a holistic harmony.17 Hierarchy, the third
principle, is, according to Landa (2018), ensuring individual elements should do their own work
and not ruin the lineup or steal some other element’s role.18 The scale/proportion principle is,
according to Evans and Thomas (2012), organising size relations of elements within the whole
and their interrelationships.19 Dominance/emphasis, is according to Fenton and Watkins (2010),
about ensuring a defnite style is visible in the artwork.20 Finally, similarity/contrast is, according
to Landa (2012), needed to shape viewers’ perception of the artwork and, by default, the music
of the artist. Similar colours and shapes give a sense of cohesion, while contrasting shapes and
colours draw attention.21

Te album covers of Pink Floyd

In this chapter, the focus is on Pink Floyd albums that have no typography on the front cover.22
Pink Floyd’s frst two albums had the band’s name on them, then the fourth and no other until
their 13th album, Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987). Therefore, the research question guiding
this analysis is: how can a commercial band promote itself as a brand when its primary form of
promotion, its album covers, omits the name of the band?

Album Typography

More (1969) None on front cover

Atom Heart Mother (1970) None on front cover
Meddle (1971) None on front cover
Obscured by Clouds (1972) None on front cover
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) None on front cover
Wish You Were Here (1975) None on front cover
Animals (1977) None on front cover
The Wall (1979) None on front cover
Endless River (2014) None on front cover

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The exploration of the research question starts in 1969 with the album More. This was pro-
duced as the soundtrack album of the movie More.23 The movie is about drug use on the luxury
Mediterranean island Ibiza. Labelled as psychedelic rock,24 the songs on the album are titled
according to the scenes of the movie.
This is a Storm Thorgerson and Aubury Powell (a.k.a. Hipgnosis) design25 – both longstand-
ing friends of the band. This is the frst studio album cover of Pink Floyd that has neither the
name of the band nor the title of the album. Without words, what characteristics of this image
communicate the main idea of a soundtrack album or the band as a brand?
The image of the cover is from a ‘delusional’ scene in which the two main characters are
seen running towards a windmill. The windmill is on the clifs. The image is reminiscent of
the Miguel de Cervantes character Don Quixote.26 A windmill and a few people can be seen in
an open landscape – Don Quixote is represented as fghting against the windmills on his horse
with his servant aside riding a donkey. In the fnal part of the movie, the characters are shown
to have lost their fght against drug addiction. And like Don Quixote, their belief that they could
win turns out to be a delusion.
Interestingly, Waters stated that Barbet Schroeder, the director, asked Pink Floyd to make
music, especially for the scenes, where the characters are listening to music. Therefore, the
music is not, strictly speaking, a flm score backing the visuals. The songs are related to the
mood of the movie, the characters and the places in the movie – it is what the characters are
listening to.27
The More sleeve is a still (a frame) from the flm itself. As such, there is little in the way of
conscious or thoughtful composition going on in this image. The design elements are, however,
visible in the colour scheme. In this image, the contrasting textures and colours are uniting
and melting in each other – the image has the quality of a photographic negative. The two-
dimensional shapes, the people and windmill, contrast in the form of fragmented pieces of
colours as layers. On the image, the sky, rather than being blue, is dark orange, and the white
clifs are a middle tone of blue. Both orange and blue are neutralised by adding some of their
own colour mutually. A little bit of light orange and dark navy blue can see as difusing. It is a
surrealistic scene with surreal colouring and depth.
Atom Heart Mother (1970) was the ffth studio album of Pink Floyd. It is labelled as experi-
mental and progressive rock, with the longest instrumental one-piece track having a 23:44
duration (until the release of the Shine On You Crazy Diamond in 1975).28 Atom Heart Mother
was a title on a newspaper story about a 56-year-old pregnant mother, who had a radioactive
plutonium pacemaker ftted.29 Musician Ron Geesin collaborated with Pink Floyd and sug-
gested it to the band as the title of their new album.30
Like instrumental music, which conveys its message without any lyrics, images can convey
their power without words. Both music and photography are ways of expression; they have
their own language. A cow is seen in the feld, looking back to you, the viewer. According to
Thorgerson (2007), the cover has nothing to do with the music and was never intended as an
album cover design. But he also says, ‘Cows are not so much odd as loveable.’ He points out,

Only Pink Floyd could do this and get away with it . . . the record company threw
a ft; the managing director was apoplectic. . . . ‘A COW!’ he bellowed, ‘A COW?
Why the fuck a COW? What’s a COW got to do with it? And there’s no name on the
cover? Are you completely barking?’31

The cow, as Thorgerson (2007), pointed out, works well. The reason for this is a photograph
of a cow, in a feld with no type, was like no other album cover in a record shop; it was diferent

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and distinct. The brief from the band to Hipgnosis was to produce something unpsychedelic.
Thorgerson recounts that ‘I wanted to design a non-cover after the non-title and the non-
concept album – something that was not like the other covers.’ It was Storm’s friend, conceptual
artist John Blake, who suggested a cow – ‘The thinking being that it was as un-psychedelic as
you could get.’ The cow, a Friesian, Lulubelle III, was photographed in a farmer’s feld in Potters
Bar, Hertfordshire. Three designs, including the cow, were shown to the band. They liked the
cow. The record company did not like the cow and ‘accused [Hipgnosis] of trying to destroy
the company.’ ‘But,’ says Thorgerson,32 ‘Floyd backed us all the way.’
The photograph of the cow, in its natural setting, realistically contains real-life colours, sizes
and shapes. The cow, which is the leading star of this photograph, is also a mother. Besides its
countless benefts, it is the least used as an aesthetic object opposed to various beautiful birds;
harmoniously coloured fshes; and gorgeous wild animals like lions, tigers or horses.
On the photograph, a regular black-and-white cow is seen from the rear, with its head
turned over its shoulder, looking at the viewer. This extraordinary point of view has an asym-
metrical balance. The huge but lighter-coloured body is balanced with the small and darker
head and shoulders of the cow. An accidentally chosen, almost plain and fat, background sup-
ports the asymmetrical balance of the position of the cow with its neutrality.
The photograph has many contrasting elements – highly linear textures of the green grass
contrast with the smooth and round structure of the sky. The dark green tone of the grass con-
trasts with the light blue of the sky – the black spots of the cow contrast with the white spots
on the cow. The straight line of the horizon contrasts with the curvy lines of the cow. Finally,
a coloured background contrasts with the black and white cow.
The cow is, of course, gazing at you, the viewer of the cover. The gaze is an important
technique in twentieth-century art.33 The eye-line takes the viewer to the cow’s head. The cow
is looking as if to say, ‘What are you looking at?’ If this is intended, then communication is hap-
pening. As you view the image without words and ask, ‘What am I looking at here?,’ then the
cow is mirroring the questions, asking, ‘What are you looking at?’ The viewer has become a
spectator and as such a part of the spectacle that is the design. This idea is from Foucault (1970),
who proposed that two persons gazing at each other blur the boundaries between the two; the
process has the possibility of being infnite.34 Of course, Thorgerson is not actualising Foucault’s
(1970) notions about the social dynamics of ‘gaze’ – he is, however, employing his skills and
knowledge about design to create something simple yet utterly enigmatic.
Meddle (1971), the sixth studio album, is also labelled as progressive rock.35 For the cover
of the album, Hipgnosis took a picture of an ear underwater and added elements representing
‘echoes’ – a series of concentric circles. Although Thorgerson stated that he did not like the
concept and thought that the cover was the worst album cover done for Pink Floyd, when
examining it in detail, the cover suits the album’s and the band’s artistic style of expression.36
After the novelty of Atom Heart Mother’s cover design, a real-life photograph without type, the
‘cow’ has become something that has utter recognisability and reportability – as a Pink Floyd
album sleeve. As such, if Pink Floyd is the band that uses only images on their album sleeves, it
may be reasonable to claim that the music-buying public, and fans of Pink Floyd, would have
assumed the sleeve of Meddle to be a Pink Floyd album – something that would be and is con-
frmed by reading the track listing on the back of the sleeve.
The cover of the Meddle album is in two tones/colours, brown and blue with a little touch
of black. Brown as a neutral and black as a situation of dark nothingness are not colours – they
are neutrals. A very bright and attractive azure blue is used to create a contrast with brown as
the darker tone of orange, which is complementary of blue. Complementary colours are oppo-
sites on the colour wheel. When combined, they create harmonies called contrasting colour

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harmonies. In every piece of artistic work, colour harmony supports the aesthetic of the work.37
While creating harmonies, neutral colour usage is free. Because they are neutral, they do not
change the formula of the colour harmony.
Although Thorgerson aimed to take a photograph of an ear under the water,38 the fnal
version looks like an upside-down nose instead of an ear and looks to be smelling blue fog. To
see an upside-down nose for a rock music album cover is interesting and unexpected. That the
shape is not instantly recognisable as an ear may, it could be argued, be part of the enigma of
looking at it and asking, ‘What is this supposed to be?’
The surface’s dynamism comes from the rippling of the water in the lower left-hand section
of the design. The intensity of the three ripples turns to quietude by the time they reach the
horizontal centre dividing line of the design. The ripples are metaphors for ‘echoes’ – a refec-
tion of the music on the record. The azure areas surrounding the nose are asymmetrically placed
by the black echoes placed at the opposite. The dark ear canal is seen as an organic irregular
spot, which is just in the middle on the golden section line with its position, size and shade – as
such, it ‘calms’ the dynamism created by the echoes.
Texture, as a visual element of the perceived surface quality, is an illusion.39 The Meddle
sleeve consists of diferent types of texture, which difuse into each other. The thick lines of the
echoes and the dark ear canal have texture. The spanning eye looking at the images provides
for a changing structure and quantity – this may have been intended to elicit an emotion from
the listener of the music, taking them from ‘movement to stillness.’ Texture, therefore, is the
dominating element of this sleeve design, and like the textural structure of music, this design
and the music it represents is homologous.
Obscured by Clouds (1972) was the seventh studio album, again labelled progressive rock,
made for the flm La Vallée (Obscured by Clouds is the English release name). The French movie
is about two travellers on a spiritual quest in Papua New Guinea. While the characters are seek-
ing the feathers of a scarce bird, they come across an isolated tribe in the dense jungle, leading
them to explore their own humanity. In the middle of the recordings of Dark Side of the Moon,
the Pink Floyd members watched a rough cut of the movie and made the album. Obscured by
Clouds has shorter tracks than the previous albums and has a country-music efect created by the
use of an acoustic guitar.40
Hipgnosis designed the cover by choosing a photographic slide from the rough-cut movie.41
In this blurred, dreamy scene, originally the character was sleeping on a tree, which is a typical
way of sleeping in a jungle. The image is reminiscent of looking up through the foliage of trees
towards the light above the canopy – the light fragments through the leaves and is in constant
change as the breeze moves the branches of the trees. The blurred dream-like efect is produced
by rendering the image out of focus.
The cover uses a neutralised colour scheme. Textures, as round dots in similar sizes, merge
into each other. These seem to be melting under the light of the sun – producing a multiplicity
of colour tones. In some parts coloured dots are united as plain areas of magnolia and dark green.
The distribution of the dots composes an asymmetrical balance, where every element has
a diferent projection. This can be seen in the distribution of the darker and lighter areas, in
terms of position on the square and as the amount, in terms of the surface, they are covering.
The textures of the blurred human body can only be distinguished by its soft orange colour and
central placement. Like the dark ear canal on Meddle, this central positioning pins the moving
efect of the textures.
The round shapes of the textures refect repeating musical loops in the album. The square
cover’s corners appear rounded, like the circular shapes of the dots in the name of unity as a
design principle.

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The cover of Obscured by Clouds has neither the name of the band nor the title of the album.
However, logotypes of the production and recording companies can be seen if you look care-
fully – they are on the top left. As such, this Hipgnosis design is unlike their other ones. Being
out of focus and lacking clarity and simplicity of shapes and colour, it is the least distinctive of
all Pink Floyd covers.
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) has been labelled psychedelic rock, and from psychedelic
rock, it is claimed, emerged progressive rock.42 The external and internal art and graphics on
the album sleeve of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) could be said to signify the movement of
the band from psychedelic and experimental music to a more precise and polished progressive
music. It is probably this album art, due to its universal recognisability, that defnes Pink Floyd
as a brand. The prism, rather than the faces of the band members, is utterly representative of
Pink Floyd.
On the front cover of the album, a beam of white light is dispersed by a prism into a mul-
tiplicity of colours. The colours exit the prism in straight lines, fanning out as they reach the
left-hand side of the cover.
The design was by George Hardy43 (from Hipgnosis) following Richard Wright’s request
for something smart, neat and classy.44 Mason (2007) added the point that this album ‘was so
removed from the outer space psychedelic image we were lurching away from, and this design
clearly refected that.’45
The cover art on The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) is, in summary, about the basic rules of the
universe, human beings, existence and how the eye perceives light as diferent colours.
On a plain black background is a prism. It is a two-dimensional thick light grey line in the
form of a triangle that merges into a mysterious black triangle – mysterious because it trans-
forms the beam of white light striking it into beams of colour. The light grey that forms the
triangle also gives the impression of the triangle being made of glass. The size of the triangle
suits the thirds rule: the width of the triangle is nearly 1/3 of the width of the cover. The
geometric centre of the triangle is on the centre of the golden section line, which lays over
the centre of the square-shaped cover. This placement is not accidental. Designers use the
thirds rule on the vertical along with symmetry (S). The horizontal line is also symmetrically
divided.
On the front cover, there are six colours seen as light beams instead of seven.46 Indigo,
generally represented as the colour between blue and purple, is omitted by the designer. The
black background has a purpose in this design – the colour spectrum is better seen when on
black.47 It balances all the ‘colourfulness’ of the spectrum; it makes it look serious. Neither
the name of the band nor the title of this album is on the front cover. Over three-quarters
of the cover has nothing in it – the bottom half is empty, just black – like the far (dark side)
side of the moon, where it is all dark. The top ffth of the canvas is empty and black. The
triangle (prism) rests halfway and appears as if transparent; the white light line shows this
when it fragments a little on hitting and entering the prism. Basic knowledge of physics tells
most people this is a glass prism; it is well known that glass prisms divide white light into the
colours of the spectrum.
The album opens with the sound efect of a heartbeat. If light gives life, then the signs of
life are a heartbeat – as measured on a heart-rate monitor. The inside fold is a heartbeat incor-
porated into the colour spectrum. The ‘beat’ is angled from left to right. On actual heart-rate
monitors, the beat is vertical.
The inside cover has no photographs of the band members, just a repetition of the spectrum
colours used on the outside covers. The spectrum of colours imitates the signal from a heart-
rate monitor – measuring the ‘beat.’

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Figure 8.2 Graphical grid showing the basic elements of Dark Side of the Moon sleeve

The inside fold also employs symmetry and the thirds principle. Architecturally speaking
both outside and inside graphics have a clear, clean and frm structure. We might say the graphs
send their own message in the language of design, mirroring the structure of the music.
This cover more than any other defnes Pink Floyd – having acquired a signifcance way
beyond the early 1970s – yet it is forever associated with this decade. This is truly an iconic
piece of twentieth century art. Furthermore, if this were the only reason, which it is not, the

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work of Hipgnosis has to be some of the most innovative, creative and timeless art that can exist
independently of the reason for which it was created. Maybe it is this commercial freedom that
motivated these covers. Thorgerson (2007) said himself that what was ‘gratifying about design-
ing album covers is that despite being commercial art, like advertising, they are not enslaved to
a product, they do not have to show the item for sale.’48
Wish You Were Here (1975) is the ninth album, labelled art-rock, which is a challenging
and avant-garde approach to rock music using modernist, experimental and unconventional
elements.49 As a concept album, it is a tribute to former band member Syd Barrett.50 Besides the
sadness expressed about Barrett, the album also criticises the music industry.51
The striking photograph of the burning businessman shaking hands with another business-
man was taken by Thorgerson when he and Pink Floyd were together on a US tour in 1974.52
In the photograph, two men, apparently businessmen, are shaking hands in an empty back lot
between the huge white studio buildings. While emptiness can represent the lack of Barrett, the
burning man is the visualisation of the common phrase about the harsh conditions in the music
industry – getting burned. The photograph is realist in form and surrealist as a concept. It shows
a real-life scene with real-life colours without any real-life gestures in both fgures. They shake
hands regardless of the visual fact that one of them is on fre.
The cover has a cold colour scheme, except for the fames. With the help of this general
coldness, the fames draw the attention of the viewer. The minor amount of contrast provides
no change to the colour harmony chosen; instead, it gives emphasis to the meeting. The two
fgures are in the middle of a road-way, which has a dynamic depth efect. On both sides, there
are white studio buildings with rounded roofs, indicating that it is a flm studio and not a ‘real-
life’ city street. But for the members of the flm industry, who only can see this side of the story,
this place is the reality.
Thorgerson (2007) says of the album, ‘it seemed that “absence” was a recurring theme,’ refer-
ring to relationships between the band members, their personal relations and the absence of
Barrett.53 The idea, Thorgerson (2007) says, was to show an ‘empty gesture’ – that in America,
people shake hands frmly, yet it is a gesture devoid of real meaning and commitment. As an
absent emotion, he says, people are also fearful of getting burnt in business, and from this came
the visual concept of two businessmen shaking hands, one being burnt in the context of the
entertainment industry – the flm studio complex.
The gesture of hand-shaking, dancing fames and rounded roofs under the efect of perspective
make the cover dynamic. The vertically oriented photograph is placed on a white square, which
became a passé-partout for the fames on the upper right side outside of the photograph in the
shape of the curved roofs. It creates two diferent types of perception, contradicting each other.
The scene on the photograph looks like as if it is real. If this scene is real, why does it have a
passé-partout like a piece of art? If it is a photograph, how can the fames come out and burn
the photograph? Thorgerson (1978)54 explained that the idea was to communicate musical con-
cepts and to compose ‘a picture that moves the viewer at frst and then later and doesn’t simply
evaporate after the initial impact.’ In itself, this approach is almost an antithesis to branding as it
is currently understood.
The light colouring of the cover contrasts with the dark shadows on the ground and the dark
suits of the two men. The two squares in front of the men are placed on the golden section line
under the centre, while the studio hangars reach up to the golden section over the centre. With
the two fgures as dark and centred, and the horizon forming a V-shape, the cover has a sense
of being symmetrically balanced. There is also an element of asymmetry. The giant shadow in
front of the fgures leads the eye down to the left of the canvas. This movement asymmetri-
cally balances the burning efect, which is on the top right of the cover. We can say the cover,

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therefore, with its representations and illusions; when you know the meaning of the songs, you
then know how this image ‘talks’ about the music business.
Animals (1977) as a concept is a critique of the political and economic conditions in Britain
in the mid-1970s. This was in many ways an aggressive turn for Pink Floyd, bordering on vio-
lence in parts. This can be heard in the aggressive vocals, distorted electric guitars, bass guitar,
drums and sharp keyboard playing. It is worth noting this is the frst album not about the band’s
former member Barrett. As such, Animals is the frst major work by Waters in what was the age
of musical change – punk rock was on the ascent as progressive rock music was on the descent.
The album cover, by design geniuses Thorgerson and Powell,55 is a composite photograph
of 40-foot infatable pig suspended above the then-disused Battersea Power Station in London.
The photo-shoot took three days (in December 1976), with the pig breaking its tethers on day
two and drifting through the airspace of Heathrow Airport before landing in a farmer’s feld in
Kent. Once recovered, the pig was re-infated and placed back on its tethers above the power
station. This time there was a marksman with a rife ready to puncture it should it break free
again.
Diferent photographs of the pig in the sky and the power station were combined to create
the fnal image. The pig and the power-station were not the frst ideas Hipgnosis suggested
to the band. Initially, they suggested the cover show a young boy seeing his parents copulating –
the band rejected this. Waters took to his bicycle and with a camera took photographs of pos-
sible locations in London. Given the themes of the album, something substantial, imposing and
industrial was needed – such as the power station at Battersea.
Battersea Power Station is an imposing building, with its four massive chimneys and angular
shape suggests a sense of hard dystopia.56 Battersea Power Station,57 the largest brick structure
in Europe, has been described as a temple of power competing with St. Paul’s Cathedral as a
landmark in London. It closed in 1975 after 40 years of generating electricity on a massive scale
for the city.
At frst sight, the cover expresses the features of the genre. The deliberate references to
George Orwell’s political fable – Animal Farm express anti-totalitarian and anti-Stalinist ideas,
alongside a critique of power and control in a post-industrial society – are all encapsulated in
sleeve design. Both album and cover are metaphors for power and control of the masses.58
The colour, tones and style of the photograph have the lyrical expression of a Georgio de
Chirico59 painting – an Italian painter and writer who combined traditional painting techniques
with metaphysical themes and a neoclassical and neo-Baroque style. The photograph of Batter-
sea Station has a ‘setting sun’ efect with bold shadows and an Art Deco style, which had begun
just before the First World War and spread through Europe.60
The lack of a human fgure also echoes the paintings of Chirico (1888–1978). Chirico
preferred to use white stone sculptures and architectural elements as fgures with contrasting
dark shadows. In this photograph of the power station, the huge and creamy white concrete
chimneys rise up as monuments to power on the colossal dark-coloured brick-work. Waters
said these were phallic egoistic symbols representing the four main members of the band. He
added that if turned upside-down, they were the legs of the band, holding up the edifce that
Pink Floyd had become.61 To complete this description, we can note that the smaller buildings
surrounding the station help the viewer to appreciate the enormous proportions of the main
structure, especially the brick towers holding up the chimneys.
The cover has a contrasting colour scheme of orange and blue in combination with countless
saturation levels of neutrals with a range of tints and shades. It is surprisingly harmonious – mild
and contrasting – and at the same time, it has the look of a surrealist piece of art. When looking
in detail at the fying pig, it is the only organic shape in the composition – placed above the

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Figure 8.3 Battersea Power Station – an imposing cathedral to power

power station and against the dark clouds. The sense we have of the dark clouds, with the blue
sky around them, is that they may signify the economic chaos of the 1970s or the dystopian
future to come.
A huge sky dominates two-thirds of the cover, with the horizon placed on the golden sec-
tion line under the centre of the cover, to show the station as a whole. The classic triangle
leads the eye directly to the centre of the station. The sunniest part of the station, the light-
coloured buildings on the right side and the white clouds, grab attention. Then the light
(cream-coloured) giant chimneys take the attention from dark smoke (not real, as the station
was not in operation) and fnally to the fying pink pig, which is the leading character as under-
stood by the titles of the songs ‘Pigs on the Wing’ and ‘Pigs’ on the album.
The pink pig is a notable element in the entire image. While it was large, in the photograph,
set against the enormity of the power station and sky, the pig looks small. But it is fying over
the power station – looking down at it and the city beyond.
Pigs play a signifcant role in George Orwell’s (1945) Animal Farm. In the book, the ani-
mals take over the farm, but freedom does not come to them. Instead, the pigs take power and

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ruthlessly enforce it through a canine police force. All the other animals are placed in a lower
order to the pigs and in spite of the revolution are no better of than they were before. The
pigs believe they have the mental capacity to rule over the others. Through fear, coercion and
propaganda, the pigs control the other animals. Although tiny, the pig, on the album cover,
looks down on the power station, the place where the work is done. Hence, the metaphor and
the message – the self-elected elite are in control; wake up to this state of existence and chal-
lenge it – become class consciousness.
It is worth noting that the front cover of Animals extends onto the rear cover – it is one
photograph (composite). On the left of the power station, there is a dark indiscernible city-
scape. The city is mostly featureless, and above it, there are dark clouds. We may take from this
the message that the power of the pigs resides in their control of the power station and through
it control of the other animals. The metaphor may be this: in place of pigs, we might suggest
politicians and in place of the animals people.
The Wall (1979) is a rock opera in every sense.62 The Wall, a double album, tells the story
about a metaphorical (psychological) wall the character Pink began to build around himself after
the death of his father in the Second World War. As a child, Pink is ‘smothered’ by an over-
protective mother and oppressed by his teachers at school. As an adult, though successful as a
musician, Pink’s wife screams at him, dominates him and, like his mother, is oppressive.
Pink becomes a rock star, whose life is one of drugs and outbursts of anger and violence.
With every incident, he adds another brick to his wall, and fnally, when completed, the wall
separates him from every person in his life. In order to perform on stage, he is medicated, and
under the efect of drugs, he puts himself on ‘trial.’ The imaginary judge orders Pink to tear
down his psychological wall.63
The album cover as sold is in a polythene wrap that does have typography on it. Scarfe
explained why this was done.64

We were actually worried about blemishing the purity of the cover and almost wanted
not to have a logo on the front. But the commercial decision was that nobody would
know what the album was, so the logo was put on a separate piece of cellophane inside
the shrink-wrap . . . you opened it, the logo fell of, and you had a pure-white album.

But once the polythene wrap is removed, the actual album, which is a double fold, has no
type on the front cover.65 The Wall’s cover is the most literal and simple in the collection. The
Wall is about a wall, and the cover is a wall.
The cover is not, however, a wall. It is not a wall of red bricks; it is light blue lines drawn
onto a white background. Looking closely, the lines look to have been drawn using a ball-point
pen and ruler on white paper. This technique is homologous with the design itself; this is a wall
someone has drawn, someone like me or you, and represents the kind of psychological wall
some of us build to protect ourselves from the world outside.
All of the artwork on the album sleeve is the work of English cartoonist and illustrator Gerald
Scarfe. Scarfe had worked with the band in 1974, providing illustrations for the Wish You Were
Here tour. Working with Waters, Scarfe retraced the steps in Waters’ life and that of the character
Pink to create a graphic representation of the core themes on the album – feelings of abandon-
ment, isolation, cruelty, psychological oppression, obsessive behaviour and hallucinations.66
With subsequent re-releases and performances of The Wall, Scarfe changed some of the
elements on the outside, inside and back covers. The 2012 version of the cover is full of illus-
trations and has black brickwork, with the typography ‘Pink Floyd The Wall’ in the middle.

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Figure 8.4 The cover of The Wall is a simple pencil-drawn design

Black rather than white suggests Pink is in a dark place, behind his wall, keeping out the hateful
people in his life.
The Endless River (2014), released 20 years after The Division Bell, probably marks the end
of Pink Floyd’s original work. Both Richard Wright67 and long-term cover designer Storm
Thorgerson were dead.68 With the recordings made before the death of Wright, according
to Gilmour, this album will be the last album by Pink Floyd and is a tribute to Wright.69
The album mostly consists of instrumental and ambient music made during the recordings of
The Division Bell but which were not used. The use of ambient sound gives the impression
of altering somebody’s space, generating calmness and evoking an atmospheric, visual and
unobtrusive quality.70
The Endless River (2014) is a tribute to Richard Wright, Pink Floyd’s keyboard player, who
died in 2008. The cover of the album is a photographic composition combining the clouds,
with man punting a boat (called a skif), heading towards the horizon. We can assume the man
in the boat is Richard Wright.
An 18-year old Egyptian digital artist, Ahmed Emad Eldin, did the cover concept – it is
interesting to note he was not born when The Division Bell was released. His work was found

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online by Aubrey Powell, Thorgerson’s design partner. He told the Adam Sherwin of The
Independent:71

When we saw Ahmed’s image, it had an instant . . . resonance. It is enigmatic and open
to interpretation and is the cover that works so well for The Endless River.

Ahmad Eldin explained to Sherwin (2014), ‘Thinking about life and nature and what is
beyond the world of charming factors we have never seen is enough to create millions of dif-
ferent amazing feelings.’72
Emad Eldin, the Stylorouge design studio and Powell worked together on the artwork.73 On
the cover photograph, there is a fgure of a man, seen from the back on a skif – he is punt-
ing the skif towards a setting sun. The clouds are like a river that has no sides nor an end. It is
like the man and skif are foating on the clouds. The Thames-style skif indicates the birthplace
of Wright – London.74 However, the skif also has biographical connotations. The punt is often
associated with the University of Cambridge and the River Cam – a place long associated with
Pink Floyd.
Although it looks realistic, this image is the result of graphic art – the use of illustration
software to produce a composite image. This does not distract from the way in which Eldin has
created a meaningful message using imaginary concepts. The viewer can recognise the main
elements – the fnal, after death journey of someone heading towards the horizon. The scene
provides a dreamlike image of a lone man punting on soft clouds; the weather is mild, and all
around him is open space. This is a relaxing image, with all of its light and soft colours, forms
and textures. Yet it is disturbing, as it shows someone alone.
The horizon is placed in the middle of the cover. The equal division between the sky and
the river indicates a journey, the skif, the man, punting, with an open fying white shirt – is
on his fnal journey. The image has simple symmetry – on both the horizontal and vertical axis.
The direction of the skif uses the vanishing point (VP) to achieve the meaning of movement.
The colours and tones of the sky merge from blue to white and fnally to cream tones, and with
the sun setting, this is clearly the end of the day. Also, note the wavy clouds with their diferent
tones of grey getting darker, sometimes lighter and swelling, creating the challenge and need
for courage.
The Endless River’s cover is, therefore, about loss, as were some other Pink Floyd albums.
Unlike the other covers discussed in this chapter, Endless River has a narrative.75 This album
brought attention to the crucial and irreplaceable role Richard Wright had played in the for-
mation and success of the early and middle years of the band. The cover, in two parts, details a
sequence of events that for fans is easily interpreted in a meaningful and emotional way. Having
seen the front cover, the back cover says it all: the skif is empty, and the typography has missing
elements. Richard Wright has, we hope, found his Avalon.

Conclusion
By the 1960s, popular music was a global industry driven by the sales of records. Across the
industrialised countries, full employment, expansion of education, and increases in disposable
income saw the entertainment businesses develop globally. Pink Floyd was no exception; they
wanted to be a successful band and by 1974 had achieved success and the wealth that came with
it.76 Yet the music industry was just that, an industry based on the principle of making a proft.
The album cover was, along with the radio, the main marketing tool used to promote a band
as a brand.

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Lucky for the industry and Pink Floyd was the vinyl LP. Its square cover was a convenient
billboard to sell a band. Covers tended to name the band and the title of the album and show the
band members. The ‘who’ and ‘what’ were usually mandatory. For example, The Beatles’ Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) showed the band members along with the name of the
album and the word Beatles. Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother (1970) showed only a cow. If the
many faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s seem diverse and exciting, then a single cow, in a feld,
looking back is perplexing. There is no sense of the ‘who’ or ‘what.’ Nor is there a narrative;
there is no story expressed on this sleeve.
Atom Heart Mother (1970) is not an iconic album cover. But Dark Side of the Moon (1973) is
iconic: globally recognisable, reproduced in multiple forms and on diverse media. The cover
and words Dark Side of the Moon are interchangeable even though no words appear on the cover.
This observation stands even with people who recognise the design but know nothing about
the band or their music.
Even by the time of Atom Heart Mother (1970), what the members of the band looked like
was not obvious. Their faces, unlike those of other bands, did not appear on their album cov-
ers. The world knew what John, Paul, George and Ringo looked like. Absence is a property
of Pink Floyd albums. There is an absence of type and the band. But there is, however, no
absence of meaning. Wish You Were Here (1975), for example, is rich with referents. It embod-
ies the loss of a band member, a founding member of Pink Floyd, the break-up of personal and
professional relationships, the money-driven music business, the need to create more ‘product’
and the efects on the mental health of musicians. These are the referents fans of Pink Floyd
know in common. However, the ‘newcomer’ cannot be expected to know any of these things;
why should they? They can, of course, look at an album cover devoid of type and do what
was intended: question just what it means and why it was done like this. In other words, as
the vinyl record has once more become fashionable, and many Pink Floyd albums are being
re-released on the media, audiences anew can have the perplexing pleasure of asking – what is
this album cover about? And this from a marketing point of view is what it is all about. But let
us not end on a cynical note. The covers of many albums, including those of Pink Floyd, are
artworks in their own right. They are more than mere tools of marketing. The cover art on
Endless River (2014), for example, signifes more than commercial concerns – it signifes the loss
of someone signifcant. Therefore, we can conclude that some album art, especially that done
for Pink Floyd, transcends the commercial imperative: that some are imbued with meanings
that are universal.

Notes
1 See the following for the many formats, https://obsoletemedia.org/audio/.
2 De Rivera, C. (2014). ‘Aubrey Powell a.k.a. Po’, Ibiza Style, June:76–90.
3 See Edmondson, J. (2013). Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, and Stories, That
Shaped Our Culture. 4 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, page 32; Wedde, I. and Burke, G. (eds.).
(1990). Now See Hear! Art, Language, and Translation. Wellington: Victoria University Press, page 153.
4 For more information and analysis, see, Gomez-Palacio, B. and Vit, A. (2009). Graphic Design, Ref-
erenced: A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design. Beverly: Rockport
Publishing, page 142.
5 See Inglis, I. (2001). ‘ “Nothing You Can See That Isn’t Shown”: The Album Covers of the Beatles’,
Popular Music, 20(1):83–97; Rivers, C. (2003). CD-Art: Innovation in CD Packaging. Hove, Sussex:
Rotovision, page 14.
6 For more on Steinweiss see, Steinweiss, A. and McKnight-Trontz, J. (2000). For the Record: The Life and
Work of Alex Steinweiss. Princeton: Architectural Press. And of course, album cover designs own their
origins to Steinweiss.

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7 See the following for more information, Kohler, E. (1999). In the Groove: Vintage Record Graphics
1940–1960. San Francisco: Chronicle Books; Evans, R. (2010). The Art of the Album Cover. New York:
Chartwell Books; Denis, J. and de Beaupré, A. (2016). Total Records: Photography and the Art of the Album
Cover. New York: Aperture.
8 For a history of the record, graphics see Kohler,  E. (1999). In the Groove: Vintage Record Graphics,
1940–1960. San Francisco, LA: Chronicle Books.
9 Grønstad, A. and Vågnes, Ø. (eds.). (2010). Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics. Copenhagen:
Museum Tusculanum, page 12.
10 Ibid:14.
11 Op. cit. Grønstad, and Vågnes (eds.). (2010); Reising, R. (ed.). (2005). ‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink
Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Aldershot: Ashgate.
12 Shill, G. (2014). Music: A  Guide to Selling and Distributing Your Work Online. Morrisville: Boutique
Entertainment Group, page 36.
13 Arnston, A. E. (2011). Graphic Desi6n Basics. Boston: Cengage Learning, page xi; Dabner, D., Calvert,
S. and Casey, A. (2012). New Graphic Design School: A Foundation Course in Principles and Practice. 4th
edition. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, pages 2–3.
14 See Evans, P. and Thomas, M. A. (2012). Exploring the Elements of Design. 3rd edition. Clifton Park:
Cengage Learning; also see Landa, R. (2018). Graphic Design Solutions. 6th edition. Boston: Cengage.
15 For more discussion on this see, Bartmanski, D. and Woodward, I. (2015). Vinyl: The Analogue Record
in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury.
16 Poulin, R. (2012). The Language of Graphic Design: An Illustrated Handbook for Understanding Fundamental
Design Principles. Beverly: Rockport Publishers, pages 116–117.
17 Wood, A. B. (2014). The Graphic Designer’s Digital Toolkit. Stamford: Cengage Learning, page 95.
18 Op. cit. Landa (2018):19–22.
19 Op. cit. Evans and Thomas (2012):14.
20 Fenton, C. and Watkins, B. W. (2010). Fluency in Distance Learning. Charlotte: IAP, page 217.
21 Op. cit. Landa (2018):155.
22 We were not permitted to reproduce the album covers of Pink Floyd. Nonetheless and fortunately the
covers can be looked at on sites such as en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pink_Floyd_album_covers –
no commercial use – where you will be able to view them in full colour. Alternatively, buy a copy of
the albums, and you will get a copy of the cover art to keep.
23 More (1969). Film. Directed by Barbet Schroeder.
24 Spencer, K. (2009). Film and Television Scores, 1950–1979: A Critical Survey by Genres. Jeferson: McFar-
land and Company, page 315.
25 An interesting documentary flm on Thorgerson see (2013). Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson
and Hipgnosis. Documentary flm. Director: Roddy Bogawa. www.takenbystormflm.com/.
26 Atkinson, S. (ed.). (2018). The Literature Book. London: DK, page 78.
27 See Buckley, P. (ed.). (2003). The Rough Guide to Rock: The Defnitive Guide to More Than 1200 Artists
and Bands. 3rd edition: Expanded and Completely Revised. London: Rough Guides, page 781.
28 Martin, B. (2015). Avant Rock: Experimental Music From Beatles to Bjork. Chicago: Open Court,
page 102.
29 Edwards, G. (2010). Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and
Rumors Revealed. New York City: Three Rivers Press, page 45.
30 Blake, M. (2008). Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Cambridge: Da Capo Press,
page 152.
31 Thorgerson, S. (2007). Taken by Storm. London: Omnibus, page 189.
32 See Blake, M. (2016). ‘Pink Floyd: The Story Behind Atom Heart Mother’, Prog, 22 September 2016.
Retrieved from loudersound.com/features/pink-foyd-the-story-behind-atom-heart-mother.
33 There is a lot of literature on gaze but see the following for a sound summary of the main concepts and
practices – Lutz, C. and Collins, J. (1991). ‘The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example
of National Geographic’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7(1):134–149.
34 Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage
Books, page 5.
35 Kopp, B. (2018). Reinventing Pink Floyd: From Syd Barrett to the Dark Side of the Moon. Lanham: Row-
man and Littlefeld, page 150.
36 Op. cit. Blake (2011):223.
37 Itten, J. (1970). The Elements of Color. New York City: Wiley and Sons, page 72.

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 Visual coverscapes

38 Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, page 151.
39 Wenham, M. (2003). Understanding Art: A Guide for Teachers. London: Sage, page 120.
40 See Fielder, H. (2013). Pink Floyd: Behind the Wall. New York City: Pace Point Publishing, page 74;
Gilmore, M. (2008). Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and its Discontents. New York City: Free Press,
page 325; Op. cit. Manning (2006):196; Romano, W. (2014). Prog Rock: All That’s Left to Know about
Rock’s Most Progressive Music. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, pages 156–171.
41 Op. cit. Blake (2011):182–184.
42 Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, page 62.
43 made this made signifcant and substantial contributions to the work of Hipgnosis and other design
shops such as NTA Studios. See discogs.com/artist/1826981-George-Hardie?flter_anv=0&subtype=
Visual&type=Credits for 52 for his album cover design credits.
44 Harris, J. (2006). The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece. New York City:
Harper Perennial, page 143; Zeegen, L. (2005). The Fundamentals of Illustration. Lausanne, Switzerland:
AVA, page 14.
45 In Thorgerson, S. (2007). Mind over Matter 4: The Images of Pink Floyd. New York: Omnibus, page 56.
46 Gray, A. (1840). Elements of Chemistry: Containing Principles of the Science, Both Experimental and Theoreti-
cal. Andover: Gould, Newman and Saxton, page 60.
47 Interesting similarity in the use of these colours on a black background can be seen in the logo of the
children’s television programme Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–1968), created by Gerry and
Sylvia Anderson.
48 Thorgerson, S. (2007). Taken by Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson. New York: Omnibus,
page 161.
49 Makela, J. (2004). John Lennon Imagined: Cultural History of a Rock Star. New York: Peter Lang, page 147.
50 Op. cit. Kopp (2018):216. Also see Holm-Hudson, K. (ed.). (2013). Progressive Rock Reconsidered. New
York: Routledge.
51 Smith, B. (1997). The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music. Billboard Books. New York: Watson-Guptill,
page 171.
52 Povey, G. (2007). Echoes: The Complete History of Pink Floyd. Bucks: Mind Head Publishing, page 197.
53 Op. cit. Thorgerson (2007):70.
54 Thorgerson, S. (1978). The Work of Hipgnosis: ‘Walk Away René’. London: Paper Tiger, page 136.
55 As a point of interest, the iconic artwork produced by Thorgerson and Powell that became so crucial
to the branding of the band did not belong to them. They did not own the copyright to their work.
This is owned by the band. For more visual delights on their work, see books such as the following,
Thorgerson, S. and Dean, R. (1977). Album Cover Album. UK, Limpsfelf: Dragon’s World; Thorger-
son, S. and Powell, A. (1999). Stories Behind the Sleeves. One Hundred Best Album Covers; Powell, A. and
Thorgerson, S. (2009). For the Love of Vinyl. London: Picture Box.
56 Popof, M. (2018). Pink Floyd: Album by Album. Minneapolis: Voyageur, page 78.
57 Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed the building. His other buildings include Liverpool Cathedral, Water-
loo Bridge and the classic red telephone box. The building also appears in The Dark Knight (2008) flm
as a derelict backdrop, in The King’s Speech (2011) as a 1920s broadcasting studio, in the 1965 Beatles’
flm Help!
58 Op. cit. Fielder (2013):227; Schinder, S. and Schwarz, A. (2007). Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the
Legends Who Changed Music Forever: Volume I. Westport: Greenwood Press, page 449.
59 For more on Georgio de Chirico, see Roos, G. (2009). Giorgio de Chirico: A Metaphysical Journey. Ber-
lin: Walther Konig.
60 Lane, J. F. (2013). Jazz and Machine-Age Imperialism: Music, ‘Race’, and Intellectuals in France, 1918–
1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, page 172; Lucie-Smith, E. (1996). Art Deco Painting.
London: Phaidon Press, page 43.
61 For the V&A exhibition, Their Mortal Remains (2017) a series of short flms were made in which the
band members discuss the album covers. See the following for a brief discussion of Animals – vam.
ac.uk/articles/pink-foyd-album-cover-design.
62 Hamelman, S. L. (2004). But Is It Garbage? On Rock and Trash. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
page 104; Johnson, M. (2009). Pop Music Theory: Harmony, Form, and Composition. 2nd edition. Boston:
Cinemasonique Music and MonoMyth Media, pages 196–197.
63 Brown, B. (2010). You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen: Collected Newspaper Articles, 1981–1984. Cin-
cinnati: Colossal Books, pages 342–344; Dallas, K. (1994). Pink Floyd: Bricks in the Wall. New York:

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Spi Books, page 21; Fertel, R. (2018). 33 1/3: Southern Rock Opera. New York: Bloomsburry, page 53;
Op. cit. Manning (2006):109.
64 Quoted in Louder 13 July  2016. Retrieved from loudersound.com/features/pink-foyd-
the-wall-album-cover-gerald-scarfe-interview.
65 Subsequent releases of the album have ‘Pink Floyd the Wall’ printed on the front cover.
66 Op. cit. Fielder (2013):205; also Hegarty, P. and Halliwell, M. (2011). Before and beyond: Progressive Rock
since the 1960s. New York: Continuum, page 134.
67 Lentz III, H. M. (2009). Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2008: Film, Television, Radio, Theatre, Dance,
Music, Cartoons and Pop Culture. Jeferson: McFarland and Company, page 464.
68 Lentz III, H. M. (2014). Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2013. Jeferson: McFarland and Company,
page 370.
69 Oktem, S. (2018). Pink Floyd: ve Monarsinin Globallesmesi. Istanbul: Beyaz Yayinlari, page 250.
70 Partridge, C. and Moberg, M. (eds.). (2017). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, page 327.
71 ‘Pink Floyd New Album: Band Unveil Cover Art for the First Record in 20 Years’, The Independent,
22 September 2014. Retrieved from independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-endless-
river-pink-foyd-unveil-cover-art-for-their-frst-new-album-in-20-years-9749012.html.
72 Sherwin, A. (2014). ‘Pink Floyd New Album: Band Unveil Cover Art for the First Record in 20 Years’,
Independent, 22 September. Retrieved from independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/the-
endless-river-pink-foyd-unveil-cover-art-for-their-frst-new-album-in-20-years-9749012.html.
73 Op. cit. Oktem (2018):250.
74 Gard, S. (2014). PortJackson Pullers: Australia’s Early Skulling Champions. Thirlmere: BlueDawe Books,
page 179.
75 See Belton, R. J. (2015). ‘The Narrative Potential of Album Covers’, Studies in Visual Arts and Com-
munication: An International Journal, 2(2) (online only):n.p.
76 See Op. cit. Povey (2007):163 for more details.

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 9
PINK FLOYD MEMORIES
AND MEMORABILITY
‘A personal essay on fandom and collecting’

Bob Follen

A middle eight break for Bob’s visual (and non-academic) take on

Pink Floyd memories
I appeared at 6:50pm on November  15, 1979, in Cambridgeshire (where else), to a newly
formed couple. My mother had four young children from a previous marriage. My father had
just lost his own father to cancer and was also very close to losing his mother to dementia. And
he owned a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl.
It is now November  23, 1979, I  am eight days old, and the Pink Floyd single ‘Another
Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ is released. A strange mix of protest song, rock concept and a little bit
of disco, this was the band’s frst UK charting single since December 1968. The single topped
the charts, shifting 1.1 million copies in the United Kingdom alone. Chart-wise, it closed the
1970s and opened the door into the 1980s. The band, in that lineup, would never have another
Number 1 single in England.
By the mid 1980s, my brothers and sister were already living elsewhere. My mum, dad and
I stayed together as a trio and geographically drifted from Pink Floyd’s home county of Cam-
bridgeshire to the Falkland Islands, a place which would form the focus for the last Pink Floyd
album to feature Roger Waters, The Final Cut. Dad was a boat builder at frst, then a carpenter,
one of the tradesmen requested by ‘Maggie’ to help rebuild parts of Goose Green after the
Falklands War. Living there as a kid was a bit like those extremely sunny, windy barren scenes
from The Wall movie, the only diference being the many spent bomb and shell cases still litter-
ing the ground, almost four years after the war. Returning to the United Kingdom in 1986 for
family and health reasons, the three of us settled in Norfolk. Bath nights were to the soundtrack
of The Dark Side of the Moon, always playing away on the Waltham record player in the hallway.
One of my frst major memories of Pink Floyd is really the band’s artwork, as I was already
interested in visual art myself. Other Floyd memories include visiting my siblings in Heacham
in north Norfolk and not being allowed out of the back of the car to go and see them or be a
part of their world. Instead, my brother Stephen (the second eldest) came over and said, ‘Hey,
I’m listening to this.’ He handed me a cassette. It was Wish You Were Here. I couldn’t hear the
music there and then, but I disappeared into the credits and the design. ‘What is EMI?’ ‘Who are
Waters, Gilmour and Wright?’ ‘There’s a song here about giving someone a cigar . . . Hannibal

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-13 191

 Bob Follen

from the A-Team smokes a cigar . . . that’s pretty cool!’ I handed the tape back to him, said our
goodbyes, and we drove away.
Within a year or so, one by one, they came to live with us. When brother Stephen made his
appearance, he brought with him his small Pink Floyd collection. This consisted of half a dozen
cassettes, a couple of posters, a few newspaper and magazine cuttings and some videos. When
brother Sam appeared, he brought with him a 1989 Pink Floyd Tour shirt. We would all watch
Live at Pompeii and The Delicate Sound of Thunder on video and Roger Waters’ The Wall: Live in
Berlin when it was aired on television.
Skip forward a couple of years, and we had all moved back to Cambridgeshire . . . and I
‘got into’ the Floyd properly. I’d almost managed to shift my focus entirely from Queen to Pink
Floyd, handing in artwork inspired by Pink Floyd at school, and trying to pluck up the inner
courage to watch the flm of The Wall on my own. At 14, I started playing in a band with school
friends, taking care of the drum section, and when the time was right, made various attempts to
inject some of the ideas and musical devices the band had pioneered. My own life progressed:
from going to college and then to university, eventually moving to London. In each place, I’d
always nip to record shops and occasionally get the odd Pink Floyd–related item, and that has
never really stopped.
In December 2017, Sam passed away. My brother Stephen was with him at the very moment
that Sam collapsed. Shortly afterwards, I was gifted with all of the Pink Floyd bits and pieces
that Stephen owned. The very same bits that got me hooked on the band in the frst place were
now mine, which felt like a gesture, a connection, from another world. And that’s where the
link with the band really fused.

Reasons for collecting Pink Floyd material

Growing up, and having access to my own money, all had a signifcant impact on my collecting.
Prior to this there were only two possible avenues open to me. Option 1: items handed down
through family and friends. Option 2: (and more likely) in the form of presents. Unfortunately,
Option 2 never happened, so I was in frmly in the driving seat of my own destiny.
The other really important factor about getting into the band, and wanting to learn more, is
almost scientifc, or investigative, in terms of the dispelling of myths that circulate them, particu-
larly the band’s constant association with drugs. I grew up in an environment where drugs were
used. It wasn’t recreational; it was addiction, two young men trying to outdo each other. Add
the band’s music, or even merely their name, to that euphoric state, and suddenly all the drug-
oriented myths come pouring out. As a teenager, I just wanted all of that stuf to ‘stop.’ I accept
the band were absolutely part of the 1960s scene, along with many other bands, but when
addiction is happening close up, I would see that there’s actually nothing glorious or romantic
in the story of Syd Barrett’s fracture and fall. It’s sad and very real, and it afected a lot of people
very close to him. I prefer to remember Syd through the great work he and the band produced.
At college, one of my friends had a Pink Floyd bootleg called Feed Your Head. This oddities
album, which appeared in the early 1990s, contains an early live version of ‘Echoes,’ announced
by Roger Waters as ‘Looking Through the Knotholes in Grannie’s Wooden Leg.’ The same
friend also had a transparent vinyl interview album featuring Nick Mason called There’s Some-
body Out. When I left college, my friend handed them over and said ‘You can have these.’ And
I still do. I also remember many adventurous shopping trips to King’s Lynn with friends. Each
trip would hopefully result in a Pink Floyd purchase. One day I hoped to fnd an inexpensive
copy of Radio K.A.O.S., but would it ever happen? A few weeks later, on another visit, by pure
chance my friend pulled out a cassette copy from a bargain bin. Very pleased.

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Bob on how memories become memorabilia

Collecting Floyd and solo items has, for me, been a wonderful trip full of unexpected twists
and turns. Holding up that obscure thing that you’ve read about for years and years . . . fnally
in your hands .  .  . feels like magic. The risks associated with getting second-hand items,
warped vinyl, books with pages missing can, even still, be really interesting. There have been
times where I’ve lived with a jumping LP, only to discover the sonic reality on a CD years
later. Occasionally, just a looped rhythm section on a scratched LP is just what the doctor
ordered, especially if it makes the funkiest parts of either ‘Atom Heart Mother’ or ‘Echoes’
last even longer.
In more recent years I have tried to understand the choices I have made and continue to
make with regard to my collecting habits. A tiny part of my design-trained brain thinks it might
be a journey into the world of branding and marketing; the group’s name seen on anything
from badges to mirrors to rolling papers to posters. Another aspect of understanding my choices
has been dictated by patience, and lots of reading. The latter really helps work out what might
actually be available out there, what holy grails remain, although I would always opt for the
unusual and afordable items.
Over a long period of time – 30-plus years – a defnite collection of sorts has formed. I have
never had a well-paid job, so my expenditure on this passion has always been measured. The
most I have ever paid was £399.00 (including the courier fee – Le Mans to Tulse Hill) for a
very rare French  Animals  vinyl bin pig. I  have carefully sourced and purchased most of my
archive, with some pieces donated from a direct source. One of my very earliest pieces came
from the late Mark Fisher, for instance. Whilst at college in the mid-1990s, I pieced together a
dissertation on the work of ‘Fisher Park’ (the godfathers of rock concert extravaganzas). I called
Fisher’s ofce. He was very patient and open to my quizzing and sent me some OHP acetate
sheets which were used during the production for The Division Bell tour (1994). The last time
I saw Fisher in person was at a Waters concert at the O2 in London in 2011. It was so nice to
see him, and to experience a show like The Wall, of which he was such an integral part. The
following day, Gilmour and Mason joined Waters on stage.
Other donations include:  a  small fight case which survived the band’s very frst trips to
Australia and Japan in 1971; a piece of the infatable pig used by Waters at Hyde Park in 2018;
a Gilmour signed pass from the Momentary Lapse of Reason era; a couple of Animals and The
Wall  items sent from  Mason’s drum tech,  the late Clive Brooks; a  sweatshirt from guitarist
Snowy White, worn during In the Flesh  tour in 1977; a 1973 Dark Side of the Moon  tour pro-
gramme from a member of the band’s road crew. After chatting at length with Mott the Hoople
and Bad Company guitarist Mick Ralphs, he very kindly sent me Gilmour’s handwritten chord
sequence for ‘C. Numb.’ The notebook page dates from the rehearsals for Gilmour’s About Face
tour in 1984.
Maybe the answer to the ‘where did they come from?’ question is a bit of a weird lottery;
I really don’t know ‘how’ or ‘why.’ Perhaps it’s a nudge back from the universe for still fying the
fag, after those 30-plus years.

Bob on exhibiting Pink Floyd

I was involved in the initial sourcing of artefacts for the ofcial Pink Floyd exhibition, ‘Their
Mortal Remains,’ back in 2014. Compiling the detailed list was quite a job. The original exhi-
bition was unfortunately abandoned and then luckily re-emerged a year or so later at the V&A
in London. None of my bits made it in, but I think, since compiling the list, it has really made

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me appreciate and re-evaluate my collection as a entity and all the personal stories behind each
artefact.
In late 2018 I decided to put together an exhibition – ‘Oink’ – of my own Pink Floyd items
as a sharing exercise, showcasing the most unusual items. I had grown a little weary of seeing
online collectors’ clubs, where people seemed to share things digitally but would never ever
share in real life.
There were many reasons I put on ‘Oink’:

1) It was aimed at the North of England, where I live, and where my collection lives.
2) It gave me the chance to research the venues in the north of England where the band (and
its members) played.
3) It inspired me to look at the areas of the north connected to the band, where flms were
shot, for instance.
4) To consider the efects of climate change on an archive and collection with regard to
fooding.
5) To do it for real, taking inspiration from the late Storm Thorgerson and the work of
Hipgnosis.

Looking back, it was certainly a bit of a brave voyage. I am defnitely very proud of it. If a
member of the public, fan or musician didn’t like something, they would tell you . . . right there
and then. The majority of attendees engaged and were really supportive. The exhibition formed
part of the music and literary festival Louder Than Words in November 2019 in Manchester,
and the last place it was held in was a public library in Halifax in early 2020. The exhibition
was always free to the public, and to hold it in a place of learning seemed like something the
remaining members of the band would approve of. The exhibition increased the footfall at the
library and encouraged a lot more people to use this precious resource. Every week I would
appear in person, with a fully expanded version of the artefacts alongside a short slide-show/
flm and music. The stories from fellow fans were great to hear and in some cases very hum-
bling. The experience certainly drove home to me the fact that everyone has interesting access
points regarding the band.

And now . . . Bob on his pig

My proudest and largest Pink Floyd artefact is a full-size plastic vinyl bin pig, which I’ve nick-
named ‘Scratchings.’ The bin was created to promote the Animals album in France, in early
1977. Whilst on a short break in central Paris in 2013, I nipped into a record shop (Monster
Melodies), on the prowl for something Floydian. The shop had a vinyl bin pig on display and,
as I’d never seen one before, I walked straight past it. Then, in a book, I discovered what the
thing was . . . and asked about it. The pig in the shop was most defnitely NOT for sale. The
shop owner said, ‘if you weer reelly lukky, zen mayyybe wonnn dayyy, yuu marght fynd wonnn’
and laughed ‘yerrh . . . Gurrrddd lurrrrck wizz tharrrt!’
Back home in London a couple of weeks later .  .  . I  found one. The one I  found was
trapped inside a barn in Le Mans and ignored for almost 40 years and is the one featured with
me in the January 2021 Prog magazine feature on Animals. The pig itself is held together with
small metal rivets. The barn pig was never used for its original purpose. It featured in a brief
photo shoot and ended up being sent straight to the barn. A rescue mission was put into action,
and a courier was booked. A couple of weeks later there was a slight issue, as the courier driver

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could only deliver the pig to Tulse Hill and not to my then home (a fat in Streatham). A non-
driver, I  was reliant on public transport. After getting Scratchings out of the van, I  power-
walked back through the deserted streets of south London with an enormous object wrapped
in brown paper. One lady stopped to question me on my return journey, believing ‘I’d visited
the local taxidermist.’ I hadn’t even got him home and the pig was already turning heads and
giving me grief.

Bob on fandom
Like most dedicated fans of any band, you see and experience lots of sides: the good fan
and the bad fan. The good fans share their stories, or maybe even give you something that
belonged to a family member. And equally, I have seen lots of positives with Pink Floyd
live and have witnessed the occasional grim side too. There is one fan-oriented experience
that I still cannot shift. At a Roger Waters show a couple of years ago, there was an abusive
character in my row. This chap, to my mind, was absolutely missing the point with regard
to who he had come to see. He would scream ‘You’ll like this . . . this one’s from . . . The
Final Cut’ before every single number. His behaviour escalated, and he assaulted and abused
two women either side of him. It was horrible to witness, and maybe the most unsettling
thing was it was happening right now, right in front of me, and it wasn’t taking place in
some hazy, dope-flled arena somewhere in the United States or Canada in the mid-70s.
The chap was eventually dragged out screaming by two guards, like some scene straight out
of The Wall flm.
The Pink Floyd story has, at times, been likened to that of a family. I certainly came to the
band in the surroundings of my own family. As time passed, my family became slowly more
fractured and I found I was looking . . . for something. And there, within this band, was some-
thing reassuring, desperately quiet, together. There are questions and tension, yes, but through-
out, they are striving for better. I do recognise the often turbulent relationships at work with
the band and am not ignorant to the sacrifces paid at the crossroads in order to ‘make things
work.’ I enjoy witnessing the sacrifces and in some cases wish for the similarly energetic, shared
journey of a band. As I’ve grown older with Pink Floyd, I’ve defnitely been more interested in
their social commentary and recognised the narratives and the landscape from which the mate-
rial grew, and continues to grow. There have been many times where I’ve witnessed difcult
fans, and thought ‘Christ, I hope I’m not like that,’ but a friend assured me recently that for me,
the Pink Floyd is just a real pure passion, and not an ugly obsession.
The work of Hipgnosis, especially the late Storm Thorgerson, continues to be very inspir-
ing throughout. When the band was up and running, they didn’t change designers with every
release, creating an element of continuity and reassurance. There’s a likeable artistic trust emit-
ting from them as well. With the passing of time, some of those trusted giants are no longer
there (especially Mark Fisher and Storm), so it’s even harder for them to fnd people to welcome
into the fold without all the silver suddenly disappearing.
The band and the solo work progresses in leaps and bounds with each new product, main-
taining continuity in the midst of great pressure from ‘everywhere on the planet.’ Dealing with
that isn’t easy. Some of the band’s comments about fandom, and how it can inhibit their creative
processes, come from a place I defnitely understand. Personally, I enjoy their collected output
but will continue to be supportive of the work they do individually. In the end, as a human
being frst (and fan second), you wish them all good health and happiness on their creative
paths. Their work for me is always fearsome, compelling, exciting. It always evolves.

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Figure 9.1 Obscure library image

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 Pink Floyd memories and memorability

Figure 9.2 Pompeii postcards

Figure 9.3 Mark Fisher acetate strip

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Figure 9.4 David Gilmour Meltdown appearance ticket and programme

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 Pink Floyd memories and memorability

Figure 9.5 Cassette archive

Figure 9.6 The Final Cut cassette banner

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Figure 9.7 The Dark Side of the Moon Earls Court programme

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 Pink Floyd memories and memorability

Figure 9.8 The Wall armband and badge

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Figure 9.9 There’s Somebody Out There interview LP

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 Pink Floyd memories and memorability

Figure 9.10 Feed Your Head bootleg LP

Figure 9.11 Norman Smith autobiography

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 Bob Follen

Figure 9.12 Invite for The Wall Live 80/81

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 Pink Floyd memories and memorability

Figure 9.13 Printer’s proof invitation for The Endless River album launch

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 Bob Follen

Figure 9.14 ‘Arnold Layne’ promo advert

Figure 9.15 Michael Gothard’s La Vallee/Obscured by Clouds quad poster

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Figure 9.16 Stephen Follen’s Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd cuttings

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PART III

Genre
 10
IN SEARCH OF SPACE (ROCK)
Pink Floyd and genre formation
in popular music

Tico Romao

Introduction
As has been well documented, the study of connections between music and the cosmos has had
a long and illustrious history.1 As far as western scholarship is concerned, that history dates as
far back as Greek antiquity when Pythagoras frst proposed a correlation between the distances
between the planets and musical tones producing a ‘universal harmony.’2 ‘Musica universalis’ or
‘music of the spheres,’ the more popular known term for this Pythagorean concept, continued
to inform astrological conceptions of the universe during the Renaissance. Johannes Kepler’s
contributions to astronomy, for instance, invoked, according to Ferguson (2008) musical
conceptions of planetary harmonics.3 In a parallel fashion, classical musical pieces occasionally
took inspiration from astronomy, as illustrated by such works as that of Joseph Haydn’s opera Il
mondo della luna (1777), Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets (1918) and Krzysztof Pend-
erecki’s Kosmogonia (1970).
The historical connections between classical music and astronomy manifested between
antiquity and the twentieth century have been reasonably well charted. James (1993), in his
study The Music of the Spheres, ofers an extensive examination of how the science of the uni-
verse informed classical music. The same cannot be said for the more recent interpenetrations
between popular music and cultural conceptions of outer space. One very notable manifestation
of such an overlap that has not received sufcient critical attention is space rock, a popular music
genre that has generated many high-profle hits such as David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ (1969),
Hawkwind’s ‘Silver Machine’ (1972) and Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ (1972). It continues to be
an enduring force through such contemporary acts as Amplifer, 65daysofstatic, Spiritualised
and Cavern of Anti-Matter.
Amongst the most pivotal bands in space rock’s development was Pink Floyd. However, one
of the outstanding facts about Pink Floyd is that it has been commonly labelled ‘the premier
space rock band’ even though that honour primarily rests on only three of the band’s early tracks:
‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967), ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ (1967), and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart
of the Sun’ (1968). William Echard (2017)4 made a case for Pink Floyd’s central status in relation
to a space rock by labelling them ‘one of the most important early space-rock bands’ and notably
recognises the signifcance of ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ as ‘space-rock
songs in advance of the space rock genre.’ This recognition is all the more conspicuous given

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-15 211

 Tico Romao

that other Pink Floyd tracks and albums manifest other thematic motifs that are less readily
classifable as space rock. Despite its title, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), the band’s eighth
studio album, is better understood as a progressive rock concept album. Its music, argues Harris
(2006),5 departs from the psychedelic terrain Pink Floyd’s previous albums explored to focus
instead upon the theme of madness, notably inspired through ex-band member Syd Barrett’s
descent into mental illness (‘Eclipse,’ the fnal track of the album, does lyrically invoke the solar
system in its fnal lines – ‘And everything under the sun is in tune/But the sun is eclipsed by the
moon.’ However, this space reference is a local lyrical trope that does not characterise the album
as a whole, with its more dominant themes of time, death, greed and madness. Consequently,
the association of Pink Floyd with space rock as genre warrants further examination concerning
the genre-forming role of these three signifcant tracks.
To better understand how these three Pink Floyd tracks played such a pivotal role in the
genre’s formation, this chapter will frst outline space rock’s generic boundaries to better situate
these tracks within the broader musical form. A case will be made that the broader parameters
of the genre are better understood as a typicality gradient, a term derived from the cognitive
psychology of categorisation, through which members of a category are ranked based on their
typicality,6 as opposed to set theory in which musical categories are understood as a narrow-
ing series of inclusive and overlapping sets. The chapter will then turn to the role of generic
recombination and its function within popular music genre development. A number of authors
such as Brackett (2002),7 Lena (2012)8 and Negus (1999),9 have correctly emphasised the role
innovation plays in genre development yet overlook the ways in which generic recombination
is involved in such processes. Signifcantly, generic recombination lay at the roots of these three
tracks, and Pink Floyd’s aesthetic innovations broadened the existing parameters of space rock
by innovating psychedelic blues. In doing so, Pink Floyd can be credited for introducing space
rock’s prototypical lyrical and musical form conventions to express longstanding associations
between space, travel and alienation. The chapter will then turn to the critical role of generic
recognition, through which the generic features that constitute space rock act as cues to the
listener that can, in turn, trigger inferences and judgements as to whether a particular band,
album or track is to be categorised with the space rock genre. Critical to these generic judge-
ments are the establishment of prototypes10 – representations of space rock that are identifed
by their typicality – and exemplars11 – which are representations of specifc pieces of music in
long-term memory, both of which are crucial to the formation of popular music genres. These
three Pink Floyd tracks became the main exemplars informing generic judgements and addi-
tionally signifcantly informed the prototypes that defned space rock as a genre. By applying a
cognitive categorisation approach to space rock and the three Pink Floyd tracks, the utility of
this framework will be demonstrated not only in relation to the analysis of popular music genres
but through its ability to shine a light onto historically critical genre-forming moments.

Generic parameters
Space rock has assumed a wide range of forms. It initially emerged from 1960s psychedelic rock
and then blossomed from the ‘kosmische musik’ of 1970s German experimental electronica to
the afro-futurist elements in funk and hip-hop, to its incarnation in the work of recent stoner
rock bands. Despite space rock’s dispersed forms and amorphous generic boundaries, it is possi-
ble to outline its most signifcant features. One initial challenge to defning space rock, though,
is the difculty of establishing its generic boundaries with similar but overlapping popular musi-
cal genres. First, there is the question of inclusion and whether space rock is a sub-genre of
broader popular music forms. Anderton (2010) claims that progressive rock is a ‘meta-genre’

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that includes a range of musical styles and infuences beyond that of the classical music tradition,
and amongst those, he cites ‘the rif-based space-rock of Hawkwind.’12 The internet fan site
Progarchives.com also includes space rock amongst its typology of progressive rock subgenres
but labels it ‘Psychedelic/Space Rock’ and claims that psychedelia ‘spawned the birth of the
space rock genre.’
Such sub-genre issues pose the additional question of how space rock is to be distinguished
from psychedelic rock, especially when one considers that seminal space rock bands such as Pink
Floyd and Hawkwind were also often labelled as psychedelic, as illustrated by their addition in
the chapter on psychedelia in Borthwick and Moy’s Popular Music Genres: An Introduction (2004).
Sheila Whiteley’s (1992)13 attempt to distinguish space rock from psychedelic rock in her semi-
nal analysis of the psychedelic coding of counter-cultural music is illustrative. In an analysis of
the song ‘Love or Confusion’ (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, she argues (1992) that its
lead guitar break fuses psychedelic elements with that of space rock: ‘the electronically distorted
notes encode the unpredictability of hallucinogenic search . . . with the unknown element of
space rock.’ Although Whiteley does not explicitly defne space rock, she clearly associates it
with the representation of space travel, whereas psychedelic rock is primarily defned in terms
of its associations with hallucinogenic experience and its attempts to express these states.
Talk of space travel is bound to invoke notions of what some music critics have dubbed
‘sci-f’ or ‘science fction’ rock in the music trade press.14 David Downing, in his book Future
Rock (1976), asserts that some of the most signifcant contributions to popular music at the time
derived from artists and bands that presented a vision of the future in some manner, be it uto-
pian or dystopic. He dedicates an entire chapter to the infuences of science fction on popular
music and provides an extended discussion of Paul Kantner’s album Blows Against the Empire
(1970) as an example of a science-fction rock.15 In contrast, McLeod’s (2003)16 discussion of
space, alien and techno futuristic themes is not intended to delineate a popular music genre per
se but nonetheless stakes out a feld of study that is more commensurate with the broader scope
of science fction music than with the generic specifcity of space rock.
One also needs to refer to ‘Krautrock,’ an embracive term for experimental rock and elec-
tronic music originating from Germany in the late 1960s to early 1970s, which were in various
ways infuenced by the pioneer electronic classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.17 A num-
ber of the bands identifed under the Krautrock rubric were often classifed as space rock,
such as Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, Popol Vuh, Cluster, Tangerine Dream and The
Cosmic Jokers. Originally the term ‘kosmische musik’ was introduced to specifcally refer to
German space rock bands and artists that were synthesiser based.
Set theory has been one way scholars have attempted to resolve the apparent contradic-
tions arising from the diferent defnitions of popular music’s generic boundaries. Some popu-
lar musical theorists such as Fabbi (1981), Brackett (2002), Frith (1998)18 and Negus (1999)
have argued that musical genres can be conceptualised as sets of stylistic conventions, rules and
expectations. From this perspective, progressive rock, psychedelic rock and space rock should
be understood as a series of narrowing inclusive sets. What the application of set theory misses,
and will be demonstrated later in this chapter, is that it does not acknowledge the critical role
in which prototypes play in the formation of these categories. For instance, the musical output
of the French space rock band Rockets is much more readily classifable as European synthpop
rather than as an example of progressive rock. Yet this identifcation derives not from inclusive
sets but a categorisation process in which the prototypical features of synthpop are found to be
more relevant than the prototypical features of progressive rock. Similar types of category judg-
ments arise when attempting to generically place The Alan Parsons Project’s I Robot (1977),
which emphasises a technologically imagined future but does not attempt to represent space

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travel or depict other space themes, which are the prototypical features of space rock. It is con-
sequently better classifed as a progressive rock album. Along the same lines, psychedelic rock
is not coextensive with space rock. Albums such as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band (1967) and Cream’s Disraeli Gears (1967) patently fall within the psychedelic rock canon
but are not informed either by science fction or space travel. Similarly, some Krautrock bands
like Can and Kraftwerk do not warrant a space rock designation, where space travel and spaced-
induced alienation play no or negligible roles in their music, whereas the bands usually afliated
with Kosmische Musik do.
Instead of attempting to conceptualise the generic boundaries of space rock as a set from
which one makes judgements concerning the inclusion or exclusion of particular instances
based on necessary and sufcient conditions that do not obtain in the popular music domain, it
is more proftable to view its parameters as a typicality gradient where judgments are directed
at establishing prototypes that exhibit the greatest degree of typicality and ranking less typical
instances on a typicality gradient. Such considerations pertaining to prototypes and typical-
ity arise even more prominently in relation to the issue of generic mixing in popular music,
with space rock being notably polymorphic. One can spot instances of space rock mixing with
electronic music: Tangerine Dream’s Alpha Centauri (1971); glam rock: David Bowie’s The Rise
and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972); funk: Parliament’s Mothership Connec-
tion (1975); disco: Boney M.’s Nightfight to Venus (1978); new age: Peru’s Constellations (1981);
ambient-house: The Orb’s U.F.Orb (1992); hip hop: Digable Planets’ Reachin’ (A New Refutation
of Time and Space) (1993); shoegaze: Flying Saucer Attack’s Flying Saucer Attack (1994); stoner
rock: Monster Magnet’s Dopes to Infnity (1995); and post rock: 65daysofstatic’s Silent Running
(2011). All of these combinations can be situated on a typicality gradient, but only a few con-
stitute true prototypes of space rock, an issue returned to later in the chapter.
Such blurring of generic boundaries additionally poses the methodological question pertain-
ing to the appropriate units of analysis: is it the production trend, the recording artist or band,
the album or the track? Since space rock as a genre tends to be a dispersed form and does not
exhibit similar levels of formal and historical unity as that manifested by heavy metal or punk
rock, then all these levels of analysis are appropriate. While it would be inaccurate to claim
that space rock derived from a school or movement during its origins from 1960s psychedelic
music, there was a manifest vogue for invoking space themes during this period. At the level of
an artist’s or band’s oeuvre, no band or artist can rival Hawkwind’s adherence to its space rock
formula over the 40 years of its discography, and in this instance, the oeuvre is the appropriate
unit of analysis. In most cases, however, the methodological focus is understandably directed at
the album or track. UFO, for instance, is better known as an English heavy metal band, and their
sole contribution to the space rock genre was their second album Flying (1971), which boasts on
its cover ‘one hour of space rock.’ Contributions to the genre from other bands like The Byrds
and Pink Floyd are much more manifested at the level of a track or two of a particular album.
As noted earlier, despite Pink Floyd’s status as one of the pre-eminent space rock outfts, their
legacy primarily rests with three early defning tracks. Notably, ‘2000 Light Years From Home’
(1967), a clear instance of space rock, is the only song in The Rolling Stones’ entire musical
output that features its defning conventions.

Generic mixing and the origins of space rock

One efective way to establish the infuence that ‘Astronomy Domine,’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’
and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ exerted on the future development of space rock
is to demonstrate that their releases occurred early within the genre’s development. However,

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such an act of historical placement is complicated by the fact that an account of the precise
historical development of space rock is lacking in popular music literature. This primarily stems
from the limited discussions on space rock as genre itself. In her study on generic development
in popular music, Jennifer Lena (2012) makes no reference to space rock.19 Borthwick and Moy
(2004),20 in their introduction to popular music genres, do make a passing reference to ‘space/
raga rock’ in relation to CTA-102 (1967) by The Byrds, but their brief gloss is set within a wider
discussion of psychedelia as genre. Ken McLeod (2003) recognises that space, aliens and futur-
ism are imagery that recurs in popular music yet regards these forms as themes that cut across a
range of popular music genres rather than constitutive of a musical genre.21 In these discussions,
space rock is not even granted the status of sub-genre, let alone a genre of popular music. There
are, however, a few writers that accord space rock a place within popular music as a distinct
category. Writing in the Phonograph Record, Shaw (1973) presented the frst historical account
of the development of space rock.22 More recently, Thompson (2009) ofers a book-length dis-
cussion on space rock, although is written by an informed fan and fellow traveller so does not
ofer a formal defnition of the genre that specifes its prototypical conventions or examines the
principal factors informing its historical development.23 Arguably, the most detailed discussion
of space rock is advanced by Echard (2017) in Psychedelic Popular Music.24 He views the origins
of the space rock genre deriving from psychedelic rock and accords the genre a critical status
that has been hitherto neglected.
Before outlining space rock’s early developments, it is worth acknowledging some popular
music predecessors that, despite possessing thematic or musical links to space, should not be
considered originators of space rock. Early instances were the 1940s and 1950s lounge jazz
recordings that introduced a space dimension to their sound and, as a result, bear an afnity to
early sci-f flm soundtracks.25 Harry Revel’s Music Out of the Moon (1947) is an example of such
space-age lounge jazz and is credited as being the frst album to use a theremin. While themati-
cally there is a connection, it goes without saying that lounge jazz is an entirely diferent musical
form to that of space rock, which draws instead from the traditions of rock music.26 Another
set of early space-related popular music was the legion of space-themed novelty songs released
during the 1950s and 1960s, such as ‘Flying Saucer Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (1957) and ‘The Martian
Hop’ (1963). Although working within the conventions of rock music, these releases never were
able to transcend their novelty rock status and establish a new critically respected rock genre.
It is within this context of popular music and space that The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Spaceman,’ released
in 1966 as a single from their Fifth-Dimension album, gains signifcance as a founding space rock
song. This recognition stems less from the claim that the release of the single earned the band
the space rock ascription, according to Rogan (1997),27 but more from its ability to innovate
the formula of the space novelty songs while at the same time not damaging their reputation as
serious recording artists. This respected form of innovation was achieved through the generic
recombination of the space-themed elements of the novelty songs with that of the electrifed
country-folk sound with which they were establishing their musical credentials. ‘Mr. Spaceman’
also introduced an allegorical dimension to space rock. One can interpret the song’s lyrics as
social commentary where ‘those strangers that come every night’ and who ‘put people uptight’
are allegorical stand-ins for hippies and the counter-cultural values they represent.
If ‘Mr. Spaceman’ introduced one of the defning thematic aspects of space rock through an
allegory of social diference and brought it some initial critical esteem, then Pink Floyd is to be
credited for introducing much of its prototypical musical form conventions and taking its lyrical
conventions in a diferent direction. Making this claim is to assert that primacy efects in popular
music genres not only derive from just their early occurrence within a developmental history
but also depend upon some level of innovation that brings the genre into being. A number of

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commentators have observed that ‘Astronomy Domine’ was innovative through a novel combi-
nation of psychedelic blues that is mixed in with Karlheinz Stockhausen–inspired experimen-
tal sound efects and psychedelic space lyrics. Middleton and Municie (1981)28 contend that
Pink Floyd was originally a rhythm and blues band (one of their previous names was the Pink
Floyd Blues Band) yet soon transformed themselves into ‘one of the frst fully-fedged British
‘psychedelic’ groups.’ This transformation into psychedelic music did not entail a shift into a
completely diferent register but derived from innovations on rhythm and blues. Psychedelic
blues as a musical style was not restricted to Pink Floyd; it also extended to other psychedelic
bands and artists, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Grateful Dead. With regard to
‘Astronomy Domine,’ this innovation is most pronounced in Syd Barrett’s trademark glissandos
on lead guitar that feature prominently in the song. Although the glissando derived from the
use of the slide guitar in blues, Barrett fed these through an echo box to transform it into a
more distinct psychedelic sound that possessed the connotation within psychedelic music of
LSD-induced altered states.
In addition to the song’s psychedelic blues style was Pink Floyd’s use of experimental sound
efects. Macan (1997)29 notes that Rick Wright, the band’s keyboardist, was mainly infuenced
by Stockhausen ‘musique concrète’ experiments that featured sounds derived from natural and
human environments, as well as sounds that were electronically produced. These elements are
manifested in ‘Astronomy Domine’ with respect to guitar drone/pulse, radiophonic sounds and
Morse code that is used at the start of the song and are not solely introduced for musical experi-
mentation but to also signify space. Echard (2017) contends the use of drone/pulse sounds
call forth a sense of a ‘vast, uninfected expanse of space itself or the vistas of alien worlds,’30 a
trope that is reinforced by radiophonic sounds, and the ‘space-wind’ sound efect used midway
in the song. These elements on their own may not necessarily prompt the listener to imagine
space-themed topics, but when combined with the song’s title – ‘Astronomy Domine,’ which
suggests some sort of astronomical chant – and the space-themed lyrics, such sounds then can
provide robust cues. The invocation of space in ‘Astronomy Domine’ was not restricted to just
these elements but also extended to its musical structure. Echard (2017) points out that the
song’s pulsing instrumental section, lengthy by contemporaneous pop song standards, is ‘clearly
staged on multiple levels as a space trip.’31 This pulsating instrumental form is taken to a higher
level in ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ which, as a nine-minute instrumental track, can add greater
structural complexity through its extended jam middle section and which is strongly cued via
its title to musically express space travel. ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ released on
Pink Floyd’s second studio album, A Saucerful of Secrets, ofers an alternative musical structure
that is more minimal and ambient. Echard (2017) suggests that ‘Set the Controls for the Heart
of the Sun’ is a particularly clear instance of Pink Floyd’s movement toward static and repetitive
structures, with the song representing ‘a distillation of certain elements and removal of others,
which collectively shifts the signifcation frmly toward space’32 and which is expressive of the
alienating aspects of space travel.
It is also important to note that the lyrics of ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Set the Controls for
the Heart of the Sun’ introduced a major thematic trope of space rock, that of space travel. As
noted previously, Whiteley analysed how Love or Confusion combined elements with ‘hallucino-
genic search’ and space travel. What is specifcally distinctive about ‘Astronomy Domine’ is how
it fuses the representation of hallucinogenic mental states with that of space travel, such that they
become reciprocal metaphors for each other. This metaphorical reciprocation between interior
hallucinogenic states and outer space became a recurrent theme within the space rock genre
and is made explicit much later in the lyrics of Julian Cope’s song ‘I’ve Got My TV & My Pills’
(1996), where he sings ‘I could be underground/I should be in outer space spinning around/

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instead I’m messed up on drugs banished to some outer galaxy.’ In ‘Astronomy Domine,’ this
reciprocity remains implicit. The opening lyrics emphasise intense colours – ‘Lime and limpid
green, a second scene/a fght between the blue you once knew’ – in ways typical of the repre-
sentation of hallucinogenic states in psychedelic rock, an imagistic metaphor that is also notably
manifested in ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ (1967) – ‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river/
with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.’ Where ‘Astronomy Domine’ lyrically breaks new
ground is by adjoining this metaphor with lyrics that are more evocative of space travel: ‘Jupiter
and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania/Neptune, Titan, Stars can frighten.’ In ‘Astronomy
Domine,’ the interiority of hallucinogenic search is mapped onto the exteriority of space travel.
In ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ much greater lyrical emphasis is placed upon the
alienating dimensions of outer space. Its title overtly signals that the song is concerned with
space travel and is used as the main refrain for the song. However, the lyrics ‘Little by little the
night turns around/counting the leaves which tremble at dawn’ and ‘over the mountain watch-
ing the watcher/breaking the darkness, waking the grapevine’ additionally expresses elliptically a
journey that is commensurate with the earth’s orbit around the sun, and the distanced and alien
perspective implies upon the activities of humankind.
If Pink Floyd is to be credited with introducing much of the prototypical musical and the-
matic conventions of space rock, then Hawkwind was the band that was most directly infu-
enced by these defning conventions. Hawkwind’s principal innovations lay with respect to
the introduction and packaging of a much broader range of space rock conventions through
the release in 1971 of their second album In Search of Space. The album’s title, artwork and the
‘Hawkwind Log’ included in the album’s packaging, which consisted of fctional space-themed
journal entries, as well the more evident space rock tracks, elevated In Search of Space as the frst
fully formed space rock album.33 Hawkwind should also be credited for innovating the sound
of space rock itself. With the release of In Search of Space, space rock was no longer confned to
the aesthetics of psychedelic rock and synthesiser dominant kosmische musik. Hawkwind took
the space imagery and theme of hallucinogenic search associated with psychedelic rock and
incorporated them into a more looping-rif-based motoric sound derived from the emergent
hard rock genre of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Just as space rock’s development hinged upon the generic mixing of blues with space rock-
themed psychedelia, Hawkwind developed it further through a combination of psychedelic
and hard rock. It would be fair to say that space rock’s subsequent development equally rests on
generic mixing. As observed earlier, the history of space rock is also a history of novel combina-
tions of popular music genres that is punctuated by key moments such as David Bowie’s combi-
nation of glam rock married with the tropes of aliens from outer space, Parliament-Funkadelic’s
exploration of Afro-futurism through funk, and The Orb that returns to the theme of halluci-
nogenic search yet fused with ambient house music. Contemporary acts such as 65daysofstatic
keep space rock a living musical force within a post-rock modality, as testifed by their video
game soundtrack No Man’s Sky: Music for an Infnite Universe (2016).

Categorisation and genre recognition

However worthy and unique the instances of musical combination within space rock are, they
do not seem to possess the same degree of prototypicality as did the Pink Floyd’s space rock
tracks that defned the genre’s early development. Just as a robin is more representative of the
category of birds than penguins or ostriches, one can say that Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Over-
drive’ on frst impression is more representative of the category of space rock than Elton John’s
‘Rocket Man’ or ‘Star Sail’ (1993) by The Verve.34 But why so? Such cases can be partially

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explained by the cognitive phenomena of the primacy efect, frst discovered in personality
impression formation in social psychology but demonstrated to also feature in category learn-
ing.35 The primacy efect relates to the cognitive tendency that the frst instances in a series are
recalled more readily than those instances presented later on in the series. In a parallel manner,
one can say that instances of music during the early stages of the formation of popular music
genre, such as the identifed Pink Floyd tracks, tend to be more memorable and representative
of a specifc genre than subsequent instances. However, to explain how such primacy efects
work in relation to popular music genre formation, it is necessary to additionally show how
such representativeness is acquired in the frst place. To do so, I will demonstrate how the genre
recognition process is subtended by prototypes, mental representations that are identifed by
their typicality and exemplars, which are mental representations stored in long-term memory,
which fgure prominently in categorisation.
Discussions about generic boundaries informed by set theory by necessity presuppose a set
of generic features that defne the set’s parameters. Some popular music theorists such as Fabbi
(1981), Frith (1998), Negus (1999) and Brackett (2002)36 have attempted to itemise these, and
a consensus has emerged that these entail both textual and extra-textual features. Although
terminology will vary, these lists normally include musical form conventions; communicative
and rhetorical conventions, including lyrics and song titles; performance conventions dictating
how the music is to be played ‘live’; and marketing conventions that inform the packaging of
the music including album cover and CD artwork. Typicality, therefore, operates across these
generic features in a manner that privileges some features as more salient than others and, when
in combination, more likely to trigger genre recognition. Exemplars, in turn, facilitate the
genre recognition process by instantiating the salient features through concrete instances that
are stored in long-term memory.
With regard to space rock, I propose that the most salient generic features that determine
typicality within the genre are its musical form conventions when acting in combination with
communicative and rhetorical conventions, with the remaining generic features normally
insufcient on their own to trigger typicality perception and genre categorisation. ‘Astronomy
Domine,’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ conform to
this typicality for the primary reason that they ofered amongst the frst templates in the popular
music of this combination of musical form and communicative conventions. The musical forms,
lyrics, and track titles of ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’
cue the listener to categorise them as space rock. Given that ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ is instru-
mental, its title serves the important function to frame to the listener the expressive dimensions
of space travel of the musical form of the track. As key moments in space rock history, and for
fans of early Pink Floyd music, such tracks became exemplars existing as long-term memory
traces that are additionally activated in generic categorisation processes.
To obtain a better understanding of the musical form conventions of space rock, it is worth-
while to frst turn to how they are defned by the Progarchives.com site, despite the brevity of
their discussion. The entry notes that space rock tends to manifest ‘repetitive, hypnotic beats and
electronic/ambient soundscapes,’ with reliance upon synthesisers producing experimental tones
and patterns and guitars often played using glissando techniques and echo and delay efects. The
entry also notes that space rock albums usually include an extended track based upon a ‘one
long meandering jam based on a main theme, where loops and wavelike fuctuations provide
slight variations to this structural foundation.’37
Such a description generally holds true for the musical styles explored during the initial
formative years by Pink Floyd, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra
Tempel. However, the entry does not itemise the full range of electronic experimentation used

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by space rock bands at the time, including electronic distortion of instruments beyond that of
the guitar and tape transformations.38 ‘C.T.A.-102’ (1967), a song about a quasar by The Byrds,
for instance, included studio sound efects, tape efects to simulate the sound of alien voices and
an electronic oscillator.39 Another popular device produced by a variety of instruments and elec-
tronic sound efects was to simulate the sound of a rocket taking of, sometimes with a count-
down overlaid, which acted as a synecdoche for space travel itself. Examples of such a device can
be heard in ‘X-M’ from Blows Against the Empire and in the opening moments of ‘Higher and
Higher,’ the frst track from The Moody Blues’ To Our Children’s Children’s Children (1969), a
concept album about space travel. While experimentation with longer structural forms and the
abandonment of popular song formulas were one of the hallmarks of the early practitioners of
space rock, they were not restricted to the open-ended jams that became the trademark of such
Krautrock bands like Amon Düül II and Guru Guru. Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, one
of the band’s collaborators who produced solo work, pursued more minimalist explorations of
abstract soundscapes. What tended to characterise these experimentations in musical structure
was that they were primarily instrumentals, which augmented their semantic ambiguity.
Music critics often deploy the term ‘spacey’ to label such experiments in instrumentation
and musical form. Despite its tautological nature, the term helps highlight the motivations
that underpin the term’s employment in the genre recognition process. Spacey as a term tends
to be primarily used by music critics to identify and categorise the musical form conventions
associated with space rock. Detmer (2011), for instance, describes Pink Floyd’s early music as
consisting of a ‘free, wild, spacey, improvisational style.’40 Similarly, when discussing the use of
feedback in popular music, Clarke (2014), notes how Jimi Hendrix ‘perfected a spacey feel of
psychedelic rock through ingenious ways of looping and relayering a noisy feedback signal to
produce a sonic density or depth efect.’41 MacLeod (2003), in a parallel manner, claims that
Lee Scratch Perry’s dub mixes electronically manipulated reverb, phase and delay to produce a
‘ “spacey” sonic efect.’42 To a lesser extent, the term ‘spacey’ has also been used to categorise
lyrics but notably to signify those in which are ambiguous and fgurative. Ihde (2015), describes
Hawkwind’s 1972 hit ‘Silver Machine’ featuring ‘suitably “spacey” lyrics’ presumably referring
to the elliptical way the lyrics refer to spacefight – ‘It fies sideways through time/It’s an electric
line/to your Zodiac sign.’43 The ascription of spacey, therefore intends to pick out lyrics that
mirror the musical form conventions of space rock through their ambiguity and fgurativeness.
In contrast, Menck (2007) notes The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Spaceman’ as their frst ‘overtly country &
western song.’44 Doyle (2017) similarly labels Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ an ‘evocative mid-
tempo ballad,’45 and Starr (2011) describes Devo’s ‘Space Junk’ (1978) as a ‘jittery new-wave
lament/ode.’46 What these cases illustrate is that the communicative and rhetorical conven-
tions do not predominate over the musical form conventions associated with other musical
genres. Despite the fact that the lyrics and track titles of these songs semantically convey space
themes, they are nonetheless uncoupled from the musical form conventions associated with
space rock and fail to trigger genre ascriptions. Consequently, ‘Mr. Spaceman,’ ‘Rocket Man’
and ‘Space Junk’ are all categorised by these critics by reference to other musical forms instead
of space rock.
Given this categorisation phenomena, it is legitimate to ask if ‘Echoes,’ the extended
side-long piece on side two of Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle, should be considered an
additional example of space rock, given that it musically conforms to the experimental
musical form conventions associated with space rock. As Macan (2011) observes, the track
brings together ‘folk-like songwriting’ with ‘atmospheric instrumental soundscapes, jazz-
funk jamming, and frankly experimental passages.’47 However, at no point in Macan’s (2011)
extended discussion of the track does he invoke the term space rock to describe it and

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instead acknowledges its formal similarities to the progressive rock music of Emerson, Lake
and Palmer and Yes, placing the track in another generic domain. Signifcantly, the ‘Echoes’
lyrics difer from Pink Floyd’s earlier space rock tracks by ofering imagery that is marine in
nature and which is situated in a diferent imaginative landscape: ‘Overhead, the albatross,
hangs motionless upon the air/And deep beneath the rolling waves/In labyrinths of coral
caves/The echo of a distant time/Comes willowing across the sand/And everything is green
and submarine.’ This suggests an inversion of the uncoupling of the communicative and
rhetorical conventions from the musical form conventions of space rock encountered earlier.
Just as ‘Mr. Spaceman,’ ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Space Junk’ all fail to trigger space rock ascriptions
by not conforming to the typical musical form conventions of space rock, one can say that
‘Echoes’ fails for the opposite reason in that its lyrics and title do not correspond to typical
space rock communicative and rhetorical conventions. Typicality in space rock, therefore,
appears to operate through the conjunction of its prototypical musical form conventions
with its communicative and rhetorical conventions. This is particularly the case when it
comes to the semantic ambiguity of instrumentals that feature prominently within the space
rock genre that rely on their titles to orient the listener to a track’s meanings. Tangerine
Dream’s ‘Fly and Collision of Comas Sola’ (1971) and ‘Nebulous Dawn’ (1972) are both epic
instrumentals, with their titles functioning as the primary cues for the listener to interpret
their electronic soundscapes as obscure intergalactic phenomena. The title instrumental track
from Guru Guru’s debut album UFO (1970), an archetype of experimental improvisation
consisting of explorations of feedback, noise and concrete sounds, ofers a more esoteric
example. To say that the song’s music is semantically void would be untrue, but it is difcult
to establish any representational intent derived through its musical form on its own. How-
ever, the song’s title, ‘UFO,’ does orient the listener as to the potential meaning of its alien
sounds and provides a cue that the abstract nature of the track parallels the abstract depiction
of a UFO gracing the album’s cover.48
It is important to recognise that despite Pink Floyd’s signifcant contribution in setting the
lyrical conventions of space rock through ‘Astronomy Domine’ and ‘Set the Controls for the
Heart of the Sun,’ they did not exhaust the thematic orientations conveyed, as the genre histori-
cally developed and acquired new themes beyond that of alienating hallucinatory space travel.
One major theme is the use of imagery of outer space aliens to act as allegories for some aspect
of the social or human condition. As noted earlier, ‘Mr. Spaceman’ invoked aliens as allegorical
stand-ins for hippies and more broadly 1960s counterculture. Normally this thematic strategy is
to cast in a new light the relations between some form of alternative social identity and the per-
ceived hegemonic norm. The most explicit and infuential exploration of such a theme is David
Bowie’s concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (12972), in
which Ziggy Stardust – an alien messiah – allegorically represents bisexual identity in relation to
normative notions of sexual orientation.49 A parallel thematic strategy can be observed in Parlia-
ment’s Mothership Connection, another concept album with ‘Star Child,’ in which a similar alien
messiah fgure features, who this time brings funk music to earthlings, which McLeod (2003)
interprets as an allegorical tale of black empowerment.
Discussions about aliens and the alienating sounds of space rock naturally lead to the subject
of alienation itself as a pervasive dimension of the genre as a whole. Both lyrically and musically,
outer space tends to be represented as an extremely alienating environment, as augured by ‘Set
the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’ Tangerine Dream’s ‘Nebulous Dawn’ (1972) is nearly
18 minutes of a steady, pulsating and ultimately alienating drone. Be it the bored tedium of
space travel as expressed in ‘Space Oddity,’ where ‘Far above the Moon/Planet Earth is blue/
And there’s nothing I can do’ or the inhospitable nature of other planets as conveyed in ‘Rocket

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Man,’ where ‘Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell,’ such lyrics
reinforce the association of space and alienation.
Even though the musical form conventions of these tracks cannot be said to be prototypical,
they are still generically signifcant as a result of extending space rock’s thematic concerns and
can be placed within space rock’s typicality gradient. The same typicality gradient applies with
respect to the marketing conventions that are manifested in the genre. In addition to acting as an
advertisement for the album itself, cover art can also orient the potential listener to the genre(s)
in which the music is situated, along with the album titles themselves.50 Whereas Pink Floyd’s
kaleidoscopic album cover for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is more a demonstrable instance of
psychedelia, the artwork for A Saucerful of Secrets is more akin to a developing space rock visual
aesthetic though its depiction of galaxies, planetary orbs and astrological signs, imagery that seek
to express some form of galactic mysticism.51
However, Hawkwind would take this marketing logic even further by using their album
titles and artwork to facilitate genre recognition unambiguously. Album titles such as In Search
of Space (1971) and Space Ritual (1973) ofer patent signals of generic afliation with space rock.
The title to their fourth studio album – Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974) – is more cryptic as to
its generic function – yet there is no doubt that its cover sleeve depicting a derelict spaceship,
presumably on a planet in another solar system, associates the release as another instalment in
the space rock canon.52 In such ways, Hawkwind’s marketing conventions are much more pro-
totypical of space rock than A Saucerful of Secrets through the unequivocal expression of space
imagery. However, given the vogue for album covers featuring space images during the 1970s,
such as Boston’s self-titled album (1976) that presents a guitar-shaped spaceship and Electric
Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue (1977) that exhibits their logo as an orbiting space station, such
artwork became a unreliable indication of the musical genres of these bands.
Performance entails not only the act of creating music in a recording studio but also per-
forming it live before an audience, as well as before a camera either as a broadcast television per-
formance or a music video.53 Given this performance dimension that Toynbee (2006), describes
as ‘theatricality,’ engagement with musical performance is better understood as spectating that
involves vision along with hearing, as opposed to the pure act of listening. However, it is
debatable that one can identify performance conventions prototypes specifcally associated with
space rock that became codifed through recurrent use. Early Pink Floyd performances, for
instance, featured liquid light shows54 but in a manner that was not signifcantly diferent from
other psychedelic acts. Hawkwind, for their 1973 Space Ritual Tour, enhanced their liquid light
show with the addition of a slide show of David Harvey’s science-fction artwork, yet this was
a performance style distinctive to Hawkwind and not replicated by other space rock bands. In a
parallel manner, the costumes designed by Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust
persona,55 if not overtly space themed, were sufciently out of this world to instil a sense of
otherworldliness, especially when worn by Bowie as an alien messiah. Such costumes, how-
ever, were more representative of Bowie’s iconoclast performances than indicative of a space
rock performance style. In contrast, the Rockets routinely dressed up in silver suits and silver
face paint and included robotic dance moves in their live performances to project an image of
campy outer space aliens. As a performance style, these visual signifers worked well to facilitate
genre recognition, but the use of such overt signals was not a performance strategy that caught
on amongst other space rock recording artists. With album artwork providing unreliable genre
cues and performance ofering an uncodifed set of styles, it is wholly understandable why such
marketing and performance conventions serve only in a secondary capacity in the generic rec-
ognition process compared to space rock’s more salient musical form conventions of space rock,
especially when combined with the genre’s communicative and rhetorical conventions.

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One of the most signifcant implications of this examination of space rock’s generic conven-
tions, and their related function in the genre recognition process, is that it provides an explana-
tion as to why the three Pink Floyd tracks are more representative and more prototypical of
space rock than other contenders. Despite the fact that The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Spaceman’ predates
these tracks, the song does not possess the prototypical musical form conventions that are asso-
ciated with the space rock genre that play a critical determining role in the genre recognition
process. Similarly, although Hawkwind represents a more thorough and consistent packaging
of space rock in their discography compared to Pink Floyd’s more limited space output, their
music does not possess the same level of formal experimentation that is associated with the
genre’s musical form conventions. There is a greater degree of literalness of the allusions to space
in Hawkwind’s music when compared to the semantic ambiguity of the three Pink Floyd tracks,
in which their metaphors and allusions are looser and more opaque. Space rock is at its most
typical when its musical form and lyrical conventions mirror both formally and thematically the
mysteries of space itself.

Conclusions of the generic kind

In this chapter, I have applied a cognitive categorisation approach to space rock and attempted
to situate Pink Floyd’s ‘Astronomy Domine,’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Set the Controls for
the Heart of the Sun’ within this popular music category. In doing so, I have advanced the con-
cept of a typicality gradient as a means to conceptualise space rock’s broad generic parameters
given its amorphous boundaries that primarily derive from a prolonged and continuing history
of generic mixing. As I have demonstrated, these three Pink Floyd tracks are seminal prototypes
in relation to space rock as a genre given that they exhibit its typical forms of musical experi-
mentation and fgurative lyrics that are expressive of space travel and alienation, generic topo-
graphical features through which space rock is principally identifed. In addition, such tracks do
not solely exist as recordings or live performances; they are also exemplars – physical memory
traces in the mind of listeners that are recalled and further employed when making generic
categorisation judgements about the space rock genre. Other notable songs of the genre –
‘Mr. Spaceman,’ ‘Silver Machine’ and ‘Rocket Man’ – while not possessing the same degree of
prototypicality as the Pink Floyd tracks, are still situated in the typicality gradient as a result of
their space-themed lyrics despite being combined with other musical forms that do not mani-
fest the same level of musical experimentation associated with space rock. While these difer-
ent musical combinations diverge from space rock’s prototypes, they reveal that the typicality
gradient should not be conceived as a domain of conceptual and creative constraint that restricts
innovation but one through which creativity can be positively expressed through further novel
combinations that extend space rock’s parameters, as testifed by the disparate and contemporary
sounds of Amplifer, 65daysofstatic and Cavern of Anti-Matter.
As the history of space rock has shown ‘Astronomy Domine,’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and
‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ are also seminal as a result of arising during the
genre’s early and formative period of development. These tracks possess primacy efects – that
is, they are memorable and representative of space rock from the sheer fact that they played a
critical role in bringing the genre into being. Their origins stem from a series of foundational
acts of generic mixing. ‘Astronomy Domine’ innovated through its combination of rhythm
and blues with a psychedelic aesthetic that utilised Stockhausenesque experimental sound
efects and fgurative opaque lyrics through which hallucinogenic states were rendered through
the optics of space travel. ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ continued to mine the thematic domain
of hallucinatory space travel through a protracted and pulsating instrumental containing an

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extended blues jam. ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ completed the shift away from
the blues by adopting instead static and repetitive structures that were more experimental and
minimalist in nature and combined with lyrics that were evocative of space in manners that
conveyed travel but also alienation. These foundational combinations were signifcant not just
because they were perceived as diferent from other psychedelic music produced during a
period when the popular music industry especially prized novelty. Their musical signifcance
derives instead from the aesthetic complementarities that arose when from such combinations
that were fertile, profound and extremely resonant. The conjoining of the music of hallucino-
genic search with the thematics of space opened up the aesthetic feld of space rock in ways
that were genre forming.
As detailed in this chapter, the history of space rock’s development did not end with Pink
Floyd’s foundational contributions but continued through a series of unique and distinctive
combinations with other musical genres: electronic music, hard rock, glam, Afro-futurism,
ambient house and post-rock. Such an historical account of combinations should not be con-
ceived as a chronicle of development that exists solely in the conceptual realm of categorisation
in which category combinations, prototypes and typicality gradients foat freely without any
dimension of or connection to materiality. The history of space rock, as with the history of any
popular music genre, is historically materialised at particular junctures of musical developments
consisting of scenes, musical cycles, technological innovations and industry changes. The cog-
nitive categorisation approach advanced in this chapter does not displace such material genre
history but elucidates their social-psychological dimensions.

Notes
1 James, J. (1993). The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe. New York:
Springer, argues that music and science have parallel histories using the concepts of celestial harmony
and cosmic dissonance to create a continuum of states. This conceptual frame of reference allows James
(1993) to look at how Enlightenment astronomers’ perceived distances between celestial objects mir-
rored the spaces between notes, how groups of stars could be equated to chords and scales.
2 Pliny was a Roman author and naval commander who died in 79 AD. His major work, Naturalis His-
toria (Natural History), is a book that aimed to cover all ancient knowledge. See Pliny (1949). Natural
History: In Ten Volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Also available at: gutenberg.org/
fles/57493/57493-h/57493-h.htm.
3 Ferguson (2008) argues that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans insights transformed how we look at
the world by observing and proving the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, including,
we presume, music. See Ferguson, K. (2008). Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe.
London: Icon Books, pages 258–263.
4 Echard (2017) argues psychedelia has exerted an infuence beyond the sub-culture of the 1960s,
infuencing many genres of music including soul, funk, rock and EDM. See Echard, W. (2017). Psy-
chedelic Popular Music: A History Through Musical Topic Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
page 201.
5 Harris, J. (2006). The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece. Emeryville: Da
Capo Press.
6 See Rosch, E. (1973). ‘On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories’, in Moore, T.
(ed.), Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language. New York: Academic Press, pages 111–144.
7 Brackett (2002), takes a philosophic look at linguistics focusing in on how categories work and how
categories in music and categories of people interact to be able to produce sounds and lyrics that have
the potential to engender emotional responses from listeners. See Brackett, D. (2002). ‘(In Search of)
Musical Meaning: Genres, Categories and Crossover’, in Hesmondhalgh, D. and Negus, K. (eds.),
Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold, pages 65–83.
8 Lena (2012) asks and then discusses a perplexing but straightforward question of why some music styles
gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches. See Lena, J. (2012). Banding Together: How
Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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 Tico Romao

9 Negus (1999) shows how the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music is shaped by
record companies and corporate business styles while stressing that music production takes within
a broader culture, not totally within the control of large corporations. See Negus, K. (1999). Music
Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge.
10 MacLaury (1991) explores and discusses the ‘prototype’ in terms of theories of categorisation, encom-
passing ideas from cognitive psychology, anthropology and linguistics. See MacLaury, R. E. (1991).
‘Prototypes Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 20:55–74. And following, the work of Rosch
(1973) concludes there is no overarching theory of prototypicality. See Rosch, E. (1973). ‘On the
Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories’, in Op. cit. Moore (1973):111–144.
11 Looking at concepts, Murphy (2016) examines prototype theories, which rely on some form of a
summary description of a category, and exemplar theories, which claim that concepts are represented
as remembered category instances. The conclusion is that exemplars are undoubtedly crucial in some
categorisation judgments and category-learning experiments but that there is no exemplar theory of
concepts in a broad sense. Hence, we can extrapolate from Murphy’s work that there is, as yet, no
exemplar theory of concepts that can be applied to music. See Murphy, G. (2016). ‘Is There an Exem-
plar Theory of Concepts?’, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23(4):1035–1042.
12 Anderton, C. (2010). ‘A Many-Headed Beast: Progressive Rock as European Meta-Genre’, Popular
Music, 29(3), October:417–435.
13 Whiteley (1992) combines musicology and socio-cultural analysis to illuminate psychedelic aesthetics
and rock music, illustrating her argument with examples from a number of groups, including Pink
Floyd (‘Set the Controls For the Heat of the Sun’), arguing that dance music of the 1990s owes its
origins to the 1960s counter-culture. See Whiteley, S. (1992). The Space between the Notes: Rock and the
Counter-Culture. London: Routledge, page 23.
14 See Anon. (1978). ‘Yes-Tormato, Atlantic SD19202. Produced by Yes’, Billboard, 30 September, page
86; Kirsch, B. (1973). ‘McGuinn Flies Solo after 8 Byrd Years’, Billboard, 17 November 1973, page 35.
15 Downing, D. (1976). Future Rock. Frogmore: Panther Books.
16 McLeod (2003) takes the popularity of space, alien and futuristic imagery in popular culture as the
topic to examine how such themes have infuenced popular music. McLeod concludes that the use of
science fction and alien themes are expressions of neo-Gnostic withdrawal and alienation from domi-
nant cultural structures which transcend divisions of race, gender, religion or nationality. See McLeod,
K. (2003). ‘Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music’, Popular Music, 22(3),
October:337–355.
17 See Cope, J. (1995). Krautrocksampler: One Head’s Guide to the Great kosmische musik – 1968 Onwards.
Yatesbury: Head Heritage.
18 Frith (1998) argues that listening to music is a performance in itself and that popular music like art
music engenders debate ad dialogue about the aesthetic merit of music, leading to diferent ways we
can construct our identities. See Frith, S. (1998). Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Also see, Fabbi, F. (1981). ‘A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications’,
in Horn, D and Tagg, P. (eds.), Popular Music Perspectives. Göteborg and Exeter: International Associa-
tion for the Study of Popular Music, pages 52–81; Op. cit. Negus (1999); Op. cit. Brackett (2002).
19 Op. cit. Lena (2012).
20 Borthwick and Moy (2004) provide insights into the relationships between popular music, cultural
history, economics, politics, iconography, production techniques, technology, marketing and musical
structure. See Borthwick, S. and Moy, R. (2004). Popular Music Genres: An Introduction. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, page 51.
21 Op. cit. McLeod (2003).
22 Shaw, G. (1973). ‘The Future Will Happen This Year: Space Rock’, Phonograph Record, March.
23 Thompson, D. (2009). Space Daze: The History and Mystery of Space Rock. London: Davidthompson-
books.com.
24 Op. cit. Echard (2017).
25 Taylor (2001), for example, examines the ways in which music is performed, listened to and under-
stood, within the context of recording and broadcasting technologies developed in the twentieth
century. See Taylor, T. (2001). Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York: Routledge.
26 Wicke (1990) examines, from a historical perspective, the fascination for and signifcance to contem-
porary society of rock music. See Wicke, P. (1990). Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
27 Rogan, J. (1997). The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited: The Sequel. New York: Rogan House, page 181.

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28 Middleton, R. and Municie, J. (1981). ‘Pop Culture, Pop Music and Post-War Youth: Counter-
Cultures’, in Bennett, T., Muncie, J. and Middleton, R. (eds.), Politics, Ideology and Popular Culture.
Milton Keynes: Open University Press, page 81
29 Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, page 141.
30 Op. cit. Echard (2017):203.
31 Ibid:202.
32 Ibid:209–210.
33 See Walker, J. (1972). ‘Hawkwind: In Search of Space’, Phonograph Record, May.
34 See Lakof, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, page 41.
35 See, for example, Asch, S. E. (1946). ‘Forming Impressions of Personality’, The Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology, 41(3):258–290; Dufy, S. and Crawford, E. (2008). ‘Primacy or Recency Efects in
Forming Inductive Categories’, Memory & Cognition, 36(3):567–577.
36 Op. cit. Fabbi (1981); Op. cit. Frith (1998):91; Op. cit. Negus (1999):25–30; Op. cit. Brackett
(2002):66–69.
37 See Progarchives.com.
38 See Manning, P. (2004). Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 172–175.
39 Op. cit. Rogan (1997):196–97.
40 Detmer, D. (2011). ‘Dragged Down by the Stone: Pink Floyd, Alienation, and the Pressures of Life’, in
Reisch, G. A. (ed.), Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with That Axiom, Eugene! Chicago: Open Court,
pages 61–80.
41 Clarke, B. (2014). Neocybernetics and Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pages
80–81.
42 Op. cit. MacLeod (2003):342.
43 Ihde, E. (2015). ‘Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and “the Imagination of Disaster”’, Cogent
Arts & Humanities, 2(1):1–13.
44 Menck, R. (2007). The Notorious Byrd Brothers. London: Continuum, page 58.
45 Doyle, T. (2017). Captain Fantastic: Elton John’s Stellar Trip Through the ‘70s. New York: Ballantine
Books, page 89.
46 Starr, J. (2011). ‘Planet of Sound: Devo, “Space Junk”’, Tor.com.
47 Op. cit. Macan (2011).
48 See discogs.com/Guru-Guru-UFO/release/7792506 for the image of the album cover of Guru (1970).
49 See Op. cit. McLeod (2003):341.
50 See Machin, D. (2010). Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound, Text. London: Sage, pages 32–35; Shu-
kar, R. (2008). Understanding Popular Music Culture. 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, pages 95–96.
51 See discogs.com/Pink-Floyd-The-Piper-At-The-Gates-Of-Dawn/master/19546 see the cover of The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967).
52 See discogs.com/Hawkwind-Hall-Of-The-Mountain-Grill/release/3192203 for the cover of Hall of
the Mountain Grill (1974).
53 Op. cit. Frith (1998):203–225; and also see Toynbee, J. (2006). ‘Making Up and Showing Of: What
Musicians Do’, in Bennett, A., Shank, B. and Toynbee, J. (eds.), The Popular Music Studies Reader.
London: Routledge, pages 71–77.
54 See Reising, R. (2005). Speak to Me: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Farnham:
Ashgate, pages 28–29; Op. cit. Whiteley (1992):28.
55 See Auslander, P. (2006). Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, pages 121–150; Goddard, S. (2013). Ziggyology: A Brief History of Ziggy
Stardust. London: Ebury Press, pages 205–215.

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 11
‘ON THE RUN’
Te birth of electronic dance music?

Jim J. Mason

Introduction
This chapter will make the case that the Pink Floyd track ‘On the Run’ – the third track on
the band’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon – is the recording that made the biggest con-
tribution to the birth of electronic dance music.1 It also discusses why the unique combination
of Pink Floyd’s high level of commercial success, with their dedication to exploring new tech-
nology, made them candidates for being a key infuence on the evolution of electronic dance
music. To make such a case for any individual track to be considered the ‘birth’ of electronic
dance music is not easy. Matters of defnition and terminology are notoriously contentious in
popular music studies.2 Additionally, it can be argued that genres often emerge progressively;
that music evolves almost unnoticeably at each small step, rather than there being a situation
where a record is so diferent from what has come before that it proudly announces itself as the
frst in a new genre.
Discussions concerning what was ‘the frst’ in a particular genre are therefore often con-
tested. Many consider 1951’s ‘Rocket 88’ the frst rock  & roll record3 and 1979’s ‘Rapper’s
Delight’ the frst hip hop track,4 but there remain those who create strong arguments for other
records to be given that status.5 With that in mind, it is important to note that this chapter does
not intend to make the argument that ‘On the Run’ was the frst electronic dance music track,
rather that it is the track that made the biggest contribution to the birth of electronic dance music.
There is a signifcant diference between these two claims, which will be further explored here.
Firstly, it is necessary to establish a working defnition of the term ‘electronic dance music.’
This term itself is also very contentious. Abbreviating the term to ‘EDM’ can lead, for instance,
to more complexity and lack of uniformity. EDM in particular is a term that, in some contexts,
can be seen to emerge retrospectively, and one that is often associated with the US’s apparently
tardy mainstream interest in this kind of music, which in itself is problematic, as the United
States is clearly identifed by historians as the birthplace of electronic dance music.6 Whilst
both ‘electronic dance music’ and ‘EDM’ are terms often used to refer to a wide range of dance
music genres produced electronically, including house, drum & bass and techno, the term EDM
in particular is often also used to refer specifcally to a certain type of twenty-frst-century
trance-style electronic dance music popular at large festivals, such as that produced by Martin
Garrix and Sebastian Ingrosso. This chapter will avoid further use of the term ‘EDM’ entirely

226 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-16

 ‘On the Run’

and will use ‘electronic dance music’ in a broader context (rather than this narrow one, focus-
ing on music in the vein of that by Garrix and Ingrosso). Butler provides an overview of what
electronic dance music is, emphasising the importance of the instrumentation in its production:

One of the most distinctive characteristics of electronic dance music is the way in
which it is produced – namely, through the use of electronic technologies such as syn-
thesizers, drum machines, sequencers and samplers. Although increasingly common
in popular music in general in recent years, these technologies have always formed
the backbone of musical creation in EDM, in which a traditional instrument or a live
vocal is the exception rather than the rule.7

It is notable here that even in Butler’s description is an example of the issues previously dis-
cussed concerning clarity of defnition, as he appears to use the terms ‘electronic dance music’
and ‘EDM’ interchangeably whilst discussing a broad range of music, even though, as we have
seen, ‘EDM’ is often also used to describe a much more limited range of music than ‘electronic
dance music.’ In light of Butler’s words, when considering records that made a large contribu-
tion to the birth of electronic dance music, it is reasonable to consider that the instrumentation
and technology involved in the record are important in this regard. It is also key to consider
compositional attributes of the genre, to ask what musical properties are always or mostly com-
mon to electronic dance music tracks. Butler discusses the importance of a 4/4 time signature in
electronic dance music.8 While it is the case that most electronic dance music could be consid-
ered to be in 4/4, the nature of the rhythms at a sub-crotchet level are perhaps of more interest.
Most electronic dance music follows the mathematical sequence often known as the ‘doubling
sequence’ or ‘sequence of powers of 2’ (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 . . . and so on) in terms of note group-
ings at a sub-crotchet level, so there will be two quavers per crotchet and two semiquavers per
quaver. However, it is notable that some examples use a resolution of triplets at a quaver level
(which can be either notated as 4/4 with triplet quavers or as 12/8), often manifesting itself as
a swing or shufe (with the absence of the second quaver of the three). There was a trend for
this in some commercial European dance music in the late 2000s, one of the most commercially
successful examples being Basshunter’s ‘Boten Anna,’9/‘Now You’re Gone,’10 (‘Boten Anna’ and
‘Now You’re Gone’ are both diferent versions of essentially the same track, frst released in
2006, but both versions were international hits independently of one another). Electronic dance
music in 4/4 but using triplet resolution at a quaver level, or in 12/8, still occurs, for instance,
NOTD and Bea Miller’s ‘I Wanna Know,’11 released in 2018. Even though it is still relatively
rare, it is increasingly common to have specifc sections of electronic dance music tracks that
use this meter. Some electronic dance music also uses triplets at a semiquaver level, or various
degrees of swing or shufe at a semiquaver level. This is historically much more common than
triplets at a quaver level, or 12/8. Butler (2006) also discusses the importance of ‘loops’ in elec-
tronic dance music, fragments of music frequently repeated.12 These are considered extremely
important to the genre by Butler;13 he considers them the ‘fundamental unit of musical structure
in EDM’ (note the previous discussion concerning his use of the term ‘EDM’) and asserts that
‘most tracks are composed primarily (if not entirely) of loops.’14
Another important criterion when attempting to judge which track made the biggest con-
tribution to the birth of electronic dance music is how widely the track was heard, both by
music creators and by the public in general. Matters of record sales and exposure are there-
fore also fundamental when determining contribution to the birth of electronic dance music.
Widely heard and high-selling recordings help shape the tastes and expectations of the public,
to pave the way for further development and innovation, in a way that more obscure, esoteric

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recordings may not. The album format may have had an important part to play in this develop-
ment in the age before downloading and streaming; more commercial, conventional tracks –
likely to have been singles – may have been the driver for the purchase, which then facilitated
exposure to more experimental and progressive album tracks. There are some music tracks
that exhibit many properties of electronic dance music, which were created well before most
would consider the genre began, but these were not widely heard at the time, so the impact
of these tracks could be considered minimal. An extreme example of this is the untitled Delia
Derbyshire creation (which for the sake of identifcation will be called ‘For Interest Only’ in this
chapter, after her modest instruction on the recording before the work starts to ‘forget about
this, it’s for interest only.’)15 It is believed that the track was created in the mid-to-late 1960s, but
it was only ‘discovered’ on some previously lost tapes in 2008. Despite the fact that the track
does sound like an electronic dance music work in many respects, it can be argued that its con-
tribution to the birth of electronic dance music is minimal, as it was not widely heard during
the development of the genre.
It is undoubtedly the case that obscure records can, sometimes, infuence the mainstream.
A notable example is Phuture’s 1987 track ‘Acid Tracks,’16 which is generally considered the
frst record in the acid house genre.17 The record did not achieve mainstream commercial suc-
cess (and is not conducive to it, due to its extreme repetitive insistence that does not typically
cater well to a mainstream music palette). However, it inspired a music scene, and it inspired
other music producers, which eventually, through cause and efect, led to acid house being a
mainstream phenomenon, initiating a media-fuelled moral panic18 and forming the subject
of mainstream pop records, such as D Mob’s 1988 UK Number Three hit single ‘We Call It
Acieed.’19 However, it is argued that for a track to have made a large contribution to the birth of
a genre, a reasonable amount of exposure for that track itself must be considered an important
factor. Exposure to the music shapes public tastes and expectations, changing the mainstream
and moving commercial music forward.
While establishing the recording that made the biggest contribution to the birth of electronic
dance music is a complex and nuanced matter, some of its main characteristics can be summa-
rised in the following taxonomy:

1 The record needs to have had considerable public exposure at the time that it is argued its
contribution was made.
2 The record needs to consist predominantly of instrumentation typical to electronic dance
music – synthesisers, sequencers, samples – as opposed to the conventional popular music
instrumentation of the time (for instance ‘real’ drums, bass, guitar and so on).
3 The record needs to be musicologically aligned with electronic dance music in terms of
structure, meter and other musical properties. An emphasis on ‘loops’ is an important
feature.

Electronic dance music characteristics in Pink Floyd music prior to

‘On the Run’
While ‘On the Run’ is very diferent from Pink Floyd tracks that came before it, it can be
argued that it is no accident that Pink Floyd created a track which is a leading candidate for
the recording that made the biggest contribution to the birth of electronic dance music. Many
Pink Floyd tracks created before ‘On the Run’ exhibited traits that would later become staples
of electronic dance music in various areas. Much of this work was pioneering at the time in
popular music, particularly in popular music that was as high-selling and as widely played as

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Pink Floyd’s output between 1967 and 1972. A large part of this is Pink Floyd’s ongoing and
consistent commitment to pioneering technology and use of that technology, with Bannister
observing that ‘the band’s use of technology predicts dance culture.’20
While there is signifcant innovation in the frst Pink Floyd album, 1967’s The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn,21 it is on their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets,22 that the traits that would
go on to be signifcant in electronic dance music emerge. This is likely to be due to a shift in
the creative direction as a result of the reduction of Syd Barrett’s infuence within the band.
Guesdon and Margotin (2017) suggest that ‘the theme of science fction is (at the point of Syd
Barrett’s disengagement) the order of the day.’23 This theme has close links with electronic dance
music. For example, Ferrigno argues that science fction was a ‘crucial ideological infuence’
for drum & bass, a genre arguably under the electronic dance music umbrella.24 Additionally,
albums by major electronic dance music artists, such as Ferry Corsten’s Blueprint25 and The
Orb’s UK Number One album UF Orb,26 have very strong science fction themes and narratives
throughout. As previously discussed, repetition combined with development is key in electronic
dance music and the alien-inspired track ‘Let There Be More Light’ from A Saucerful of Secrets
uses this formula,27 featuring a repeated ostinato played on the Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar,
with musical development led by the Hammond M-102 organ. ‘Set the Controls for the Heart
of the Sun’ from the same album uses a similarly repetitive motif throughout and also has a sci-
ence fction focus. The latter track in fact incorporates many diferent infuences and sounds
which can be connected with electronic dance music. In the years following ‘On the Run,’ Pink
Floyd continued to explore science fction sonic imagery, particularly that relating to ‘machines,’
in conjunction with a focus on synthesisers, efects processors and ‘artifcial’ sounds. Examples
include 1975’s ‘Welcome to the Machine’ from the album Wish You Were Here28 and 1987’s ‘A
New Machine’ (parts 1 and 2) from A Momentary Lapse of Reason.29
Another aspect of electronic dance music is its relationship with non-Western music, par-
ticularly Eastern music and tribal rhythms. Guesdon and Margotin suggest that ‘Set the Controls
for the Heart of the Sun’ is ‘inspired by the wisdom of the East.’30 The strong use of Phrygian
mode in the track also clearly associates it with Eastern music. Tribal rhythms are incorporated
into many sub-genres of electronic dance music. Tribal house is a prominent sub-genre of house
music, and 2 Unlimited almost parodied the infuence of tribal rhythms in dance music in their
1993 worldwide major hit, the dance-pop single ‘Tribal Dance.’31 Tribal rhythms are also a
feature of Pink Floyd music prior to 1972. This is particularly evident on the aforementioned
‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ in addition to the track ‘Party Sequence’ from the
1969 album More,32 the soundtrack to the Barbet Schroeder flm of the same name.33 This track,
particularly in its context in the movie, has another notable link with electronic dance music. In
the flm, the track – which consists mostly of a tribal rhythmic foundation – plays, in a diegetic
context, during a scene where ‘hippies’ have a party on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. This
period was arguably the start of the island’s strong association with electronic dance music and
its associated drug-related culture, which came to prominence in the 1980s and resulted in sig-
nifcant commercial and cultural impact in the late 1990s.
As previously established, looping – the repetition of short portions of audio, notably focus-
ing on drums – is strongly associated with electronic dance music. There is a notable diference
in aesthetic character when comparing a drum loop which, for example, has a repeating pattern
but is continually played in real time by a drummer and a drum loop which consists of actually
looping the audio. The former will not sound exactly the same each time, as the fact that it is
played by a human will inevitably result in diferences of timing, tone and amplitude; the latter
will sound identical on each occasion it is looped. In ‘Syncopated Pandemonium,’ a ‘movement’
of the track ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ (1968), a drum loop is featured which is not a continually

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played pattern, rather it is a tape loop of a short portion of audio,34 thus falling into the latter
category. (Having said this, there are variations in the audio present, as a result of mixing and
processing, but these have a diferent aesthetic character from a pattern repeated by a drummer
in real time.)
Pink Floyd were instrumental in bringing the idea of soundscapes to mainstream popular
music, and soundscapes are also a key feature of many aspects of electronic dance music. A key
processor concerning soundscapes was the Binson EchoRec 2, an echo-oriented unit that was
extensively used by Pink Floyd across many recordings, including ‘One of These Days,’35 from
the 1971 album Meddle.36 The sounds produced when Pink Floyd combined this unit – with
the Farsifa Compact Duo and Hammond M-102 organs, in particular – are a key precursor to
similar soundscapes used in electronic dance music. The sound created is described by Goodall
at the 2017 Pink Floyd ‘Their Mortal Remains’ exhibition at London’s Victoria  & Albert
Museum as a ‘wash’ of sound. The ‘Saucerful of Secrets’ ‘movement’ ‘Something Else’ and
More (1969) track ‘Quicksilver’ are further examples of soundscape-driven Pink Floyd work.37
Electronic dance music’s association with drugs has strong links with the latter track, which pro-
vides the soundtrack to drug-related scenes in the flm. It is notable that the interest in Binson
EchoRec products was germinated in the band by Syd Barrett; he used the Binson EchoRec
Baby, described on a text panel at the aforementioned exhibition as ‘cutting edge’ at the time.
In the early 1970s, Pink Floyd began to feature more electronic sounds, evidently a key fea-
ture of what would become electronic dance music. Further, they led the way in introducing
these sounds, availing themselves of the several ‘frsts’ in music technology. 1972’s ‘Obscured by
Clouds’ – a track on the 1972 album of the same name – features a particularly strong electronic
start.38 Nick Mason plays what is considered the frst electronic drum kit ever created,39 built
by Graeme Edge and Brian Groves. The initial ‘four on the foor’ kick drum heard near the
beginning is very evocative of early house music (such as at the start of the original version of
Steve Silk Hurley’s 1987 UK Number One single ‘Jack Your Body’),40 both sonically and rhyth-
mically. A text panel at the aforementioned exhibition explains that electronic drum sounds
created on the Auto-Rhythm De Luxe drum machine can also be heard on 1972’s ‘Child-
hood’s End,’ also from Obscured by Clouds.41 The main synth pedal note is also very evocative of
electronic dance music, created using the ground-breaking EMS VSC3, a similar unit to the
EMS Synthi AKS used on ‘On the Run,’ which will be discussed later. Guesdon and Margotin
describe the way two of these sounds ‘succeed each other in waves, progressively thickening
the overall sound texture.’42 Such a technique is similar in nature to the ubiquitous layering and
detuning of sawtooth wave-based sounds in electronic dance music. A text panel at the V&A
exhibition detailed how bands integrating synthesisers into their sound in this way are very rare
at this point in history.
Another key feature of certain Pink Floyd recordings is audio clips of speech and other
‘found sounds.’ Both feature in ‘On the Run,’ but these techniques were also used elsewhere
by the band prior to this. An example of this is in 1970’s ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat,’ from Zabriskie
Point,43 a track strongly evocative of electronic dance music through its simple, repetitive main
rhythm, in combination with sound efects processed through the Binson EchoRec 2, in addi-
tion to other processors. Speech and sound efects are prevalent in much ambient dance music.
Hugely successful acts such as The Orb – who incorporate both sound efects and audio sam-
ples of speech heavily within their music – have acknowledged Pink Floyd’s infuence and
have sometimes afectionately parodied them, for example, on the cover art for their Live 93
album,44 which depicts a stufed toy designed to look similar to a sheep, fying over a power
station, which is similar to the pig and power station on the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album

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Animals,45 or in track titles such as 1991’s ‘Back Side of the Moon,’46 from The Orb’s Adventures
Beyond the Ultraworld.47
Other techniques ubiquitous in electronic dance music – for example, reverse efects, par-
ticularly cymbals, leading up to key moments – appear in early Pink Floyd work. The 1971
track ‘One of These Days’ features a combination of Hammond organ and cymbal, reversed, to
lead into chords also evocative of electronic dance music, created by playing a piano through a
Leslie speaker.48 This technique is found in early house tracks such as Steve Silk Hurley’s ‘Jack
Your Body’ and has arguably now become an electronic dance music cliché. One notable aspect
of ‘One of These Days’ is its use of Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire’s ‘Doctor Who’ as a key
infuence,49 a track that will be further discussed as a rival candidate for the work that made the
biggest contribution to the birth of electronic dance music. This infuence would also go on to
be strongly felt on 1977’s ‘Sheep’ from the 1977 album Animals.50
Bannister also observes another interesting parallel between Pink Floyd and dance music,
noting how the band’s apparent relative anonymity, ‘hiding behind their machines,’51 is a pre-
cursor to the relative anonymity of dance music producers in later decades. It can therefore be
argued that Pink Floyd’s passion for the early adoption of new music technology in the context
of experimentation, combined with an interest in science fction themes and concepts, along
with the development of a relatively anonymous performance style and profle, leads to an
inevitability that Pink Floyd would have a strong association with the development of electronic
dance music.

Other contenders
In addition to ‘On the Run,’ other key contenders for the recording that made the biggest
contribution to the birth of electronic dance music should be considered. Before shortlisting
these tracks, some other commonly cited music in this respect will be discussed with respect to
the previous criteria.
Parallels are often drawn between the work of the Minimalist composers of the 1960s, such
as Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and electronic dance music, mostly as a result of
the loop-based nature of their styles. Sherburne, however, suggests that electronic dance music
may not have been infuenced by these works.52 Furthermore, many of these works use con-
ventional instrumentation, and they had limited commercial success. Some further examples
include ‘For Interest Only’ by Delia Derbyshire,53 which exhibits many of the traits of electronic
dance music and does not include conventional instrumentation but had little to no notable
exposure at the time of its creation. ‘Oscillations,’ a 1968 track by Silver Apples,54 is often con-
sidered a signifcant infuence on electronic dance music; however, it uses mostly conventional
instrumentation and was not well known at the time of release.
Raymond Scott’s early 1960s albums in the Soothing Sounds for Baby series focus on a syn-
thetic, sequenced sound, and some tracks appear to pre-date electronic dance music genres by
around 30 years. The 1964 track ‘Toy Typewriter,’ from Soothing Sounds for Baby Volume 2 is
particularly notable for its rhythmic similarity to drum & bass and jungle styles.55 In many ways,
the music of these albums meets many of the criteria for electronic dance music – conventional
instrumentation rejected in favour of synthesised and sequenced sounds with a focus on loops.
However, the music was, at the time, unfavourably received, as it was considered not ft for the
purpose of relaxing babies, and it was commercially unsuccessful. There are, of course, numer-
ous other contenders that could be considered, all of which have been rejected for various
reasons, and a full discussion of these is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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What follows is list of the seven tracks that this chapter argues, along with ‘On the Run,’
have the strongest cases for being considered the recording that made the biggest contribu-
tion to the birth of electronic dance music. They are discussed here chronologically in terms
of release date. It could be considered that the earlier releases have an advantage, for obvious
reasons:

‘Doctor Who’ – Delia Derbyshire/Ron Grainer (November 1963)56

Most commonly known as ‘The Doctor Who Theme,’ this is notable for being one of the frst
pieces of electronic music to be heard regularly by the public at large, albeit mostly focused on
a British audience. Many millions of people were exposed to this track on a weekly basis from
November 1963 onwards as the signature tune for the BBC television drama Doctor Who. In
February 1964, around 10 million people in the United Kingdom alone were watching the pro-
gramme each week, each being exposed to the music twice for each complete viewing. In addi-
tion to meeting the requirement of being signifcantly exposed to large amounts of people, this
track also entirely lacks conventional instrumentation, and has a ‘synthesised’ and ‘sequenced’
sound which was created before synthesisers and sequencers were in common use by using
musique concrète techniques of tape splicing and manipulation, in conjunction with ‘samples’ of
plucked instruments and the basic oscillator waveforms which would later become so integral
to the analogue synthesisers of the 1970s. This track is a strong contender for the recording that
made the biggest contribution to the birth of electronic dance music, but what lets it down
in this respect is the 12/8 (or 4/4 with triplet quavers) rhythm. As previously observed, this
rhythm is used in some electronic dance music (for example, Basshunter’s ‘Boten Anna’/‘Now
You’re Gone’),57 but it is defnitely the exception rather than the rule. The KLF, under the name
The Timelords, famously encountered this as an issue when attempting to create a dance track
based on this piece of music.58 The fnal resulting release ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ – a UK Number
One hit single in 1988 – did not sound like a dance track at all, in no small part a result of this
incompatibility of meter.59

‘Revolution 9’ – Te Beatles (November 1968)60

This is arguably the weakest contender of the seven listed. However, it is noteworthy as an
example of a very experimental track that was widely listened to by the public as a result
of being on an album containing much more commercial music. ‘Revolution 9’ therefore
meets the criterion of having high public exposure, due to featuring on the album The Beatles
(more commonly known as ‘The White Album’), which was an extremely big seller, reaching
Number One in many countries across the world and selling in particularly large quantities
in the United States. It also meets the criteria of lacking, largely, conventional instrumenta-
tion. Although conventional instruments are used in ‘Revolution 9,’ the way they are used is
unconventional, often reversed, efected and/or parts of loops. There are a great deal of ‘found
sounds’ used in the track, which are looped in a similar way to the way that the samples are
looped in certain electronic dance music tracks. However, there are a number of factors that
lead to this track being a weaker contender than others. First, despite there being rhythmic ele-
ments throughout, it lacks a strong and consistent rhythmic centre. Second, it lacks signifcant
focus on electronic sounds such as synthesisers. Also, although exposed to a great deal of by
people playing the album, it is so esoteric that it generally received a poor reception by both
critics and the public.61

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‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ – Te Who (June 1971)62

This track was a major hit single and was also on the big-selling album Who’s Next. It contains
two signifcant sections featuring a sound evocative of a synthesiser with changing parameters.
The sound itself is actually an organ, pushed through the processors of a synthesiser, but its
sound is very reminiscent of both the low-pass fltering with variable flter cut-of and side-
chain gating used on synthesised sounds in electronic dance music. One of the main factors that
weakens the case for this track is the fact that this ‘synthesised’ section is only a small part of the
track, the rest of which uses conventional rock instrumentation. As a track in its entirety, it is
therefore not evocative of electronic dance music; only small sections are. Additionally, these
small sections are musically inconsistent and not particularly loop-like in nature, which makes
them less evocative of electronic dance music than if they had been simpler and more rhythmi-
cally regular.

‘Popcorn’ – Hot Butter (July 1972)63

This huge international hit certainly meets the criterion concerning public exposure. It is not
signifcantly diferent from the original version by Gershon Kingsley in 1969;64 however Kings-
ley’s version was far less commercially successful at that earlier time. Hot Butter’s version features
many sounds evocative of modern electronic dance music, including use of resonant flters with
varying cut-of frequencies. The frst 37 seconds is dominated by synthesisers; however, after
this a real drum kit is played for much of the remainder of the track. Further, one quality of
electronic dance music this track does not have is rigidly quantised sequencing. The synthesisers
appear to be being performed rather than sequenced. Indeed, the track has signifcant timing
issues throughout.

‘Phaedra’ – Tangerine Dream (February 1974)65

This track is a major contender for the recording that made the biggest contribution to the birth
of electronic dance music. Conventional instrumentation is eschewed in favour of sequenced
synthesiser loops, which form a signifcant part of this work. The album that includes this
track – Phaedra – was Tangerine Dream’s frst to focus on this sound, and it is widely considered
one of the most important and infuential electronic music albums of all time. ‘Phaedra’ is the
most rhythmic track on the album and the one with the sounds most evocative of electronic
dance music, with the rising and falling low pass flter cut-of that is heard so often in electronic
dance music, along with a very strong focus on looping. Despite this, it does not feature strong,
steady percussion, a major feature of electronic dance music. The track’s parent album was a
strong commercial seller, especially in the United Kingdom, although its sales fgures leave it
some distance from a really major hit, and as a result, this is a track only exposed to a minority
of people, mostly those who actually sought it out. It could also be argued that in terms of the
central position of this chapter, the seeds of electronic dance music had already been sown by
the time of its release.

‘Autobahn’ – Krafwerk (November 1974)66

Kraftwerk are widely considered one of the most, if not the most, important infuences on early
electronic dance music. It is clear that much of their music from the 1974 album Autobahn

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onwards has many features typical of electronic dance music. The music consists of looping
synthesised and sequenced sounds, structures and meter characteristic of electronic dance music
and a lack of conventional rock instrumentation. The track ‘Autobahn’ from this album was a
considerable, although not enormous, commercial success and features many looped rhythmic
sequenced synthesiser sections. However, like Tangerine Dream’s ‘Phaedra,’ it could be argued
that electronic dance music had already been born by the time of this track’s release.

‘I Feel Love’ – Donna Summer (May 1977)67

Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ is chronologically the last possible record capable of being con-
sidered the recording that made the biggest contribution to the birth of electronic dance music.
Certainly, few would consider that electronic dance music was born after this record was a
worldwide smash hit. It meets many of the criteria listed here very strongly, and, more than any
other record on the shortlist, it is undoubtedly a dance record. The main argument – and it is a
strong one – that this track is not the recording that made the biggest contribution to the birth
of electronic dance music is the strength of these earlier examples and the strong possibility that
electronic dance music had already been born prior to its release.

Te case for ‘On the Run’

The case for Pink Floyd’s ‘On the Run’ will now be considered. As we have noted, ‘On the
Run’ is the third track on Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon,68 an album con-
sidered, both commercially and critically, one of the greatest of all time.69 It is also, at the time
of writing, the third biggest-selling album of all time worldwide, which means it is difcult to
overstate its importance, infuence and impact in both artistic and popular contexts. Regarding
public exposure at the time, it is relevant to note that the album was not an exceptionally high
seller at the point of initial release; like many classic albums, it took a little time for the public
to discover that this was a truly exceptional album. The album started to show abnormally high
levels of sales ‘staying power’ during the following year, 1974, with a ten-week run in the Top
10 of the Ofcial UK Albums chart starting in July of that year. However, this is still very early
regarding any developments concerning electronic dance music. While it took many more years
for the album to become the third best-selling of all time worldwide, international sales within
the frst two years of release were still extremely high. Therefore, as part of this album, ‘On the
Run’ achieved very high levels of public exposure.
‘On the Run’ is, in one sense, a bridging track between ‘Breathe’ and ‘Time,’ which reinforces
a number of the album’s themes, not least its general overarching theme of human experience
and mental fragility. Content from other tracks on the album is repeated or referred to, such as
the heartbeat from ‘Speak to Me,’70 in order to strengthen the album’s cohesion and identity.
Roger Waters and Richard Wright have discussed its subject matter,71 revealing that it concerns
the pressures of touring and fear of death through fying. While ‘On the Run’ fts within the
narrative of the album as a whole and shares some of its characteristics with other tracks on the
album, it does exist in contrast to much of the album. Indeed, ‘On the Run’ is not given a great
deal of prominence in a lot of academic writing on The Dark Side of the Moon, and this could
be considered surprising considering its experimental and ground-breaking nature. Despite that
experimental nature, the album is dominated by conventional rock instrumentation: drums,
bass, guitars and vocals. ‘On the Run,’ however, is dominated by synthesisers, sequencers and
sound efects and includes very little in the way of conventional instrumentation, a key point in

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the argument concerning ‘On the Run’ being so infuential in the development of electronic
dance music.
In order to further investigate this argument, it is important to consider each element of
the track in detail in relation to the previously established taxonomy. This chapter will frst
focus on the main musical loop that runs throughout the track. This loop is possibly the most
important element of the track, and its presence is possibly the most important factor in making
the case. As already established, electronic dance music often includes short loops of repeated
material. To contrast with this repetition, there are often changes to both the sonic properties
of that looped material and the material surrounding it, while the key musical components
of the loop remain consistent through much of all of the track. A very high number of very
successful tracks, in many diferent sub-genres of electronic dance music, exhibit this trait, but
particularly strong examples include Josh Wink’s ‘Higher State Of Consciousness’72 and Eric
Prydz’s ‘Pjanoo.’73 The main loop from ‘On the Run’ exhibits a number of these key traits of
electronic dance music that, in this period, had never previously come together as strongly as
this on a commercially successful record. In my own musicological analysis, the track has a 4/4
time signature with no signifcant triplet or ‘shufe’ element at any resolution. It follows the
mathematical ‘doubling sequence’ previously discussed in terms of rhythmic groupings. The
loop is a two beat (half a bar)-long repeated pattern of eight semiquaver notes. The loop was
created using the Synthi AKS, a piece of equipment designed and manufactured by Electronic
Music Studios (commonly, and from here on, referred to as EMS). Various parameters of the
sound are changed over time as the track progresses.
The chapter will now further consider how the main loop is sequenced. While the notes in
the loop were played in a sense (originally by Dave Gilmour, with changes then made by Roger
Waters, as Gilmour selected the notes by playing them on the Synthi AKS’s built-in keyboard),
the pattern of notes has been signifcantly ‘sped up,’ resulting in a musical sequence that would
arguably be impossible for a human to play in real time with such accuracy of timing. The use
of the EMS Synthi AKS is key to the discussion here. Roger Waters states that ‘it was the frst
sequencer I’d ever seen.’74 While it was not the frst ever sequencer, the Synthi AKS was certainly
the frst to combine key aspects in a number of particular ways to make the sequencing of music
accessible. These will now be further interrogated. The full history of sequencing and synthesis
is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, sufce it to say that both synthesis and sequenc-
ing in various forms had been around for a long time by this point; in the case of sequencing,
possibly even by millennia using some defnitions. Electronic sequencers and synthesisers had
also been combined prior to this. However, the EMS Synthi AKS combined a sequencer and
a synthesiser in a particular way, which arguably made it the most user-friendly sequencer and
synthesiser combination up to that point. User-friendliness should not be underestimated in this
context, as many innovative records have been made as a result of the layout of technology user
interfaces, making such processes easy, convenient and conducive to experimentation by those
who may not have advanced technological or musical understanding.
The EMS Synthi AKS was, technologically, very similar to the previously released EMS
VCS3, and EMS Synthi A. These units were notable for their portability and the ease of use
of their processor patching system, both key factors in enabling creativity. However, unlike the
VCS3 and Synthi A, the Synthi AKS included both a sequencer and a music keyboard, which
was built into the lid of the portable unit container. The portable nature, ease of use of patch-
ing, use of sequencer and synthesiser together and inclusion of musical keyboard to ‘play in’
notes arguably made the EMS Synthi AKS the most convenient and easy-to-use sequencer and
synthesiser made up to that point. Had this combination of processors and interfaces not been

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available at this point and in this particularly useable way, Pink Floyd may never have created this
track. This combination of sequencer, synthesiser and keyboard arguably makes the EMS Synthi
AKS a candidate for the frst music workstation, one defnition of which is a piece of equipment
that enables the production of entire music tracks, and the concept of which became extremely
popular over the following two decades. The EMS Synthi AKS also featured technology that
would become the staple diet of electronic dance music. Although there are many elements of
electronic dance music that have changed technologically throughout the years, it is perhaps
surprising that the standard elements of many sounds in electronic dance music have remained
so consistent over the years. The AKS provides two standard oscillators, a low frequency oscilla-
tor (LFO) and a low pass flter, with a resonance control (called ‘Response’). Many synthesised
sounds in electronic dance music, even today, are created by using processors of this nature.
Several aspects of the main rif from ‘On the Run’ make it more like electronic dance music
than the other tracks previously discussed. The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ used an EMS
VCS375 (which, as previously mentioned, was very similar to the Synthi AKS) – in conjunction
with other equipment – before ‘On the Run’ to create the introductory section mentioned
previously. However, this section is less evocative of electronic dance music than ‘On the Run’
due to its musically complex nature and lack of repetition. A strength to the argument for ‘On
the Run’ is that the rif is musically so simple, and the narrative is conveyed through sonic,
rather than musical, changes. In ‘On the Run,’ the main rif continues in a musically identical
loop throughout the track, but the nature of the sound changes, making it very evocative of
electronic dance music. The low pass flter’s cut-of frequency and the amount of resonance
(‘Response’) both change over time, and the LFO is applied to the flter’s cut-of frequency to
varying extents. Regarding other sounds in the track, the varying of flter cut-of frequency and
the varying of LFO depth, regarding application to cut-of frequency and other parameters, are
also prominent features.
Another aspect of the main rif that makes it so evocative of electronic dance music is the fact
that it is so obviously sequenced and that the time distances between the notes are too accurate
to have been played in real time by a musical performer. In the case of ‘On the Run,’ the notes
were played in real time by a human and then the tempo was increased, signifcantly reducing
the duration between notes to an extent that it could not have been played by a human at that
speed. The absence of human performance in music is very important to its mood and concept.
Timing that is impossible for a human to achieve in real-time performance may evoke emotions
in listeners related to science fction concepts, such as that of artifcial intelligence exceeding
human abilities.76 These are emotions and concepts dramatically explored by acts such as Kraft-
werk (although Kraftwerk did not always use sequencers). As discussed, science fction is a key
theme in both the work of Pink Floyd and the development of electronic dance music.
Many electronic dance music tracks are, harmonically, both simple and ambiguous, often
choosing to create interest through complexity of sound design rather than harmonic com-
plexity. The harmonic simplicity and ambiguity can add to the ‘unhuman’ aesthetic referred
to previously. This applies to a great many successful electronic dance music tracks from last
30 years. A typical example is Fisher’s 2018 club hit ‘Losing It,’77 which reached Number One
in major club charts in the United States and Australia and was playlisted at BBC Radio 1. This
track only rarely deviates from use of two notes, G and Ab, which hints at the sinister mood
of Phrygian mode but fails to commit to the mode through absence of use of its other notes.
This harmonic simplicity and focus on sound design are also characteristic of ‘On the Run,’
in contrast with most other tracks on The Dark Side of the Moon. O’Donnell draws attention to
how ‘On the Run’ shifts focus on the album away from the use of musical modes on the previ-
ous track ‘Breathe’ to a simplicity of harmony that allows the listener to focus instead on the

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sound design.78 The main looped motif from ‘On the Run’ consists entirely of a pentatonic scale
based around C, although starting on a note of E and ending on an E one octave above, caus-
ing some harmonic ambiguity. The note of C is only used once in the sequence – most notes
are used twice, resulting in a lack of emphasis on C. Further harmonic ambiguity is introduced
when other synthesiser sounds hold pedal notes of G, which are low enough in pitch to play a
‘bass’ musical role. There are also instances of non-diatonic Bb notes, which further destabilise
the track harmonically. I  argue therefore that, harmonically speaking, ‘On the Run’ is both
simple and ambiguous, making it similar to many electronic dance music tracks in this respect.
It is worth noting that this version of the main rif, created by Roger Waters, is harmonically
more ambiguous than the one demonstrated by David Gilmour,79 which is, presumably, similar
to his original sequence, which was replaced by that created by Roger Waters, which Gilmour
reluctantly agrees is better.80 Perhaps the higher levels of harmonic ambiguity present in Waters’
version of the rif contributed to the opinion of both men that the latter version of the rif was
more appropriate for the fnal track.
Another key argument in favour of ‘On the Run’ being cited as the birth of electronic
dance music is the absence of ‘real’ instruments. Although real instruments are included in the
recording in places (for instance guitars), none of them are playing traditional roles. O’Donnell
observes that,81 ‘ “On the Run” departs from the keyboard and guitar modal improvisation, and
focuses instead on electronic timbres, with flter sweeps and stereo panning providing the pri-
mary source of forward motion.’82 Unlike many of the other contenders, ‘On the Run’ features
a prominent percussion part which is synthesised and sequenced. It sounds similar enough to
a conventional hi-hat part to be identifed as such but is sonically noticeably diferent and, due
to its origins in manipulated white noise, has more in common with the type of hi-hat sound
which would become ubiquitous in electronic music in the next decade, for example, with
the sound of the Roland TR-808 hi-hat. The sound was derived from the Synthi AKS, but
Guesdon and Margotin suggest that it is ‘likely’ that it is doubled with a ‘hi-hat tape loop,’ sug-
gesting this particular part was originally performed on a real hi-hat.83 This hi-hat/hi-hat-style
part continues throughout the track and is one of the key foundation parts that changes very
little throughout the track. However, it is notable that the most prominent part of the rhythm
is on each beat of the bar, playing on the odd-numbered quaver rather than playing on the
even-numbered quaver beats of each bar (the ‘of beats’), which is where hi-hat style sounds are
traditionally often prominent in electronic dance music. In this respect, its role is more akin to
the role of a kick drum in electronic dance music rather than a hi-hat.
Sound efects have played a prominent role in electronic dance music’s history, and it is
particularly notable that the type of sound efects used in ‘On the Run’ have also been very
prominent in the history of electronic dance music. For instance, Roger Waters states that ‘On
the Run’ has a strong connection with a travel theme, particularly air travel.84 Certainly, the
track features audio evocative of an airport announcement. While there is insufcient ration-
ale to suggest that the sound efects in ‘On the Run’ were a direct infuence on those similar
sound efects that have become popular within electronic dance music, it is notable that leading
electronic dance music sound designers Vengeance record many of their sound efects in travel
venues such as airports and rail stations. In the advertising content for the Vengeance Essential
Tech House Volume 1 sound collection, it states that their sound efects were recorded ‘on airports
and in train stations.’85 These sound efects are almost ubiquitous in some areas of electronic
dance music. Indeed, use of non-musical recorded sound in general was a very dominant part of
much early commercial electronic dance music, particularly during the 1980s. In the latter part
of this decade in particular, the development of technology made it relatively easy to sample any
sound and include it in a track. This particular period in time was notable in that it predated

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the less liberal legal climate in this context that made it less desirable to include samples from a
number of diferent recorded sources. During this decade, many highly commercially success-
ful electronic dance music records had sound efects at their heart. Examples include Coldcut’s
‘Doctorin’ the House’ (1987),86 S-Express’s ‘Theme from S-Express’ (1987),87 and Bomb the
Bass’s ‘Beat Dis’ (1988),88 all UK Top 10 hit singles.
Another interesting parallel between ‘On the Run’ and electronic dance music is the lyrical
content, specifcally the recording of Roger Manifold, a member of Pink Floyd’s road crew, say-
ing ‘live for today, gone tomorrow, that’s me.’89 These words make up the only signifcant lyrical
content of the track. It is notable that this philosophical approach is aligned with electronic
dance music in the way that the electronic dance music experience has close associations with
the concept of living in the moment, itself closely linked to hedonism. Riley, Grifn and Morey
draw connections between electronic dance music culture and hedonism.90 Dance music lyrics
sometimes focus on the importance of the moment and putting the future to one side. A recent
example includes ‘I might hate myself tomorrow but I’m on my way tonight’ from Avicii’s
‘Lonely Together.’91 Womack suggests that Manifold’s words ‘demonstrate the feeting nature
of our existence, as well as the philosophy of presentness that plagues our condition.’92 Again,
there is no clear rationale for drawing a direct association here, but, nevertheless, it is notable.

Conclusion
Despite many connections that Pink Floyd music pre-1973 had with what would later emerge
as electronic dance music, ‘On the Run’ is notably more evocative of the genre than any Pink
Floyd material that went before it and, arguably, any that followed. ‘On the Run’ is a sea-
change moment as regards the closeness of connection between it and the subsequent genre of
electronic dance music. There will never be a defnitive and absolute answer to the question
of which single track should be considered the recording that made the biggest contribution
to the birth of electronic dance music, but it must be argued that Pink Floyd’s ‘On the Run’
is a key contender. It satisfes a great many strong criteria – it had huge public exposure, it
consists predominantly of sounds common in electronic dance music with a notable absence of
conventional instrumentation, it has links with science fction and hedonism, it is harmonically
ambiguous and it is loop based. It also shows a marked change in style compared with music
that went before it.
Very few acts have both wanted to, and been able to, move music forward in the way that
Pink Floyd managed. This band was able to combine commercial success with experimentation
. . . and keep their audience with them. Such rare ability, vision and sensitivity are the perfect
conditions to give rise to particular tracks that genuinely open the minds of a number of other
music creators to new possibilities. ‘On the Run’ is one such track.

Notes
1 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1973). The Dark Side of the Moon [Recorded by
Pink Floyd: CD]. London, UK: Harvest.
2 van Venrooij, A. and Schmutz, V. (2018). ‘Categorical Ambiguity in Cultural Fields: The Efect of
Genre Fuzziness in Popular Music’, Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts, 66:
1–18. Retrieved from researchgate.net/publication/323635150_Categorical_ambiguity_in_cultural_
felds_The_efects_of_genre_fuzziness_in_popular_music.
3 Lipsitz, G. (2009). ‘ “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” Remembering Ike Turner (1931–2007)’,
Popular Music and Society, 32(1):117–121.

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4 Schmeiding, L. (2015). ‘Second Culture, Good Vibrations, and Writings on the Wall: Hip-Hop in the
GDR as a Case of Afro-Americanophilia’, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(2). https://
doi.org/10.5130/portal.v12i2.4397.
5 Coates, N. (2008). ‘Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sis-
ter Rozetta Tharpe by Wald, Gayle’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20(3):330–346. https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00163.x.
6 Op. cit. van Venrooij and Schmutz (2018).
7 Butler, M. J. (2006). Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter and Musical Design in Electronic Music. Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, page 33.
8 Ibid.
9 Altberg, J. E. (2008). ‘Boten Anna’, on Now You’re Gone – The Album. Retrieved from www.spotify.
com (2018).
10 Altberg, J. E. (2008). ‘Now You’re Gone’, on Now You’re Gone – The Album. Retrieved from www.
spotify.com (2018).
11 Gill, J., Danielsson, T. M., Islam, N., Brandt, S. and Hjellström, S. (2018). I Wanna Know [Recorded
by NOTD and Bea Miller]. Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
12 Op. cit. Butler (2006).
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Derbyshire, D. (ca 1963). (Unknown). Retrieved from www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwQIgGQLOQ8.
16 Smith, E., Jackson, H. and Jones, N. P. (1987). Acid Tracks. Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
17 Vitos, B. (2014). ‘Along the Lines of the Roland TB-303: Three Perversions of Acid Techno’, Dance-
cult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 6(1). DOI: 10.12801/1947-5403.2014.06.01.14.
18 Hill, A. (2003). ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: Contesting Spaces in Late 1980s Britain’, Space and
Polity, 7(3):219–232. DOI: 10.1080/1356257032000169695.
19 Poku, D. K. (1988). ‘We Call It Acieed’ [Recorded by D Mob featuring Gary Haisman]. Retrieved
from http://apple.com/itunes (2018).
20 Bannister, M. (2005). ‘Dark Side of the Men: Pink Floyd, Classic Rock and White Masculinities’, in
Reising, R. (ed.),‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, page 54.
21 Barratt, S., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1967). The Piper at the Gates of Dawn [Recorded
by Pink Floyd: CD]. New York City, NY: Sony Music Entertainment.
22 Barratt, S., Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1967). A Saucerful of Secrets [Recorded
by Pink Floyd: CD]. New York City, NY: Sony Music Entertainment.
23 Guesdon, J. and Margotin, P. (2017). Pink Floyd – All the Songs – The Story behind Every Track. New
York City, NY: Black Dog and Leventhal, page 96.
24 Ferrigno, E. D. (2011). ‘The Dark Side: Representing Science Fiction in Drum ‘n’ Bass’, New Review
of Film and Television Studies, 9(1):95–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.512722.
25 Corsten, F. (2017). Blueprint [CD]. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Flashover Recordings.
26 Paterson, A. and Weston, K. (1992). U.F.Orb. London, UK: Big Life.
27 Op. cit. A Saucerful of Secrets.
28 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1975). Wish You Were Here [Recorded by Pink
Floyd: CD]. London, UK: Harvest.
29 Carin, A., Ezrin, R., Gilmour, D., Leonard, P., Manzanera, P. and Moore, A. (1987). A Momentary
Lapse of Reason [Recorded by Pink Floyd: CD]. New York City, NY: Sony Music Entertainment.
30 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017):100.
31 Wilde, P., Slijngaard, R., Clayton, X. and Martens, P. (1993). ‘Tribal Dance’, in No Limits [Recorded
by 2 Unlimited]. Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
32 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1969). More [Recorded by Pink Floyd: CD].
New York City, NY: Sony Music Entertainment.
33 Schroeder, B. (Producer and Director). (1969). More [Motion picture]. New York City, NY: Home
Vision Entertainment.
34 Wild, A. (2017). Pink Floyd – Song by Song. Stroud, UK: Fonthill Media.
35 Mason, N. (2005). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London, UK: WandN.
36 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1971). Meddle [Recorded by Pink Floyd: CD].
London, UK: Harvest.

239
 Jim J. Mason

37 Op. cit. More.

38 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1972). Obscured by Clouds [Recorded by Pink
Floyd: CD]. London, UK: Harvest.
39 Op. cit. Mason (2004).
40 Hurley, S. (1986). Jack Your Body [vinyl single]. London, UK: London.
41 Op. cit. Obscured by Clouds.
42 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017):268.
43 Gilmour, D., Mason, N., Waters, R. and Wright, R. (1970). ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’, in Zabriskie Point
[CD]. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM.
44 Paterson, A. and Weston, K. (1993). Live 93. London, UK: Island.
45 Gilmour, D. and Waters, R. (1977). Animals [Recorded by Pink Floyd: CD]. London, UK: Harvest.
46 Op. cit. Bannister (2005).
47 Paterson, A. and Weston, K. (1991). The Orb’s Adventures beyond the Ultraworld. London, UK: Big Life.
48 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017).
49 Grainer, R. and Derbyshire, D. (1963). ‘Doctor Who’, on Doctor Who – The 50th Anniversary Collection
(Original Television Soundtrack). Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
50 Op. cit. Animals.
51 Op. cit. Bannister (2005):54.
52 Sherburne, P. (2004). ‘Minimalism in House and Techno’. Retrieved from freshgoodminimal.ro/wp-
content/uploads/2008/10/digital-discipline.doc.
53 Op. cit. Grainer and Derbyshire (1963).
54 Coxe, S., Taylor, D. and Warren, S. (1968). ‘Oscillations’, on Silver Apples [CD]. New York City, NY:
Kapp.
55 Scott, R. (1964). Soothing Sounds for Baby Volume 2 [CD]. Los Angeles, CA: Epic.
56 Op. cit. Grainer and Derbyshire (1963).
57 Op. cit. Altberg (2008). ‘Boten Anna.’
58 Cauty, J. and Drummond, B. (1988). The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way.
London, UK: Ellipsis.
59 Cauty, J. and Drummond, B. (1988). Doctorin’ the Tardis [Recorded by Timelords: vinyl single].
London, UK: KLF Communications.
60 Lennon, J. and McCartney, P. (1968). ‘Revolution 9’, on The Beatles [Recorded by The Beatles: CD].
London, UK: Apple.
61 Wilkinson, C. J. (2008). ‘John Lennon’s “Revolution 9”’, Perspectives of New Music. 46(2):190–236.
Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/25652393.
62 Townsend, P. (1971). ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, on Who’s Next [Recorded by The Who: CD].
London, UK: Track.
63 Kingsley, G. (1972). ‘Popcorn’, on 28 Big Ones [Recorded by Hot Butter]. Retrieved from www.
spotify.com (2018).
64 Kingsley, G. (1969). ‘Popcorn’, on Music to Moog By. Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
65 Froese, E., Franke, C. and Baumann, P. (1974). Phaedra [Recorded by Tangerine Dream: CD]. London,
UK: Virgin.
66 Hutter, R., Schneider, F. and Schult, E. (1974). ‘Autobahn’, on Autobahn [Recorded by Kraftwerk:
CD]. London, UK: Vertigo.
67 Summer, D., Moroder, G. and Bellotte, P. (1977). ‘I Feel Love’, on I Remember Yesterday [Recorded by
Donna Summer: CD]. New York City, NY: Casablanca.
68 Op. cit. The Dark Side of the Moon.
69 Reising, R. (2005). ‘Introduction: Life on the Dark Side of the Moon’, in Reising, R. (ed.), ‘Speak to
Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s the Dark Side of the Moon. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
70 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017).
71 De Grunwald, N. (producer), Longfellow, M. (director) and Smith, M. R. (producer). (2003). Pink
Floyd – The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon [DVD]. London, UK: Eagle Rock Entertainment.
72 Winkleman, J. (1995). Higher State of Consciousness [CD Single]. New York City, NY: Strictly Rhythm.
73 Prydz, E. (2008). Pjanoo. Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
74 Op. cit. De Grunwald et al. (2003).
75 Op. cit. Townsend (1971).
76 Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near. New York City, NY: Viking.
77 Fisher, P. (2018). Losing It [Recorded by Fisher]. Retrieved from http://apple.com/itunes (2018).

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 ‘On the Run’

78 O’Donnell, S. (2005). ‘On the Path’: Tracing Tonal Coherence in The Dark Side of the Moon’, in Op.
cit. Reising (2005).
79 Op. cit. De Grunwald et al. (2003).
80 Ibid.
81 Op. cit. O’Donnell (2005).
82 Ibid:90.
83 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017):305.
84 Op. cit. De Grunwald et al. (2003).
85 Retrieved from www.vengeance-sound.com/samples.php (2018).
86 Evans, Y., Riley, W., Cohn, M. and Hedley, A. (1988). Doctorin’ the House [Recorded by Coldcut Fea-
turing Yazz and the Plastic Population: CD Single]. London, UK: Virgin.
87 Moore, M. and Gabriel, P. (1988). Theme from S-Express [Recorded by S-Express, CD Single]. Lon-
don, UK: Rhythm King.
88 Gabriel, P. and Simenon, T. (1988). ‘Beat Dis’, on 100 Hits of the 80s 2 [Recorded by Bomb The Bass].
Retrieved from www.spotify.com (2018).
89 Op. cit. Guesdon and Margotin (2017).
90 Riley, S. C. E., Grifn, C. and Morey, Y. (2010). ‘The Case for “Everyday Politics”: Evaluat-
ing Neo-Tribal Theory as a Way to Understand Alternative Forms of Political Participation,
Using Electronic Dance Music Culture as an Example’, Sociology, 44(2):345–363. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0038038509357206.
91 Levin, B., Tamposi, A., Lee, B., Høiberg, M. A. and Wotman, A. (2017). Lonely Together [Recorded by
Avicii featuring Rita Ora]. Retrieved from http://apple.com/itunes (2018).
92 Womack, K. (2005). ‘Pink Floyd’s Levinasian Ethics: Reading The Dark Side of the Moon’s Philosophical
Architecture’, in Op. cit. Reising (2005):181.

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 12
MORE PUNK THAN PINK
Pink Floyd’s relationship with 1970s UK punk

Martin James

A personal introduction
July  1975, Pink Floyd brought their The Dark Side of the Moon tour to a close with a per-
formance at Knebworth Festival. They performed all of The Dark Side of the Moon, most of
the yet-to-be-released Wish You Were Here, ‘Echoes’ and two songs destined for what would
be Animals. The critically lauded performance included all of the audio-visual cues that had
become associated with Pink Floyd; from the mesmerising lightshow to a model plane explod-
ing into the stage set, not forgetting the huge mirror ball suspended behind the band, throwing
shards of light across the site. For many Pink Floyd fans it represented a high point in their
personal experience of the band’s career. It was exactly what the music press had told them to
expect. It met audience demands. The band played The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety –
what more could you ask for?
For a 13-year-old boy from the leafy Buckinghamshire market town of Marlow-on-Thames,
that answer came some seven months later when the Sex Pistols performed at High Wycombe’s
Buckingham College of Higher Education on Friday 20 February  1976. That performance
presented 15 minutes of visceral, adrenalised rock complete with audience attacking the singer;
a student union DJ desperately trying to get the band of stage by putting disco records on
between songs; plugs being pulled; microphones being destroyed and fghts between roadies,
audience and the band’s entourage.1 In those 15 minutes I was introduced to a generation gap
that separated me from my older brother and his friends. In only 15 minutes my life had become
less about ‘Us and Them’ and more us versus them as I fully embraced the notion of the binary
oppositional divide that had driven rock & roll since its emergence some 20 years earlier. My
binary divide was obvious: my 18-year-old brother’s generation as represented by that Pink
Floyd gig were old and dull. This new young thing was exciting.
Only it was not to be that simple. In mid-1975, around the same time as that Pink Floyd
gig, a young John Lydon (a.k.a. Rotten) was invited to join the Sex Pistols, more as a result of
his style than his singing ability. That style included harshly chopped and dyed-green hair and a
green Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ‘I hate’ written above the band’s name. Indeed, in that
act, a binary opposition – between what was to become known as punk and the ‘dinosaur rock’
acts as epitomised by Pink Floyd – was presented and codifed through the nihilism of hatred.
Pink Floyd was singled out as representative of all that Lydon et al. were supposed to despise.

242 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-17

 More punk than Pink

With The Dark Side of the Moon remaining at the top of the album charts for what seemed like
an age, Pink Floyd became the target of ‘them’ in the sights of ‘us.’ It was a simple binary that
would become presented through the battlegrounds of audience distance, musical skill and class,
as expressed via the tropes of authenticity.
This chapter explores the shifting notions of authenticity and authentication through the
presumed oppositional binary of punk and progressive rock, with specifc reference to Pink
Floyd, in contrast to John Lydon’s activities as a member of The Sex Pistols and then Public
Image Ltd (PIL). It will argue that both Pink Floyd and Lydon emerged with an oppositional
aesthetic and ideology that was represented through the duality of absence and presence that can
be seen as simultaneously punk and progressive rock gestures. These gestures underpinned the
authenticating urge associated with Pink Floyd and Lydon (Sex Pistols/PIL). Yet the authen-
tication of both Floyd and Lydon reveals interestingly inverted journeys, with Lydon moving
from the presence of punk to the absence of progressive, through his journey from Sex Pistols
to PIL, while Floyd’s journey from the absence of their psychedelic era to presence of Animals
(1977) ofers an inversion of this model that underlined the punk nature of their progressive
tendencies. Both journeys can be observed through the context of the radius of creativity,2 with
both absence and presence becoming interchangeable authenticating elements of both Floyd
and Lydon’s progressive punk/punk progressive tendencies.

When punk went to war with Pink Floyd . . . and

other simple binaries
Whether Oasis versus Blur, or dole queue versus art school; the simplistic binary has been
employed throughout the history of rock music as a marker of authenticity.3 Much of punk’s ire
was aimed at what were defned as ‘dinosaur’ bands that seemed to have limited relevance to the
lives of young people in the late 1970s. Johnny Rotten’s ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt became a
representation of all bands that sat at the ‘dinosaur’ end of the rock spectrum, while Pink Floyd
epitomised all that Rotten et al. considered authentically redundant. Their albums, artwork and
live shows were indulgent; their fans seemed passive; and their market was mainstream. Indeed
by 1976, The Dark Side of the Moon, although only peaking at Number Two in the UK charts,
had been in the sales charts continually since its release on March 31, 1973. The punk argument
was simple: Pink Floyd and the progressive rock they represented was irrelevant, old and absent;
punk was new, authentic and very present.
If the newly active punk generation were hitting out at all old bands defned as dinosaurs,
why then has the myth emerged that the binary opposition was between punk and prog?
Quite simply, of all of the dinosaurs, it was the progressive rock bands that appeared to be
most removed from punk’s motivational ideologies. Borthwick and Moy (2004) state that
progressive rock was a product of the late 1960s’ ‘Zeitgeist, wherein virtuosity, complexity
and the “album as art form” assumed greater signifcance within the newly named “rock”
feld.’4 Floyd and their ilk were presented as an irrelevance in the face of punk rock’s own late
1970s ‘zeitgeist’ of the urgency of the 7” single. The opposition between punk and progres-
sive rock was frst mediated through a Melody Maker review of the 100 Club Punk Festival, in
October 1976. Journalist Caroline Coon drew on the words of an audience member to make
the point: ‘ “They’re great!”, shouted a bespectacled youth halfway through [The Clash’s] set.
“I used to listen to Yes and Genesis”,’5 thus locating a rejection of progressive rock as a defn-
ing aspect of punk identity and inscribing this duality into youth culture history. Progressive
rock was from this point mediated as the main ‘dinosaur’ genre with little relationship to that
period’s punk Zeitgeist.

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The mediation of punk’s limited music ability came in contrast to progressive rock’s asso-
ciations with high levels of musicianship achieved through the privileged processes of the tra-
ditional music education system. Inevitably the emphasis on academic achievement pointed
to class-based links to music genres. Where progressive rock’s highly qualifed, highly skilled,
immersive album listening experience and visually indulgent performance became mediated
through the cultural capital of the middle classes, punk’s low skill, auto-didactic, 7-inch-single
focus and communal subcultural thrust was mediated as authentically working class. Both posi-
tions were intrinsically problematic.
This focus within the ideological rock press mirrored the concerns of the Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Studies, whose subcultural theories presented, in Paul Hodkinson’s
(2002) terms, ‘an overly simplistic opposition between opposition culture and dominant cul-
ture,’6 which was located in the notion that there existed ‘singular, subversive meanings of
subcultural styles which ultimately, refected class position of participants.’7 The result of this
position was that the study of popular music became preoccupied with the working-class expe-
rience as an expression of subcultural authenticity. Subcultural theorist Dick Hebdige (1979)
places class at the core of his hypothesis, viewing all subcultural activity as ‘strategy among
working-class youth to position themselves in relation to a parent culture that has become
increasingly irrelevant, and to defne a sense of self that does make sense in relation to like-
minded individual.’8 This position efectively defned popular music as a space through which
class is articulated. Given the fact that the study of popular music grew out of both an analysis
of textual works and youth subcultures, there was almost an inevitability that critics who were
informed by and informed these studies would show similar analytical focus on the authenticity
of class-based subcultural experience. Class thus became employed as a marker of authenticity,
with emphasis being placed on the working-class experience. Conversely, the critical authenti-
cation of music within the rock press also placed a huge emphasis on the values of musicianship,
poetics and aspects of creativity that implied educational aspirations of the middle classes.
Roy Shuker (2012) has noted that discussions around authenticity have played a central
role within rock music discourse.9 He argues that the authentic artist presents a number of key
attributes such as creativity, originality and sincerity – each an area of Floyd’s oeuvre that punk
claimed was redundant. Simon Frith proposes a typology of authenticities: frst the time-served
argument that presupposes the authenticity of a band that has paid their dues over a period of
time of working on their craft; the second expression of authenticity emerging through the
ascribed notion that rock music is an artform that can be seen as a subcultural expression of
diference and originality; and third that a rock community exists through which all subcul-
tural actors, regardless of whether they are audience or artist, share a common bond.10 While
it would be wrong to suggest that any of punk’s main players held anywhere near the time-
served authenticity outlined in Frith’s model, it is also debatable whether Pink Floyd and the
artists most readily associated with them in the period leading up to punk were part of a clearly
defned subcultural style or a shared common bond. Indeed, Pink Floyd’s claim to oppositional
culture came through its association with London’s countercultural and psychedelic scenes in
the decade before punk.
Allan Moore (2002) proposes a tri-partite typology of frst, second and third person authen-
ticity that explores the meaning of authentication through an emphasis on who, rather than
what, is being authenticated.11 Such an approach places subsequent attention on the ascription
of authenticity and allows for the tensions at work in this process. He proposes that frst person
authenticity, or ‘authenticity of expression,’ ‘arises when an originator succeeds in conveying the
impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to commu-
nicate in an unmediated form with an audience.’12 These can be viewed through ‘extramusical’

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actions, which directly convey a sense of emotion and is where the performer is recognised as
being authentic to themselves. Third person authenticity, he argues, is where a performer is
identifed as authentically representative of a third party or ‘other’ group; while Moore’s (2002)
concept of second person authenticity, or the ‘authenticity of experience,’ hinges on the experi-
ence of authenticity and ‘occurs when a performance succeeds in conveying the impression to
a listener that that listener’s experience of life is being validated, that the music is “telling it like
it is” for them.’13 Authenticity is not inscribed in either art or artist but is something ascribed
in the process of interpreting the performance.14 It is in the actual attribution of authenticity as
confrmation of creative merit that we can view the impact of the mediation of art, artist, genre
and the historical perspective surrounding the event.
Moore’s (2002) model for authentication allows for authenticity to be ascribed, subsequently
highlighting the role of the media in this process. As noted, the rock press prioritised the sub-
cultural authenticity of music that would move people to work against the perceived parent
culture and to attempt to efect social change. However, this subcultural authenticity was also
linked to musical and poetic ability which, as has been noted, created a dichotomy around the
mediation of both punk as low-brow, unskilled, subcultural oppositional agitator and progres-
sive rock as the high-brow, highly skilled, aspirational marker of taste. As a subculture, punk
clearly defned itself against a perceived mainstream parent culture, drawing comparisons to
working-class identifed subcultures that had preceded it. The rock press authentication of punk
was simply a continuation of long-held ideologies of what constituted authentic underground
garage rock. Many rock critics were subsequently often highly antagonistic towards progres-
sive rock due to its apparent embrace of establishment through the heavy infuence of classical
music. Indeed rock critic Lester Bangs considered progressive rock ‘the insidious befoulment
of all that was gutter pure in rock.’15 Perhaps unsurprisingly, punk was the focus of much early
subcultural analysis and became epitomised as a representation of Britain’s post-war working-
class youth subcultures that challenged dominant ideology, hegemony and social normalisation
through symbolic forms of resistance.16 Punk was thus easily written into being within the pages
of the rock press as a stylistic expression of opposition to a parent culture, while its music was
proposed as being representative of that very ‘present’ opposition.
If the progressive rock acts had become personifed by absence, then their engagement
through recordings had become defned by a dislocation from the communal act of dancing.
Punk, like its rock n’ roll predecessor, was animated via the 7-inch single. It was a format that
drove the communal nature of subcultural engagement by encouraging public sharing. Follow-
ing 1967’s concept album Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles turned their backs
on live performance to concentrate on recording. Rock music subsequently increasingly priori-
tised private listening over the public hearing experience.17 Listening is a process through which
we develop frameworks for interpreting and understanding sound. It is, as Tara Brabazon (2012)
remarks: ‘intentional, conscious and active. . . . While we may hear noise, we listen to music.’18
By implication, serious rock artists, and especially those within the progressive rock genre,
with its associations with classical music forms that demanded close listening were deemed
‘legitimate culture,’ in Bourdieu’s terms19 and worthy of being listened to. The immersive and
solitary listening experience demanded by full-length conceptual albums – with supporting
album artworks – introduced the notion of ‘serious’ rock music with a perceived greater value
and associated with a legitimised notion of taste. It was an approach that became epitomised
by progressive rock where bands like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis and Pink Floyd
delivered concept albums housed in highly creative sleeves with tracks that in some cases lasted
the full length of one side of a vinyl disc. The individual listener was under no illusion that
every aspect of the progressive rock experience was valuable and serious. The rest was deemed

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 Martin James

frivolous noise by a music press that modelled itself on the romantic authenticities of the rock
era. Singles-driven pop music was thus reduced to the level of disposability.
Bourdieu (1984) viewed ‘Taste’ as a means of naturalising class diferentiation and thus
demonstrating and justifying class distinction.20 In this understanding, taste is an afrmation
of economic power. Working-class tastes serve as a negative reference point, anchored in well-
established aesthetics associated with needs and then deprived of cultural capital to expand a
frame of reference defned by the taste of necessity. The middle-class taste culture associated
with economic freedom defnes and asserts itself against the working-class taste of necessity
and thus holds an implicit legitimacy and superiority. Music that demanded solitary, serious,
appreciative, educated ‘listening’ gained priority over ‘hearing’ music as a shared, communal
necessity. Serious rock music was thus deemed superior to pop; progressive rock – a music of
aesthetic ‘distinction’ – was superior to punk’s valueless and tasteless working-class noise; pro-
gressive rock’s absence was presented as having higher cultural value than punk rock’s presence,
despite punk’s clearer call to a subcultural authenticity. Progressive and punk operated within
this binary.
In the frst Sex Pistols interview, Johnny Rotten declared: ‘I hate shit. I hate hippies and
what they stand for. I hate long hair. I hate pub bands. I want to change it so there are rock
bands like us.’21 This can be taken as UK punk’s earliest public statement of intent. Interestingly
the term ‘punk’ was neither used adjectively nor collectively in the feature. Rotten himself
identifes Sex Pistols as ‘rock,’ or as a continuum of a form of rock music perceived as lost or
absent from the present. If Rotten’s statement of intent was a blueprint for the dissemination
of punk, it was clear that the key actors were as yet not using the term to defne themselves.
Indeed, UK punk is only fully defned in the mainstream press as both genre and subculture as
late as August 1976 via Caroline Coon’s Melody Maker piece ‘Punk Rock: Rebels Against the
System.’22 This piece was published in a month that was fanked by The Sex Pistols’ last two resi-
dency dates at the 100 Club and presented the clearest outline of UK punk as a self-identifying
heroic subculture. It was also published a matter of weeks after the frst edition of Snifn’ Glue
fanzine (1976–1977), which summed up the confusion over defnitions of ‘punk rock’ through
its subtitle ‘+ other rock’n’roll habits for punks!’ and varied content that included Blue Oyster Cult,
along with the Ramones.

Absence and presence as oppositional marker

Punk’s clearest opposition to rock music’s so-called ‘dinosaurs’ took place through the authenti-
cating element of presence. British rock music had seemingly become distanced from its roots.
By 1975/76, the years that birthed UK punk, a number of UK’s rock artists, such as David
Bowie, Genesis and two of the former members of The Beatles, had moved beyond the gaze
of the UK audience and relocated abroad. Artists such as The Who, Led Zeppelin, Queen and
Pink Floyd – who had once been the mainstays of the student unions and small club and pub
circuits – were now too popular to even regularly play the larger London venues like the Ham-
mersmith Odeon or The Rainbow and opted instead to book huge arenas such as Earl’s Court
and Wembley Empire Pool. To counteract issues of distance between audience and performer,
many bands started to deliver ever more grandiose performances, with excessive light and flm
shows. This was especially evident among the progressive acts, whose lack of movement and
self-absorbed, non-performance became hidden by excessive lighting efects and, in the case of
Peter Gabriel of Genesis, an array of costume changes.
By 1975, with the lack of a viable selection of new rock acts that could attract large audi-
ences, student unions largely opted to become discothèques. These 7-inch-record–driven

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 More punk than Pink

events would also feature small-scale live acts including old mainstays that had never been able
to translate the hard work of constant gigging to signifcant market share of record sales and
audience popularity. Student union entertainment secretaries would also book newer bands that
had been championed by the rock press, such as the mid-1970s pub rock scene that had simi-
larly been unable to convert column inches to sales and popularity. It was into the discothèque
environment of the student union bars that the proto-punk Sex Pistols frst went into battle.
The huge stadium gigs of the stars of progressive rock were too distant to ofer any tangible
sense of subcultural opposition. Rather they became emblematic of the separation and distance
of a ruling elite.
Pink Floyd acknowledged the distance between themselves and the industry that they
belonged to, the space between their past and present histories and the void between presence
and absence on the album Wish You Were Here (1975), which coincided with the emergence of
proto-punk. In his analysis of the album, Edward Macan argues that Wish You Were Here was a
conceptual piece supporting an overall theme of ‘absence.’23 Indeed, Macan suggests that Pink
Floyd’s mid-to-late 1970s music was imbued with a range of absences not only from audience,
industry and community but also from the dominant progressive rock form. In the period of
the proto-punk reaction to punk’s codifcation (1975–1977), Pink Floyd’s music – although
involving lengthy instrumental sections – was notable for its apparent simplicity, despite being
harmonically complex. Songs were dominated by David Gilmour’s extended blues-based gui-
tar solos and Richard Wright’s light jazz chord structures and ambient synth passages. Indeed,
Wright’s musique concrete experiments – such as rubbing the rims of glasses to achieve a ringing
bell sound, as heard on Wish You Were Here, or the barrage of ringing clocks on ‘Time’ from
The Dark Side of the Moon – did little to challenge the listener, instead simply supporting mood
and conceptual context. Rhythmically, too, Nick Mason’s stripped-down drums rarely strayed
from a 4/4, despite the obvious exceptions like ‘Money’ from The Dark Side of the Moon, which
is in 7/8 in all sections but the guitar solo, where it shifts to 4/4.
Punk’s emergence, on the other hand, had been informed by a visceral presence. It was
a form that was delivered via the visual violence of bricolage and the intensely claustrophobic
physical closeness of audience and artist.24 It was defned through supposed lyrical realism,
and, in contrast to the growth of ‘serious’ listening, punk’s emergence had occurred around
the ideology of an apparent anyone-can-do-it musical simplicity. Fanzine editor Tony Moon’s
renowned illustration ‘here’s a chord, here’s another, here’s a third, now form a band’ came to
embody an emphasis on a supposed egalitarian, low-skill threshold.25 Punk’s performed defni-
tion came in the shape of a celebration of unskilled players, which extended to the subcultural
rejection of the skills associated with education. Sight reading and graded exams, for instance,
were replaced by the ability to ‘feel’ the music and perform accordingly, thus stretching back to
the aesthetics of many of the 1960s British Skife and R&R scenes, whose class position limited
access to formal music education.
However, in reality many of the frst wave of punk musicians were in fact highly skilled, with
experience of playing in bands long before the codifcation of a punk subculture. This would
enable the punk genre to extend its musical reach within 18 months of The Sex Pistol’s frst gig.

Te present versus the past

There is an acceptance that creativity leads to progressive tendencies.26 As Sheila Whitely notes,
the authenticity of ‘progressive rock . . . was constituted by specifc musical features which show
a sense of development and originality from base style.’27 When Johnny Rotten left The Sex
Pistols to form Public Image Ltd, it was commonly presented in the rock press as the singer

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reaching beyond the increasingly standardised confnes of punk’s codifcation, now embracing
a more creative approach to music making. Now known as Johnny Lydon, he could be seen
to reach back to his own roots in the progressive forms of Krautrock, space rock, psychedelia
and dub.28 The results can be viewed as heralding the emergence of the retrospectively named
post-punk movement, an uprising of creativity that Simon Reynolds suggests came to complete
punk’s unfnished promise.29
This simplistic, linear perspective negates the fact that many of UK punk’s frst guard of
music creatives can been seen to have drawn heavy infuence from psych-pop, art-pop, jazz
rock, space rock and Krautrock. For example, the infuence of Frank Zappa and Captain Beef-
heart is a constant among early punks, with the frst incarnation of The Buzzcocks covering
Don Van Vliet’s ‘I Love You, You Big Dummy’ (later covered by Magazine, the Pink Floyd–
indebted band formed by Howard Devoto after departing The Buzzcocks). Furthermore, the
Keith Levene–penned ‘What’s My Name?’ from the eponymous debut album by The Clash is
built through chord and harmonic structures and tonal ambiguity that echoed Captain Beef-
heart’s work. Alternative TV covered Frank Zappa’s ‘Why Don’t You Do Me Right?’ on their
debut album The Image Has Cracked (1978), which, as Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell note,
opens with a nine minute ‘Moog-assisted progressive rock overture.’30 Doubtless inspired by
working, living and touring with progressive space-rock band Here & Now (with whom Alter-
native TV released a shared, one-side-each, live album What You See Is What You Are [1978]),
their second album, Vibing Up the Senile Man Part 1 (1979), released only ten months after their
debut, found the band applying a punk aesthetic to the avant-garde jazz of Art Ensemble of
Chicago and Sun Ra, as well as the ever present infuences of Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa
and the tonal drones of Can. Similarly, the presence of British psychedelic bands hung like a
spectre over Wire, whose own development would reveal echoes of Pink Floyd’s progression.
Having signed to and reignited Harvest Records, Wire moved from the early Brian Eno-style,
two-minute art-pop-punk blasts of Pink Flag (1977) to the Barrett-era Floyd psych-pop whimsy
of Chairs Missing (1978) and on to the long-form structured progressive tendencies of 154
(1979), all in a period of just under two years. Post-punk’s emergence can be argued to have
occurred symbiotically with punk’s codifcation.
In considering punk rock’s sampling of a range of musical forms from the past, it is useful to
consider Toynbee’s (2000) deployment of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1984 concepts of habitus, strategy
and feld through the radius of creativity model.31 Toynbee argues that popular musicians are
active creative agents operating in modes of expression that are heavily prescribed. The habitus
pre-disposes a musician to a set of approaches to playing, writing and performing that draw
from broader stylistic strategies. These strategies are deployed on a feld – a prescribed and
competitive cultural space of popular music institutions, genres and practices. Toynbee (2000)
augments Bourdieu by saying it is the space of ‘possibles’ that are key to understanding musical
creativity. Possibles arise in the relationship between the habitus, the feld of musical practice
and the likelihood of selection (of stylistic practices, musical works, instruments and techni-
cal practices and strategies) from this feld. This forms the basis of the radius of creativity – a
fgurative space demonstrating the range of the likely creative possibles of an individual agent.
Among these possibles is the appropriation of earlier voices, which is often unintentional and
entirely subconscious. The clearest example of Pink Floyd’s direct relationship with punk came
through The Damned’s entirely conscious intention to inject their second album, Music For
Pleasure (1977), with the creative drive of psychedelic rock. Coming only ten months after their
debut (and UK punk rock’s frst album) Damned, Damned, Damned (1977), production duties for
Music for Pleasure were taken up by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason. However, Mason hadn’t been The

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Damned’s frst choice; they had wanted Syd Barrett, but he was unavailable due to his mental
health–induced reclusive lifestyle. The choice of Barrett was through a shared love of his psych-
pop songs for Pink Floyd and on his own solo releases. Despite the inclusion of avant-garde
jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill, the album could not be regarded as a successful stretch towards a
psychedelic imprint. Mason states:

Unfortunately, they were having a nasty dose of musical diferences at the time. The
suggestion of a particular bass line using a glissando slide was rejected out of hand and
the idea of more than a couple of takes was seen as heresy. . . . We fnished the album
and mixed it in the time Pink Floyd would have taken to set up the microphones.32

Of Mason’s production, Sounds critic Peter Silverton (1977) suggested the drummer ‘seems
to have worked on the basis of letting the Damned have it their own way. There’s no tricks, just
a constant barrage of primal simplicity. Pity he can’t do the same for the Floyd.’33 Ironically, early
Pink Floyd in their 1966–1967 punk moment could actually have been described as constant
barrage of primal simplicity.

Pink Floyd’s punk moment 1966–1967

In many ways, however, Pink Floyd’s own emergence can be seen as both the punk and post-
punk of pre-progressive rock. They can be viewed as the enfants terribles of progressive rock due
to their lack of virtuosity and structural simplicity,34 while Macan’s (1997) analysis depicts them
as being closely aligned with art-rock’s progeny. Dickinson (2014) argues that Pink Floyd’s
‘punk moment’ came in a brief period between 1966 and 1967 when they ‘employed punk’s
tactics of negation and shock to challenge the hegemonic spectacle of mid-’60s British pop.’35
Indeed, Nick Mason had described The Damned’s debut album as a ‘punk rock insurrection,’
which was ‘a welcome return to where Pink Floyd originated.’ Between February and June of
1966, Pink Floyd performed at a series of ‘improv’ happenings advertised as the Spontaneous
Underground at venues such as London Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Wardour Street’s
Marquee Club. The experience of these events would have a profound infuence on the band as
they began to introduce extended improvised passages into their sets. It was an act that directly
challenged contemporary rock notions of technical skill and virtuosity that were based on mas-
tery of classic jazz and blues approaches. None of the band could claim to possess virtuosic skill.
Shifting between radio-friendly psychedelic pop and abrasive improvisation, the band’s live
show was a representation of the band’s creative dichotomy. On the one hand, their psyche-
delic pop numbers were attracting interest from music industry executives and audiences in full
expectation of a set of similar ditties. Following the release of their frst single, ‘Arnold Layne,’
on March 10, 1967, on the EMI label, audiences came to their gigs with a full expectation of
hearing psych pop. Conversely, the band’s desire was to push the boundaries of expectation
through often-aggressive improvisation. It was an act that extended beyond song structure into
extensive use of high volume, disorienting sound efects and discombobulating stage lighting.
The efect was a negation of hegemonic pop performance, an assault on the senses that had
little to do with the jazz- and folk-infuenced psychedelia of contemporary acts such as Soft
Machine. As Sean Albiez (2006/2012) has noted, ‘Pink Floyd’s late-60s “Reaction in G” was a
single chord drone played at heckling audiences in an early defant punk-like gesture.’36
The band’s shift from the happenings of London’s fashionable psychedelic underground
cognoscenti to the gruelling environment of the national tours they embarked on following

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their signing to EMI revealed the confict between audience expectation and the band’s creative
urge. Dickinson notes that:

as the label’s ‘Next Projected Sound of ’67,’ a vigorous attempt was made to frame
them as part of a marketable stable of pop acts, with photo ops and fan magazine
interviews, singles, an LP, and a gruelling schedule of national and international gigs
and radio station sessions, along with appearances on the fagship BBC pop show, Top
of the Pops. The Floyd played over 200 shows in 1967, visiting the North of England
and Scotland, sometimes playing two shows in one night.37

Many audiences found the band’s extended passages of aggressive, simplifed improvisation
hard to comprehend. The band’s co-manager Peter Jenner suggests that they were limited to
either playing the blues clubs or the professional pop circuit, where neither audience was par-
ticularly impressed.38 Nick Mason (2004) states: ‘They hated us! The audience would come
expecting a band who would have a repertoire that had some link to Top of the Pops. Of course,
what they got was the full psychedelia, and they generally hated it.’39
Hostile crowds reacted with either deliberate slow hand-claps, a cowed silence or throw-
ing beers and coins at the band, in a response somewhat akin to punk audiences. On April 24,
1967, at the Feather’s pub on Ealing Broadway, someone threw a coin that hit Roger Waters in
the forehead and drew blood.40 The band seemed to fnd some solace in these reactions, with
a combative Roger Waters describing Pink Floyd’s sounds as ‘cooperative anarchy’ in their frst
press interview.41 He was reported to have said: ‘At least we frightened a few people tonight’
after a particularly aggressive performance in Bedford.42 Nine years later, these same reactions
would be meted out to The Sex Pistols at their early provincial shows. As with early Floyd, The
Sex Pistols were faced with a choice of two types of venue: the blues and jazz pub venues or the
student union discotheques. Many of The Sex Pistols’ earliest gigs in London and in London’s
satellite towns were at art school union bars, or at least colleges with an art school presence.
While the general response was one of audience apathy or choreographed outrage, I have noted
already the frst time that unplanned, spontaneous ‘chaos’ manifested as audience violence was
at a gig in High Wycombe’s Buckingham College of Higher Education on Friday February 20,
1976, when The Sex Pistols were supporting Screaming Lord Sutch as part of the end of a rag
week celebratory discotheque.43
Richard Boon, who would become manager of The Buzzcocks, who formed as a result of
this gig, recalls:

Half a dozen longhairs from the back of the hall moved to the front and sat under the
stage making sardonic and sarcastic gestures to their mates at the back. Johnny leant
forward and tousled their hair. Their back-of-hall mates ran to the front, pulled John
of stage and started a ruck while the band kept playing. Nils Stephenson (band tour
manager) and bits of the Pistols crew joined in. A ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoon-esque
melee ensued as the band kept playing, until Johnny scampered out, back on stage and
remarked, ‘That was no fun’. And, of course The Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ was what they
were playing. We were like ‘what the fuck?!’44

Until this point, attempts at creating this reaction had been orchestrated by band manager
Malcolm McLaren, clothes designer Viviane Westwood and McLaren and Westwood’s Sedition-
aries shop sales assistant Jordan and met with general derision or disinterest, or, as Jon Savage
(1991) recounts, ‘50 per cent indiference, 25 per cent hostility, 20 per cent hilarity and 5 per cent

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immediate empathy.’45 These reactions had revolved around the questionable interplay between
Rotten’s petulant vandalism and Jordan’s shock antics, whether throwing chairs or wilfully
destroying equipment as witnessed at their debut show with Bazooka Joe. The Sex Pistols’
appearance at Andrew Logan’s 1976 Valentine’s Party saw Rotten rip Jordan’s top of in an abu-
sive display of rock misogyny – more Woodstock with swastikas than cash from chaos.
Far from being oppositional forces, the early performances of both Pink Floyd and The
Sex Pistols held similar concerns based on a desire to challenge through extreme performance
spectacle. The two acts similarly faced the challenge of marrying the needs of commerce with
personal aims for creative autonomy. Pink Floyd would eventually explore this theme in ‘Have
a Cigar’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’ from Wish You Were Here (1975), while The Sex Pistols
would pen their challenge to industry control on the song ‘EMI’ (1977) before Lydon’s subse-
quent use of his PIL project as an attempted subversion of the industry’s commercial activities.
Where Stacy Thompson argues that

the entire feld of punk can be understood as a set of problems that unfold from a
single contradiction between aesthetics and economics, between punk, understood as
a set of cultural productions and practices that comprise an aesthetic feld, and capital-
ism and the commodity, an economic feld and an economic form in which punks
discover that they must operate,46

he might also have been discussing the dichotomous contradictory relationship between
aesthetics and economics that challenged Pink Floyd during their 1966–1967 punk moment.
A surprising similarity between these two bands is notable in the fact that both Pink Floyd
and The Sex Pistols were criticised for a lack of virtuosity in comparison to their peers. By
drawing on Rob Wallace, one may argue that punk subverted rock music’s ‘[d]isdain for per-
ceived musical charlatanism’ by making the lack of virtuosity ‘a virtue – a marker of authentic-
ity,’47 but the same marker of authenticity was employed by Floyd in their psychedelic period,
where their musicianship was secondary to the sound, volume and light moods they sculpted.
Indeed, despite the often impenetrably aggressive improvisations creating distance between
them and their audience, the visceral performance was acutely present, holding many of the
sonic concerns of the punks who would follow. Nick Mason had himself described the band’s
early gigs as

a sort of punk thing. Very free. It’s funny when you’re improvising and you’re not
particularly technically able; it’s one thing if you’re Charlie Parker, it’s another thing if
you’re us. The ratio of good stuf to bad is not that great.48

Clearly psychedelia’s ‘cooperative anarchy’ was a huge infuence on punk; however, Pink
Floyd’s ‘punk moment’ can ultimately be presented as ‘present distance’ leading to ‘distant
absence’ as they moved away from the abrasion of their earliest performances and instead drew
on a range of musical foils as an embrace of the importance of high skilled musicianship and
complex compositional structure.49 Floyd’s early techniques of hiding behind walls of noise and
projected visuals enabled them to have a distance from the live performance and became a meta-
phor for Syd Barrett’s gradual retreat into absence. It is perhaps little surprise that when Johnny
Lydon formed his post-Sex Pistols band Public Image Ltd, his frst act in defance of punk’s
increased pop standardisation was the deployment of techniques of ‘absence.’ First PIL were
presented not as a band but as a company, subsequently addressing the dichotomous relationship
between aesthetics and commerce of both punk rock and early Floyd. Second, some of the early

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shows by PIL were performances of abrasive, freeform ‘cooperative anarchy’ played behind a
screen that separated band from audience. Absence was thus used as an authenticating aspect of
PIL’s punk aesthetic over the standardisation of ‘present’ punk. As with Floyd’s early psychedelic
shows, PIL’s retreat into ‘absence’ was an act of defance and opposition to the machinations of
the popular music ‘machine’ that demanded ‘presence.’ ‘Absence’ could thus be clearly defned
as an oppositional punk gesture. For screen, read Wall.

Zigzag our way through the boredom and pain

Despite attempts by the record label to force Pink Floyd into the ‘present’ light of pop with
the ‘Next Projected Sound of ’67’ tour, the band’s frst embrace of ‘presence’ only emerges on
1977’s Animals, which is often presented as their reaction to punk as a result of its comparatively
simple structures and socio-political commentary and the year of its release. Animals (1977)
was largely authored by Roger Waters, who used the project to voice his societal concerns,
producing what was considered by NME ‘one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and
downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun’ and by
Melody Maker’s Karl Dallas an ‘uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium that has become in
recent years, increasingly soporifc.’50 The album is a critique of the capitalist economic system,
in which Waters attempts to illuminate the masses about their exploitation and oppression.
With direct comparison to George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945), Waters presents human
beings as three diferent ‘classes’ of animal. Dogs are represented as the bourgeoisie that aspires to
be the ruling pigs, while the sheep are the proletariat, oblivious both to the threat that is posed
by the dogs and to their continued exploitation by the pigs.
Early performances of the tracks that would eventually appear on Animals (1977) were even
angrier, with 1975’s ‘Raving and Drooling’ (which would become ‘Sheep’) fnding the band
channelling their own earlier piece of psychedelia nostalgia, ‘One of These Days’ (1971), but
underlined with rushed, tense and gritty ambience. While Waters’ bass pulses, Gilmour ofers
shards of crashing guitars as Wright’s synths seem to be in perpetual detuned descent. Else-
where, ‘You’ve Got to Be Crazy’ of 1975 (which would become ‘Dogs’) features a vocal deliv-
ery at double speed to the version that would eventually be released. Waters’ anger with society
seemed palpably present. Although the age of these tracks and their already evident lyrical focus
challenge the notion of Animals (1977) being infuenced by punk (as indicated, they were per-
formed as early as 1975), it is clear as a band, Pink Floyd was grappling with many of the issues
that would be the catalysts in punk’s emergence. This is an album that is squarely located in the
present, giving way to press reviews that aligned the album directly with the punk explosion.
Such observations seemed even more justifed in July 1977, at Stade Du Parc Olympique, in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, when Waters showed the same contempt for the audience that
he had displayed in the band’s earliest days by spitting at someone who was talking too much.
Waters had now seemingly adopted one of the clearest tropes of the punk subculture, spitting.
As punk’s own progressive tendencies started to fnd form through an overt reference to
rock’s past, the key device used was an embrace of the kind of ‘absence’ that had defned early
Pink Floyd, who in return increasingly introduced motifs of ‘presence.’ As previously noted,
in May 1981, PIL appeared at New York’s Ritz, playing behind a projection screen of video
images while newer artists such as The Human League employed visuals as a key element of
their production while also playing behind Perspex screens. A year earlier in 1980, Pink Floyd
had highlighted the fracture between audience and band by performing live while a wall was
built between them and the audience. By pointing to the fact that he ‘was struck by the thought
that there was a huge wall, that you couldn’t see, between me and the audience,’51 Waters

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brought his personal awareness of the band’s ‘absence’ to the fore. The performance of The Wall
was indeed the culmination of a project that had started with Wish You Were Here, in which
Waters attempts to address notions of absent presence and present absence. It was also a project
that brought Pink Floyd into a similar creative feld as the punk generation’s expansion of their
radius of creativity.52

I hate Pink Floyd, long live Punk Floyd . . .

The punk versus prog binary would quickly be shown to be nebulous. Its main thrust was
instigated through the codifcation of punk in the mediation of the subculture through the
national music press; however, the simplifed symbolism of class allegiance quickly dissolved
as punk’s popularity grew. On the basis of the key actors of early punk alone we are able to
point to a number of participants with middle-class upbringings, such as Joe Strummer of
The Clash, who was the son of a diplomat. Albiez (2003) notes C. P. Lee’s (2002) suggestion
‘that the majority of punk musicians were middle class, adopting a working class pose for the
duration of their involvement in the movement’53 and his agreement with Home (1995) that
the self-conscious ‘adoption of a class stance’ by punks was a ‘rejection of a middle class world
incarnate.’54 Conversely, although artists associated with progressive rock were typifed as being
steeped in middle-class privilege, Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, among others, challenged this
stereotype through his own working-class background, rejected in favour of post-war middle-
class aspiration. The ‘virtuosity’ associated with middle-class educated progressive rock, in con-
trast to punk’s supposed working-class untutored approach, was also called into question by
Pink Floyd’s unskilled psychedelic era in contrast to the highly skilled playing of many of punk’s
earliest bands such as The Stranglers, The Vibrators and The Clash. Furthermore, the progres-
sive tendencies displayed in the post-punk era were trailed by Public Image Ltd, a band whose
roots were decidedly working class.
The links between punk and progressive rock also became increasingly transparent. Punk
was presented as a Year Zero zeitgeist in terms of its cultural presence, yet musically it looked
backwards to a range of styles, many linked to progressive rock and in turn revealing a hid-
den symbiosis between the apparently binary oppositional genres. Indeed The Sex Pistols’ frst
Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall gig in 1976 saw the band supported by progressive blues
rockers Solstice, while numerous Sex Pistols publications note their gig at Didsbury College,
Manchester, on October 1, 1976, with progressive folk rock band Gryphon. Although close
investigation into this gig has shown that it didn’t ultimately take place, it also reveals links
between punk and progressive rock that challenge the simple binaries presented by the rock
press.55 The Sex Pistols and Gryphon had met in Manchester and had found a common ground
through a joint love of bands such as Henry Cow and Van der Graf Generator, and as a result
both were aware of Peter Hammill’s abrasive songs on 1975’s Nadir’s Big Chance, ‘which was
played by members of Van Der Graaf Generator in an enthusiastic garage punk-like style.’56
When The Sex Pistols were negotiating a deal with EMI, the label suggested they resurrect
Harvest Records for the band. When the band refused – due to links with Pink Floyd – the
label was ofered to Wire instead. Dave Oberlé of Gryphon subsequently provided backing
vocals on Wire’s debut album Pink Flag. In response, Gryphon members Richard Harvey (as
Rick Mansworth) and Jon Davie (as John Thomas) formed The Banned, who had a punk hit in
1977 with ‘Little Girl’ – originally self-released on Can’t Eat Records and eventually Harvest.57
The shift from progressive rock to punk was also highly visible in the case of The Police, whose
individual members rejected the music they had been associated with in order to embrace punk.
Drummer Stewart Copeland had been a member of Curved Air, while Sting was in the jazz

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rock fusion act Last Exit. After self-releasing the debut single ‘Fall Out,’ the duo were invited
by Gong musician Mike Howlett to join the progressive space rock band Strontium 90, which
featured Andy Summers on guitar. The trio would then join forces (sans Howlett) to create
new wave act The Police.
Although presented as being in diametric opposition to each other through Johnny Rot-
ten’s T-shirt, Pink Floyd’s relationship with punk was more clearly outlined through these
authenticating notions of absence and presence that reveals Pink Floyd’s ‘cooperative’ anarchy
as its own punk expression. Pink Floyd’s journey took them from a period where their abrasive
improvisations were performed at unsuspected pop audiences as an act of absence. Similarly,
the frst shows by The Sex Pistols saw aggressive, untutored high-speed rock performed at
equally unsuspecting discothèque audiences. Both Pink Floyd and The Sex Pistols demanded a
response from their audiences and considered violent reactions towards them an afrmation of
performative success. In both Pink Floyd and punk rock’s formative years, musical ability was
less important than the need to achieve a stylistic vision that was in opposition to the dominant
mainstream form. Punk rock used physical, communal, pop presence as reaction to the per-
ceived geographical, economic and performance distance of the progressive rock mainstream.
Floyd’s own oppositional vision deployed tactics of distance as a punk-like defance of the radio-
friendly presence of popular music of the late 1960s.
Punk’s growth saw artists such as John Lydon’s PIL draw on Toynbee’s ‘radius of creativ-
ity’ to embrace the sonic and visual performance tactics of artists associated with progressive
rock’s left feld, as well as the psychedelic rock of early Pink Floyd. In so doing they made a
punk-like statement in opposition to the systematic structures associated with the codifcation
of punk and embraced techniques of absence. Absence was thus presented as a punk statement
in opposition to the presence of punk’s mainstream. Pink Floyd’s development would see them
using musicological, visual and thematic motifs of absence until the release of Animals (1977),
where they engaged in concepts that were located in a social present. The question of distance
between presence and absence resulted in the creation of the concept to The Wall (1979) and
saw the band exploring similar aesthetics to the progressive punk bands later defned as post-
punk. Both presence and absence thus become a marker of rock authentication. Both are tactics
that underline the punk in Floyd and the progressive in punk.

Tat T-shirt – a slight reprise

That infamous ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt would become shared among The Sex Pistols, with
various members wearing it in the band’s early days. Indeed, it would become as much a part of
the biographies of The Sex Pistols as it was Pink Floyd’s. It marks the moment of generational
transition. While rehearsing at their Denmark Street studio in a building that was shared with
Pink Floyd album sleeve designers Hipgnosis, Johnny Rotten confronted Aubrey Powell in the
shared hallway. At once struck by the threat represented by the T-shirt’s statement, Powell asked
why Rotten would wear it. Rotten’s response was typically acerbic: ‘‘You are old men, you hear
Crosby, Stills and Nash all day, you are fnished. We are the New Wave. Watch out!’ . . . He was
very aggressive. But I realized that there was a change in the air.’58
The signifcance of the T-shirt would be recognised in 2017, when the garment was included
in Pink Floyd’s Victoria & Albert Museum exhibition Their Mortal Remains. Its inclusion not
only emphasised the supposed antagonism that existed between the punks and the ‘dinosaurs’
they’d come to replace but, through its placement immediately before the Animals (1977)
exhibit, also succeeded in underlining Pink Floyd’s own punk attributes, even if the roots of
those attributes actually dated back a full decade earlier, to 1966.

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Notes
1 James, M. (2018). ‘No I  Don’t Like Where You Come from, It’s Just a Satellite of London: High
Wycombe, the Sex Pistols and Punk Transformation’, Punk & Post Punk, 7(1):341–362.
2 Toynbee, J. (2000). Making Popular Music Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. New York: Bloomsbury
Academic.
3 Wiseman-Trowse, N. (2008). Performing Class in British Popular Music. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
4 Borthwick, S. and Moy, R. (2004). Popular Music Genres. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, page
61.
5 Coon, C. (1976b). ‘Parade of Punks’, Melody Maker, 2 October 1976.
6 Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford and New York: Berg.
7 Ibid.
8 Op. cit. Wiseman-Trowse (2008):12.
9 Shuker, R. (2012). Popular Music Culture: The Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge.
10 Frith, S. (1983). Sound Efects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable.
11 Moore, A. (2002). ‘Authenticity as Authentication’, Popular Music, 21(2):209–223.
12 Ibid:210.
13 Ibid:219.
14 See Rubidge, S. (1996). ‘Does Authenticity Matter? The Case For and Against Authenticity in Per-
forming Arts’, in Campbell, P. (ed.), Analysing Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
15 Lester Bangs, quoted in Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counter-
culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 169.
16 Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Abingdon: Routledge.
17 Wald, E. (2009). How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music.
New York: Oxford University Press.
18 Brabazon, T. (2012). Popular Music: Topics, Trends and Trajectories. London: Sage, page 13.
19 Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20 Ibid.
21 Ingham, J. (1976). ‘The  Sex Pistols  Are Four Months Old’, Sounds. Retrieved from jonh-ingham.
blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/sex-pistols-frst-interview.html.
22 Coon, C. (1976a). ‘Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System’, Melody Maker, 7 August 1976. Retrieved
from rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/punk-rock-rebels-against-the-system.
23 Op. cit. Macan (1997):112–125.
24 Op. cit. Hebdige (1979).
25 Op. cit. James (2018).
26 Op. cit. Toynbee (2000).
27 Whitely, S. (1992). The Space between the Notes. London and New York: Routledge, page 36.
28 Op. cit. Toynbee (2000).
29 Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978–1984. London: Faber & Faber.
30 Hegarty, P. and Halliwell, M. (2011). Beyond and before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s. New York and
London: Continuum, page169.
31 Op. cit. Toynbee (2000).
32 Unknown (2013). ‘Punk Floyd: Lydon “Likes Pink Floyd” – and When Floyd Worked with the Damned’,
everyrecordtellsastory.com, published 16 June 2013. Retrieved 17 July 2019, from everyrecordtellsastory.
com/2013/06/16/punk-foyd-lydon-likes-pink-foyd-and-when-foyd-worked-with-the-damned/.
33 Silverton, P. (1977). ‘The Damned:  Music for Pleasure’, Sounds (1977). Retrieved 5 July  2019, from
rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-damned-imusic-for-pleasurei.
34 Martin, B. (1998). Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing
Company.
35 Dickinson, P. (2014). ‘ “Punk Floyd”? Rethinking Early Pink Floyd, 1966–67’, paper presented at
the 35th Annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, New
Mexico, February 2014, page 9.
36 Albiez, S. (2003). ‘Know History! John Lydon, Cultural Capital and the Prog/Punk Dialectic’, Popular
Music, 22(3).
37 Op. cit. Dickinson (2014).
38 Pinnock, T. (2017). ‘Pink Floyd: Their Secrets Unlocked!’, Uncut. Retrieved from uncut.co.uk/
features/pink-foyd-secrets-unlocked-99599/3.

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39 Ibid.
40 Hodges, N. and Priston, I. (1998). Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology – 1966–1971. London: Cherry
Red Books, page 47.
41 Miles (1980). Pink Floyd: A Visual Representation. London: Omnibus Press.
42 Op. cit. Hodges and Priston (1998):59.
43 Op. cit. James (2018).
44 Boon, in Ibid.
45 Savage, J. (2005 [1991]). England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber & Faber, page
143.
46 Thompson, S. (2004). Punk Productions: Unfnished Business. New York: State University of New York,
page 2.
47 Wallace, R. (2013). ‘Kick Out the Jazz!’, in Heble, A. and Wallace, R. (eds.), People Get Ready: The
Future of Fazz in Now! London: Duke University Press, pages 111–137.
48 Quoted in Ibid:123.
49 Op. cit. Dickinson (2014).
50 Mackinnon (NME) and Dallas (Melody Maker) quoted in Blake, M. (2008). Comfortably Numb: The
Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, page 247.
51 Turner, S. (2010). ‘Roger Waters: The Wall in Berlin’, Classic Rock #148, August 2010, page 78.
52 Op. cit. Toynbee (2000).
53 Albiez, S. (2006/2012). ‘Print the Truth, Not the Legend: Sex Pistols, Lesser Free Trade Hall,
Manchester, 4 June  1976’, in Inglis, I. (ed.),  Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time.
Abingdon: Ashgate Publishing. Retrieved from docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGV
mYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxzZWFuYWxiaWV6fGd4OjRmNWI5NTE5ZmI0OTU3NDk&pli=1.
54 Lee, C. P. (2002). Shake, Rattle and Rain: Popular Music Making in Manchester 1955–1995. Ottery
St. Mary, Devon: Hardinge Simpole, pages 133–134.
55 Op. cit. Albiez (2006/2012).
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Powell, quoted in Creedon, L. (2019). ‘Aubrey Powell: Hero of the Vinyl Era’, pinkfoydz.com. Posted
14 January 2019. Retrieved from www.pinkfoydz.com/aubrey-powell-hero-of-the-vinyl-era/.

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 13
PINK FLOYD
Te musical elements

David Detmer

Introduction
No other musical artists, with the exception of several Pink Floyd tribute bands, sound like Pink
Floyd. This chapter attempts to identify the specifc musical elements which, when combined,
produce the instantly recognisable Pink Floyd sound.
A noteworthy feature of that sound, especially in the period of the band’s greatest musical
achievement – 1973–1979, encompassing the albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were
Here, Animals, and The Wall – is that it perfectly complements Roger Waters’ lyrics, facilitating
a sympathetic listener’s ability both to comprehend them intellectually and to respond to them
viscerally. Explaining with some precision just how the elements of Pink Floyd’s music (such
as their unusual approach to tempo and song length, their incorporation of spoken words and
sound efects, their frequent reliance on unusual harmonic progressions, and their notorious use
of septuple meter in ‘Money’) conspire to achieve these efects is a second aim of this chapter.
The challenge is to fgure out how the band managed to make their music and their mes-
sage so accessible to a rock audience in spite of the fact that so many features of that music ran
counter to prevailing rock conventions. Such experimentation and innovation in rock music is
frequently received with incomprehension, derided as pretentious, and appreciated only by a
rather specialised audience that favours the genre of rock music known as progressive rock. That
Pink Floyd has largely avoided this fate calls for an explanation. This chapter attempts to locate
this explanation in the musical style of Pink Floyd.

Progressive rock and its critical reception

Pink Floyd is often said to be a purveyor of progressive rock and placed in that category along
with such notable contemporaries as King Crimson, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Jethro
Tull, and the early version of Genesis (especially the Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett years, but
not forgetting the frst album with Anthony Phillips). Despite the success of all of these bands,
as measured by record sales and concert attendance, maintained over a period of many years,
they have generally not fared well at the hands of rock music critics,1 who have tended to issue
sweeping denunciations of the lot of them, dismissing them on the grounds that they are ‘pre-
tentious,’ ‘self-indulgent,’ ‘elitist,’ and ‘bombastic,’ among other insults.2

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-18 257

 David Detmer

What are the characteristics of progressive rock, such that it merits such widespread disap-
proval? While no set of necessary and sufcient conditions could possibly be given, as the
concept is too loose, and the music of the diferent artists who are placed under it is too varied,
the following characteristics (by no means a complete list) are typical of music that tends to be
labelled ‘progressive rock’:

• Musical pieces are longer, often much longer, than the standard three- or four-minute rock
song, with the increased length resulting from the nature of the compositions themselves,
as opposed to being built up from extensive jams or improvised solos.
• Conventional rock/pop structures, such as repeated verse/chorus alterations, are used spar-
ingly. Instead, compositions are structured around several distinct musical themes, in the
manner of multi-movement suites.
• Albums are not collections of unconnected songs. Instead, the individual songs are unifed,
even if only loosely, by an underlying theme or concept. Thus, the central musical ‘unit’ is
the album, not any individual song or songs.
• There is greater rhythmic variety and complexity than is found in most rock music. One
often encounters syncopation, and/or odd time signatures (5/4, 7/8, 11/8, etc.), thus
frustrating listeners who expect the rock-solid 4/4 of conventional rock. Shifting meters
within a composition, and even, though less common, polyrhythms (the use of two or
more rhythms simultaneously) are also sometimes used.
• Harmonic patterns incorporate a much wider variety of chords than one fnds in stand-
ard rock songs. While not abandoning the major and minor triads and dominant seventh
chords that are familiar to rock listeners, progressive rock adds augmented, diminished, and
suspended chords, as well as jazzy chord extensions (ninths, elevenths, thirteenths, and so
forth).
• Variations in dynamics, and especially the incorporation of both very quiet and very loud
passages within one piece, are common, in contrast to the more uniform dynamics (loud,
from start to fnish) of the standard rock song. Such changes in dynamics are often achieved
by means of changes in instrumentation, as when sections featuring electric instruments are
juxtaposed with acoustic passages.
• Musical ideas and techniques derived from styles other than rock and blues (for example,
European classical music, various non-bluesy jazz styles, Indian classical music, other non-
Western ‘world music’ styles, English folk music, and so forth) are used extensively.
• Many pieces are difcult to play and require skills that exceed those of some professional
instrumentalists who play in less demanding styles of rock music.
• Lyrics tend to be abstract, to require interpretation, and to deal with a wider range of topics
than is typical of more mainstream rock styles.

Greg Lake, who was a member, at diferent times, of two of the leading progressive rock bands
(King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer), ofers a reasonable conjecture is to why such
music is disliked in some quarters:

perhaps for the average person – if there is such thing – it was too complex, too
involved, too much to have to think about, too much to have to wrestle with. It’s
much easier to have a three-minute song; you can sing the hook because you can
remember it, and it’s done with. Bing, bang.3

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Plausible as this explanation is with regard to the tastes of the ‘average’ rock music fan, it
would be surprising if it carried over to the attitudes of professional rock music critics. For in
other felds of criticism of the ‘popular’ arts, such as flm and television, one usually fnds that
professional critics difer from the public at large in that the former are more appreciative of
challenging works that aspire to high art, and less appreciative of low-brow entertainment, than
is true of the latter. And there is no general tendency among critics in these felds to dismiss
as pretentious any work that places demand on its audience, that is formally adventurous and
unconventional, and that aims for a higher level of artistic achievement than that of merely
entertaining an audience.
The explanation for this anomaly, so far as I can tell, is that rock music difers from other
popular art forms in that some people understand its very essence as being tied up with sim-
plicity, lightheartedness, easy accessibility, dancing (‘boogieing’), and good times. And it is
undoubtedly true that such a characterisation accurately attaches to the music that emerged as
‘rock and roll’ in the 1950s, a music that many professional rock critics revere to such an extent
that they regard any substantial innovation that leads away from its norms and conventions as a
kind of sacrilege or abomination – a desecration of something precious.
But the idea that rock music could continue to exist without evolving away from the limi-
tations of its earliest style is completely unrealistic. Art changes; new styles emerge. Artists are
creative, sensitive people, with a need to express themselves, to say something new, and thus
not to be boxed in by existing forms and conventions. Moreover, artists are infuenced by one
another, eager to take what they like from another innovator’s work, so as to make use of it,
while developing it further, in their own creations. Similarly, artists respond to the world around
them, and changes in the world may call for changes in artistic styles and techniques. Returning
to the specifc example of rock music, musician and musicologist Edward Macan points out that
the ‘musical syntax’ and the ‘topical material’ of early (1954–1964) rock music ‘is limited, and
not subject to infnite development. Furthermore, it is ridiculous to expect musicians who lived
through the turmoil of the late 1960s to have the same innocent, carefree attitudes toward their
music as did the pre-counterculture rockers.’4
In any case, despite the sneering of the rock critics, at one time a large segment of the
record-buying and concert-going public liked progressive rock. In the frst half of the 1970s
it was arguably the dominant style – thoroughly mainstream, not at all a ‘cult’ phenomenon.
Moreover, the most successful of the early 1970s progressive rock bands have maintained long
careers, continuing to sell out concert halls into, or, in the cases of Yes and King Crimson,
past, their ffth decade of existence. And the market for the classic progressive rock albums of
the 1970s, which continue to be re-released, invariably in ‘expanded and remastered’ editions,
remains strong, even as interest in the punk and ‘new wave’ albums that were once thought to
have killed of the genre has dried up.
Because it has been largely forgotten just how much popular success progressive rock, a sup-
posedly elitist form with limited appeal (mainly to nerds and snobs), once achieved, it might be
illuminating to consider a few record sale statistics for ‘the big six’ progressive bands. Focusing
just on the United Kingdom and the United States (in spite of the fact that all six bands did
considerable business in other countries), we fnd the following:

• Emerson, Lake and Palmer: UK: seven top-10 albums; US: seven top-20 albums, four
of them top-10; nine Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certifed gold
albums (with gold certifcation indicating sales of at least 500,000 units)

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• Genesis (counting only their ‘progressive’ albums, that is, those from the Peter Gabriel era
plus the frst two post-Gabriel albums (through 1976’s Wind and Wuthering): UK: six top-
20 albums, fve of them top-10; US: four gold albums
• Jethro Tull: UK: 16 top-20 albums, 6 of them top-10; US: 13 top-20 albums, 7 of them
top-10; 14 gold albums, 2 platinum albums (sales of one million units), and 1 3-times-
platinum album. It might be objected that Jethro Tull is an eclectic band, working in many
styles (blues, jazz, hard rock, folk, etc.) and thus that its discography does not consistently
ft in the progressive rock category. While this is a reasonable objection, it should be noted
that by far the band’s two most progressive albums, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play (each
consisting of just one 40-minute-plus track, divided in two only to accommodate the two-
sided LP format), each hit #1 in the United States (and were certifed gold), and #5 and 16,
respectively, in the United Kingdom. And Aqualung, their US three-times-platinum album,
features two lengthy multi-movement suites (‘Aqualung’ and ‘My God’), as well as at least
one side (the second) devoted to a single lyrical theme (a critique of organised religion)
• King Crimson: UK: three top-20 albums, two of them top-10; US: one gold album
• Yes: UK: 15 top-20 albums, 11 of them top-10; US: 12 top-20 albums, 7 of them top-10;
5 gold albums, 5 platinum albums, 1 2-times-platinum album, and 1 3-times-platinum
album. Perhaps their proggiest album, Tales From Topographic Oceans, which is almost uni-
versally despised by rock critics (it features just four songs of over 20 minutes each, spread
evenly across four album sides), went to #1 in the United Kingdom. The albums that are,
by my reckoning, tied for second in their discography in terms of being representative of
the progressive rock genre, Close to the Edge and Relayer, each hit #4 in the United King-
dom. All three albums also reached the top 5 in the United States
• Pink Floyd: UK: 21 top-20 albums, 18 of them top-10, 6 of them #1; US: 12 top-20 albums,
10 of them top-10, 5 of them #1; 4 gold albums, 3 platinum albums, 4 2-times-platinum
albums, 2 3-times-platinum albums, 2 4-times-platinum albums, 1 6-times-platinum album,
and 2 diamond albums (sales of ten million units). One of these is certifed 15-times-
platinum, the other 23-times platinum.5

Figure 13.1 Album chart 1973 in Record World

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As the statistics cited here suggest, of all artists widely regarded as a representative of the pro-
gressive rock genre, Pink Floyd is by far the most commercially successful. The Dark Side of the
Moon is one of the best-selling albums of all time, having sold over 45 million copies worldwide.
It remained on the Billboard album chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988 and continues occa-
sionally to reappear on that chart, so that its appearances now total 943 weeks (as of June 2019).
In the United Kingdom it is the seventh-best-selling album of all time and ranks in the top 25
in the United States. It also remains popular on the radio, as several of its tracks are staples on
stations with a ‘classic rock’ format. From April 20, 2004, to the same date in 2005, ‘Time’ was
played on US radio stations a total of 13,723 times, almost matching the 13,731 occasions in
which ‘Money,’ another several-decades-old recording, was played.
Sales of the band’s next three albums, while modest in comparison to Dark Side, are spec-
tacular by any other standard. Wish You Were Here had sold 13 million copies by 2004. Animals
reached #1 on the album charts of fve diferent nations and was certifed gold or platinum in
six countries. The Wall, an expensive double album, had sold 19 million copies by 1990. It also
yielded a single, ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’ that topped the singles chart in the United
Kingdom, United States, Norway, Portugal, West Germany, Australia, France, New Zealand,
Switzerland, and South Africa, and has been certifed platinum in both the United Kingdom
and the United States.
And while the critical reception of these albums has by no means been uniformly posi-
tive, it has certainly been better than that accorded the works of the other major progressive
rock bands. For example, while Rolling Stone magazine has taken a back seat to no publication
when it comes to eforts at discrediting the entire progressive rock genre, it has nonetheless
consistently placed Pink Floyd albums on the various ‘greatest albums of all time’ lists it has
published over the years. For example, in its ‘top 500 of all time’ list published in 2012, it
places the band’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, at #347, Wish You Were Here at
211, The Wall at 87, and The Dark Side of the Moon at 43. Only one other of ‘the big six’ pro-
gressive rock bands can be found on the list, and with only one entry: Jethro Tull’s Aqualung,
placed at #337.6
Perhaps the best source of information about the degree of critical approval that diferent
musical artists have received is Acclaimed Music, a website that statistically aggregates hundreds
of published lists that rank songs and albums. Lists submitted by readers, including those that
are published in magazines, are excluded. The website aggregates rankings by year, decade, and
all time. The website estimates that Pink Floyd is the 19th most highly acclaimed musical artist
of all time, fnishing ahead of such luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac,
Simon and Garfunkel, Chuck Berry, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder. It also places four of the
band’s albums within the top 200 most acclaimed albums of all time, putting Dark Side at 19,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn at 120, The Wall at 152, and Wish You Were Here at 189. Dark
Side rates as the most critically praised album of its year (1973) and comes in seventh for the
decade of the 1970s. The three other albums just mentioned also rank in the top ten for their
respective years of release.
None of the other major progressive rock bands fare nearly as well. In the overall all-time
artist rankings, the closest that any of ‘the big six’ come to Pink Floyd’s #19 ranking is King
Crimson, at 174. Genesis also cracks the top 200, at 195 – but it is universally acknowledged
that most of that band’s later output does not even remotely qualify as progressive rock. Yes
checks in at 245, followed by Jethro Tull at 325, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer at 742.
Similarly, while Pink Floyd, as noted, appears four times on the list of the top 200 most criti-
cally praised albums of all time, only one of the other bands has placed even one title on that
list: King Crimson, with In the Court of the Crimson King, at #139. The highest rankings for a

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single album achieved by the other bands are: 448 for Jethro Tull, 486 for Genesis, 557 for Yes,
and 1,791 for Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
As a fnal measure, the website’s all-time ranking list for albums extends only as far as the top
3,000 albums. Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Jethro Tull both place three albums on that list,
with Genesis, King Crimson, and Yes appearing four times each. Pink Floyd is represented on
the list by nine diferent albums.7

Pink Floyd, progressive rock, and successful communication

Pink Floyd’s record of success, both with rock music critics and with the general public, requires
an explanation, given (1) that Pink Floyd’s music shares so many characteristics with other
progressive rock bands; (2) that those bands are much less favoured by the public than is Pink
Floyd, and are positively loathed by the critics; and (3) that the very characteristics that critics
point to in explaining their disdain for the other bands are often ones that are just as attributable
to Pink Floyd.
The explanation I propose consists of three main points. (1) Pink Floyd’s music, despite shar-
ing in common with the music of other progressive rock bands so many features that are said to
typify the genre, also contains some unique characteristics that distinguish its music from that of
the other bands. (2) These unique features, when combined with the other features that critics
and general audiences usually fnd objectionable, often have the efect of rendering the latter
features inofensive, or even pleasurable. To be clear, this point is not merely that Pink Floyd
provides a lot of non-proggy goodies, thus making audiences willing to swallow cheerfully the
progressive stuf as the cost of getting access to those goodies, but rather that the band’s way of
mixing these non-proggy features with the proggy ones creates something new, a gestalt, that is
thoroughly enjoyable. (3) The fnal point is that in addition to whatever increase in the aesthetic
value of Pink Floyd’s music one might attribute directly to the presence of these unique features,
they also have the efect of making the other aesthetic values that are present in that music much
more accessible to the listener.
Thus, to return to the comparison with the other progressive rock bands, the point might be
made this way. Much of what is of value in the music of the other progressive bands is underap-
preciated simply because it is not really ‘heard’ or understood, in the same way that the sounds
made by a speaker of a foreign language are taken in as mere noise, not grasped as meaningful.
(Even if one recognises that the speaker is communicating in a language, not inarticulately bark-
ing or grunting, one still does not ‘hear’ the meaning that is being conveyed.) Carrying the anal-
ogy further, my point is not that there is a higher ratio of speaking to grunting in Pink Floyd’s
music than in that of the other members of the ‘big six’ progressive rock club, but rather that in
Pink Floyd’s case it is much easier to hear the speaking as speaking, as opposed to confusing the
speaking with grunting. In other words, my point is not that Pink Floyd’s music is better than
that of the other ‘big six’ progressive rock bands (I greatly admire all six) but rather that Pink
Floyd’s music is simply much more accessible than that of the others, so that its quality is more
readily appreciated.
Since this analogy is likely to ofend readers who do not like Pink Floyd or progressive rock,
I want to make it clear that my intention in using it is not to criticise anyone for his or her taste
in music. I cheerfully acknowledge (1) that no one likes everything; (2) that everyone’s taste is
selective; (3) that no one, including me, is capable of appreciating everything of value; (4) that
some of the people who dislike progressive rock are highly musically literate and understand
quite well what is going on in this music (no foreign language problem there); and (5) that
everyone, including me, is, with respect to a great many art forms and styles, like one who

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listens to a speaker of a foreign language – that is, lacking the background knowledge, and the
sympathetic familiarity with relevant conventions, that one needs in order to appreciate, and to
make an informed judgment about, the art in question.

Te Pink Floyd sound

Returning to the question of what is distinctive about Pink Floyd’s music, perhaps the frst
thing to notice is that, far more so than most rock music of the period, it is impressionistic and
atmospheric. Especially in its pre-Dark Side of the Moon period, Pink Floyd’s music succeeds not
by virtue of catchy melodies or infectious rhythms but rather through its efectiveness at creating
(and sustaining) a mood. Despite the fact that some of the band’s early melodies seem as amor-
phous and undefned as clouds, their fuid, drifting quality does not detract from their ability to
evoke feeling or create a sense of atmosphere. It is largely for this reason that Pink Floyd music
was often used in flm soundtracks, as in the case of More (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), and
The Valley (1972). These early pieces succeed by calling the listener’s attention to the ‘colours’
of sounds themselves, that is, their timbral qualities, as opposed to their melodic or harmonic
function as notes in relation to other notes.
This is music of nuance and subtle suggestion, utterly lacking in the bold, overt clarity of the
standard 1970s rock musical statement, characterised by its reliable, strongly felt 4/4 rhythm and
its easily accessible melodic hooks. But through skilful manipulation of the variety of sounds
that can be achieved by combining the diferent tone colours of diferent instruments in difer-
ent ways (a variety which they sometimes augmented by electronically altering the sounds of
instruments and by including as sound efects what would otherwise be regarded as non-musical
material), the early Pink Floyd created sound collages fully capable of engaging listeners emo-
tionally. And their music never lost this moody, evocative quality, even as the band underwent
a gradual transition from a free, wild, spacey, improvisational style to, by the time of The Dark
Side of the Moon, one based on more tightly structured and melodic compositions.
Moreover, while Roger Waters’ transition away from the often vague and impressionistic
lyrical style of early Pink Floyd songs in favour of composing more direct lyrics, intended to
convey specifc philosophical, political, and moral ideas, occurred at the same time that Pink
Floyd’s music was transitioning away from trippy formlessness to radio-friendly melodic acces-
sibility, the band did not abandon its sensitivity to timbral nuances, its employment of extra-
musical sound efects, or its technologically-driven sonic experimentations but rather used all of
these resources to evoke thoughts and feelings in the listener that would underscore, intensify,
and harmonise with Waters’ lyrical message.
Another feature of Pink Floyd music, one that it shares with others in the progressive genre,
is its tendency to unfold over a much greater length of time than is typical of rock music of
any period. This is important because much more time is usually needed for the signifcant
development of lyrical themes, and for the musical creation of a mood conducive to the optimal
reception of those themes, than is allotted to the standard radio-friendly rock song. So Pink
Floyd has consistently sought larger canvases on which to paint.
In some cases, this has simply meant long songs. The band’s very frst album contains an
instrumental, ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ which clocks in at over nine-and-a-half minutes, an almost
unheard-of duration at that time (1967). Three years later the band upped the ante, flling an
entire LP side (over 23 minutes long) with one piece, the title track from the album Atom Heart
Mother. The following year saw the release of another song of similar length, ‘Echoes,’ which
took up an entire side of the album Meddle. Taking this approach even further, ‘Shine On You
Crazy Diamond’ is broken into two multi-part suites on the album on which it appears, Wish

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You Were Here, in part because at 26 minutes it is too long to be contained on one album side.
And three of the fve songs on Animals exceed 10 minutes in length, including ‘Dogs,’ which
runs more than 17 minutes.
But even when individual songs are not long, they are clearly intended to be heard (and
generally are heard) as components in a long, continuous listening experience. The band makes
use of several techniques to achieve this efect. The simplest of these is simply the segueing of
one song into another. On The Dark Side of the Moon, for example, the only break in sound
occurs at the end of side one of the original LP. All of the songs on side one segue into each
other without a break, as do all of the songs on side two.
Another device is to disperse some musical passages throughout an album rather than con-
fning them to the song in which they frst appear. For example, ‘Breathe,’ the second song on
Dark Side of the Moon, is reprised at the conclusion of that album’s fourth track, ‘Time.’ The fact
that the listener hears no break between the frst and second iteration of ‘Breathe’ reinforces
the sense that one is engaging a single work of art rather than several discrete songs. Similarly,
‘Another Brick in the Wall,’ from The Wall, is divided into three parts and distributed to difer-
ent parts of the album.
It would be a mistake to conclude from this, however, that Pink Floyd’s music is especially
repetitious, by the standards of rock music. It is not. Rather, the point here is that while a more
conventional rock band might repeat the melody of a verse and a chorus three or four times in
one song, and then never repeat them again, Pink Floyd’s more usual procedure is to have fewer
repetitions of such melodies occur within the song in which they are frst introduced (with
ample time being instead devoted to atmospheric instrumental music, guitar solos, and sound
efects) but then to reprise them at a later stage of the album on which they appear.
In any case, a subtler technique, but one that helps to produce the sense of unity and
continuity even in listeners who do not explicitly notice its employment, is the reprising of
musical elements, such as distinctive rhythmic or harmonic patterns, that are less obvious to
the casual listener than melodies or lyrics. Thus, two songs that are about diferent subjects
and that use dissimilar tunes might nonetheless resemble each other by being built around the
same chord progression. For example, the ‘E minor to A’ sequence that serves as the harmonic
foundation of ‘Breathe’ recurs, though modulated to diferent keys, throughout Dark Side of the
Moon, most notably in ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ and ‘Any Colour You Like.’
But clearly the biggest factor lending coherence and continuity to the Pink Floyd albums of
1973–1979, resulting in their being experienced and appreciated in the long form, as albums,
rather than as collections of shorter artistic units (the individual songs), is the fact that these
are concept albums – each with a unifying lyrical theme and with music appropriate in mood
and feel to that theme. The Dark Side of the Moon is about the pressures of life that we all must
confront – fears and anxieties in connection with work, money, war, madness, aging, and
death, among other things. Wish You Were Here, as the title suggests, is about absence, including
emotional absence (even when there is physical presence). Animals is an allegory, inspired in part
by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, on human nature, with the diferent classes of humans sardon-
ically categorised either as ‘Dogs,’ ‘Pigs,’ or ‘Sheep.’ This categorisation is developed throughout
the album in connection with issues in contemporary politics. And The Wall, the longest of the
four (a double album), uses the story of a fctional rock star to explore themes of abandonment,
isolation, and alienation. At a higher level of abstraction these might also be said to be the
themes of the preceding three albums as well.
Yet another distinctive feature of Pink Floyd’s music is its extensive use of both sound efects
(such as industrial noises, heartbeats, footsteps, animal vocalisations, chiming clocks, and so
forth) and spoken word passages. These devices help to set the mood for the music and often

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suggest a way to interpret its intellectual and emotive content, thus facilitating understanding.
To be sure, they do not always serve this function. For example, the lyrics of ‘Time’ and ‘Money’
from The Dark Side of the Moon are sufciently clear that the sounds of clocks in the former and
of clanging coins and cash registers in the latter, while evocative and enjoyable to hear, do not
signifcantly aid the listener’s eforts at interpretation. But the case is very much otherwise with
regard to other songs on that album.
For example, ‘On the Run,’ an instrumental piece primarily played on a synthesiser, features
airport announcements of an upcoming fight – ‘Have your baggage and passport ready’ – and
the sound of frantic footsteps and heavy breathing. With the help of these clues (and the title),
it fully, and very efectively, communicates panic, alludes to the hassles associated with travel,
and doubtless reminds some listeners of their fear of fying. And this, in turn, refers to a more
general theme that recurs throughout the album – fear of dying, underscored in this track by
another barely discernible spoken message: ‘Live for today, gone tomorrow.’ Without these aids,
I think the intended meaning of the track would be rendered much less clear.
Similarly, while guest vocalist Claire Torry’s largely improvised scat (that is, wordless) wailing
on ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ manages to move the listener, even on repeated listening, solely on
the strength of its own intrinsic human and musical qualities, it probably achieves some of
its communicative power from the title of the piece in which it appears (which suggests that
she might be singing about death) and the presence of a few brief, quiet, unobtrusive spoken
passages which allude to dying (for example ‘I am not frightened of dying’ and ‘If you can hear
this whispering you are dying’).
Finally, because sound efects and spoken word passages are sprinkled throughout the albums
in which they occur, their repeated appearances further contribute to the listener’s sense of the
album as a unifed and coherent work rather than a collection of disparate parts. For example,
‘Speak to Me,’ The Dark Side of the Moon’s brief opening track, serves a similar function to that of
an overture to a classical opera, that of introducing the larger work (the opera or, as in this case,
the album) by presenting briefy a succession of musical ideas that will appear in more extended
form as the larger work unfolds. The track begins with the sound of a heartbeat and then goes
on to present the sounds of cash registers and jangling coins from ‘Money,’ airport sounds from
‘On the Run,’ laughter from ‘Brain Damage,’ Claire Torrey’s screams from ‘The Great Gig in the
Sky,’ and several spoken word snippets. Similarly, the album’s closing track, ‘Eclipse,’ concludes
with the sound with which the album had begun: that of a heartbeat.
Like other progressive rock bands, Pink Floyd also frequently employs unconventional song
structures. For example, throughout The Dark Side of the Moon Roger Waters dispenses entirely
with lyrical refrains. Some pieces feature repeated alterations between two diferent melodic
ideas, in the manner of a verse/chorus structure, but in every Dark Side song that is structured
this way (and in many other Pink Floyd songs as well), there is no lyrical repetition – each ‘cho-
rus’ features new lyrics every time it is repeated.
But perhaps the single most distinctive element of Pink Floyd’s music, the one that most sets
it apart from other rock bands of all periods (including those in the progressive camp), is the
unhurried pace with which the band plays the great majority of its material. Whereas most rock
bands, from the very inception of the genre, have tended to play fast, in an attempt to create a
sense of energy and aggression, Pink Floyd generally prefers to let its pieces unfold slowly. One
of the efects of this, of course, is to lengthen the performance of each song, and substantial song
length, as I have already argued, facilitates the creation of mood, which in turn facilitates the
listener’s readiness to focus both on lyrical messages and on the emotive content of the music.
Moreover, I  would suggest that a slow tempo, irrespective of song length, is intrinsically
more conducive to the creation of atmospheric, thought-inspiring music than is a fast tempo.

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Whereas an up-tempo rock song might challenge the listener’s eforts to keep up, to hear and
grasp all of the musical details as they go fying by, a slower pace allows the listener to relax
and to absorb the music, to wallow in the atmosphere it creates and to contemplate the ideas
it expresses, without feeling rushed. This patient, unhurried approach may also foster trust in
the listener, for it may be heard as implying a message along the lines of ‘we want you to hear
everything, and not miss anything; and we’re not covering anything up by rushing past it.’
Furthermore, insofar as up-tempo rock music does successfully create a mood, it tends to be
one of excitement and exhilaration, which would obviously confict with Pink Floyd’s much
more sombre lyrical themes.
Finally, the slow pacing helps the band to achieve the clear, clean, uncluttered sound for
which its recordings are noted. For in spite of their frequent inclusion of sonic ‘extras,’ such as
sound efects and spoken narration, those recordings rarely sound dense. Rather, they sound
open and spacious, an efect that further encourages the listener to engage the material freely,
thoughtfully, and at leisure.8

1973–1979
When we turn to Pink Floyd’s lyrics, especially during the 1973–1979 period, when Roger
Waters served as the band’s sole lyricist, we fnd one point of similarity with the lyrics of other
progressive rock bands but also one major diference. Consistent with the prog rock tradition,
Pink Floyd’s lyrics rarely deal with teenage romance or any other subject that is frequently fea-
tured in the lyrics of more mainstream rock artists. The diference, however, lies in the fact that
Waters’ lyrics, in stark contrast to those featured in many progressive rock classics penned by
other artists, tend to be clear, direct, and open to comprehension.
Consider, for example, the opening lines of Yes’s ‘Close to the Edge’ – ‘A seasoned witch
could call you from the depths of your disgrace/And rearrange your liver to the solid mental
grace/And achieve it all with music that came quickly from afar/Then taste the fruit of man
recorded losing all against the hour.’9
Or, to continue with the ‘witches’ theme (an uncommon one in the history of rock music),
here is a verse from King Crimson’s ‘The Court of the Crimson King’ – ‘The keeper of the city
keys/Put shutters on the dreams/I wait outside the pilgrim’s door/With insufcient schemes/
The black queen chants the funeral march/The cracked brass bells will ring/To summon back
the fre witch/To the court of the crimson king.’10
Compare those lyrics to the frst two verses of Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ – ‘Ticking away the
moments that make up a dull day/You fritter and waste the hours in an ofhand way/Kicking
around on a piece of ground in your home town/Waiting for someone or something to show
you the way.’ The next stanza talks of ‘time’ being lost or wasted until you realise, ‘you fnd ten
years have got behind you.’11
My point in making this comparison is neither to ridicule the Yes or King Crimson lyrics,
nor to assert that Waters’ lyrics are simplistic. On the frst point, many great poems are abstract,
open to multiple interpretations, and powerful by means of suggestion rather than clear state-
ment. And since song lyrics are attached to melodies and sung, in some cases their sound is
more important than their meaning. On the second point, while the literal meaning of Waters’
lyrics is easy to discern, the points he makes in them are serious, important, challenging, and
provocative.
In any case, the clarity of Waters’ 1973–1979 lyrics is something that he deliberately sought
and took pains to achieve, ‘I made a conscious efort when I was writing the lyrics for Dark
Side of the Moon to take the enormous risk of being truly banal about a lot of it, in order that

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the ideas should be expressed as simply and plainly as possible.’12 Gilmour confrms this: ‘Roger
tried defnitely, in his lyrics, to make them very simple, straightforward, and easily assimilable –
easy to understand.’13 This characteristic of Waters’ lyrics partially explains why Pink Floyd is, in
comparison to other progressive rock bands, less frequently called ‘pretentious.’14
And perhaps a similar point can be made about the band’s musicianship, which is often
said to be inferior to that of the other major prog bands. The prog genre features some of the
most highly acclaimed musicians in the history of rock music – players who dazzle audiences
with their fashy virtuosity. One thinks, in this connection, of the keyboard playing of Keith
Emerson, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Yes’s Rick Wakeman; the guitar work of Yes’s
Steve Howe and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp; the bass playing of Yes’s Chris Squire; the wild,
unorthodox fute playing of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson; and the drumming of Carl Palmer, Phil
Collins of Genesis, and Bill Bruford, who played for both Yes and King Crimson. However,
while it is true that the level of technical ‘chops’ of the Pink Floyd instrumentalists probably is
indeed below the standard set by the musicians just mentioned, it seems to me likely that some
critics underrate their competence because they underrate those aspects of good musicianship
that do not involve lightning-fast playing or other ostentatious displays of technical prowess.
In this connection I would make a comparison between Waters’ lyrics and Gilmour’s guitar
playing. Just as there is no ‘show of’ quality to Waters’ straightforward, but nonetheless inter-
esting and provocative, lyrics, the same can be said for Gilmour’s typically slow, but invariably
melodic, expressive, and tasteful guitar playing.
In interviews Gilmour is usually quite modest in his assessment of his playing ability, as well
as that of his bandmates, ‘I work within my limitations. . . . In terms of musical virtuosity, we’re
not really anywhere I  think; individual musicianship is well below par.’15 And he frequently
confesses to an inability to play fast.16
But I am far from alone in regarding him as an outstanding guitarist.17 His playing almost
always sounds both melodic and atmospheric, free and structured – a delicate balance, difcult
to achieve. He has great feel and timing. His playing is fuid, never stif or awkward. Whereas
many rock guitarists seem to view their solos as opportunities to display the athleticism of their
fngers as they fy up and down the fret board at a dizzying pace, Gilmour is willing to take his
time, to proceed slowly, and to allow the intensity of his playing to build gradually. The playing
is economical. Every note is important; nothing is wasted. What he plays almost always sounds
good and serves the song well. But it never sounds merely functional, a flling up of musical
space before another verse comes around. Rather, it genuinely engages the listener.18
While Gilmour is, in my judgment, by far the most talented Pink Floyd instrumentalist,
what the other players share in common with him is a talent for understatement, a commitment
to restrained playing that achieves its purpose without calling undue attention to itself. This, in
common with Waters’ lyrics, suggests a certain modesty that is inconsistent with pretentiousness.
Similarly, when Pink Floyd makes use of unusual time signatures (another characteristic of
progressive rock), the point in doing so is not to show of or to pursue difculty for its own sake
but rather to achieve specifc musical efects. The most famous example is, of course, ‘Money,’
one of the band’s few hit singles. An inattentive listener might take the song’s lyrics literally,
and thus hear the song as a joyous hymn in praise of the acquisitive life. The lyrics to the frst
verse certainly create that impression – ‘Money, get away/Get a good job with good pay and
you’re okay.’ Successive lines talk of grabbing cash (money) and buying luxury items including
a football team.
And this apparent defence of wealth only becomes more aggressive as the song progresses.
Redistributionists are warned to ‘keep your hands of of my stack’ and critics of the pursuit
of wealth are then ridiculed, both for their naïve moralism (‘Don’t give me that do goody

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good  bullshit’) and their hypocrisy (‘if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re giving
none away’).19
But several features of the music seem to undermine the song’s seemingly cheerful and posi-
tive lyrical content. Chief among these is the fact that most of ‘Money’ is performed in 7/8
time, which is highly unusual for rock music. The song shifts briefy to the more conventional
4/4 time for a brief instrumental interlude featuring a Gilmour guitar solo before returning to
7/8. Even the sound efects that introduce ‘Money’ – the sounds of coins being dropped on the
foor, old-fashioned cash registers clanging, and paper receipts being torn – play in this unusual
time signature. This is a result that was achieved only through a laborious process of frst cutting
and pasting from several feet of reel-to-reel tapes and then manipulating the tapes to get them
to play at the proper speed and in the right rhythm. One might expect some listeners, more
accustomed to the standard rock beat (4/4 time, with accents on every other beat) to fnd the
rhythm of ‘Money’ jarring. Its accents fall on the second, fourth, and sixth beats of each meas-
ure, meaning that the listener’s expectation that every other beat will be accented – and this
expectation would be ‘felt’ in an inarticulate way even by listeners who are not counting beats
and who have no knowledge of music theory – will be systematically frustrated. After hearing
(and/or feeling) three repetitions of the no accent/accent pattern (beats one through six of each
measure), the pattern then breaks down, as the last beat of each measure (beat seven) and its
immediate successor (beat one of the next measure) both remain unaccented.20
Moreover, the music follows the form of twelve-bar blues, which many listeners would rec-
ognise and would associate with lyrical messages having to do with heartache, hard times, and
trouble. Finally, the melody is set in a minor key. One might expect, then, that these features of
the music would be heard as clues that the superfcially cheerful and upbeat lyrics are not to be
trusted and that we are not to believe their claim that money is the key to happiness.
Two other features of the recording lend further support to the interpretation of the song’s
lyrics as satirical, a mocking of the claim that they appear, on the surface, to be asserting. One
is that the track concludes with spoken voices discussing personal violence, specifcally a person
talking about having hit someone, and having been ‘defnitely in the right’ in doing so. But an
even stronger clue, and one that can only be detected by those who have taken on board the
understanding that The Dark Side of the Moon is a unifed work of art, rather than a collection of
songs, is that ‘Money’ is surrounded (both preceded and followed) by songs about the causes of
stress and anxiety in life. Can the acquisition of money solve problems of war, of interpersonal
confict, and of the impossibility of stopping time from passing at an accelerated pace, leading
inevitably to one’s death and personal extermination? Obviously, it cannot. Indeed, considera-
tion of the content of the other songs on Dark Side supports the conclusion that the song’s real
message is that concern for money, far from providing a solution to life’s major problems, is itself
just one more of them.
Pink Floyd’s occasional use of ‘difcult,’ unusual, extended chords (another progressive rock
characteristic) is just as functional as its use of odd time signatures. For example, ‘Dogs’ from
Animals is based on repeated four-chord progression (Dm9, Bbadd4, Asus2sus4, Absus2sus#4),
in which chords 2, 3, and 4 are dissonant. But their harsh, tense, abrasive sound serves the song
well, since ‘it maintains tension through extended portions of the song,’ and ‘its claustrophobic
nature illustrates Waters’ vision of workers in the capitalist world, trapped in their lives with no
way out.’21
And many songs on The Dark Side of the Moon feature jazzy extended chords played by
Richard Wright on various keyboard instruments. But unlike the progressions in ‘Dogs,’ these
rarely sound dissonant. For example, the six ‘harmonically expansive chords’ (including a D7#9
chord that he learned from listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album)22 that he plays in the

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chorus of ‘Breathe’ sound as open and welcoming as the stately Gilmour pedal steel part that
introduces that song.

Conclusion
Pink Floyd’s music exhibits many characteristics of the critically unpopular progressive rock
genre. The band’s works are clearly presented as serious works of art – long-form, concept-based
pieces that are to be listened to, thought about, discussed, and debated, not ephemeral entertain-
ments to be briefy enjoyed, perhaps danced to, and then disposed of when the next hit record
comes around. Pink Floyd’s music features experimental elements, such as sound efects and
spoken passages, as well as unusual chord progressions, metric structures, and lyrical content –
features that mark the band’s work as substantially diferent from the more mainstream rock
music styles that usually generate greater critical and popular approval.
The fact that Pink Floyd has surpassed other progressive rock bands in terms of both com-
mercial and critical success stems from some of the features of their music that distinguish them
from their progressive peers. These features interact with the critically disapproved characteris-
tics they share in common with the other progressive bands, rendering the latter more accessible
(and thus less objectionable) to both critics and general audiences.
The band’s typically slow pacing, combined with their skill at atmospherics and sound pro-
duction, make it easier for listeners to hear, and to process, what is happening with the music.
While the lyrics take up subjects that are uncommon in rock music, they are clear, direct, and
open to comprehension. Sound efects and spoken passages do not clutter up the sound but
rather give further clues as to the interpretation of the meaning of the lyrics. Unusual har-
monic and metric structures are more easily grasped (because of the pacing and production) and
employed in such a way as to clarify, underscore, or harmonise with the other musical features,
as well as the lyrical content, of the pieces in which they are used. Finally, the band’s slow play-
ing, clear lyrics, and general penchant for understatement is endearing, as it connotes modesty,
rather than bombast and excess, and suggests a sincere desire to communicate with, rather than
impress, its audience.

Notes
1 I am far from alone in making this observation. As Edward Macan (2006) puts it, ‘as a style, progressive
rock has for a very long time been despised by the vast majority of the critics who write for the major
rock journals.’ See Macan, E. (2006). Endless Enigma: A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Chicago: Open Court, pages xxxvii–xxxviii.
2 Ibid. Macan (2006):xxxix, refers to the ‘utterly predictable tone and language’ of the critical dismissals
of progressive rock that have been issued since the mid-1970s.
3 As quoted by Weigel, D. (2017), who interviewed Lake for Weigel’s The Show That Never Ends: The
Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. New York: Norton, page xv.
4 Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford
University Press, page 170.
5 These statistics are taken from Wikipedia discography articles, each of which has as its title the name of
one of the bands plus the word ‘discography,’ as in ‘Jethro Tull discography’, ‘Yes discography’, and so
forth. These articles, in turn, cite authoritative sources, such as Billboard for chart positions, and The
Recording Industry Association of America, for gold, platinum, and diamond certifcations.
6 ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’, Rolling Stone, 31 May 2012. Retrieved from rollingstone.com/
music/music-lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-156826/outkast-aquemini-2-155441/.
7 See acclaimedmusic.net. A limitation of the website’s ranking method, when it is taken as evidence
of the overall critical reception of an artist’s work, is that it is based solely on positive information
(an artist’s inclusion, and placement within, various ‘best of ’ lists), and takes no notice of critical

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disparagement. Thus, it makes no distinction between, on the one hand, a band’s exclusion from a list
because a critic is unfamiliar with it or judges it not quite good enough to be included and, on the
other hand, an exclusion based on the fact that the band is despised. If it were possible to award nega-
tive points for such critical bashing, all of the progressive rock bands would, to varying degrees, drop
down in the rankings. But in that case, I suspect that the gap between Pink Floyd and most of the other
progressive bands would only increase, perhaps dramatically.
8 The Dark Side of the Moon was beautifully produced – often regarded, for many years, as the audio
standard by which to judge the quality of one’s home hi-f system. One reason for its massive com-
mercial success is that many customers kept coming back to buy new copies as old ones began to wear
out. This, in turn, testifed to the fact that people wanted to play the record over and over again but also
that the production, crammed as it was with sound efects, demanded a pristine copy, unblemished by
scratches. Moreover, as listeners upgraded their stereo systems, they wanted to hear it bring out all that
the album had to ofer, and that required a new copy. Like many other classic rock albums from the pre-
compact disc era, the change in format generated another round of strong sales, as listeners abandoned
their vinyl copies in favor of the new format. And even in the digital era, improvements in remastering
technology have led to a series of re-releases, triggering more repeat purchases by audiophiles who are
reluctant to miss out on experiencing any sonic delights that the latest technology might reveal.
9 Jon Anderson and Steve Howe, from the album Close to the Edge by Yes (1972). The lyrics are by Jon
Anderson.
10 Ian McDonald and Peter Sinfeld, from the album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969). The lyrics
are by Sinfeld.
11 Nick Mason, Roger Waters, Rick Wright, and David Gilmour, from the album The Dark Side of the
Moon (1973). The lyrics are by Roger Waters.
12 As quoted in Harris, J. (2005). The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of Pink Floyd’s Masterpiece. Cam-
bridge, MA: Da Capo, page 89.
13 As quoted in Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. New York: Delta,
page 171.
14 Nick Mason (2004) notes that the lyrics to The Dark Side of the Moon were ‘clear and simple enough for
non-native-English speakers to understand, which must have been a factor in its international success.’
See, Mason, N. (2004). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
page 186. One might add that the lyrics are as relevant to adults as to teenagers. Indeed, ‘Because the
songs are about life and the things that come with it, everyone can relate to them. Who hasn’t worried
about having enough time (“Time”) or money (“Money”), or dealt with confict (“Us & Them”) or
death (“Great Gig in the Sky”)? Everyone has to make choices (“Any Colour You Like”) and keep
busy (“On The Run”). Life can make it hard to keep your sanity (“Brain Damage”). Every person
is born (“Speak to Me/Breathe”) and dies (“Eclipse”).’ Matt Smith, ‘What was so special about Pink
Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album that enabled it to attain the record for the greatest number of
weeks on the Billboard album charts?’: see quora.com/What-was-so-special-about-Pink-Floyds-Dark-
Side-of-the-Moon-album-that-enabled-it-to-attain-the-record-for-most-number-of-weeks-on-the-
Billboard-album-charts.
15 As quoted in Erskine, P. (1997). ‘Dirty Hair Denied’, in MacDonald, B. (ed.), Pink Floyd: Through the
Eyes of the Band, Its Fans, Friends, and Foes. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, page 95.
16 See, for example, Guesdon, J.-M. and Margotin, P. (2017). Pink Floyd: All the Songs. New York: Black
Dog & Leventhal, page 309.
17 For example, Guitar World magazine named one of Gilmour’s solos (his second on the song
‘Comfortably Numb’ from The Wall) the fourth-best rock solo of all time. See ibid. Guesdon and
Margotin (2017):433.
18 It may seem surprising that Gilmour frequently cites American folksinger Pete Seeger, whom he calls
‘a wonderful, fantastic human being,’ as a major infuence on his guitar playing, as quoted in Baker, L.
(1993). ‘Careful with That Axe’, Guitar World, February: see, pink-foyd.org/artint/gwcr.htm. After
all Pink Floyd’s musical style would seem to be far removed from Seeger’s musical world of folk
songs, gently strummed and picked on acoustic instruments. But if one recalls that Seeger’s playing is
unfailingly smooth, melodic, and sensitive, but unfashy, one can see that Gilmour’s comment makes
perfectly good sense.
19 Roger Waters, from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973).

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20 Macan (1996) makes the point that ‘Have a Cigar’ from Wish You Were Here, which resembles ‘Money’
in that both songs feature sardonic lyrics, also uses unusual time signatures, as its refrain ‘is set to a
daunting pattern in which bars of fve, four, two, and three alternate.’ Macan comments: ‘it’s almost as
if Waters at some level associated sarcastic, biting lyrics with unpredictable, of-balance metric schemes,’
in Op. cit. Macan (1996):122.
21 See Cohen, G. (2015). ‘Expansive Form in Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”’, Music Theory Online: A  Jour-
nal of the Society for Music Theory, 21(2), June. Retrieved from mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.2/
mto.15.21.2.cohen.html.
22 Manning, T. (2006). The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd. London: Rough Guides, page 198.

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 PART IV

Periods of Pink Floyd’s work

 14
THE PSYCHEDELIC SELF
AT PLAY
Re-reading whimsy in the early music
of Pink Floyd

James Barrett

Introduction
Members of the band, fans and critics have often referred to Pink Floyd’s early-recorded
musical compositions (1966–1969) as whimsical.1 Roger Waters, a founding member of
the group, qualifed whimsy in the early music when he said to John Harris of The Guard-
ian newspaper in 2004,2 ‘My big fght in Pink Floyd, was to try and drag it, kicking and
screaming, back from the whimsy that Syd was into – as beautiful as it is – into my con-
cerns, which were more political and philosophical.’ The early songs, such as ‘The Gnome,’
‘Chapter 24,’ ‘Arnold Lane’ and ‘See Emily Play’ certainly generate strange and humorous
reactions. But to say this music is not political is to severely discount both the artistic inspi-
ration and the reception these songs received when they were frst released. The early music
of Pink Floyd is a literary and cultural phenomenon that represents a mass psychedelic
movement with implications that are only beginning to be accepted by broader mainstream
culture today.
This chapter examines whimsy as a trope in the early music of Pink Floyd, demonstrating
a spontaneous quality that challenges stable and linear conceptions of time, with juxtaposition
and illogicality often present. But whimsy is only the surface of what the early music of Pink
Floyd represents. I begin by establishing the concept of the psychedelic self, a radical image of
the human subject that includes whimsy, but that is not defned by it. I then go on to read 13
early compositions by Pink Floyd that demonstrate elements of whimsy and that correspond
to the psychedelic self. Finally, I argue the image of the psychedelic self in the songs matches
the conditions of LSD intoxication that researchers in the neurological sciences are only now
managing to describe clinically.3 I conclude that the musical legacy of Pink Floyd is a sustainable
one, with our understanding of cognition just now catching up and projecting into the future an
image of the self that embraces fragmentation of self-identity, multiple simultaneous cognitive
perspectives and non-linear temporality.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-20 275

 James Barrett

Figure 14.1 1966 poster for Friday night gig at Hornsey College of Art

Te psychedelic self
Whimsy is a trope with political implications due to how it constructs an image of the psyche-
delic self. Therefore, it is necessary to trace the connections between the three points; whimsy,
psychedelia and the person it represents. This line of associations begins with the chapter ‘Piper
at the Gates of Dawn’ in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows, which
references a type of music that seems similar to that of the early Pink Floyd;

‘Hark to the wind playing in the reeds!

‘It’s like music – far-away music,’ said the Mole nodding drowsily.
‘So I was thinking.’ murmured the Rat, dreamful and languid. ‘Dance music, the
lilting sort that runs on without a stop – but with words in it too – it passes into words
and out of them again – I catch them at intervals – then it is dance music once more
and then nothing but the reed’s soft, thin whispering.’4

The qualities of the music discussed by Rat and Mole foreshadow the primary importance of
rhythm, sustain and improvisation that the early Pink Floyd created and explored. The essence
of the description, and indeed of The Wind in the Willows text itself, is whimsy. When Rat and
Mole encounter the god Pan, asleep in ‘the place of my song-dream,’5 they introduce a darker
and more mystical whimsy that overturns many common preconceptions regarding time and
reality. The chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ from where it comes was taken as the
name of the frst Pink Floyd album in 1967.

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 Te psychedelic self at play

The early music of Pink Floyd was a leading part of a new genre of psychedelic rock music.
The music was best experienced in live concerts, often in multimedia environments where the
audience participated in the show, called ‘freak outs,’ through dance, projections, lighting and
sound efects with extravagant clothing and the taking of the psychedelic drug LSD (called
‘acid’). Nick Mason (2005) recounts a comment by Floyd fan of that time refecting on Pink
Floyd as, ‘the frst authentic sound of acid consciousness. . . . They’d be up on stage like super-
natural gargoyles playing their spaced-out music, and the same colour that was exploding over
them was exploding over us. It was like being taken over, mind, body and soul.’6 The London
venues the Roundhouse, UFO and Middle Earth and one-of events like ‘Games for May’
(1967) or ‘The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream’ (1968) became multimedia environments where
the music of Pink Floyd was frst heard by many. At these events, Gammond (2008) says, ‘the
band disappeared. The band was virtually lost in the light show. The Pink Floyd was not a band
that put their faces forward. They were anonymous makers of sound.’7 These events were the
spatial realisation of the imagery and ideas that were expressed in the songs of Pink Floyd and
that were shared with the audience.
The events became part of a broader creative culture, with many other musicians, artists,
poets, writers, designers, playwrights, sculptors and philosophers joining in what was commonly
known as Swinging London.8 Amidst the swirl of London at this time, there was an image of
humans as a specifc subject shared by many. This was perhaps most clearly articulated initially
on June 11, 1965 when, according to Smith (2016, n.p.), ‘an audience of 7,000 flled the Royal
Albert Hall to watch and hear readings by 17 mainly American and British poets including
Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz and Beat guru Allen Ginsberg.’9 In the words of Barry Miles
(2006),10 who was there, ‘all these people recognized each other, and they all realized they were
part of the same scene.’ The International Poetry Incarnation (also called ‘Wholly Communion,’
after the 1965 Peter Whitehead flm documenting it)11 was the moment when a counter-cultural
scene became publicly recognisable in London. Remarkably, this moment of recognition is also
accompanied by a full series of texts that describe the philosophy, thoughts, ideas, fantasies and
aspirations of the movement behind it. When Alan Ginsberg read his poems, including Who
Be Kind To (1965),12 he used irony to promote the message of peace, love and understanding.
Kindness, prayer and pacifsm are qualities of the ‘new kind of man’ Ginsberg (1965) looks
towards but arguably not so new as counter-culture ideals. But Ginsberg highlights an essential
distinction in this new self; the presence and acceptance of the body, ‘to end the cold war he
has borne/against his own kind fesh.’13 The poor soul crying from a crack in the pavement
(cement urban run-down and crowded – lacking space) does not have a body. The psychedelic
self is blood and fesh and spirit in convergence. The undesirables – ‘lack-loves of Capitals and
Congress’ – are disembodied as ‘sadistic noises on the radio.’ Throughout the subsequent crea-
tive expression related to the psychedelic experience and culture, the body is equal to, and in
congress with, the mind. Through these fow ideas about community, family, truth, the state,
spirituality, duty and knowledge.
The psychedelic self is not just the state of mind that results from the taking of ‘acid’ or LSD.
This self exists in the contexts provided by culture, community, fashion, philosophy, music, art
and literature (and now history). In 1967, according to Brown and Gaines (1983), ‘Swinging
London was just as much about acid as it was about anything else that year. Acid was the per-
fect drug for the moment; it gave the already shimmering world just the right efervescence.’14
The city was already shimmering with economic prosperity and social mobility emerging in a
culture that was producing a generation of educated youth possessed of a degree of disposable
income and that was raised in a strengthening middle class. These factors combined with a

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developing post-colonial multiculturalism and a growing sense of internationalism, and with the
resistance to the disaster that was the war in Vietnam. The divide between generations and a dis-
satisfaction with the morals, ethics and aspirations of the previous generation made LSD and the
philosophies and ideas that came to be associated with it (e.g., ‘free love,’ anti-materialism and
the appropriation of various Eastern philosophies and religions) a ripe cultural moment by the
second half of the 1960s. As Toop (2016) observes regarding the music of the time, ‘the collec-
tive long-duration improvisations and semi-improvisations that were so prevalent in the 1960s
and 1970s embodied the era’s conjectural societies and their rites, laboratories for hypothetical
forms of communality.’15 The music of Pink Floyd was at the forefront of this communality, and
the sacrament for so many people at the time was LSD. As their then-manager Pete Jenner said,
‘there we were quite clearly simulating drug experiences, that’s part of what we were doing.
Hey when you take a trip, you hear sounds like this and then we played it to them.’16 The result
was a leading position in the counter-culture movement of growing proportions with infuence
and a sense of cultural change.
As the counter culture became more established and (ironically) popular, the ideas associated
with it were expressed in the media it published. Central to this culture was LSD as a shared
technology that allowed for a collective self-identity, both on a personal and social level. Those
who took acid, says Roberts (2008), ‘travellers [that] returned from LSD trips with tales of other
dimensions, other ways of seeing, other ways of thinking, and, most importantly, other ways of
being.’17 Michael Hollingshead (1973), a leading fgure in the early psychedelic scene, writes
‘people who have had a psychedelic experience can “tune-in” to the secret and occult, in which
God is better honoured and loved by silence than by words, and better seen by closing the eyes
to images than by opening them.’18 Leary (1992) comments on the same experience, with the
LSD trip described as the awareness

of processes you never tuned into before. You feel yourself sink down into the soft
tissue swamp of your own body, slowly drifting down dark red waterways and foating
through capillaries canals, softly propelled through endless cellular factories, ancient
fbrous clockworks – ticking, clicking, chugging, pumping relentlessly.19

But the body could become entirely something else. One example is an LSD experience by
a person who states: ‘I found my awareness slipping inside that of the dafodil. While still being
conscious of sitting in a chair, I could also sense my petals! Then an exquisite sensation cascaded
through me, and I knew I was experiencing light falling on those petals.’20 These changes had
inevitable results on a personal level, and this then went on to play a collective role in the cul-
ture. These change that occurs with the use of LSD in both perception and identity, as I discuss
in the following, is present in the lyrics of Pink Floyd at the time.
Pink Floyd is globally recognised as ushering in a mass psychedelic culture through their
early music. But despite this association, the band and its management have been at pains to
distance their public image from the perceived excesses of the psychedelic movement. It was
even necessary for their record company EMI publish a press release in April 1967 after their
debut on Top of the Pops, which stated; ‘The Pink Floyd does not know what people mean by
psychedelic pop and are not trying to cause hallucinatory efects on their audience.’21 Mason
(2005) recounts the band was too busy writing the music and performing to ‘share in the psy-
chedelic experience’:

We may have been adopted as the house orchestra, but we rarely got to share in the
psychedelic experience. We were out of it, not on acid but out of the loop, stuck

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in the dressing room at UFO. We were busy being a band: rehearsing, travelling to
gigs, packing up and driving home. Psychedelia was around us but not within us. We
might buy a book at Indica, but we certainly never had time to linger. We read IT
[International Times], but the primary reason was to check whether we had a review
or not. Of the band, Syd was perhaps slightly more intrigued by the broader aspects
of psychedelia, and drawn to some of the philosophical and mystical elements that
his particular group of friends was exploring. But although he was interested, I don’t
think – like the rest of us if we had wanted to – he had enough time to become fully
immersed in the scene.22

But even as a denial, it is clear Nick Mason is aware of the cultural connection between the
music of Pink Floyd and psychedelia.23 Mason (2005) elaborates on what psychedelia means as
a culture and an experience; to be ‘out of it’ (i.e. on LSD), to buy and presumably read books
from counter-culture bookshop Indica, and to read International Times, along with being
intrigued by and drawn to the philosophical and mystical aspects of the culture. According to
Mason (2005), the psychedelic culture was dependent on the experience of taking acid, as it
needed to be ‘within us.’ While the psychedelic scene swirled around them, and they were a
leading creative force that contributed to it, the members of Pink Floyd were fast becoming
professional and commercial musicians, whether they liked it or not. The association between
whimsy and the early Pink Floyd may be a distancing from the psychedelic culture at the time.
Not only was the taking of LSD illegal after 1966 in the United Kingdom, but the powers that
organised the music industry at the time, such as the BBC (which banned ‘Arnold Layne’ from
broadcast) also did not want to be associated with the counterculture.
Today the history of the early Pink Floyd is dominated by the presence of the singer, guitarist
and chief songwriter Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett. Barrett has often been idealised as a broken genius,
in the Romantic tradition of the fatally cursed young artist, after leaving the group in 1968
under challenging circumstances. Furthermore, Barrett is held up as the principal representative
for psychedelic culture in Pink Floyd. He was also the least interested in being part of a com-
mercially successful band.24 But the myth of Syd as an artistic and radical can be arguably said to
function as an extension of the personality and ideology that is constructed in the songs of Pink
Floyd. It is as though Syd has become a character from the narrative world of Pink Floyd, along-
side Arnold Layne, Emily and Corporal Clegg, just as he later became a source for the character
Pink in the flm of The Wall (1979). For this reason alone, it is worthwhile re-examining the
narratives within the early music of Pink Floyd, and in doing so, one cannot avoid the trope of
whimsy in this same music.
As a musician Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett had an aesthetic of song production; Barrett wrote the
frst singles and all but one of the songs on the frst album Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967).25
Commenting on songwriting, Syd said the lyrics were essential,

I think it’s okay if a song has more than one meaning. Maybe that kind of song can
reach far more people – that’s nice. On the other hand, I like simple songs. I liked
‘Arnold Layne’ because to me it is a very clear song. It would be terrifc to do much
more mood stuf. They’re very pure, you know, the words.26

Furthermore, Barrett ‘collated “moods” through words . . . infusing their songs with emotional
resonance, mirroring their state of mind during composition.’27 Norman Smith, the producer
of the frst Floyd album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, states it was not even music, as he under-
stood it, instead, ‘a mood creation through sound is the best way I could describe The Floyd.’28

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Figure 14.2 1967 San Francisco. By B. Maclean. Presented by Bill Graham

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 Te psychedelic self at play

At the same time their frst single, ‘Arnold Layne,’ is a multi-tracked recording featuring drum
repeats and sustain – on the instrumental and vocal tracks with echoes – which create the efect
of looping time signatures on the track. With ‘Arnold Layne,’ we frst meet the growing com-
plexity of Pink Floyd’s music, which would culminate in the elaborate studio recordings and
large-scale live concert productions of the 1970s. This complexity provided the sonic structure
for the lyrics and the ‘freak outs’ when the music was performed live.
In 1968 Pink Floyd included for their live performance, along with their famous light shows,
a Beat Frequency Oscillator, ‘basically a tone generator’ according to Roger Waters.29 Both
Syd Barrett and Rick Wright used Binson Echorec efects units, ‘with its multiple tape heads,
overloaded valve electronics and winking green ‘magic eye’ level indicator.’30 By 1968, a device
known as the Azimuth Co-ordinator was also used for live sound efects, as a spatial panning
sound manipulator that could encircle the audience in a particular efect, such as footsteps or
bird song, moving it about the room. In 1968, tape phasing and many other efects were only
possible in the studio. A testbed valve oscillator was one of the sound efects devices used on
Floyd’s frst album. The result is a throbbing rhythmic drone with samples and sound efects
that defne so much of the Floyd music of this period. The music is danceable, but at the same
time, it is ambient, foating and flled with vocals and efects that fade in and out but also pul-
sate and build up into frantic crescendos. As Cavanagh (2003) describes, ‘Pink Floyd delivered
something new, an amalgam of melody, discord and abstract sound, unlike anything that went
before.’ Throughout their improvised and compositional work, ‘from very early in their career
they were experimenting with unusual vocal sounds, especially on the backing vocals.’31 The
result is a multimedia, multisensory performance experience for those that attended Pink Floyd
performances and later bought the records and tapes they released. The psychedelic self is a
central element in work produced and the performances of Pink Floyd from the early period.
In the lyrics, both time and memory are used within the performances and music of the group
to present a new vision of the human subject.

Time and memory

Pink Floyd lyrics often reference time and memory. In the early songs, time is a passing state
of awareness that is associated with childhood as well as focusing on the present moment, the
now, as being the only important component of time. In ‘Remember a Day’ (1968), written and
sung by keyboardist Rick Wright, the past is ‘before today’ when ‘you were young’ when you
were ‘free to play alone with time’ and ‘evening never came.’ Memory is of being young when
we are ‘free to play alone with time,’ presumably in childhood. But then the narrative lyric shifts
to present time and asks the listener to ‘sing a song that can’t be sung.’ This line suggests a state
beyond language, where experience is not mediated but is embodied. This concept is the point
of access for the timeless state of childhood when the intellect is not the sole social interface and
play is an important activity. The focus on childhood, the fattening out of the past, via memory
into a single day, ‘before today’ and the freedom to play are all elements of the whimsical. In this
confguration, whimsy breaks free from the expectations and constraints of adulthood and the
associated symbolic orders of time and language. The freedom is gained by living in a perpetual
now when ‘evening never came.’
Time as a dimension of whimsy is not only related to memory and childhood in the music
of Pink Floyd. In ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ (Waters, 1968), time as a system
is transformed. We frst encounter time at dawn, the leaves and the lotuses. Perhaps these are
symbolic of the masses and the ‘turned on’ in Swinging London, after an all-night ‘freak out’ in

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the Alexandra Palace, All Saint’s Church Hall or the Roundhouse, trembling at dawn and then
beginning a journey to ‘the heart of the sun,’

The journey to the heart of the sun is to travel outside socially sanctioned time, to
time-point-zero in relation to the earth. The terrestrial calendar year, days, hours,
minutes and seconds are calibrated according to the rotation and orbit of the earth
around the sun. At the central point of the sun, all such celestial movement is void and
null. The sun rotates instead around Galactic Point Zero, the centre of the Milky Way
Galaxy at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. The galactic year is about 230 million
earth years long, in the time it takes the sun to make one complete orbit around the
Milky Way. Such a temporal scale obliterates present human time scales and is mean-
ingless to the culture we presently live. This is the time-scale for the heart of the sun.

Against this vast cosmic temporality, there is an inner world of ‘Set the Controls for the
Heart of the Sun,’ represented by love giving over to myth, as ‘One inch of love is one inch of
shadow’ and ‘Love is the shadow that ripens the wine.’ These lyrics, says Pringle (2000), ‘in fact
owe much to an anthology of Chinese poetry called Poems of the Late T’ang by A. C. Graham,
published by Penguin in 1965.’32 Li Shangyin wrote ‘One inch of love is an inch of ashes,’ while
the Floyd lyric is ‘One inch of love is one inch of shadow.’ The introduction of the shadow is
possibly the meeting with the subconscious or those elements of the self that are suppressed.
Love becomes the access point to this inner self and meeting with the other. Furthermore, the
shadow can be related to the archetype of life itself or that facing within of the unpleasant or for-
gotten elements of the personality. This idea comes from the work of Jung (1966), who wrote;

Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear ofers even
the slightest hope of security does it become possible for us to experience an archetype
that up to then had hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima.
This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself.33

This traumatic breaking through to the archetypes of self is also described the LSD experi-
ence, as an expansion of consciousness and awareness of the divine.34 The ripening of the wine
and its connection to love is an ancient image from European antiquity and the teachings of
Gnostic Christianity. This same image is present in ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’
with the lines, ‘Over the mountain watching the watcher’ with ‘Breaking the darkness’ and
‘Waking the grapevine.’
In mythology and gnostic scriptures ‘Waking the grapevine’ is represented by blood and the
sexual congress of Eros with the earth (Gaia). Following the frst intercourse (sunousia) of Eros
with the earth, Bonnefoy (1992)35 quotes, ‘The grapevine sprouted up from the blood which
was poured upon the earth. Therefore, those who drank it (the vine) engaged in themselves
the desire for intercourse.’ From this myth, Bonnefoy (1992) goes on to explain that ‘while the
cosmogonic epiphany of Eros, which separates light from darkness, remains positive, that of
the Eros who appeared ‘between angels and men’ would, through recourse to women cause a
principle of death to enter the world.’ The watcher of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the
Sun’ witnesses the breaking of darkness, through the epiphany of Eros, who joins with Gaia to
give humanity the intoxicating vine. Like the primal image of the god Pan, asleep in The Wind
in the Willows’s ‘place of my song-dream,’ ‘Waking the Grapevine’ shifts awareness to myth and
the inner self through imagery that transcends the social.

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The purpose of life is a consistent element in Pink Floyd lyrics, and this is addressed in the
fnal verse of ‘Heart of the Sun’ through a question and an act of poetic adaptation. The dark-
ness continues as an image in the lines, ‘Witness the man who raves at the wall’ and ‘Making the
shape of his questions to Heaven.’ With the sun perhaps failing, the lyrics continue, ‘Whether
the sun will fall in the evening’ and ‘Will he remember the lesson of giving?’ before returning
to the line, ‘Set the controls for the heart of the sun.’
Once again, the lyric is taken from the Graham (1965) translation of the Táng poet. The
line ‘Witness the man who raves at the wall/Making the shape of his questions to Heaven’ is
taken from ‘Don’t Go Out of the Gate’ by Li He (Li Ho), who wrote of an earlier Chinese
poet, ‘Witness the man who raved at the wall as he wrote his questions to Heaven’ according
to the Graham (1965) translation.36 The wall is distracting the subject from higher ideals, in an
attempt to address heaven, but instead, he raves uselessly at ‘the wall.’ To step outside time and
be generous, ‘Remember the lesson of giving,’ is to overcome ‘the man who raves at the wall,’
in all of us, or the sense of the futility of outward, social communication and the constraints of
worldly time. To connect with others through giving is to overcome loneliness and to reach a
new level of self beyond social convention.
To summarise, in the songs ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the
Sun,’ memory and time are constructed as strange or unusual. The very strangeness of the lyrical
world of these songs distances them from anything that could be political within the ordinary
social world most people live. It is therefore easy to understand how these lyrics can be con-
sidered to lack social value in the scope of whimsy. But instead, the lyrics take up the value of
concerning oneself with the inner universe, or a childhood perception of the cosmic patterns
of our planet, solar system and galaxy. Coupled with this is the time of myth, of the seasons
and the interventions of the gods. All of the forms of time related to these references and the
consequences that result from them are coupled to larger cosmic cycles. The sun in relation to
the earth is made a symbol for a shift in human awareness, according to an increase in scale (i.e.
the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy and our 230-million-year round trips through it) and how
it operates outside the social conception of time.
Furthermore, ‘Remember a Day’ suggests a continuation of childhood up to the present
moment, when the listener presumably hears the song. Time becomes an eternal on-going now,
a continual presence as all past and future combined. Into this eternal now is introduced the
mystical concept of ‘song that cannot be sung,’ as a recognition that, according to Mead (2016),
‘the true Gnostic Te Deum cannot be sung at any one time only, but must be sung eternally;
the man must transform himself into a perpetual song of praise in through and word and deed.’37
The introduction of myth, explains Mayerhof (1955), into the lyrics negates ‘the social mean-
ing of time, referring to the meaning which time acquired in the processes of production and
consumption in the modern world.’ By resisting the time of production and consumption as the
social meaning of time, the narrative also resists a socio-cognitive system that Mayerhof (1955)
says, ‘exhibits the same characteristics as the units of physical time and the units of sensory expe-
rience.’38 Childhood as a time or the cosmic time of the galaxy both become sensory, embodied
experiences in the lyrics of ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘Set the Controls.’ Both childhood as mem-
ory and cosmic time lead inwards to a self that is outside the sanctioned or clock time of society.

Whimsy and the psychedelic self

Whimsy is not just a charming but meaningless efect; it is also the expression of a personal rev-
olution.39 The concept of the politics of the personal, in particular as applied to consciousness

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is referenced in ‘See Emily Play,’ a song that brings whimsy into the human form of a girl. ‘See
Emily’ Play was the second single released by Pink Floyd in 1967 (it was later included on the
US release of Piper but not the UK release). Written by Barrett, the song features a backwards
tape of piano, efects and lyrics, and it is reportedly inspired by the ‘psychedelic schoolgirl,
Emily Young,’ at the time a 16-year old who regularly attended the London Free School night
sessions around the Notting Hill area of London.40 Emily is both an internal and external self –
she ‘tries but misunderstands’ and is ‘often inclined to borrow somebody’s dreams till tomorrow’
but ‘There is no other day’; ‘it can be tried another way,’ and ‘lose your mind and play.’
Emily’s misunderstanding could be about either the world or her life or in the specifcs of
the psychedelic state. This sense of failure is alleviated by the strategy of borrowing ‘somebody’s
dreams till tomorrow.’ Emily’s borrowed dreams are returned ‘tomorrow,’ which as everyone
knows never comes. Play is proposed as an essential element of whimsy, as by ‘let’s try it another
way,’ it is rendered as a means for relating to the world around us, whereby self and the world
become one, when you ‘lose your mind and play.’
‘See Emily Play’ was initially called ‘Games for May,’ a song written specifcally for an event
of the same name that took place on May  12, 1967, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall that was
advertised as featuring ‘space-age relaxation for the climax of spring – electronic composition,
colour and image projection, girls, and the Pink Floyd.’41 The shift from ‘Games’ to ‘Play’ can
be seen as signifcant in reading the contexts implied by the song. The diference between game
and play is that the former has rules, winners and losers, but the latter does not necessarily have
to. The transcendence of the immediate needs of life was precisely the context for the activities
of Pink Floyd during ‘Games for May.’ During the Pink Floyd performance, Manning (2006)
recalls, ‘some of the band members created sound efects by chopping up wood on stage, a
man dressed up as an admiral gave out dafodils,’ and borrowing from the weekly UFO club, a
‘machine blowing bubbles into the audience . . . which used soap, water, air, electricity, a small
engine and chance to produce volatile and hypnotic visual compositions’ in combination with
the psychedelic light show.42 A large gong onstage for the frst time accompanied this activity,
as well as tympani drums, mechanical toy ducks and wind-up toys and the introduction of the
Azimuth Co-ordinator, ‘a device designed to send quadrophonic sound efects across a two-
hundred-and-seventy-degree-span.’ The experience of play was apparent during the concert,
recognised as ‘the moment Pink Floyd started playing games with technology, bouncing sound
all around the hall.’43 The audience responded with elaborate costumes, toys, the taking of LSD,
dancing and play.
Play, whimsy and the psychedelic self are three supports for the narrative world represented
in early Pink Floyd lyrics. Play, according to Huizinga (1998) joins the subject with the environ-
ment through collaboration and improvisation;

In-play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and
imparts meaning to the action. All play means something. If we call the active princi-
ple that makes up the essence of play, ‘instinct’, we explain nothing; if we call it ‘mind’
or ‘will’ we say too much. However, we may regard it; the very fact that play has a
meaning implies a non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.44

When we play, we lose our self, which may sound trite but means that when one is at play,
one is joined with the moment, the place and those that are with one in play. Social classifca-
tions and situations are lessened to such a degree in the act of play as to be meaningless. In a
sense, one becomes someone else when we play, as a new set of meanings are at work, accord-
ing to the ‘non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.’ Play disintegrates these

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identity systems under very controlled conditions, such as when costumes, props or imaginary
places become the set and setting for the play, which can then be reversed immediately and
leave no lasting efects, other than memories and perhaps bruises.45 Play fxes whimsy into a
new set of relationships, depending on the nature of the play. The ‘Games for May’ event was
played for adults, ofering ‘space-age relaxation’ and multimedia experiences. The freeing up
of social activity and the references to the inner self in the media associated with the ‘Games
for May’ lead to the third element in the narrative world of early Pink Floyd compositions, the
psychedelic self.
The depiction of the psychedelic self in the early music of Pink Floyd can be charted via ego
dissolution and self-binding, borrowed from cognitive neuroscience. Ego dissolution, Letheby
and Gerrans (2017) explain, is when ‘the subject is experiencing the disintegration of a system
whose integration she normally experiences in terms of an indivisible mental substance.’46 Ego
dissolution is a possible reaction for those that are on an LSD trip. The psychedelic self is, they
add, contingent on the concept of ego dissolution, a mental state that enables,

Subjects to experience cognition not bound by self-models. We emphasise that the

‘self ’, which dissolves in the psychedelic experience, is not an actual entity or an
object of perception, interception, or introspection, but an entity inferred by the mind
to predict the fow of experience in and across the cognitive modalities.47

The degree to which ego dissolution is experienced is, according to Lethby and Gerrans
(2017), indicated by self-binding, or ‘the preferential enhancement of cognitive binding for
self-relevant information.’ The depiction of self-binding in the lyrics of Pink Floyd suggests
a movement either towards or away from a conscious self-awareness versus a state of ego
dissolution. Self-binding, they add, ‘does not entail the existence of an object to which
attributes are bound – though it does require the representation of an object, to which
representations of attributes are bound.’ In other words, when the dominant mode of con-
scious awareness projects that awareness outwards to objects as separate entities in what can
be called material reality.
On the surface, the song ‘The Gnome’ (1967) appears to be a work of archetypal whimsy
drawing on Tolkienesque imagery. The early verses support a whimsical reading of the song,
with lines like ‘And little gnomes’ who are in their homes, eating, sleeping, drinking. But a
more in-depth examination of the song reveals how it suggests a diminished depiction of self-
binding in the egoless state with lines such as, ‘Another way for gnomes to say, Oooooooooom-
ray’ as they look at the sky and the river. The question is asked about such things, ‘Isn’t it
good?/. . . fnding places to go.’
There is a marked shift in the song at verse three, which can be recognised as the climax of
the piece. In contrast to the previous verses, the third verse is spoken, not sung. It is the gnome
now speaking, distinct from previous verses when it is narrated as the third person subject. It is
also the only verse with reverb and delay on the voice and with a dulcimer added. The lyrics
make sense as an example of self-binding, and verse three is the point of breaking through into
ego dissolution. The gnome is now speaking, and he is experiencing a breakdown in conven-
tional self-modelling following ego-dissolution, where the river and the sky are now intimate
dimensions of his own self. This breakdown is indicated by the use of the singular article ‘it’ to
reference both the sky and the water. It is not these two external entities that are ‘good’; it is
the perception of them. Such a breakdown is highly reminiscent of the conditions identifed
as emerging from play, as the ‘non-materialistic quality in the nature of the thing itself.’48 In
the case of ‘The Gnome,’ this breakdown is indicated by the musical and vocal changes and the

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change in address for the lyric, with the gnome now expressing an internal dialogue as opposed
to the narrating voice describing him, his actions and surroundings.
If we consider the archetypal text of whimsy, Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), it is
Alice that is experiencing the dramatic shift to a parallel reality, and we, the reader, witness it
through her senses as the lens of the primary narrative avatar. As Alice runs, grows, shrinks, falls
and fies, we follow her in the narrative, according to her various physical dimensions and points
of awareness in time, as the focaliser which, according to Niederhof (2011), is ‘a selection or
restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator,
the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the story world.’49 Likewise, in the lyrics
of Pink Floyd, the listener is positioned in relation to the subject by the syntax and imagery of
address, the setting up of temporal development, the perspective granted on characters and the
use of efects and vocal or musical structures. So, while whimsy can be defned as funny, strange
or humorous, it can have a revolutionary side whereby it is placed in a particular context or
explored as a literary device that challenges established concepts of self-identity, temporality and
the nature of reality.
The song ‘Chapter 24,’ also from the album Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), challenges the
socially dominant image of reality by introducing chance and the fow of change in the nar-
rated subject. The act of chance and the nature of change as depicted in ‘Chapter 24,’ Cavanagh
(2003) says,

Refects Syd and his peers’ fascination with the I-Ching, which situates us solidly in a
period of the 60s when interest in Eastern religions was percolating over. A syncretic
religion was being composed in the parlours of Cambridge and other towns in England
at the time. The I-Ching was seen as quite a subversive text because, most fundamen-
tally, it threw you open to chance rather than making you submit to dogma.50

The syncretic religion that was being composed was psychedelia claims Roberts (2008), with
‘the I-Ching particularly popular among LSD users and it was a common book to fnd in fats
and squats, consulted and acted upon with the utmost sincerity.’51 ‘Chapter 24’ is indicative of
surrendering to chance and acting upon what the I-Ching presented. Verse 1 says, ‘All move-
ment is accomplished in six stages.’ The chorus adds, ‘Change returns success.’
The rules imposed by one society and its norms are bought down to a discrete level by
allowing chance to play a role in an individual’s daily life. Furthermore, random change goes
against power and the concept of authority, along with the hierarchical systems that organ-
ise activity according to social norms. The psychedelic religion that this interpretation of
the I-Ching supported was a counter-cultural one, of rebellion that held the individual as
the comprehensive guide to the spiritual, with the assistance of what they believed was the
sacrament of LSD.

Memory and the self

The whimsical in early Pink Floyd echoes what Henri Lefebvre (2014) refers to as a ‘reverse
image’ in flm analysis, or ‘an image of everyday reality, taken in its totality or as a fragment,
refecting the reality in all its depth through people, ideas and things which are quite diferent
from everyday experience and therefore exceptional, deviant, abnormal.’52 In the case of the
early Pink Floyd, this drawing on life to construct the whimsical is only half the picture. In the
case of Pink Floyd, the whimsical is applied to everyday life via the psychedelic, and everything
becomes quite diferent in everyday experience. Memory is compromised, such as in the song

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‘Paint Box’ (1967), when entering a familiar room becomes a radically diferent experience to
that which is recalled, for ‘Getting up, I feel as if I’m remembering this scene before.’
The act of ‘getting up,’ with its double meaning as a counter-culture slang term for experi-
encing the efects of a drug, becomes a feeling, a scene and a memory. But the memory, and
perhaps the scene too, are forgotten. The room is empty, as is the memory. But observation
continues, without participation as the door is opened, revealing an empty room. Between
the memory, which is now gone, and the experience under perception (i.e. opening the door,
fnding the room empty then forgetting) sits the self. The subject is not remembering some-
thing; the feeling ‘I’ is remembering together while the self, as a thinking entity is aware of it
in memory. In this sense, the psychedelic self does not represent an autonomous subject but
a conglomerate of perspectives operating in non-linear time. The memory and the event are
simultaneous in a temporal point that seems to stand still, but then the memory is forgotten,
raising the question: who is remembering what? Psychedelia becomes a systems-critical per-
spective; similar to play but with more profound personal and spiritual potentials.
Memory is an infuential component of whimsy in early Pink Floyd music. The song ‘Matilda
Mother’ (1967) illustrates this infuence. The original version of ‘Matilda Mother’ quoted words
from Hilaire Belloc’s book Cautionary Tales for Children (1907).53 The estate of Belloc, however,
refused to give permission for the lines to be used in the song, so Barrett wrote his own lyrics.54
The lyrics became a recounting of the time when Belloc’s book featured in Barrett’s life as a
child in Cambridge. Matilda is a character from another poem in the same book. She told lies
and was fttingly burned to death as a result of her indiscretion (‘Matilda, Who Told Lies and
Was Burned to Death’). ‘Matilda Mother’ (1967) takes on almost painterly visual qualities as a
result of the mixture of memory and perspective. Barrett recounts, ‘For all the time spent in
that room,’ with ‘old perfume’ and ‘fairy stories held me high on, clouds of sunlight foating by.’
And presumably, the boy asks for more stories to be told to him, ‘Oh Mother, tell me more.’
The child’s room and its features of scent and darkness become entwined with the Belloc
book to create a new third voice produced by Barrett from memory. But there is another side to
the narrative, of the hallucinatory world with ‘clouds of sunlight foating by’ and its suggestion
of alternate awareness. Memory, in this case, remains a mix of material perception, in the scent,
light and space of a place, and in the disembodied projections of the mind (‘Clouds of sunlight’).
The body of the child is again in the dark. It is unclear if the doll’s house is in the room or vice-
versa. Place, as the location where the book was experienced, becomes an essential element in
how the psychedelic self is further projected into time, though both psychedelic and physical
impressions as a fragmented multisensory memory.
Likewise, ‘Grantchester Meadows’ (1969) evokes memory set in place, and as one of the frst
post-Barrett pieces by Pink Floyd shows, these themes continued. We are once again grounded
in the remembering subject with lyrics like, ‘In the lazy water meadow’ and remembering, ‘a
bygone afternoon’ that brings ‘sounds of yesterday into my city room.’
The ‘lazy water meadow’ is a stretch of public land that hugs the River Cam between
Cambridge and the village of Grantchester. It is a piece of the classic English countryside, in
summers of waterlogged green felds, a slow-fowing river, rushes and willows, birds singing
in the trees, the sun warm in the hazy sky. It was here that the youth of Cambridge, since the
days of Rupert Brooke, would retreat to and enjoy, with parties and making their own brief
world among the green. The Floyd lyric brings this back as a memory, but it takes auditory and
three-dimensional forms in the ‘city room’ of the narrator. Memory transcends time, assisted
by the sound efects of a looped skylark chirping throughout and later the sound of a honking
goose and followed by the sound of it taking of from the water (a tape loop that featured in the
‘Games for May’ performance).

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Furthermore, the song uses panning and stereo to give the efects of depth and space. The
result is a feeling generated that evokes the sun, space and colours of an English feld in June.
Such a multisensory and embodied evocation of memory can be easily related to the state of
awareness of the psychedelic self. The body remains central to this awareness, with the trans-
sensory spatiality of memory contributing to the embodied subject.
Even when memory is not fxed upon a place (as is the case with ‘Grantchester Meadows’
and ‘Matilda Mother’) but within the subject, such as regarding love, there are shifts that desta-
bilise any fxed central point of awareness. In ‘The Narrow Way Parts I II and III’ a pure sensa-
tion is felt as an embodied memory when, ‘Pull your thoughts back many years,’ to ‘time when
there was life with every morning.’ And hoping that, ‘Perhaps a day will come’ sometime in the
future, ‘’When the light will be as clear as on that morning.’
The clarity of light is a regular image in the early lyrics of Pink Floyd, as mentioned previ-
ously in ‘Set the Controls,’ as well as ‘Let There Be More Light’ (1968), which features the
phrases, ‘now is the time’ ‘to be aware.’ In ‘The Narrow Way Parts I II and III’ the eyes are
closed, but the light remains, just as Hollingshead (1973) advised that ‘better seen by closing the
eyes to images than by opening them,’55 for this is the inner light of LSD. Light is here analogous
with heightened understanding and awareness. ‘The Narrow Way Parts I II and III’ was written
and performed by Dave Gilmour. Still, the imagery of the lyrics continues with the idealisation
of a time in life ‘When there was life with every morning.’ This continuity suggests an idealised
subject based on nostalgia for childhood.
Furthermore, memory can take on elements of transpersonal awareness, in a similar sense to
the egoless state of the idealised psychedelic self. Such a transpersonal memory exhibits binding
qualities in another Gilmour song, ‘Ibiza Bar’ (1969), when the human subject becomes a book
and a camera – both rational machines for ordering experience. The human subject is expressed
in the opening stanza with the line, ‘I feel like a cardboard cut-out man.’ In the last stanza, the
narrator says they are. ‘On the shelf like the rest’ and asks ‘a time,’ and when the ‘storyline is kind.’
There is, of course, an ironic metaphor to the lyrics: that life is not rational, and humans are
not books, where ‘characters rhyme/and the storyline is kind.’ The irrational, the tragic, as well
as the comic dimensions of life, underpin the lyrics to ‘Ibiza Bar,’ taken from the LP More, the
frst full record released by the band after the departure of Barrett. But just as the gnome binds
with the sky and the river in ‘The Gnome,’ the lyrics of ‘Ibiza Bar’ draw on a form of perception
where the boundaries between self and other are lessened.
The psychedelic community in London by 1969 had grown to such an extent that it was no
longer a counter-culture. The cultural moment moved on, and the ‘shimmering world [with] just
the right efervescence’56 had become a parody of fashion fads and bands formed by record labels. In
‘See Saw’ (1968) Pink Floyd present, in return to the mythology and its archetypes, a couple that can
be equated with Gaia and Eros but as siblings, a brother and sister who drift apart when adulthood
redefnes their relationship. That drift is expressed in the regret, ‘She grows up for another man.’
The unbalanced seesaw, ‘he goes up while she goes down’ can be read as the foreshadowing of
things to come in the culture, with he (Eros – Love) gone, and she (Gaia) now given to another
man. The culture of the ‘straight world’ was not changing as a response to the psychedelic vision
that Pink Floyd represented. Instead, the broader culture was absorbing the newer smaller one, and
through success, fame and money, the remaining members of the band were making that move too.

Conclusion
The cultural moment of so-called Swinging London, and the sights, sounds and ideas of the
psychedelic epiphany was a short one. By 1969 the playful vision and social transcendence of

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‘Games for May’ had become a commercial opportunity with hippies, freak-outs and bum trips
featured in popular parodies such as the 1968 Peter Sellers romantic comedy flm I Love You,
Alice B. Toklas.57 But that brief moment, when the psychedelic culture was permitted to fower
on its own terms, gave us some of the most colourful and progressive art, music and literature
from the western world in the twentieth century. Additionally, due to the pharmacological
and psychological dimensions of the culture, particularly related to the use of LSD, the works
of early Pink Floyd are among those that provide us with an insight into a collective mindset,
which can be explored more fully within the frames of religion, literature, sexuality, sociology
and, of course, culture studies. Yet we have not even begun to map the psychedelic self seriously.
Liechti (2017) says that all ‘clinical research on LSD came to a halt in the early 1970s because of
political pressure following its widespread uncontrolled use,’58 and it only slowly began again in
the 1990s. Today we can report, Liechti (2017) continues to say, that ‘the frst modern research
fndings from studies of LSD in psychiatric patients have only very recently been published.’ It is
just in the past fve to ten years that the lyrics of early Pink Floyd can be matched to neuropsy-
chological states of awareness and the images and the ideas that they generate taken seriously as
practical examples of philosophical concepts and cognitive realities related to the psychedelic
experience.
The psychedelic experience was given a cultural identity and the rituals of the collective
given mythology and liturgy by the early music of Pink Floyd. According to Alpert (1988), who
worked with Timothy Leary but went on to abandon psychedelics for spiritual life as Ram Dass,

one of the dramatic characteristics of the psychedelic experience is being with another
person and suddenly seeing how they are like you and not diferent from you and
experiencing the fact that yes, we indeed are brothers in the real sense of that which
is the essence in you and is the essence in me is indeed one.59

The boundaries of personality and cognition are perceived as weakened in the psychedelic
experience. The boundaries that divide up our time and our memories of how we think of our-
selves as individuals and that separate each from those around us are felt bodily and cognitively
as lessened. Whimsy is a trope that represents or engages with the weakening of boundaries by
introducing humour, the sentiment of nonsense. But whimsy does not fully explain either the
contexts for the lyrics and music of early Pink Floyd or how these were understood and shared
by the audience and fans at the time. I have attempted to show in this chapter how whimsy is
a somewhat superfcial feature of the work. To understand the early music of Pink Floyd, it is
necessary to engage with the concept of the psychedelic self and see how the depicted subject
of these songs is conditioned by the breaking down of structural time, by the co-opting memory
as a means to challenge dominant ideas about age, the body, perception and the autonomy of
the self.
The ideals of psychedelic awareness became defning elements for a culture in which hun-
dreds of thousands, if not millions, of people shared. Pink Floyd brought an almost unparalleled
degree of focus to psychedelic culture. This focus was, of course, done as a form of art, with its
unique voice and originality. What remains from that production is a body of work that is rich
in cultural meaning. Many people continue to exalt that work and the artists who created it, in
particular through the tremendous myth of Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett. The prohibitions around the
mind-altering substances that contributed so much to the culture of Swinging London are now
being relaxed in research, and the issues that defned the culture, such as personal freedom and
the rights of the individual and minorities (in the form of sexual, gender, ethnic and embod-
ied rights), are now part of everyday discourse.60 The products of the genius of Roger Waters,

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David Gilmour, Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason are now monuments of culture,
like points on a roadmap. The years 1967–1969 were grounding for Pink Floyd, and the band
went on to develop their approach to both performance and composition based on many of the
themes present in their songwriting from these years. Today the early works can be viewed as
exquisite examples of psychedelic art by a society that is just coming to accept as legitimate the
states of mind they represent.

Notes
1 Whimsy is defned as ‘funny or unusual’ or ‘something that is intended to be strange and humorous
but in fact, has little real meaning or value’ (Cambridge Dictionary n.p.). Also see Ackermann, E. (2015).
‘Amusement, Delight, and Whimsy: Humor Has Its Reasons that Reason Cannot Ignore’, in C. Kyni-
gos and G. Futschek (eds.), Constructionism and Creativity. AHCI Journal Constructivist Foundations,
10(3):405–411.
2 Harris, J. (2004). ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pink Floyd’, The Guardian, 5 November.
Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/music/2004/nov/05/pinkfoyd.popandrock
3 Letheby, C. and Gerrans, P. (2017). ‘Self-Unbound: Ego Dissolution in Psychedelic Experience’, Neu-
roscience of Consciousness, (1). https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/nix016; Liechti, M. E. (2017). ‘Modern
Clinical Research on LSD’, Neuropsychopharmacology, 42(11):2114–2127; Lebedev, A. V., Lövdén,
M., Rosenthal, G., Feilding, A., Nutt, D. J. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2015). ‘Finding the Self
by Losing the Self: Neural Correlates of Ego-Dissolution under Psilocybin’, Human Brain Mapping,
36(8):3137–3153.
4 Grahame, K. (1978 [1908]). The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen Children’s Books, page 141.
5 Ibid:134.
6 Mason, N. (2005). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Chronicle Books, page 57.
7 See Gammond, S. (writer and director) (2008). A Technical Dream. Retrieved from archive.org/embed/
ATechnicolorDream2008. This anonymous element is referenced by Cunningham (1997), according
to how ‘the Floyd placed little emphasis on themselves as performers, preferring to give audiences an
experience that relied on this interaction of sound, light and atmosphere.’ Cunningham, M. (1997,
March). Welcome to the Machine – The Story of Pink Floyd’s Live Sound: Part 1. All Pink Floyd Fan Net-
work. Retrieved from apfnredux.boards.net/.
8 The manager of Pink Floyd, Peter Jenner, writes of the Technicolor Dream that it was ‘The high point
of the psychedelic era for me. It was a perfect setting, everyone had been waiting for them, and every-
one was on acid; that event was the peak of acid use in England, . . . everybody was on it, the bands,
the organizers, the audience, and I  certainly was.’ Quoted in Roberts, A. (2008). Albion Dreaming:
A Popular History of LSD in Britain. London: Marshall Cavendish, page 119.
9 See, Smith, L. (2016). 11 June  1965: Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Poets Create a Cultural Storm at
the Hall. Retrieved from www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2016/january/11-june-
1965-allen-ginsberg-and-the-beat-poets-create-a-cultural-storm-at-the-hall/.
10 , Miles, B. (2006). Pink Floyd: The Early Years. London: Omnibus.
11 Whitehead, P. (1965). Wholly Communion. Film. Dir. Peter Whitehead. See, screenonline.org.uk/flm/
id/1379899/index.html for further details.
12 Ginsberg, A. (2007). ‘Who Be Kind To’, in Collected Poems 1947–1994. New York: Harper Collins.
13 By self I  mean what Michel Foucault said, ‘the thinking subject’ Furthermore, according to Op.
cit. Letheby and Gerrans (2017). ‘The self is an object whose continued existence explains the co-
occurrence of physical and psychological attributes.’
14 Brown, P. and Gaines, S. (1983). The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles. New York:
McGraw Hill, page 224.
15 Toop, D. (2016). Into the Maelstrom; Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom (before 1970). New
York: Bloomsbury, page 187.
16 Quoted in Cavanagh, J. (2003). Pink Floyd’s the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. London: Continuum Books,
pages 43–44.
17 Op. cit. Roberts (2008):4.
18 Hollingshead, M. (1973). The Man Who Turned on the World. London: Blond and Briggs, page 140.

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19 Leary, T. (1992). The Politics of Ecstasy. Berkley CA: Ronin Publishing, page 137.
20 See Devereaux, P. (1997). The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia. New York: Penguin/Arkana, page
27. While the concept of set and setting, which was frst proposed by Timothy Leary and his group
at Harvard, claimed that the character of a psychedelic experience is determined frst and foremost by
the user’s character, expectations and intentions (set), as well as by the social and physical surrounding
in which the drug experience takes place (setting). Op. cit. Leary (1992) went as far as to claim that
99% of the specifc response to LSD is determined by set-and-setting. Op. cit. Roberts (2008):15 adds,
‘Later recreational LSD users would fnd the combination of these two factors could be decisive in
how an LSD experience would develop.’ See also Hartogsohn, I. (2016). ‘Set and Setting, Psychedelics
and the Placebo Response: An Extra-Pharmacological Perspective on Psychopharmacology’, Journal of
Psychopharmacology, 30(12):1259–1267.
21 Palacios, J. (2010). Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe. London: Plexus, page 200.
22 Op. cit. Mason (2005):51.
23 For the American perspective, see, Hartogsohn, I. (2013). The American Trip: Set, Setting, and Psyche-
delics in 20th Century Psychology. MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies) Bulletin,
Spring:6–9. Retrieved from www.maps.org/news-letters/v23n1/v23n1_p6-9.pdf.
24 Op. cit. See Palacios (2010):202–205.
25 Roger Waters is credited with ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,’ but all the members of the band
worked on many of the songs on Piper in the studio, with input coming from each person.
26 See Op. cit. Palacios (2010):365.
27 Ibid.
28 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2000):24.
29 Op. cit. Gammond (2008):n.p.
30 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):30.
31 Ibid:31. Also, see the BBC. Record Producers. BBC Radio 6. Arnold Layne – Multitrack Breakdown
(BBC) – Pink Floyd youtube.com/watch?v=RCiqpFeYEVU.
32 Quoted in Pringle, G. (2000). Allusions to Classical Chinese Poetry in Pink Floyd. Retrieved from www.
cjvlang.com/Pfoyd/meaning.html. The quote is from, Graham, A. C. (1965). Poems of the Late T’ang.
London: Penguin.
33 Jung, C. G. (1981). Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
page 66.
34 See, Op. cit. Roberts (2008):3; also see Stevens, J. (1987). Storming Heaven: LSD and the American
Dream. London: Paladin, pages 439–449.
35 Bonnefoy, Y. (1992). Roman and European Mythologies. Doniger, W. (trans.). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pages 193–94.
36 Op. cit. Pringle (2000):n.p.
37 Mead, G. R. S. (2016). Essays and Commentaries, Parsons, S. N. (ed.). Los Angeles: Adeptus Press, page
137. From the Latin Te Deum laudamus, rendered as ‘Thee, O God, we praise.’
38 Meyerhof, H. (1955). Time in Literature. Los Angeles: University of California Press, page 91.
39 See, Goswami, N. (2009). ‘The Empire Sings Back: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Whimsy’,
Contemporary Aesthetics Special Volume, (2). Retrieved from contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/
article.php?articleID=545.
40 For more detail, see, Schafner, N. (2005). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. New edition.
London: Helter Skelter.
41 As recorded in Manning, T. (2006). The Underground: The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd. London: Rough
Guides, page 37.
42 Op. cit. Manning (2006):38 and Palacios (2010):223.
43 Op. cit. Palacios (2010):224.
44 Huizinga, J. (1998). Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge, page 1.
45 The contemporary genre of live action role playing (LARP) is an example of the transgressive power
of play. The work of American artist Brody Condon is an example of how to play under LARP
conditions can be used to simulate and alter reality. See, Condon, B. (2016). Level 5. Retrieved from
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0ycivSBgmI and (2008). Twentyfvefold Manifestation. Retrieved from
youtube.com/watch?v=7s7P8pOGJbM.
46 Op. cit. Letheby and Gerrans (2017):1–2.
47 Ibid.

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48 Op. cit. Huizinga (1998):1.

49 Niederhof, B. (2011). The Living Handbook of Narratology: Focalization. Hamburg: Hamburg University
Press. Retrieved from lhn.uni-amburg.de/article/focalization, n.p.
50 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):100.
51 Op. cit. Roberts (2008):139.
52 Lefebvre, H. (2014). Critique of Everyday Life. London: Verso, page 34.
53 Belloc, H. (1907). Cautionary Tales for Children. Illustrator: Basil T. Blackwood. London: Eveleigh
Nash. gutenberg.org/fles/27424/27424-h/27424-h.htm.
54 See Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):45–46.
55 Op. cit. Hollingshead (1973):140.
56 See Op. cit. Brown and Gaines (1983):224.
57 I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. (1968). Directed by Hy Averback. Alice B. Toklas was a cookbook writer
whose 1954 cookbook included a recipe for cannabis brownies.
58 Op. cit. Liechti (2017):2114.
59 Alpert, R. (1988). Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path – Ram Dass. Full Lecture. Santa Rosa, CA.
Retrieved from youtube.com/watch?v=nyn0dH5k-Ls.
60 One example of this research in the UK today is the Psychedelic Research Group at the Department
of Medicine, Imperial College London, with a 32-member research team.

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 15
LEGACY RECRE/ATION
Mining the elements in the archive of
Te Early Years box set

Rob Chapman

Introduction
In this chapter I will be critically examining Pink Floyd’s 2010 box set release The Early Years
1966–1972 for what it might reveal about the group’s working practices during its formative
period. The Early Years 1966–1972 considerably enhances our understanding of the band’s crea-
tive gestation and allows us to plot a less prescriptive and demarcated path through their varied
styles than might otherwise have been available.
The apparent aloofness that frequently manifests itself both in the band’s public image and
the imperious, sometimes glacial, quality of some of their music stands completely at odds with
their prodigious work rate in their early years. Pink Floyd, during the years under consideration
here, 1966–1972, were an incredibly hard-working band, touring extensively and producing
new records at a rate that now seems astounding in an era when major bands sometimes produce
a new album every three or four years. It is just one of several contradictions in their chemi-
cal make-up and group dynamic that an apparent standofshness and guarded attitude towards
the machinery of pop promotion has been ofset by the fact that in their peak years they were
incredibly prolifc and frequently open to adventurous collaborative projects that expanded the
notion of what could be achieved within the medium of rock & roll. No other band from that
era produced so many ofcial releases alongside a plethora of soundtrack recordings and other
collaborative work. In addition to this the band recorded an abundance of material which has
not seen the light of day on any ofcial releases until now.
In the Wire magazine of November 2016,1 the writer and musician David Toop recounted
the circuitous and ultimately frustrating route he took in order to try and gain access to a record-
ing of ‘John Latham,’ a track, or possibly series of tracks, purportedly recorded by Pink Floyd in
the 1960s for an intended collaboration with the artist of the same name. In Random Precision,
David Parker’s diligently researched Syd Barrett sessionography, the author’s access to the EMI
archives tantalisingly unearthed details of a session that took place on Friday October 20, 1967,
at De Lane Lea Music Recording Studio in London WC2. On that day, according to the ofcial
documentation, Pink Floyd recorded ‘John Latham’ (takes unknown), ‘Intremental’ (take 1) and
‘In The Beechwoods’ (takes 2–5). Parker did not have permission to listen to archive recordings,
and the people he interviewed (Pink Floyd’s former managers Andrew King and Peter Jenner
and sound engineer John Leckie) could shed little further light on the recording, other than to

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-21 293

 Rob Chapman

confrm that it was intended to be used as the soundtrack to Latham’s flm Speak, a ten-minute
piece of animated op-art made up of stroboscopic coloured discs, dots and concentric rings.
With little more than Parker’s research to go on, all that the John Latham project amounted to
for many years was a series of unverifed rumours, an engineer’s pencilled scrawl on a tape box
and an invoice confrming that such a session took place. It is certainly all that I had at my dis-
posal when I came to research and write my own Syd Barrett biography, A Very Irregular Head.2
When my Barrett book was published, David contacted me in connection with a Latham
exhibition he was co-curating with Wire magazine editor Tony Etherington. Titled Blow Up,
this celebration of the artist’s life was to be held at Flat Time House, Latham’s former home
and workspace in Peckham, South London. We were able to assemble what little we knew, our
knowledge of Latham’s work as an artist and the scraps of rumour that existed as to the veracity
of the Floyd collaboration. Toop had previously established, after a conversation with Latham’s
son, Noa, in 2005, that Speak  ’had attracted soundtracks by Pink Floyd, free improvisation
pioneer Joe Harriott and electronics composer/dancer Ernest Berk. All of these pieces were
rejected by the artist as being ‘unacceptable,’ leading him to record his own noise track.’ On the
basis of this information Toop contacted Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason with regard to using
the recordings as part of his Latham exhibition. Mason replied by e-mail, informing him that
he had no knowledge of any such recordings: ‘I’m certain there are no tapes gathering dust,’ he
told Toop, ‘Someone would have bootlegged them by now.’3
Six years later, in November 2016, Pink Floyd authorised the release of a substantial 27-CD
box set, entitled The Early Years 1965–1972, and there, among all the other archive riches,
were the John Latham recordings, split into nine separate tracks. Also included in the box set
were Pink Floyd’s earliest known studio recordings. Two of these tracks – ‘Lucy Leave’ and
‘I’m A King Bee’ – had previously only been released on bootleg. The others – ‘Double O Bo,’
‘Remember Me,’ ‘Walk With Me Sydney’ and ‘Butterfy’ – were long believed to have been lost.
Indeed, this was their ofcial status when I wrote my Barrett biography, and I was only able to
make passing reference to them based on hearsay. The Early Years also contained freshly remixed
versions of ‘Vegetable Man’ and ‘Scream Thy Last Scream,’ two Syd Barrett compositions origi-
nally vetoed by the band and now fnally sanctioned for ofcial release, along with a plethora of
alternate takes and previously withheld demos, as well as an abundance of live concert record-
ings (in audio and video format) and BBC radio sessions previously unavailable to the public.

Box sets and legacy

Such lavish commercial enterprises have become increasingly commonplace in recent years.
The Beatles and Bob Dylan are amongst the famous artists to have sanctioned the release of
elaborate career resumes and much expanded re-issues of earlier studio recordings, with appro-
priate marketing strategies to match. Anniversary tie-ins of reissued albums now often come
accompanied with the full redux panoply of alternative mixes, bonus tracks, demos and record-
ings of works at the various stages of their creative gestation. This was not always the case. It
would have been unthinkable at one time, for instance, to hear ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ in
bedroom demo form on an ofcial release. It was the ofcial line at both Apple and EMI for
many years that there were no unheard Beatles or indeed Pink Floyd recordings in the vaults
that were suitable for release. This has not prevented many such recordings being made available
illegally, and it has long been the case in these circumstances that the record companies’ revenue
loss has been the bootlegger’s gain. When Bob Dylan’s famous 1967 Woodstock Basement tapes
were fnally given an ofcial release in 1975, it was estimated that they had already sold in the
hundreds of thousands on bootleg. The reason for such a change in record company policy in

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recent years tells us much about the rock era’s capacity for documenting, recycling and prolong-
ing its legacy. These lavish box sets represent a convergence of processes taking place as rock
music enacts its own responses to the machinations of late capitalist logic. Mindful of the fnite
life of copyright, coupled with the fact that the life cycle of a post-war boomer generation is
coming to an end and that people consume their music diferently now, the rock industry sees
these lavish commercial enterprises as one way – perhaps the last way – of putting its seal on a
generation’s engagement with its most popular and lucrative cultural form.
In a 1990 interview I carried out with the BBC radio producer Kevin Howlett for a radio
trade magazine,4 we discussed the whole issue of legacy and how diferent artists approach it
at diferent stages of their career. Howlett had by that time made two documentaries about
Simon & Garfunkel and noted the essential diference between the two:

If you listen to Paul Simon on the mid-seventies profle I did called Simon & Garfunkel:
Alone and Together he wasn’t giving much away at all. He was only two records into his
solo career. Now approaching 50 he was prepared to give us as much as we wanted.
He could understand his own career more and put it into perspective. Twenty years
further on and you are just starting to get the picture.5

Almost three decades on from that conversation, the picture is further embellished with an
abundance of retrospective box sets. There are several reasons artists and record companies adopt
this course of action, the most obvious one being to increase or prolong revenue streams. These
boutique items also serve the purpose of satisfying or creating markets for completist fans, and
they play their part in shaping or securing a sense of an artist’s worth as recording careers draw
to a close. Box sets do something else, too, which is arguably of far more value to the process
of critical evaluation than their primarily commercial imperatives would suggest: They allow a
more comprehensive picture of an artist’s career to emerge, and it is this very expansiveness that
actively undermines the curatorial and gatekeeping role of standard rock histories. On one level,
the sheer quantitative bombardment of extra material (for instance stereo and mono mixes,
alternative takes, studio demos) amounts to little more than marketing overkill. On another
level, such relatively unfltered strategies throw interesting new light on the ebb and fow of
creativity and artistic development and allow for fresh critical interventions into the received
narrative.
In the case of Pink Floyd this is all extremely apposite. As gatekeepers of their own destiny
they have keenly guarded their legacy. A certain insularity has always pervaded the band’s public
persona. Notoriously unforthcoming and reluctant interviewees, they have often seemed wary
of the music industry and to this day remain ambivalent about the whole wearisome process
of promotion. There are half a dozen interviews contained on the Early Years anthologies, and
every one is a master class in reticence. The band members have also been consistent opponents
of bootleggers in the past. A short snippet from a BBC 24 Hours documentary from the 1971
Reverber/ation set shows them and manager Steve O’Rourke being played a bootleg recording.
Their faces are a portrait of collective disdain. Running counter to this difdence, the band
has almost paradoxically maintained a fexible, at times downright cavalier, approach to the
process of recording and releasing material. There is perhaps no better example of this than The
Dark Side of the Moon album, which the band toured and road tested extensively for a full year
before they recorded and released it. This goes against all sensible marketing logic and has left
Pink Floyd at various stages of their career at the mercy of the very bootleggers they clearly
despise. Indeed, unofcial recordings of the gig where The Dark Side of the Moon material was
frst partially unveiled – Portsmouth, January 1972 – emerged within months of the concert

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taking place.6 This contradictory stance is brought into sharp relief on the Early Years anthol-
ogy. As a band Pink Floyd have always been keen to exercise quality control on all material that
has been ofcially released, and yet here they are on a ‘Radio One In Concert’ session from
1970 revealing shaky live harmonies and wavering lead vocals on two songs, ‘Fat Old Sun’ and
‘Embryo’ (the latter a track they disapproved of when it was released in demo form on the
Harvest Records sampler Picnic that same year). In a similar spirit of rapprochement, the 1970
set contains a German documentary on the making of the Atom Heart Mother LP with a heavily
critical commentary. The narrator calls the project kitsch and accuses the band of producing
‘pomp not pop.’ There is a plethora of similarly uncensored material on The Early Years. Freshly
liberated and sympathetically curated it casts the band in a whole new light and allows for some
fascinating re-contextualisation.

Pink Floyd’s musical and stylistic evolution

It has long been convenient for rock historians and documentary makers to locate four clearly
demarcated stages of progression in the career of Pink Floyd: the fedgling R&B band that
developed into a freeform exploratory unit at the height of psychedelia during 1966–1967;
a transitional period between 1968 and 1971 where they further explored the improvisatory
possibilities of long form works; a decade of peak fame between 1972 and 1980 where they
recorded three of the biggest-selling LPs of all time; and a period of personal ructions, split and
subsequent realignment caused by the major fallout between Roger Waters and other members
of the band. In fact, as these newly compiled early recordings illustrate, there was always stylistic
overlap and continuity between these apparently distinct phases.
The sum total of Pink Floyd’s recorded output in the period covered by the Early Years box
set amounted to ten albums in seven years:

1967 The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

1968 A Saucerful of Secrets
1968 The Committee (part soundtrack)
1969 Ummagumma
1969 More (full soundtrack)
1970 Atom Heart Mother
1970 Zabriskie Point (part soundtrack)
1971 Meddle
1972 Obscured by Clouds (soundtrack)
1973 The Dark Side of the Moon

The 27 CDs on the original release were subsequently repacked as six separate collections:
1965–67 Cambridge St/ation; 1968 Germin/ation; 1969 Dramatis/ation; 1970 Devi/ation; 1971
Reverber/ation and 1972 Obfusc/ation. A further portion of the original set – 1967–72 Continu/
ation – has not at the time of writing been issued as a stand-alone release. It is these frst six
volumes that I want to examine in order to build a more nuanced picture of the band’s early
development. Contained on the Cambridge St/ation 1965–67 set were Pink Floyd’s earliest
known demos, a group of six tracks recorded at Decca Studios early in 1965. I have made the
point elsewhere that given the sheer amount of possibilities open to beat groups in the mid-
1960s, it must have been a fair refection of the quality of these demos that no ofers were made
to sign the band.

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Original guitarist Bob Klose remembers the band auditioning for the pop show Ready Steady
Go and entering Melody Maker’s annual beat contest without success.7 Sponsored American-
style ‘Battle of Bands’ competitions were commonplace in and around the London club scene,
with the incentive of a recording contract often on ofer for the winner. Ofshore pirate radio
was in its ascendancy, and stations such as Radio London and Radio City also held beat group
competitions. As late as 1967, the ITV pop magazine show Come Here Often was holding a
televised group and singer competition with a studio recording session with producer George
Martin on ofer for the winners. Despite such extensive opportunities at a time when the pop
industry was engaged in a cycle of over production that would have bankrupted many other
industries, Pink Floyd remained unsigned until early 1967. Listening to those early demos, it is
perhaps not hard to see why.
As with the John Latham sessions, these earliest recordings were missing, presumed lost, for
many years. Apart from the two tracks which had appeared on bootleg, they had not been heard
by the public until the Cambridge St/ation set appeared in 2011. The recordings reveal a band still
clearly fnding its feet, tentative, in thrall to its infuences, semi-competent. ‘Lucy Leave’ is by far
the most distinctive of the fve tracks. The fragmentary lyric is delivered in Syd Barrett’s oddly
untutored singing style – constricted, hysteria-tinged and already containing trace elements of
what Roy Hollingsworth latter called ‘a well-spoken whine.’8 ‘Double O Bo’ utilises the Bo
Diddley ‘shave and a haircut two bits’ rif, with Barrett singing in a caricature American accent.
They sound like any number of bands who would have been honing their craft in youth clubs
and village halls at the time. The lyrics, witty in a schoolboy-ish kind of way, sound like they
were hatched in the 6th form common room or tech college canteen. ‘Walk with Me Sydney,’
a Roger Waters composition, is more amateur school review pop, the residue of Variety and
Footlights satire sifting down to these ex-Cambridge grammar school boys. Over ‘Tobacco
Road’ chords, Barrett and guest vocalist Juliette Gale recite a litany of failings – ‘Meningitis,
peritonitis/DTs and a washed-up brain’ – that hint at Waters’ future firtations with the macabre.
By the time that somewhat tiresome ‘fat feet/fallen arches’ chorus comes around for a third
time, it is clear that this is a band not yet fully committed to a full-time career in the pop music
industry. Waters’ sense of humour, always darker and more sardonic than Barrett’s, was some-
what overshadowed in the early days, surfacing only briefy on the frst two Pink Floyd albums,
but it was already in place here, albeit in a somewhat forced cabaret club style. ‘Remember Me’
is declaimed gratingly and unconvincingly by Bob Klose. Any original musicality is provided
by Rick Wright’s heavily modulated electric piano, which hints at improvisatory textures Pink
Floyd would later explore extensively. ‘I’m a King Bee’ is a mediocre cover of a Slim Harpo
blues (also recorded by The Rolling Stones), with Barrett attempting a passable impression of
Mick Jagger’s drawl and Bob Klose playing a rudimentary slide guitar solo and harmonica.
Wright is clearly the most accomplished musician in the band at this point. On ‘Butterfy,’
he plays the kind of desiccated blues chords that would become a key feature of the band’s
harmonic structure as it developed its early style. It is fascinating to hear it here in gestation.
The bridge of ‘Butterfy’ anticipates the ‘see you’ refrain in ‘Apples and Oranges.’ Barrett’s lyric
veers erratically between the cartoon macabre: ‘I won’t squeeze you dead/Aiming through your
head’; the self-consciously poetic: ‘I won’t write your name/in Latin in the rain’ and the languid
semi-detached distancing of his later solo work: ‘sometimes when I watch you/I stretch out
my hands to touch you.’ Any melodic charm the song possesses is ofset by Barrett’s pastiche of
braggadocio posturing. He sounds the least likely of macho singers. Heard at 50 years remove,
this hollow machismo sounds faintly risible now, but from Keith Relf of the Yardbirds to Paul
Jones in Manfred Mann, a whole generation of well-bred London and home counties boys was

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learning to adopt the backdoor blues mannerisms of their Chess studio heroes. This mutated
form of blues vaudeville was the lingua-franca of an entire generation, as newly masculinised
forms of rock song attempted to move away from the courtship rituals and music industry
norms of pop writing.

Pink Floyd and the avant-garde

Hundreds of bands started out like this in the 1960s, but not many progressed in the way that
Pink Floyd did. These early recordings on the Early Years throw into sharp relief the monumen-
tal leap in musical development made by the band. Initially and somewhat quaintly they were
billed as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’ and yet somehow, they progressed from these rudimentary
derivative recordings to ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’ in barely 18 months.
This is a band who by the end of the decade would be seriously contemplating making an entire
LP featuring the sound of household gadgets. Elsewhere, the 1970 Atom Heart Mother album
featured a track called ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,’ where musical interludes were interspersed
and cross-layered with assemblage recordings of their roadie Alan Styles free associating about
food, life on the road and the universe as we know it. The band even performed this number
on stage for a short period.
Pink Floyd’s avant-garde credentials were born partly out of proximity and happenstance;
they were in exactly the right places at the right time. The wider cultural milieu of the
Cambridge-based members of the band (Syd Barrett, Bob Klose, Roger Waters and David Gil-
mour) was staunchly progressive middle- or upper middle–class. In Cambridge there were three
art cinemas showing European new wave flms and regular Happenings which incorporated the
contemporary avant-garde infuence of Black Mountain College luminaries such as John Cage
and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the concrete and beat versifers of the English poetry
underground. Montage, collage, action painting, free jazz, found objects and music concrete
style tape manipulation were all part of the fabric of experimentation at this time. When the
members of the band were students, they lodged in the North London house of Mike Leonard,
a lecturer at Hornsey College of Art. Leonard also ran an embryonic Light and Sound workshop
which would become an integral feature of the group’s musical explorations. London at this
time had a vibrant fast-developing scene full of fruitful cross-genre activity. At many of Pink
Floyd’s early gigs, at the Notting Hill Free School, for instance, and at UFO, they fully absorbed
the creative possibilities of immersive environments and mixed media. They performed with
the pioneering free-form unit AMM on numerous occasions and on bills that featured poets,
dance troupes and jazz groups.

John Latham
Freshly contextualised, the John Latham tapes ofer an audible reminder of both the band’s
creative aspirations and its musical limits. At least at ease with avant-garde collaboration,
they were not always competent exponents of it: From the frst of the nine John Latham
extracts, it becomes clear that it is Rick Wright and Syd Barrett who are most comfortable
working within an improvisatory framework. As on the free-form sections of ‘Interstellar
Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine,’ it is their interplay that most successfully realises the
band’s sonic palette. For the most part, Roger Waters restricts himself to simple rudimentary
bass patterns.
Nick Mason, whose style was intrinsically suited to the early development of the band, sounds
out of his depth here. Pink Floyd could not have accommodated a pyrotechnic drummer –

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a rock Elvin Jones fgure like Mitch Mitchell or Keith Moon – but Mason was, nevertheless,
utterly essential in helping shape Pink Floyd’s overall dynamic. As with Ringo Starr in The
Beatles, it is hard to envisage what the band would have sounded like without him. It is Mason,
for instance, as much as Syd Barrett, who adheres to the Bo Diddley rhythmic template in many
of their early recordings. And it is his tympani, toms and cymbal crescendos that colourise much
of their best abstract work in the late 1960s. On the John Latham recordings, however, his com-
pulsive clattering rapidly becomes irritating. He betrays all the traits of the improvisatory novice
by either duplicating, or call and responding, in a somewhat hackneyed fashion to the Morse
beeps and polytonal textures explored by Wright and Barrett. On sections I and 4 he launches
into furries of overactivity singularly unsuited to the interplay between organ and guitar. He
also commits the cardinal improvisatory sin of overplaying. Improvisation requires discipline,
empathy, the ability to live in a permanent ‘now’ while remaining alert to the possibilities of
the compositional dynamic as it is evolving. Too many rock bands at the time, incapable of
emulating the improvisatory contingencies of jazz, simply either sped up the tempo or locked
in to a basic boogie rhythm which everyone else then felt compelled to follow. No matter how
adept the leading players were, they would more often than not be shackled by the fundamental
impulses of the novice. Anyone who saw a live rock band in the late 1960s or early 1970s jam-
ming to the limits of their capabilities would have recognised these tendencies. For the most
part the John Latham extracts sound indecisive. Stripped of their wider mixed media context,
they merely come across as tentative, disorderly, directionless.
David Toop, having fnally heard these grail-like recordings, concluded:

what it sounds like, this rarity of rarities, is an illustration of why free improvisation is
difcult, needs experience, practice, technique, a sense of purpose. Richard Wright
reveals unfulflled promise. . . . Barrett is abrasively caught between rifs and a wan-
dering bottleneck; Mason is clearly at a loss and seeks salvation in whatever repetition
is thrown his way, usually by the clicking bass of Roger Waters. All very fascinating,
a mystery solved but seriously, we’d all be better of listening to AMM’s frst record.9

As Toop suggests, it is Wright’s reedy Farfsa Compact Duo, generously manipulated with
Binson Echorec and wah-wah, that shapes these sketches, and it is the reputation of Wright
which is most consolidated not just on the Latham session but on the early years recordings as a
whole. Wright’s role in the early Pink Floyd was central but has subsequently been downplayed,
a process of critical devaluation that began when he took on an increasingly less prominent role
in shaping the band’s creativity during the latter part of the 1970s.

Te infuence of Rick Wright

Shortly after Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd in April 1968, they made a series of promotional flms
that were shown on the Belgian TV show Tienerklanken. Filmed partly in the studio, intercut
with footage shot in a Brussels park, they show the band, awkwardly at times, lip synching to
recordings made with Barrett. On ‘Paintbox,’ new recruit David Gilmour is flmed in half-lit
longshot; there is more than a suggestion here that he is being passed of as Barrett. On ‘See
Emily Play,’ the band are required to play about in the park like it is still director Dick Lester’s
1965. The Floyd were not unique in this. In an era when the music industry frequently betrayed
a limited perception of what could be achieved in a three-minute promotional feature, every-
one from Cream to The Move and Procol Harum were flmed being self-consciously crazy in
a park. It seems utterly incongruous now to watch a band that had made such a central feature

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of light shows and mixed media in its live act still being requested to comply with the norms of
showbusiness and the commercial choreography of the beat era.
While Roger Waters and David Gilmour took it in turns to mime Barrett’s vocal parts
on TV shows, it was Rick Wright who ofered musical continuity with the Barrett muse.
Wright had sung the verses on ‘Matilda Mother,’ his airy enunciation providing a sympathetic
counterpoint to Barrett’s startling and abrasive interventions in the chorus lines. Wright also
sang lead vocal on ‘Astronomy Domine,’ side one track one on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
and a lynchpin of the band’s live repertoire until the early 1970s. A clutch of songs Wright
wrote during this period: ‘Paintbox,’ ‘See Saw,’ ‘Remember a Day’ and ‘It Would Be So Nice’
all sound like attempts to emulate the Barrett style with their mixture of childlike charm
and frail melancholia. ‘Paintbox’ was the B-side of the fnal Barrett-era single ‘Apples and
Oranges.’ ‘Remember a Day’ was Pink Floyd’s frst post-Barrett single and their penultimate
1960s release before, like so many underground bands, they eschewed the commercial impera-
tives of 45s aimed at the Top 30. ‘See Saw’ and ‘Remember a Day’ frst appeared on the Sau-
cerful of Secrets LP and sound like swansongs to psychedelia. ‘Paintbox’ has elements of both
‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Penny Lane,’ with its discernible air of wistful detachment, of feeling
that reality is illusory and ever shifting. Its lyric ‘I opened the door to an empty room’ ofers a
similar dreamlike sense of escape to that found in the conclusion of ‘Bike,’ where the workings
of ‘the other room’ chime diferently to what has gone before. The ‘why can’t we play today/
why can’t we stay this way?’ refrain of ‘Remember A Day’ ofers a tangible echo of Syd Bar-
rett’s own evocations of suspended adulthood. Barrett himself contributes a piercing desolate
slide guitar on what was one of his fnal studio contributions to the band. ‘See Saw’ is the most
exotic of Wright’s Floyd compositions, another kindergarten reverie in waltz time, lyrically
infused with images of childhood games and sibling rivalries. There’s also a very Barrettesque
‘so there’ in the chorus. Beatles-infuenced imagery also manifests itself in the girl who sells
plastic fowers (instead of ‘poppies from a tray’). Musically, it is augmented by exquisite piano
runs and the portentous swell of a mellotron. The chorus has an exotic lilt, with the long-
ing refrain ‘another time/another day’ punctuated by Wright’s marimba, which plays a mock
exotic Japanese motif. ‘It Would Be So Nice’ has all the period charm of a 1968 single from a
band that would probably rather not be making singles anymore. A choral wall of sound in the
intro gives way to a jaunty rhythm and facile throwaway verses, all of which is accompanied
by parodic backing vocals. The whole thing slips comfortably into the time-honoured twee-
ness of the era. ‘Evening Standard’ is replaced by the inauthentic sounding ‘Daily Standard’ in
order to please the BBC censors and guarantee airplay. Once again Barrett’s spectral presence
casts melancholy shadows. The ‘let’s try it another way’ of ‘See Emily Play’ fnds emotional
counterpoint in Wright’s ‘there can be no other way.’
If Rick Wright’s lyrical contributions ofer trace elements of Barrett’s childlike musings, it is
the ethereal droning sustain of his keyboard that is the key element of the band’s sound through-
out 1968 and 1969. The 11-eleven minute title track of A Saucerful of Secrets, represented in
several live versions on The Early Years, is a Wright showcase. ‘That’s the sort of music they
should have coming out of churches’ intones John Peel reverentially at the conclusion of the
Radio One Live In Concert version, from June 25, 1968. On the original album version, the
eerie slow shifting chords of the opening section give way to Nick Mason’s rhythmic skittering
and conclude with a baroque meditation on organ accompanied by celestial voices. As numer-
ous live versions reveal, the piece evolves considerably throughout the late 1960s. By the time
a live version appears on the Ummagumma album in 1969, the track ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ has
developed an architectural splendour that was only hinted at in the original studio recording.

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When they formed the band in 1964, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright were
all architectural students. Wright abandoned his architectural studies after a year to attend the
Royal College of Music, but it is the keyboard player who shapes the band’s soundworld at the
start of the post-Barrett era. He is, in efect, Pink Floyd’s chief architect during this period.
Those lengthy keyboard extemporisations were absorbed by fans as something akin to hippie
devotional music. They helped shape what became known in Germany in the late 1960s as
krautrock or kosmische music, and they represent a sonic legacy line that stretches all the way
from the early Tangerine Dream albums to the work of ambient dance pioneers like The Orb.

Rurality in the music of Pink Floyd

Another clear development within the Pink Floyd sound of the late 1960s, which the Early Years
anthologies usefully teases out, is a kind of elegant folksy pastoral. This style remains distinct
from the psychedelic fairy tales and ‘doll’s house darkness’ of the Syd Barrett era and presents a
facet of the band that would feature prominently for a number of years until it was eclipsed by
the weightier conceptual concerns of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here albums.
A clutch of songs recorded during this period wind their way gracefully into the band’s oeuvre,
much like the River Cam meanders through Grantchester Meadows. This stylistic tendency
reaches its crowning moment on the BBC Top Gear programme of May 12, 1969, with a ses-
sion that features ‘Grantchester Meadows,’ ‘Cymbaline,’ ‘The Narrow Way’ and ‘Green Is the
Colour.’ A sequence of tracks on CD1 of 1969 Dramatis/ation commencing with the ‘Seabirds’
instrumental outtake from More and ‘Embryo’ and concluding with the May  1969 Top Gear
session capture the band at their post-Barrett peak. These tracks also formed the backbone of
‘The Man’ and ‘The Journey,’ the music suite Pink Floyd toured extensively that summer and,
as its inclusion on 1969 Dramatis/ation would suggest, could easily have formed an album in its
own right. Embellished with simple sound efects – seagulls, crashing waves, a wind machine –
these songs represent Pink Floyd at their most carefree and bucolic. Even the astral travelogue
of ‘Cirrus Minor’ is sufused with birdsong and images of wet willow meadows and mossy
churchyards.
‘Cirrus Minor,’ ‘Green Is the Colour’ and ‘Cymbaline’ featured on the More soundtrack.
‘Grantchester Meadows’ and ‘The Narrow Way’ were respectively part of Roger Waters’ and
David Gilmour’s solo contributions to Ummagumma. This pastoral style is still evident in 1970
on side two of Atom Heart Mother, in Waters’ ‘If ’ and Gilmour’s ‘Fat Old Sun.’ Numerous ver-
sions of these songs appear on 1969 Dramatis/ation and 1970 Devi/ation, and they spring fully
formed from the psychogeography of Cambridge. Cambridge must be one of the few places
in the British Isles where cows graze on meadowland near to the city centre, as they do on the
Fen Causeway. In the 1960s the narrow lanes, winding alleyways and passageways of the city
were full of bookshops which spilled their surplus stock out onto the street. In any number of
roads at that time you could gaze into the windows of terraced housing and see cramped front
rooms walled with shelving, unmistakably the tenancy of professors and dons, men and women
of eminence. The willow-lined River Cam winds through town, past the unchanging archi-
tecture of the colleges, past the willowed banks which runs from St. Johns College in the north
down to Queens College in the south, an area that is known locally as ‘The backs.’ From there
the river runs on into the open green pastures of Grantchester. It is easy to ofer a picturesque
tourist vision of all this: idly punting children of privilege, bicycling eccentrics and the like, but
all these associations seeps efortlessly into the languorous tempo of Pink Floyd’s fnest acoustic
compositions.

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Soundtracks
These gentle unassuming songs are not without an element of menace and unease. There is an
unsettling moment in ‘If,’ when Waters almost disarmingly sings ‘please don’t put your wires in
my brain,’ giving a hint of lyrical concerns to come. ‘Cymbaline,’ another Waters composition,
mixes neo-gothic neurosis and music business exploitation, again themes that would become
integral to Pink Floyd’s conceptual armoury throughout the next decade, particularly in the
increasingly partisan and dystopian lyrics of Roger Waters. Evident in much of the band’s late
1960s work is a widescreen flmic quality that lends itself so well to their soundtrack record-
ings. Pink Floyd were commissioned to contribute music to four flms during this period:
Max Steur’s The Committee (1968), Barbet Schroeder’s More (1969), Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point (1970) and Schroeder’s La Vallee/Obscured by Clouds (1972). In 1973 they also
contributed incidental music to a performance by Roland Petit’s newly founded Ballet National
de Marseille. While rock music flm soundtracks became increasingly common during the era
of Easy Rider, few bands were invited to contribute an entire album and certainly no one scored
them as prolifcally as Pink Floyd.
Soundtrack writing disrupts the chronology of Pink Floyd album releases in a variety of
interesting and novel ways. These commissions gave the band working space in which to shufe
and recycle themes from works in progress and to add further tonal colour to musical tenden-
cies mapped out on their frst three studio albums. ‘The Committee part 7,’ for instance, was
an early version of ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene,’ while ‘Explosion’ in Zabriskie Point bor-
rows recognisable elements from the slow, menacing build of ‘Eugene.’ Among the unreleased
Zabriskie Point tracks featured on 1970 Devi/ation were ‘The Riot Scene,’ which was the blue-
print for ‘Us and Them’ on The Dark Side of the Moon, while the pulsebeat that fades in at the
beginning of ‘Childhood’s End’ on Obscured by Clouds resurfaced on The Dark Side of the Moon
on ‘Time.’ Elsewhere, ‘Love Scene’ (version 7) and ‘Unknown Song’ (Take 1) feature sequences
from David Gilmour’s ‘The Narrow Way’; ‘Quicksilver,’ on the More soundtrack, takes as its
musical cue the sound efects coda of ‘Bike’, and Roger Waters’ bass fgure from ‘Let There Be
More Light appears in a slower tempo on More’s ‘Dramatic Theme.’ In addition, the organ and
Echorec motifs of ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ crop up on numerous tracks, on ‘Love Scene’ (ver-
sions 1 and 2) on the unreleased Zabriskie Point recordings, for instance; on the main title theme
of More; and on ‘Absolutely Curtains,’ the closing track on Obscured by Clouds. Numerous other
examples can be cited in the band’s soundtrack recordings where musical motifs are borrowed
from or contribute to works to be found pieces other the ofcial albums. Because of the way
chronological and developmental fow is disrupted on The Early Years, we now have a more
rounded picture of the degree of pragmatism that the band applied towards its working practises.
Soundtrack commissions allowed the band to do several other things, all of them benefcial
to their creativity. On the one hand, the discipline of reacting to visual cues with a stopwatch
honed their craft skills to precision and resulted in some exquisite miniatures. It also aforded
them the opportunity to explore freeform impressionistic ways of working without the over-
riding need to think in terms of a polished fnished product. There is no structural arc and sense
of resolution in much of their best flm work. Soundtrack cues often foat in and out with all
the weightlessness of proto-ambient music. Soundtracks also allowed the band to indulge musi-
cal borrowings in a way that was largely absent from their ofcial albums, where the emphasis
was more on innovation. This is particularly evident on Obscured by Clouds, where there is a
relaxed, country aspect to songs such as ‘Wot’s . . . Uh the Deal,’ ‘Mudmen’ and ‘Stay.’ There
is an undertow of this infuence in much English rock of the period inspired, in part, by the
roots Americana of the frst two Band albums: Music from Big Pink and The Band; by The Byrds’

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The Notorious Byrds Bothers and Sweetheart of the Rodeo LPs; and by the frst two Crosby, Stills
and Nash and Young LPs. In their soundtrack work, Pink Floyd rif unselfconsciously on these
leanings in a way that they rarely did in their ofcial band releases. Obscured by Clouds, for
instance, may be more structurally orthodox than their previous soundtrack albums, but its lev-
ity of touch sharply contrasts with the conceptual gravitas of The Dark Side of the Moon, which
the band was working on during the same period. The Zabriskie Point tracks reveal a band
that sounds like Crosby, Stills and Nash one minute (‘Crumbling Land’/‘On the Highway’)
and Cream the next (‘Aeroplane’). ‘Nile Song,’ and its thematic reprise ‘Ibiza Bar,’ on More are
among the heaviest tracks the band ever recorded and give early indications of Roger Waters’
more foreboding compositions on The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and
The Wall. Re-contextualised by The Early Years, More reveals itself to be the great lost Pink Floyd
album, more structurally cohesive than A Saucerful of Secrets and with more substantial songs than
Meddle. Heard anew, it is Pink Floyd’s Balearic album.10
In the early 1970s Pink Floyd made a conscious and concerted attempt to move away from
the stylistic trappings of what was referred to at the time as ‘space rock.’ By then it had become
clear that ‘space rock’ was a genre option, a musical language like any other, with an identif-
able tonal vocabulary, sonic leitmotifs and lyrical themes. In particular, Roger Waters shrewdly
recognised that this could easily become a musical cul de sac. By the time Atom Heart Mother
and Meddle were released, in 1970 and 1971, respectively, the band had signifcantly moved on
from the fnite spatial territory of space rock. Musically, they become weightier. When he frst
joined the band in 1968, David Gilmour eased his way in by exploring similar spacy textures
and slide guitar abstractions to the man he replaced. By 1970, he had started to fnd his own
style, and his playing became noticeably more assertive and full-bodied. Rick Wright switched
from Farfsa organ to Hammond, and its chunkier sound began to make similar substantive
inroads into the band’s sound. Roger Waters, who had clearly had enough of setting the controls
for the heart of sun, instructed the band’s sleeve designers Hipgnosis to make the sleeve of the
follow up to Ummagumma as non-cosmic as possible. Storm Thorgerson promptly went out into
the Hertfordshire countryside and photographed a Friesian cow. As a belligerent art statement,
it is as good as any Pink Floyd ever came up with: an anti-cover, a frm response to anyone who
assumed the band would be content to have star clusters, dayglo graphics and fsheye lenses on
their sleeves (and indeed their light show backdrops) forever more. It is also a very Cambridge
gesture, a nod to those cows who graze with docile indiference to their surroundings on the
Fen Causeway Meadows or chew the cud in the dewy splendour of Grantchester Meadows.
Atom Heart Mother is a portentous piece of work, not entirely successful in its execution
but classical in ambition. Stripped down to demo form, sans brass and choir – as it is on the
1970 Devi/ation box set – you hear the Bach and Booker T roots of the piece. Indeed, the
Funky Dung section – with Gilmour’s Steve Cropper–inspired Stratocaster playing and Wright’s
chunky Hammond chords – could easily pass of as a Booker T and the MGs work from the
period. Even at their stratospheric peak in 1967, the band frequently extemporised on basic
R&B structures. The Live in Stockholm set featured on Cambridge St/ation will have come as a
revelation to anyone who is only familiar with Norman Smith’s clean and polished production
on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn album. With ‘vocals recorded at less than optimum level,’11 the
listener can concentrate on the sheer abrasive instrumental energy of tracks like ‘Reaction in
G’ and ‘Scream Thy Last Scream.’ In many ways, the new musical direction undertaken in 1970
was, in fact, a return to core principles. By the time Pink Floyd appeared on the Radio One
In Concert Session contained on the 1971 Reverber/ation set, ‘Fat Old Sun’ had been infated
from a languid acoustic strum to a ten-minute rock jam. ‘Embryo’ was similarly expanded, los-
ing much of its former eeriness in the process. ‘One of These Days’ similarly dispels with the

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motoric force evident on the Meddle LP version and is stripped down to a 12-bar boogie work-
out that, in retrospect, sounds like a fast-tempo dry run for the version of ‘Money’ that would
appear on The Dark Side of the Moon. Throughout this period, Gilmour’s guitar is meatier and
given free rein to solo. It, rather than Rick Wright’s keyboard, begins to dominate the music
from this point on; everything is more bluesy, as the band emerge from its former reliance on
echo and reverb.
‘Atom Heart Mother’ was the frst major long-form piece composed by Pink Floyd that rep-
resented something more substantial and cohesive than their previous semi-improvised work-
outs. Taking up a whole side of the album, the 23-minute title piece contains moments of great
beauty. The choral movements in particular have something of Stravinsky’s ‘Song of Psalms’
about them, while Ron Geesin’s brass arrangements evoke more recent contemporary classical
works like Michael Tippett’s ‘Praeludium for Brass, Bells and Percussion’ (1962). Unlike less
successful collaborations in this feld (for example Deep Purple with Orchestra, or Five Bridges Suite
by The Nice), the augmentation never seems bolted on. Atom Heart Mother bears a structural
confdence and awareness of musical resolution rarely evident in the band’s earlier long-form
work. There is a sense of striving, of moving forward. Viewed at almost 50 years’ remove, the
densely layered complexity of The Dark Side of the Moon seems only a subtle stylistic shift away,
a simple matter of fne-tuning a few conceptual priorities. In contrast to the weightiness of the
title piece, the songs on side two of Atom Heart Mother sound like a fond requiem to psychede-
lia. The musical interludes on ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ have all the carefree splendour of
the best late 1960s psych pop, while Wright’s ‘Summer of ’68’ would have easily ftted on the
second Syd Barrett solo album, or indeed within a Pink Floyd that been able to accommodate
Barrett’s wayward creative spirit.
In an Australian interview, featured on 1971 Reverber/ation,12 the band is characteristically
unforthcoming. We gather from the few reluctant conversational snippets that there is a lot of
improvisation in rehearsal, less musical rapport in the studio than on stage (‘in fact it’s quite a
scufe,’ admits Gilmour) and that the veto of any displeased band member is the strongest crea-
tive force – a strategy incidentally that was responsible for ‘Vegetable Man’ and ‘Scream Thy
Last Scream’ being withheld from release for over 40 years. By now, the group’s recalcitrance
had become an art form, and it comes as no surprise to learn that the new album, due for
imminent release, does not yet have a name and that the centrepiece on the new record began
life as a series of unrelated musical sequences called ‘Nothing, Parts 1–24.’ Also variously known
as ‘Son of Nothing’ and ‘Return of the Son of Nothing,’ the piece was initially hewn out of
arbitrary rehearsal impulses, honed in full public view in concert and perfected back in the
studio. In many ways this approach represented the boldest and most ambitious aspects of the
band’s methodology up to that point. As working strategies go, it is both painstakingly cautious
and improvisatory, and few other bands have married these oppositional tendencies as well as
Pink Floyd. The piece eventually emerged as ‘Echoes,’ but ‘Nothing’ or ‘Son of Nothing’ would
have made perfectly appropriate titles, suitably perfectly Cagean terminology for a wilfully ran-
dom approach to what would eventually be shaped into a work of considerable substance.13 As
praxis it is perversely zen-like in both its thinking and execution, inchoate germs of non-ideas
that eventually form themselves into tangibility. It is no wonder that there is a certain steadfast
languor to even their grandest works. It takes a lot of random practice to achieve that kind of
equilibrium. In that same Australian interview, Gilmour says, ‘we are into very timeless ageless
sort of moods, atmospherics.’14 As a description of the band’s sound in the late 1960s, it is per-
fect; in the early 1970s, although weightlessness is replaced by gravitas, order and linearity are
restored. The lyrical concerns may be predominantly about alienation and rootlessness, but the
music becomes more grounded.

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On both Atom Heart Mother and Meddle there is a clear sense of a band working towards
what it ultimately wanted to do. Again, it was Roger Waters who insisted that he wanted the
lyrics to be as thematic as the music and the songs to be about specifcs, not generalities. It was
Waters’ desire that themes should fow conceptually in interlinked song cycles and not merely
as impressionistic fragments placed next to each other in an ad hoc manner, as they sometimes
had been on earlier albums. There had always been a conceptual element to Pink Floyd’s work –
an attempt to frame the music thematically within a performance setting – but even on Atom
Heart Mother and Meddle this still entailed a lengthy work taking up one side of the LP, with the
individual member’s song compositions on the other. With The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973
and Wish You Were Here in 1975, the former architectural students fnally achieved their grand
design. As such, the fve years of music gathered together on the Early Years box set reveals the
blueprints, and the compositional components, that went into the making of this design, in
fascinating and remarkably uncensored detail.

Notes
1 Toop, D. (2016). ‘David Toop Listens, Finally, to the John Latham Recordings of Pink Floyd’,
Wire, November  2016.  Retrieved from thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/david-toop-listens-fnally-
to-the-john-latham-recordings-of-pink-foyd.
2 Chapman, R. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London: Faber & Faber.
3 Op. cit. Toop (2016).
4 Radio and Music Magazine (1990). Unpublished.
5 Kevin Howlett, personal communication with the author.
6 See, retrieved 16 April 2020 from, ultimateclassicrock.com/pink-foyd-live-debut-dark-side/.
7 Op. cit. Chapman (2010):54.
8 Roy Hollingsworth reviews Syd Barrett’s Stars. Melody Maker, 31 February 1972. Syd Barrett’s extraor-
dinary dénouement to the song ‘Matilda Mother’ lifts the composition out of mere wistful childhood
reminiscence into much deeper and emotive terrain: ‘For all the time spent in that room/the doll’s
house darkness/old perfume.’
9 Op. cit. Toop (2016).
10 Here I reference the dance music revolution of the late 1980s, where DJs came back from Ibiza and
tried to put into practice what they had heard in the island’s clubs, recontextualising music that would
not normally have been defned under a UK club culture rubric. Due to the adventurous music policy
of DJs like Alfredo at The Café Del Mar, everyone from Chris Rea to Mike Oldfeld found their music
classifed as ‘Balearic.’ What had begun as miscellany from disparate sources became a recognisable
genre.
11 See Early Years sleeve notes. In the 1960s, before the era of Marshall stacks and megawatt PAs, the
sound at gigs could be very rudimentary. Vocals in particular sufered as a result of this. On more than
one Pink Floyd bootleg recording, the singing cannot be heard at all, as is the case here.
12 The Australian TV interview, Randwick Racecourse, Sydney, 15 August 1971.
13 John Cage (1912–1992). An avant-garde composer, theorist and philosopher, Cage made great use of
random chance elements in his compositions. For instance, in certain compositions practitioners were
encouraged to throw the I Ching to determine what course to take at any given moment.
14 Australian TV interview, Sydney, 1971.

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 16
‘CRUISING FOR A BRUISING’
How Te Dark Side of the Moon made Pink
Floyd successful beyond their wildest dreams
and instigated their downfall

Daryl Easlea

Introduction. sofly spoken magic spells

Released in March 1973,1 The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most treasured and debated
albums in the history of popular music. It elevated Pink Floyd from their status as a much
admired and successful ‘heads’ band to a global property. The album had (and still possesses) a
universality that appealed equally to both the group’s long-term fans, and the millions of new-
comers it attracted.
The Dark Side of the Moon had all the necessary elements for long-termers – cosmic design,
gatefold cover, printed lyrics (for the frst time in the band’s releases), free material inside the
sleeve. The fans had lived with the music too, from the frst appearance of this suite of songs,
when it was known as Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics, at The Brighton Dome
in early 1972.2 For the newcomers, here was a complete world to join – akin somewhat today to
novices in the Marvel Cinematic Universe3 – lots of references, a fully established crew, special
guest performances and, once enjoyed, a catalogue to go back and explore, to fesh out your
love for what you have just experienced.
A key factor in the immense commercial success4 of The Dark Side of the Moon was the
universality of its themes. Lyrically: birth, life, ageing, confict, lunacy, decline and death;
Sonically: Everyone has a heartbeat, is aware of the sound of a cash register and what it
signifes,5 recognises the drones that sound like the helicopters in Vietnam, on the news
every night. Pink Floyd, previously seen as chroniclers of the cosmic, were now earthbound,
cataloguing the lives of their listeners.6 Whether long-term or newcomer, pop audiences
were maturing; the ravers from 1967 were, just like Pink Floyd themselves, now all staring
down marriages, mortgages and parenthood. For the group, the success of the album marked
a closure to their frst six years as a signed, working band and elevated them to the status of
well-of musicians.
In this chapter, after examining the background to the album, I shall explore the efect that
success, and the trappings of fame, had on the group, individually and collectively; how it led to
the schism and division that has come to defne Pink Floyd in popular culture while also creat-
ing some of the best-known musical work of the late twentieth century.

306 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-22

 ‘Cruising for a bruising’

Ordinary men?
The story of Pink Floyd has been related so frequently that it is becoming a well-worn folk
myth, and it is dominated by a man who did not write or play a single note on The Dark Side of
the Moon. For approximately 26 months between late 1965 and early 1968, guitarist and vocalist
Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett was the group’s frontman and principal songwriter. Barrett knew bass
player Roger Waters from school in Cambridge; Waters went to study architecture in London,
where he met drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright.
Group friend Nick Sedgwick captured just how striking this band leader was:

Everything that was visible in Syd was impressive except possibly, his height. He was
short, 5’6” or 7”, though one barely noticed this at frst so struck one was by his
extraordinary good looks. Thick black hair, high cheekbones, compact athletic body,
he was, as they say, small but perfectly formed.7

It was clear that Barrett possessed an otherworldliness and a creative spirit, coupled with a
passion for the nascent drug culture in London and Cambridge. The Pink Floyd, as they were
frequently referred to, were signed to EMI in early 1967, and by the July – the apex of ‘The
Summer of Love’ – their second single, ‘See Emily Play,’ was in the UK Top 10, a feat repeated
by their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a month later. By the end of 1967, it was
clear that the pressures of being in a successful band combined with his drug-induced illness
were not compatible. The group had the idea to draft in Barrett’s old Cambridge friend, David
Gilmour, to play guitar and lighten Barrett’s load.
For the early weeks of 1968, Pink Floyd became a fve piece. ‘The Psychedelic Kid left after
about nine months,’ Nick Mason said in 2003. ‘We only started in March 1967 as a professional
band. He was really on the way out at the end of ’67, early ’68.’8 On their way to a gig, Pink
Floyd simply chose not to collect Barrett. It seemed a strange, inconclusive way to efectively
sack your leader. Over the coming years, Barrett’s decline into LSD-triggered illness, although
well chronicled, was not viewed through today’s lens of understanding. Insanity seemed au cou-
rant in the late 1960s and early 1970s – psychiatrist R. D. Laing was a landmark on the London
scene; David Bowie would be writing about his half-brother’s bipolar disorder and John Len-
non would be engaging in Primal Scream therapy; Monty Python would lampoon the medi-
cal condition frequently.9 Barrett’s spectre would haunt the group . . . and was to inform their
best-known works.
Pink Floyd found direction as an art-rock ensemble, without the whimsy that Barrett brought
to the collective. For a while it looked as though Richard Wright might lead the group, but
instead it settled into a four-way split with Gilmour and Waters as the group’s frontmen, simply
by the virtue that they were the ones standing up. The group scored flms, ballets and moon
landings, they wrote conceptual pieces, became a success on the continent and made in-roads
into the American market. They also took part in a flm, directed by Adrian Maben, flmed
principally in the amphitheatre at Pompeii (the city destroyed by the lava fow from Vesuvius in
AD 79). Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival on September 2,
1972, and crowned the era in which the group were adding soundtracks to foreign art movies
and recording in Paris. It also marked closure for the European Pink Floyd, before their success
in America. The flm is nothing to do with stadiums, cherry-bombs, frecrackers or good times;
it is Pink Floyd, alone at the cradle of modern civilisation, making their unusual, space-focused

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music on the site of one of the greatest natural disasters in history with the sun and its rays
refected of the walls . . . and their gong. Pompeii, and its incredible October light, is, in many
ways, one of the stars of the flm; its majesty, eeriness, sense of broken progress and a civilisa-
tion brought to its knees suited Pink Floyd and their audience’s cosmic consciousness. This core
audience’s cosmic consciousness was also about to be expanded.

Te cloud bursts, thunder in your ear

The idea for The Dark Side of the Moon came to Roger Waters during 1971:

I’m not sure when it came to me that one could make an entire album about things
that could impinge upon one’s life in an emotional or physical way. We had a meet-
ing in Nick Mason’s fat somewhere in Camden Town. . . . I remember sitting in his
kitchen looking out at the garden and saying, ‘Hey, boys, I think I’ve got the answer,’
and describing what it could be about.10

In late 1971, The Dark Side of the Moon was written and rehearsed in a studio in West Hamp-
stead.11 Inspired in part by the success of the shorter, poppier, side of Meddle, the songs seemed
focused, with experimental moments undeniably included, but in for the sake of context, not as
an end to themselves. Regrouping in the frst week of 1972, the group opened their UK tour
in Brighton on January 20 for a UK tour that culminated in four nights at the Rainbow in Lon-
don’s Finsbury Park, between February 17 and 20, by that point playing what would become
The Dark Side of the Moon in full. ‘This new piece represented a musical change,’ wrote Miles,
‘focusing on the fears and problems of everyday life, rather than the post-psychedelic space trips
that the earlier music suggested.’12 The early recordings of this live show can be heard in the
Immersion Edition of the album from 2011 and, recently, on streaming services, live in Japan in
March 1972.13 Almost a year before its release, it ofers a glimpse of just how much work and
evolution there was still to come to shape the fnal album: ‘On the Run’ was a lengthy blues
jam, then known as the ‘Travel Sequence’; Wright and Gilmour’s unison vocal on ‘Time,’ pos-
sibly in an attempt to refect ennui, just sounds disinterested.
After a break to record the Pink Floyd rock album Obscured by Clouds in France, the band
played an American tour before moving to Abbey Road in June 1972. It was the studio, and the
possibilities of the studio, that really made the album come alive. The group’s on/of retreat into
the EMI complex in North London was to make the album as synonymous with the studios as
The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had done seven years previously. The album
would be produced by Pink Floyd, with their principal engineer, the 24-year-old Alan Parsons.
Parsons was one of the up-and-coming technical staf at Abbey Road, after working on The
Beatles’ album of the same name and Let It Be, and had already been Pink Floyd’s tape-op on
Atom Heart Mother.14 He was more than just a mere recording engineer, however, adding sug-
gestions for sound, working on the transitions between pieces of music and being able to work
the new 16-track console at the studios.
Pink Floyd had always been perceived as on the cutting edge of developments in technology,
from their original lightshows; their use of the quadrophonic panning Azimuth Co-ordinator
for the Games for May (the ‘Space age relaxation for the climax of spring’) at London’s Queen
Elizabeth Hall on May  12, 1967;15 and incorporating musique concrete into their albums.
They were also pioneering in their use of the synthesiser, something that was discussed in
Maben’s Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. Gilmour talks about whether the equipment is controlling
them or whether they are being controlled by it. Waters adds that it was a question ‘of using

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the tools that are available when they’re available and more and more now there are all kinds
of electronic goodies which are available for people like us to use, who can be bothered. And
we can be bothered.’ Gilmour insists that ‘it’s all extensions of what’s coming out of our heads’
and that these new machines cannot be solely responsible for their success. Waters agrees: ‘It’s
like saying give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton. It’s not true. Give a man
an amplifer and a synthesiser and . . . he doesn’t become us.’16 The new machine in question
was the EMS Synthi VCS3synthesier, a portable modular synthesiser. The group had frst used
one during the Obscured by Clouds sessions in France and now set about exploiting is sound as
much as possible.
Just before the Christmas break of 1972, on returning from their tour of France, Alan
Parsons completed a ‘frst pass’ mix of the album for the group to take away to listen to over
the festive season. It was good, but not right. Rick Wright’s song ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’
which had grown out of the ‘Mortality Sequence,’ had astronaut Gene Cernan’s commentary
from Apollo 17 – at time of writing, the last man to have walked on the moon’s surface. The
group still felt there was work to do, and between January 18 and February 1, 1973, added the
fnal touches to the album. The most noticeable one was that they took up the suggestion by
Parsons to enlist vocalist Clare Torry to emote over Wright’s plaintive piano on ‘The Great Gig
in the Sky.’ In doing so, one of the most-loved Pink Floyd tracks came into being. Producer and
engineer Chris Thomas, who was also looked after by Pink Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke,
also came in to supervise the mix.
The Dark Side of the Moon was released in March 1973, 9 months after the group’s soundtrack
album, Obscured by Clouds, and 16 months since their last studio album, Meddle. Here were ten
tracks, over 43 minutes – Pink Floyd in bite-sized pieces. And here was a truly coherent album,
with its subjects rooted in the everyday. Even the track titles themselves – ‘Breathe,’ ‘Time,’
‘Money,’ ‘Brain Damage’ – refer to stages that people can encounter in everyday life. ‘If there’s
any central message it’s this: this is not a rehearsal,’ Waters said in 2003.17 ‘Brain Damage,’ with
its line ‘and when the band you’re in starts playing diferent tunes, I’ll see you on the dark side
of the moon,’ was about mental disorder in general yet could only evoke the helplessness of the
situation between the group and Barrett. As Schafner (1991) writes, it marked:

The apotheosis of fve years of hit-and-miss experimentation, and fve years of com-

ing to grips with the madness of the man who had given Pink Floyd their name, and
their fame. The title itself has nothing to do with astronomy, but, as Gilmour put it,
‘an allusion to lunacy’.18

Schafner (1991) adds that Pink Floyd’s original manager Peter Jenner was to say The Dark
Side of the Moon was ‘undoubtedly one of the great rock records. Though it was largely about
him, that was the record where they escaped from Syd.’
This all added to the mystique of Pink Floyd and contributed to its success. The Dark Side
of the Moon has a beginning, a middle and an end. You could simply go back to the beginning
and start again. There was little of the noise, squall or difculty that could be found on previ-
ous Pink Floyd albums, but there was lots to explore.19 Waters’ lyrics, printed on the sleeve for
the frst time, espoused enough sixth-form philosophy to be adored in bedrooms of teenagers,
at a time when hearing the word ‘shit’ was daring.20 The album created its own universe: Less
than four minutes in, the tripped-out dread of ‘On the Run’ emerges with the VSC3 bubbling
away, panning, footsteps and a crashing plane; the sound of clocks introducing ‘Time’ evoked
the dark horror of passageways at elderly relatives’ houses; the mixture between experimentation
and melody was in ideal measure.

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The sound efects suggested hidden messages, and Waters’ idea of asking people around the
studio questions and taping their reactions is another key factor in what was to make the album
so revered. Rather than conducting straightforward interviews, Waters put a series of questions
on cards and asked people such as Abbey Road doorman Gerry O’Driscoll, or Wings’ guitarist
Henry McCulloch, to answer them directly to microphone. As Waters wrote in the Shine On
box set, ‘The frst card was something irrelevant and innocuous, like “what’s your favourite col-
our?” and the last was the more enigmatic “what do you think of the dark side of the moon?”
The others included the telling “Are you afraid of dying?” and “Do you ever think you’re going
mad?”’21 Good questions provoke fascinating answers – and the best weave through the album
like a unifying thread. As Mark Blake noted in These Mortal Remains, ‘These feeting, uniden-
tifed voices proclaiming, “I’ve been mad for fucking years” and “there is no dark side of the
moon . . . in fact, it’s all dark” created an atmospheric sub-plot to the music.’22
The reviews were largely favourable: Loyd Grossman wrote in Rolling Stone:

The Dark Side of the Moon . . . seems to deal primarily with the feetingness and deprav-
ity of human life, hardly the commonplace subject matter of rock. ‘Time’ (‘The time
is gone the song is over’), ‘Money’ (‘Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie’).
And ‘Us And Them’ (‘Forward he cried from the rear’) might be viewed as the keys
to understanding the meaning (if indeed there is any defnite meaning) of The Dark
Side of the Moon.23

Tony Stewart said in the NME:

With the possibility of sounding a little hifalutin, Dark Side is about life and the result
is not too pretty a picture, particularly as suggested by ‘Eclipse’. Probably this is Floyd’s
most successful artistic venture. Not only are the lyrics statements of opinion, usually
quite discernible, but they’re enhanced by some clever tape and sound efects. And
there are hideous mad-man laughs frequently recurring.24

Although it could not have been more hidden in plain sight – here was the Madcap. Laughing.25
The Dark Side of the Moon kept on selling. In a year where there seemed to be, in the United
Kingdom at least, an increasing polarity between the singles charts and the albums charts,26 the
LP was very much seen as a lifestyle accessory. Like the other great ‘serious’ work of 1973 –
Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfeld – it was the prog album that it was OK for non-progressive rock
fans to own. It was also very much tied up in the home hi-f explosion of the early-to-mid
1970s, tied into stereo recordings, a million miles away from the mono Dansette of the previous
decade. Tubular Bells played up to this with its warnings on the sleeve: ‘In Glorious Stereo-
phonic Sound: Can also be played on mono equipment at a pinch,’ and ‘This stereo record
cannot be played on old tin boxes no matter what they are ftted with. If you are in possession
of such equipment please hand it into the nearest police station.’27 The hi-f store became a
component part of the UK high street, with listening rooms to demonstrate the audio. The
Dark Side of the Moon, with its Doppler efect footsteps, ticking clocks and explosions, would be
a perfect album for your new home set-up. It became a rite of passage album, borrowed from
older brothers or purchased like a Habitat vase . . . a little something that possibly may make
your life better.
It wasn’t just the music – the Hipgnosis-designed sleeve heralded the high-water mark of the
collaboration between artist and designer. Although a silver surfer design had been mooted, it

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was the lean simplicity of the prism that that the band decided upon, thus creating one of the
most instantly recognisable and distinctive designs of all time:

The idea of the prism came from a series of conversations with the band, especially
with Roger and Rick. Roger spoke about the pressures of touring, the madness of
ambition .  .  . and the triangle is a symbol of ambition. Rick wanted some more
graphic, less pictorial, something as he put it, more stylish than before.28

The triangle refected the importance of the group’s lightshow; the light turns into a heartbeat,
which spreads across the gatefold, before passing through an inverted triangle which returns
the light to a single white beam. If the triangle is ambition, new life, then the inverted triangle
surely signifes the end. The triangle also culminated in a poster image of the pyramids at night-
time, as well as on stickers included deep inside the album’s gatefold sleeve.
In its own quiet and archaic way, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii expanded the band’s reputation
throughout the 1970s in tandem with the success of The Dark Side of the Moon. As the decade
progressed, through one-of and late-night screenings in the United Kingdom and United
States, it did their touring for them. The flm, which had been shot in 1971, had footage added
the following year: Maben arrived at Abbey Road in October and remained around Studio 2
for a couple of days before getting ‘politely thrown out.’ This footage extended the flm to 80
minutes and became the version that gained a general release in summer 1974, after Pink Floyd
had become PINK FLOYD. In the United States it was shown at late night performances; in the
United Kingdom it had special one-of screenings, often with other rock flms. For new fans,
Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (as with their 1971 cut-price sampler, Relics) immediately catapulted
the band back to another era. This version of Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii showed (as they became
glacial and removed) the band sharing lunch and recording in a moment of almost seemingly
Beatlesque bonhomie. It was enough for this writer and countless other viewers to be taken in.

Te root of all evil, today

The root of all evil, indeed; it can be argued that ‘Money,’ the most loved/hated/debated song
on The Dark Side of the Moon (also taken as a single in America) was the track that instigated the
downfall of Pink Floyd. ‘With that sort of success, the audience is coming out and listening to
a big band that’s got a hit single and all that.’ Gilmour said:

They aren’t all necessarily there just for the music, not necessarily there for the reasons that
people who would see us previously would be there. Consequently, a lot of the elements
who like to get out to a show to have a party, so to speak, became obvious for the frst time –
people shouting out for us to play ‘Money’ all through our show. . . . It took a song that
was not my favourite, nor anyone else’s and helped put us into everyone’s consciousness. It
did that job and worked really well, but it left behind something that wasn’t so much fun.29

Gilmour added that ‘We were by no means rich at that time. “Money” was the single that
helped to really break us in America. It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds,
funnily enough.’30 Waters found his collective principles challenged:

Money interested me enormously. I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is it and I have to

decide whether I’m really a socialist or not.’ I’m still keen on a general welfare society,

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but I became a capitalist. You have to accept it. I remember coveting a Bentley like
crazy. The only way to get something like that was through rock or the football pools.
I very much wanted all that material stuf.31

Ironically, perhaps, ‘Money’ is also one of the factors that led to Waters spitting at an unruly
audience member at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal in July 1977, which led directly to The
Wall, Pink Floyd’s second-best known album.
After the release of The Dark Side of the Moon, the band fulflled a US tour, and on Friday
May 18 and Saturday May 19, they played two concerts at London’s Earl’s Court Exhibition
Hall, a triumphant homecoming showcase for the album. Nick Mason said: ‘All the elements
came together, as we presented the piece in its most developed version. The music had been
rehearsed enough to be tight but was new enough to be fresh.’32 Although no footage exists, the
band, augmented by saxophone player Dick Parry and Vicki Brown and Liza Strike on back-
ing vocals, played the frst of the shows that was to typify the rest of their career – with striking
visuals and stunning special efects. After a further US tour through June, for the frst time, the
group had signifcant time of.
Pink Floyd’s evolving lack of direction was underlined by their frst post–The Dark Side of
the Moon forays. They returned to Abbey Road in October 1973 to follow up the album with
Household Objects, an idea that the band had frst considered in the early 1970s. With engi-
neer Alan Parsons, the four members tried to make music out of household objects. Sessions
continued sporadically through to December, but the idea was fnally abandoned. Gilmour
told this writer in 2002: ‘I remember spending an inordinately long-time stretching rubber
bands across matchboxes to get a bass sound – which just ended up sounding like a bass gui-
tar!’ When I enquired whose idea it was, he replied ‘Probably Roger’s – it certainly wasn’t
mine. We spent an awful lot of hours of wasted studio time fafng around.’33 In fact, the next
18 months of Pink Floyd’s career could be encapsulated by the phrase ‘fafng around.’ While
Waters pondered the invisible world, the other members of the band grew their property port-
folios, threw parties and generally bathed in the ennui of the newly rich. As it was clear that
there would not be any new material to come from Pink Floyd for some time, EMI assessed
the situation and, using the opportunity to exploit the group’s back catalogue, released A Nice
Pair, a low-price double collection of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets,
on January 10, 1974; the efect of The Dark Side of the Moon was clear – it was able to reach
No. 21 in the UK charts and remain on the listings for 20 weeks. It achieved gold status by
February 1975.34
Thanks to the all-conquering success of The Dark Side of the Moon, expectations grew, and
more and more people came to see their light show, and as a result, it became a period where
people talked solely about how many tonnes of equipment the group had and numbers of staf
they had to operate their projections rather than the music. In 2011 Gilmour explained:

In this post Dark Side of the Moon period, we were all having to assess what we were in
this business for, why we were doing it and whether we were artists or business people.
Having achieved the sort of success and money out of all of that could fulfl anyone’s
wildest teenage dreams, why we would still want to continue to do it?35

Waters subsequently surmised: ‘But of course, Dark Side of the Moon fnished the Pink Floyd
of once and for all. To be that successful is the aim of every group. And once you’ve cracked
it, it’s all over.’36 Gilmour was later to reply: ‘Roger has said that we may have been fnished at
that point, and he may have been right,’37 but Waters knew why the band stayed together: ‘We

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were frightened of the great out there beyond the umbrella of this extraordinarily powerful and
valuable trade name, Pink Floyd.’38
One of the key factors in accentuating the schism was that the individuals in the group no
longer had to spend so much time in each other’s company – since early 1968, Pink Floyd and
recorded and performed solidly. Gilmour said:

Between 68 and 72, we gigged three or four times a week all the time. It wasn’t
defned as a tour in those days. Later, most of them became sheds all over the country
and Europe, which I’m extremely happy to forget.39

Now they had free time, and Wright, Mason, Waters and Gilmour reunited only to work.
Never a band of pals in the sense of the common view of The Beatles,40 the group’s disparate
individuals began to lead disparate lifestyles. As Waters was the most driven of the four, it was
natural that he should be the one who would accumulate the newest material for consideration
for the group’s future projects. Rick Wright, especially, seemed to needle Waters. Waters told
Uncut in 2003:

We always had our diferences – witness what happened later on, the ways we parted
in 1979, 1980 or whenever it was. He and Dave, I think, always resented the idea
that I put a lot of emphasis upon emotion, politics, philosophy and all those things
that they felt shouldn’t really be a component. They’ve always been central to all my
work.41

This change in circumstance profoundly afected Roger Waters. He moved from a being
a dreamer with a dark heart to an essayist sputtering bile and invective after The Dark Side of
the Moon. By gradually decreasing the contribution of the group’s other three members, the
Pink Floyd albums that followed saw melodies fall away and, by the time of 1983’s The Final
Cut – released almost ten years to the day of The Dark Side of the Moon – efectively function as
background music for Waters’ Sprechgesang.42
By 1987, Waters had acrimoniously split from Pink Floyd, who incensed him further by
carrying on in his absence, just like he had done when the group failed to pick up Syd Barrett
back in January 1968, emphasising beyond doubt his irony-laden line ‘Oh by the way, which
one’s Pink?,’ from ‘Have A Cigar’ on 1975’s Wish You Were Here album. The David Gilmour-
led Pink Floyd – with Rick Wright (whom Gilmour had the audacity to recall to the line-up
after Waters fred him in 1980) and Nick Mason – made three further albums before fnally
laying the band to rest in 2015. All were signifcant commercial successes, and the tours that
accompanied A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell were huge box ofce. A feet-
ing détente was granted when the four players who made The Dark Side of the Moon reunited
for Bob Geldof ’s Live 8 in 2005; playing a fve-song set, which featured both ‘Breathe’ and
‘Money’ from that album. ‘Breathe’ drifted away into the London sky with all the ethereal grace
as it did back in 1973.
But no matter what faction of the group you side with, The Dark Side of the Moon is simply
there, in the middle of it all. David Gilmour’s Pink Floyd played it as complete work on his
group’s The Division Bell tour in 1994, and Roger Waters followed suit as a solo artist in 2006.
In addition to the preservation of the work by its main protagonists, The Dark Side of the Moon
has been central to the ‘heritage rock’ industry and perfect for the new streaming generation. It
was frst issued on CD in Japan in 1983 and then in the United States and Europe in 1984; it
was part of the nine-disc Shine On CD box set in 1992. To mark its 20th anniversary in 2003,

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a boxed CD edition was issued. For its 30th in 2003, a 5.1 stereo mix was undertaken by James
Guthrie.43 Further to this, in 2011 a six-disc boxed-set ‘Immersion Edition’ centring solely on
the album was released, and then, as the revival of its original format was underway, a new vinyl
edition was issued in 2016.
In 2003, New York-based reggae collective The Easy All Stars recorded a reggae version of
the album – Dub Side of the Moon – which became a worldwide festival staple,44 a tacit recogni-
tion of how many people have smoked marijuana with the album as a soundtrack. That year,
Waters himself acknowledged the fact:

I don’t see anything wrong, when you’re in your adolescence, with getting stoned, if
you’re aware of the fact that you’re getting stoned because you want to, and because
you can have that luxury. You have no responsibilities at that age, particularly. It may
well be that it’s important to lie around stoned, listening to music for a year or two.45

Gilmour added:

There’s a lot going on, lots of stuf semi-hidden, all sorts of layers, it’s not that simple
and easy to get it. The more you concentrate, the better you listen and the more you’ll
get out of it. The classic stoner thing of a reefer and a pair of headphones does, I’m
sure, get you an awful lot out of it.46

In 2010, another group who were weaned on Pink Floyd, The Flaming Lips from Oklahoma
City, recorded a tribute version of the album, and in 2013, Tom Stoppard wrote the play Darkside,
incorporating The Dark Side of the Moon, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 for the album’s
40th anniversary on August 26, 2013, and released as a CD/book in November of that year.
The Dark Side of the Moon unites both casual fan and collector. Specialist record site Discogs
noted that on September 11, 2020, The Dark Side of the Moon reached the threshold of

1000 diferent versions . . . making it one of the most populated MRs [master releases]
in the entire database. . . . New and previously undocumented versions of The Dark
Side of the Moon get added to the database frequently making it one of the most inter-
esting titles to focus on for ‘deep collectors.’47

Conclusion. the sun is eclipsed by the moon

The fnal line of The Dark Side of the Moon, ‘the sun is eclipsed by the moon,’ could be inter-
preted as a metaphor for the rest of Pink Floyd’s career and the seeds of the group’s demise.
Undoubtedly, the success of the album brought David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters
and Rick Wright all new cars, caviar and four-star daydreams but created the hairline fractures
that would lead to their downfall. Waters said in 2003:

We had fulflled the basic need we had to work together as a group. We’d cracked it
after The Dark Side of the Moon, and we clung together. I’m quite glad we did. We
did some very good work after that. But we’d fulflled the dream, and to us, in some
fundamental sense, it was over, so it was all downhill from then on.48

To this day, The Dark Side of the Moon – although 1979’s The Wall comes close – is the record
that is most associated with Pink Floyd. When the group’s Shine On box set was released in late

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1992 to mark the zenith of the CD era, the lavish Storm Thorgerson-designed accompanying
hard-backed book inside featured an essay ‘The Rock Album That Wouldn’t Go Away,’ unpack-
ing all the potential reasons for The Dark Side of the Moon’s prolonged success. Nick Mason
harumphed inside:

You won’t get an explanation from me. You’re quite right there’s no way this record
is stunningly better than twenty or forty albums of the last two decades . . . it was
the right idea, the right sound. Also, the cover art was appealing. Something came
together . . . it was the most strange sort of combination.49

Nick Grifths, who became the band’s long-serving sound engineer encapsulated its appeal
thus: ‘Dave made people enjoy it, and Roger made them think. This combination worked really
well.’50 Richard Wright said in 2003:

It was a very exciting and creative time in Abbey Road, a very happy time, very har-
monious. We weren’t the best of friends, but we were very together. We were all into
this project, and we worked extremely hard and quite fast. It was, quite honestly, the
last time, the end of that era of the band working very closely and creatively together.51

David Gilmour told me in 2002:

Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discus-
sions of infnity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns
it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I don’t claim responsibility and don’t
hold any great truck with.52

However, it is that magical, mystical realm that continues to attract new admirers around
the world.
Pink Floyd will forever now be seen in terms of the power struggle between Roger Waters
(the words and ideas) and David Gilmour (the music and soul), and The Dark Side of the Moon
saw the roots of this manifest. All four of the group were coming to terms with their new-found
success and a dawning realisation, as in the marriages that were breaking and forming around
them, that the individuals who made up the institution, thrown together and taken on a wild
ride – had little in common.
Like a serious artiste who scores a one-hit wonder, or a classically trained actor who inad-
vertently fnds success in a TV sitcom, the ever-present proximity of The Dark Side of the Moon
to the four individuals who made it remains a double edged-sword, as they were captured
forever in that moment. It is the key reason that they have been able/were able to sustain their
success and lifestyle, yet to a great extent, it obscured their collective and individual bodies of
work. Despite being their greatest success, and, for many, the work that strikes the greatest
resonance, The Dark Side of the Moon can be assessed as the album that instigated the downfall
of Pink Floyd.

Notes
1 The date of the album’s UK release date vary according to sources. March 24 is widely recognised
(Miles, 1980); Glenn Povey ofers March 23, while other less reputable sources suggest March 1.
2 The concert had to be abandoned due to equipment failure, meaning the frst full rendition of it was
at Portsmouth Guildhall the following night. When it became apparent that the group Medicine Head

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had released an album with the title of Dark Side of the Moon in summer 1972, the piece changed title
to Eclipse. When the Medicine Head album fopped, the group reverted to The Dark Side of the Moon.
3 Established in 2008 with Iron Man, all flms in this universe from thereon in contain references to other
characters/plotlines in the franchise.
4 Currently estimated at 45 million units sold worldwide.
5 The cash registers at the start of ‘Money’ were recorded and looped by Waters himself. There was a
distinct similarity to the use of similar for the theme of UK BBC TV comedy series Are You Being
Served, written by Ronnie Hazlehurst and David Croft, the pilot of which frst aired on BBC 1 on 8
September 1972. The frst full series of the programme aired the same month as The Dark Side of the
Moon was released. ‘I made those recordings in a shed at the bottom of the garden, throwing coins
into a big industrial bowl that my wife used for mixing clay. I recorded those sound efects on my frst
proper tape recorder, chopped them up and glued them together, stuck them in the machine, put a
mike stand there to hold tape taut, and of we went.’ Roger Waters in conversation with John Har-
ris. https://web.archive.org/web/20091014133943/www.rollingstone.com/artists/pinkfoyd/articles/
story/5937470/dark_side_at_30_roger_waters.
6 The ‘space-rock’ tag that was bestowed upon them came in part from numbers such as ‘Set the Controls
for the Heart of the Sun’ (1968); and supplying the music – ‘Moonhead,’ a live jam, for the BBC-TV
moon landings in July 1969.
7 Sedgwick, N. (2017). In the Pink [Not a Hunting Memoir]. London: Roger Waters Overseas, page 23.
8 Clerk, C. (2003). ‘The Making of Dark Side of the Moon’, Uncut. Pink Floyd. Retrieved 16 December 2021,
from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-making-of-idark-side-of-the-mooni.
9 Bowie’s half-brother Terry Burns would have a series of psychotic episodes that made him a patient at
Cane Hill Hospital, Coulsdon. John Lennon and Yoko Ono took part in Arthur Janov’s primal scream
theory throughout 1970; Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who worked extensively on
mental illness, who was fashionable enough to be signed by Charisma Records to make an album.
Monty Python used the word ‘loony’ as short for lunatic often, but not, as is commonly thought, in
their Election Night Special broadcast 3 November 1970, where Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-
lim-bus-stop-F’tang-F’tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel stood for the Silly Party.
10 Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
11 Due to the mention of the Rehearsal Studio being in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, in the
Shine On book that came with the 1992 box set, led many to make the assumption that it was at the
Decca Recording Studios, which are also in that road. It wasn’t.
12 Miles, B. (1980). Pink Floyd: A Visual Documentary by Miles. London: Omnibus Press, page 90.
13 Pink Floyd: Lyon & Tokyo. Retrieved from https://open.spotify.com/album/3xTwbhFwl4CHMchX
EOKoAE?si=IRgYxVjlR92xJGzbKjBQ8Q.
14 Parsons can clearly be seen in the Peter Jackson Disney + The Beatles Get Back (2021) documentary as
a 21-year-old, with his button-down shirts and mod haircut. He was in the basement at Apple Studios
capturing the sound from the Beatles’ rooftop performance on January 30, 1969.
15 12 May, ‘1967: Pink Floyd Astounds with “Sound in the Round”’, www.wired.com/2009/05/
dayintech-0512/.
16 Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, dir. by Adrian Maben (1972, 1974) Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR); Ofce de
Radiodifusion Télévision Française (ORTF); RM Productions Fernseh-und Filmgesellschaft mbH.
17 Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
18 Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, page
159.
19 For example, ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with
a Pict’ from Ummagumma (1969), or ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ from Atom Heart Mother (1970).
20 The line ‘do-goody good bullshit’ made the song an underground pleasure at this writer’s comprehen-
sive, a trailer for the later main feature of Derek & Clive. It is ironic that this was a song Pink Floyd
played at Live 8 in 2005, which was, indeed, ‘do-goody good bullshit.’
21 Waters, R. (1992). facsimile letter in Pink Floyd: Shine On. London: EMI Records.
22 Blake, M. (2017). Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains. London: V&A, page 217.
23 Grossman, L. (1973). ‘Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon’, Rolling Stone. Pink Floyd.
Retrieved 17 December  2021, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pink-foyd–the-
dark-side-of-the-moon.

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24 Stewart, T. (1973). ‘Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon  (Harvest)’, New Musical Express. Pink Floyd.
Retrieved 16 December  2021, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pink-foyd-idark-
side-of-the-mooni-harvest.
25 Syd Barrett’s frst solo album, The Madcap Laughs, was released on Harvest Records, January 1970.
26 The best-selling UK single of the year was Tie a Yellow Ribbon by Dawn, and the top 10 was full of
singles by Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter. The albums chart had The Dark Side of the Moon, and was
topped by Elton John’s Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player. The only artists to feature in both
were Opportunity Knocks-winning vocal duo, Peters & Lee.
27 Taken from the rear sleeve of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfeld (Virgin Records V 2001, 1973).
28 Thorgerson, S. (1992). Pink Floyd: Shine On. London: EMI Records, page 51.
29 Sullivan, J. (1993). ‘Pink Floyd Still Rides Its Dark Side’, The Boston Globe. Pink Floyd. Retrieved 17
December 2021, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pink-foyd-still-rides-its-dark-side.
30 Richard Wright in Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
31 Gwyther, M. (1993, 7 March). ‘The Dark Side of Success’, The Observer:34.
32 Op. cit. Mason (2004):187.
33 Easlea, D. (2003). ‘David Gilmour: The Record Collector Interview’, Record Collector. David Gil-
mour, Pink Floyd. Retrieved 16 December 2021, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/
david-gilmour-the-record-collector-interview-.
34 Information taken from British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Retrieved from www.bpi.co.uk/
award/223-1497-2.
35 David Gilmour in The Story of Wish You Were Here (Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2012).
36 Salewicz, C. (1987). ‘Over the Wall: An Interview with Roger Waters’, Q. Pink Floyd, Roger
Waters. Retrieved 17 December  2021, from www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/over-the-
wall-an-interview-with-roger-waters.
37 David Gilmour in The Story of Wish You Were Here (Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2012).
38 Roger Waters in The Story of Wish You Were Here (Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2012).
39 Op. cit. Easlea (2003).
40 Richard Lester’s Help! (United Artists, 1965), which saw The Beatles going into four individual ter-
race houses, when on the other side was a huge, swinging bachelor pad, seemed to be what everybody
thought groups lived like/were like.
41 Roger Waters in Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
42 Sprechgesang (‘spoken singing’) is an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking.
Wood, Ralph W., ‘Concerning “Sprechgesang”’, Tempo, new series no. 2, December 1946. For exam-
ple, ‘The Post-War Dream’ on The Final Cut.
43 This edition alone is reported to have sold over 800,000 copies.
44 The cash resisters on ‘Money’ were replaced by inhalation of a bong.
45 Nick Mason in Thorgerson, S. (1992). Pink Floyd: Shine On. London: EMI Records, page 51.
46 David Gilmour in Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
47 www.discogs.com/master/10362-Pink-Floyd-The-Dark-Side-of-The-Moon.
48 Op. cit. Clerk (2003).
49 Ibid.
50 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):161.
51 Op. cit. Clerk (2003):i.
52 Op. cit. Easlea (2003).

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 17
PINK FLOYD’S ‘SHINE ON YOU
CRAZY DIAMOND’ AND THE
STAGE THEORY OF GRIEF1
Gilad Cohen

Introduction
The 1975 Pink Floyd song ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ was written, in part, as a requiem
for the band’s former leader, Syd Barrett, who had sufered a breakdown. This chapter argues
that the musical structure of ‘Shine On’ corresponds to the popular model of the fve stages of
grief: shock, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance. Portraying the bereavement process of
a band that had never recovered from traumatic loss, this emotional arc imbues the piece with
a powerful, genuine framework that demonstrates the band’s propensity for evoking emotions
through lyrics, composition, and meticulous arrangement and production.

Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett and ‘Shine On’

By 1968 Pink Floyd’s founder member, singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Syd Barrett, was grad-
ually losing his hold on reality. The pressure from the music industry, the public, and his col-
leagues; Barrett’s increasing use of LSD; and, some argue, preexisting mental instability were too
much for the young Barrett.2 After only one album and several singles, Barrett was ofcially out
of the band. Drummer Nick Mason (2011) described the band’s feelings at the time:

Syd was completely out of it yet again, and the rest of us were fnally reaching [the]
breaking point. It was time to come out of denial. . . . We did not want to lose Syd. He
was our songwriter, singer, guitarist, and although you might not have known from
our less than sympathetic treatment of him – he was our friend.3

Following his departure, Barrett was pushed by his managers to record two solo albums, with
help from members of the band. In 1974 he stopped playing completely and dissolved all ties to
the music industry, right up until his death in 2006.
Five years after his departure, Pink Floyd became one of the most successful bands in the
world, as their 1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon became an international bestseller. Barrett’s
shadow, however, remained hovering over the band members and their music. In 1974 lyricist
and bassist Roger Waters decided to write a tribute to their original front man, songwriter, and
friend, whom none of them had seen for several years. ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ was

318 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-23

 ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’

Side A

Track 1: ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I–V)’

Part I II III IV V
Time+ 0:00 3:55 6:27 8:42 11:15

Keyboard

Keyboard
Distorted

Distorted
E. Guitar

E. Guitar
Clean E.
Guitar
Leading Baritone Tenor
Vocals
instrument sax. sax.

Track 2: ‘Welcome to the Machine’

Side B
Track 3: ‘Have a Cigar’
Track 4: ‘Wish You Were Here’
Track 5: ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts VI–IX)’

Part VI VII VIII IX

Time+ 0:00 4:56 6:02 9:00 11:23
Leading Distorted slide
Vocals None Keyboard Keyboard
instrument e. guitar(s)

Figure 17.1 The form of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as part of the album Wish You Were Here (1975)

written as an epic 26-minute piece that was to be recorded on an entire side of their new album.
During the creative process in the studio Waters developed an overall concept of ‘absence’ as the
theme of the new album. ‘Shine On’ was consequently split into the opening and closing tracks
of Wish You Were Here (1975), with three new songs sandwiched in the middle: ‘Welcome to the
Machine,’ ‘Have a Cigar,’ and ‘Wish You Were Here.’4 Figure 17.1 outlines the formal structure
of ‘Shine On’ within Wish You Were Here.
The lyrics of the album address issues such as friendship, loss, memories, and pressure from
the music industry. While Waters denies that the overarching theme of the album – ‘absence’ –
relates directly to Barrett, he and all of the other band members have repeatedly stated that
both the lyrics and the music in the piece ‘Shine On’ were about Barrett.5 Waters describes his
approach to writing the song:

I wanted to get as close as possible to what I felt . . . that sort of indefnable, inevitable
melancholy about the disappearance of Syd. Because he’s left, withdrawn so far away
that, as far as we’re concerned, he’s no longer there.6

‘Shine On’ and Bereavement

Tellingly, Waters’ recollection sounds as though he has experienced a loss of someone who
passed away.7 Psychological response to such loss has been the focus of the work of several psy-
chiatrists who, in the 1960s, introduced the notion that the bereavement process can involve a
progression through distinct phases (sometimes iterative). Stage models of grief (most famously

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the Kübler-Ross model) have been widely accepted by both clinicians and the general public.8
This bereavement process is not limited to a response to death; rather, it can be relevant for grief
resulting from various types of personal loss. Considering its impact on Pink Floyd, the Barrett
tragedy was arguably an event that triggered bereavement. Stage models of grief suggest various
titles for each stage. These can be seen in Figure 17.2. This sequence is by no means strict: stages
can overlap, their order may vary, and some may be more substantial or last longer than others.9
This chapter, therefore, ofers a reading of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ from a novel
angle: that the formal architecture of the work mirrors the band’s psychological response to the
Barrett tragedy. I argue that the piece features an original and efective musical structure that
expresses a sequence of emotional reactions to loss, which both in content and in order is strik-
ingly similar to popular stage models of grief. I also identify correlations between ‘Shine On’
and two more recent developments in grief and loss research: the recognition of yearning as the
most common negative stage in the sequence in a well-known empirical examination and the
change in the defnition of the ultimate goal of grief work from detachment from the deceased

Figure 17.2 A  summary of the progression of bereavement stages based on Selby Jacobs’s synthesised
model and empirical tests

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to adaptation to the loss.10 ‘Shine On’ is, therefore, not only a momentous requiem for a close
friend; it is also a highly necessary enactment of grief for four people who, admittedly, experi-
enced feelings of sadness, guilt, and regret.11 It thus refects the coping of the band with, as the
lyrics suggest, ‘the shadow of yesterday’s triumph.’

Morning and grief

Several studies draw correlations between musical pieces associated with mourning and the stage
theory of grief, usually mentioning only a few of the stages and not referring to the order of the
stages in the models.12 While these studies analyse works that vary in instrumentation and time
of creation, none of them discuss popular music, despite the substantial place that stage theory
has in popular culture. The choice to utilise grief studies for looking at Pink Floyd’s music is
particularly appropriate, considering that much of the band’s output refers to Syd Barrett’s trag-
edy as well as to Roger Waters’ loss of his father in the Second World War, when Waters was an
infant. Previous studies have analysed ‘Shine On’ as part of Wish You Were Here and from various
other angles: Edward Macan uses the album to compare Pink Floyd’s style with the styles of
British progressive rock bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis, and Yes,13 and Philip
Rose’s interpretation touches on ideas such as art music versus rock, mechanical versus human,
the music industry, and Barrett’s behaviour.14 By looking at ‘Shine On’ as a complete work
through the lens of an ‘emotional map’ and examining how this and other Pink Floyd works
express specifc emotions, this chapter ofers a new approach for understanding and evaluating
the lyrical and musical merits of this piece of Pink Floyd’s music (and music in general).

Shock and numbness

Pink Floyd’s psychedelic jams in their early concerts were invitations for the audience to put
life on hold and immerse themselves in the sound.15 The music extensively featured oscillating
harmonies, repetitive rhythms, and manipulations of timbre, all of which can provide a musical
equivalent to a hallucinogenic experience. As such, they afect the listener’s perception of time
by creating an impression that time has stopped, slowed down, changed direction, or disap-
peared.16 This tactic was then adopted in the studio, where these features were joined by slow
tempi and harmonic rhythm, sound efects, and prolonged forms, all of which resulted in a
sensation of a slowed temporality, as can be heard in free (and in most cases unmetered and non-
tonal) interludes in the lengthy pieces ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ ‘Echoes,’
and, to a lesser extent, ‘Dogs.’
The frst track of ‘Shine On’ demonstrates this prominent feature in Pink Floyd’s musical
vocabulary. It begins with multiple keyboard layers, all producing a continuous G-minor chord.
With no meter or chord progression, this introduction immediately creates a static feeling
(0:00–2:10; the following time marks refer to the frst track of ‘Shine On’). Likewise, ruminat-
ing melodic phrases played by a horn-like synthesiser are slow and spacious and do not provide
a clear sense of advancement. In two ways, this harmonic and textural (and, to a lesser extent,
melodic) motionlessness refects a shocked response to loss: it creates a temporal illusion that
time has stopped and illustrates a physical state of being paralysed or numb.17 The shimmering,
continuously changing timbres of the keyboards’ sustained chord create an impression that the
music is experienced through a screen, likewise suggesting a typical initial response to loss in
which one is ‘blanketed with numbness.’18 The musical stasis also conveys an emotional lack of
direction, which one might feel upon experiencing loss: ‘We wonder how we can go on, if we
can go on, why we should go on.’19

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After two minutes of constant tonic harmony, a clean-tone electric guitar (with no distor-
tion) takes the lead, and the harmony begins to stroll. A chord progression stems from the pre-
ceding tonic, sparks the harmonic engine, and begins an extremely slow journey that alternates
between a G-minor tonic, its subdominant, and a minor dominant, each one lasting for as long
as 20 seconds. The absence of the leading tone – and consequently a major dominant sonority –
is signifcant, preventing a substantial pull toward the tonic. Ever so slightly more animated than
the opening two minutes, this section prepares the surface for the forceful emotions that are
about to bubble and foat, thus ftting the closure of the frst stage in the bereavement sequence,
when ‘the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying
begin to surface.’20

Yearning
Predominant in many love songs, the emotion of yearning is frequently expressed in popular
music. Since Pink Floyd rarely wrote such songs, however, yearning is not as common in the
band’s output, and it usually occurs in the context of loss (such as the band’s loss of Syd Barrett,
Roger Waters’ loss of his father, or the fctional Pink’s loss of his wife in The Wall). Musically,
Pink Floyd evokes the emotions of yearning and longing through melodic, harmonic, rhythmic,
and timbral tensions. The combination of ongoing uneasiness and accumulating expectation
toward a defned destination (such as a melodic chord tone, a tonic chord, a strong downbeat,
or a soothing timbre) mirrors the feeling of yearning for someone or something. The band use
augmented triads, for instance, to express yearning for a wife who has left (‘Don’t Leave Me
Now’ on The Wall), for a lover who is about to leave (Roger Waters’ ‘For the First Time Today,
Part 2’ from his 1984 solo LP The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking), or for a world in which people
do not kill or fght (‘The Gunner’s Dream’ on The Final Cut). In ‘The Gunner’s Dream,’ a G+
chord coincides with a recurring chromatic motion in the piano, D−D♯−E in the key of G
major, that manifests a search for a resolution (this ascending chromatic fguration resembles a
descending one in ‘Shine On’ that uses the same notes, which will be discussed at length in the
following). In ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ from The Wall, the extended chord F(add9,♯11,13)
and its desire to resolve to A-minor tonic join a massive crescendo, wailing guitar feedback, and
ominous electric buzz in expressing the yearning of the protagonist Pink to the world outside
the wall. In ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ (on The Wall), the use of polyrhythm illustrates the
tension between the civilians who long for the troops to return home (represented by a choir
singing in 6/8) and the army (portrayed by a snare-drum military groove in 4/4).
A signifcant portion of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ uses similar techniques to evoke
yearning. Three minutes and 50 seconds into the piece, an iconic Pink Floyd moment occurs:
a four-note phrase played by an electric guitar over a static, unmetered G-minor ‘bed.’ This
instrumental motif was the starting point and the inspiration for the entire piece,21 and it is both
its core and its most recognisable hook. For Storm Thorgerson, the legendary designer of Pink
Floyd’s album covers, this motif demonstrates the band’s mastery in evoking a mood with just
a few notes. Thorgerson found that this motif is ‘moody, atmospheric, and it has this sense of
wide-open spaces of the inner mind.’22 Indeed, these four notes seem to capture many of the
feelings that the band had for Barrett. It is striking how much emotion the band attributed to
this short instrumental phrase: over the years they described it as ‘very sad,’ ‘plaintive,’ ‘poign-
ant,’ and ‘mournful,’ which, more than what it says about the phrase itself, arguably shows the
feelings that the band has projected into it, once the lyrics were added and the subject matter
became clear.23 Biographer Nicholas Schafner writes: ‘To Waters, these notes resonated with a
profound melancholy that brought the spectre of Syd Barrett inescapably to mind.’24

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Figure 17.3 The pitch arsenal of the guitar and keyboard improvisations throughout Part I (frst track,
0:00–3:50)

Figure 17.4 The yearning motif as a melody and as a chord

At the moment it appears, this B♭–F–G–E phrase marks a change. It is at the forefront of
the mix – much louder than the accompanying keyboard layers, which have gone through a
signifcant decrescendo earlier – and penetrates the texture with the electric guitar’s timbre. This
phrase is more assertive than any of the melodic fragments that were improvised earlier by either
the guitar or the keyboard, and it certainly does not evoke numbness anymore. The previous
improvisations employed six notes of a G-minor scale as illustrated in Figure  17.3 (with an
occasional blue note) that were all soothing, appropriately to the static atmosphere. The 6^ degree
was completely absent from the melody for almost four minutes, and it appeared only in the
accompaniment as part of a C-minor chord. The arrival of E♮ – a foreign note that suggests the
Dorian mode – as the fnal note of this robust phrase (illustrated in Figure 17.4) is, therefore,
striking. Hearing the E♮ as emerging from the F brings to mind the ‘sigh motif ’ (‘pianto’), a
descending minor second that has been associated with grief and sorrow for centuries in both
vocal and instrumental music.25 Furthermore, since the phrase is played on four diferent strings
using a heavy reverb efect, all four notes keep resonating, making it into a hybrid between a
melody and a chord: Gm7 (a common Floydian tonic) with an added E♮.26 The coexistence
of the F and the E♮ produces a bittersweet dissonance that is yearning for a resolution and
enhanced by the diference in timbre between a stopped note (F) and an open string (E♮).27
This is the frst moment in the piece where such tension and anticipation are induced. Hence,
I associate the section that begins here with the second stage of the grief sequence, and likewise
call this phrase ‘the yearning motif.’
The yearning motif accumulates tension over 30 seconds and through fve repetitions that
grow closer and closer in time. This is enhanced by a massive crescendo and a sudden beating
of the bass drum that begin with the fourth occurrence of the motif. At the moment the ffth
occurrence concludes on the fnal E♮, a full rhythm section marks its debut with a forceful,
bluesy 12/4 groove, and the extensive G-minor harmony changes to C-major (4:32). This is a
true moment of catharsis, illustrated in Figure 17.5.28 The non-chord tone E suddenly becomes
a chord tone over C major; thus, it can be viewed as a dissonant anticipation note that, appro-
priately, creates a prolonged, yearning anticipation. The C-major chord partially satisfes the
longing of the motif, bringing the listeners to a familiar territory: a bittersweet i-IV progression,
a common Floydian gesture.29 These two chords, Gm7 and C, are in fact linked through the
four notes of the yearning motif: B♭, F, G, and E.

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 Gilad Cohen

Figure 17.5 Introduction and catharsis of the yearning motif

As mentioned, an empirical examination of the stage theory of grief has suggested that
yearning is the leading negative emotion in the grief sequence. Similarly, yearning can be inter-
preted as the predominant emotion both in ‘Shine On’ and in Wish You Were Here as a whole.
First, it is expressed in the short lyrics of ‘Shine On,’ one of only a few Pink Floyd songs that fea-
ture a repeated, uplifting sung refrain. Appearing only in Parts IV and VII of the song, the lyrics
are about yearning for the early days of Syd Barrett (‘Remember when you were young/You
shone like the sun . . .’) and for Barrett at the time the song was written (‘Nobody knows where
you are/How near or how far . . . and I’ll be joining you there’). Second, yearning is clearly
represented by both the album’s title Wish You Were Here and the lyrics of the title song. Last, the
yearning motif – the catalyst for the creation of the piece – has a structural role in ‘Shine On’:
it repeats throughout the piece in various forms and triggers substantial musical developments.
After the motif triggers the arrival of a major IV chord (CM) for the frst time in the song,
it keeps directing the harmonic progression. Through multiple repetitions over a harmonic
pendulum of i–IV, the yearning motif builds an expectation, and when its last note suddenly
drops to E♭ (4:51) and then leads into D, it carries the harmony with it in decisive parallel
octaves, completing a chromatic journey from F to D, as shown in Figure 17.6. Following its
last appearance as the leading role, the yearning motif promptly retreats to the back of the stage,

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Figure 17.6 Development of the yearning motif and the harmonic progression

and, doubled by an organ, it becomes a supporting actor for the guitar solo and accompanies
its frst half (5:14–6:07). As Figure 17.6 shows, the chord progression also seems to derive from
the yearning motif, as it extends the descending chromatic motion (6:07+). A similar motion
occurs in the piece’s refrain as the vocal melody moves chromatically from G to E♭ and back to
G (9:23–9:44, 10:46–11:08, and in track 5, 5:40–6:02). Uncommon in Pink Floyd’s harmonic
vocabulary, extended and chromatic chords throughout this section likewise evoke tension that
yearns for a resolution (all in the key of G minor): a prolonged D7(♯9) at the end of two harmonic
cycles (7:28–7:34; 8:36–8:40); a C7(♭9) in the middle of every sung refrain (9:30; 10:54; and in
track 5, 5:49); and a surprising G♭ chord that, within each verse, tonicises the following B♭
chord as its ♭VI (8:46–8:50, and so on).
The yearning motif returns in its original form much later in the track as a background
for a baritone saxophone solo (Part V, 11:09+). Played by an acoustic guitar this time, it soon
transforms into the repeated accompaniment fguration shown at the top of Figure 17.7. This
fguration clearly derives from the motif: it is produced by the same position on the guitar neck,
a similar fngering, and primarily the same strings. This eighth-note pattern creates a polyrhyth-
mic feel over the 12/4 meter: coupled with the opening E, its highest pitches emphasise a subdi-
vision of the measure into eight equal units, which is highlighted by the use of the same string
for all four notes (see circles in Figure 17.7). These rhythmic accents catalyse a dramatic change:
At 12:01, the entire band follows the lead of the acoustic guitar and switches into a double-time
feel of 12/8, in which the previous accented notes become the new beat, as shown at the bottom
of Figure 17.7. Furthermore, the soloing baritone saxophone is replaced by a tenor saxophone,
allowing for the improvisation to rise up in the air, until it fades out at the end of this track.
Since its arrival, the four-note yearning motif initiated development in melody, harmony,
rhythm, and instrumentation, producing a strong sense of direction throughout the frst track
of ‘Shine On’ following the static, numb opening and establishing this extensive section as part
of the yearning stage in the bereavement map. In the second half of ‘Shine On,’ the eighth-
note guitar fguration returns, highlighted in the mix as it is accompanied solely by a sustained
G-minor chord (track 5, 6:02; all following time marks refer to the second track of ‘Shine On’).
While its pitches are exactly the same as before, the last note in each phrase is now rhythmically
longer. Only after a few repetitions of this fguration the meter is revealed to be a slow 4/4, in
which the fast notes are sixteenth notes, as Figure 17.8 shows. This new rhythmic feel is soon
adopted by the entire band, as a one-chord groovy jam begins. Once again, the yearning motif
is the catalyst for a signifcant rhythmic change that allows the music to grow into a new place
with diferent harmony and atmosphere.

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 Gilad Cohen

Figure 17.7 Guitar accompaniments during the baritone saxophone solo and the tenor saxophone solo

Figure 17.8 Guitar pattern in the transition to Part VIII

The yearning motif, therefore, has a crucial role in the development of the material through-
out both tracks of ‘Shine On,’ and its structural signifcance, coupled with the lengths of the
sections associated with yearning in the piece and strengthened by the use of dissonant chords,
matches the central place of this stage in the bereavement process. As a result of the substantial
changes this motif catalyses in the musical arrangement, the song’s sections are also kept varied
and the piece as a whole gains a strong sense of direction. At the same time, the motif ’s continu-
ous presence, coupled with the unifed key of G minor, keeps the piece cohesive.

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Anger
While negative emotions such as sadness and anger are often expressed in Western tonal music
through dissonant intervals and chords,30 Pink Floyd tends to convey anger in other means.31
These include the use of unpleasant sounds with no defned pitch (for example, screams in
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’ ‘Speak to Me,’ ‘The Gunner’s Dream,’ and ‘One of My
Turns’); rough timbres (penetrating distortion guitar solos in ‘Dogs,’ ‘Comfortably Numb,’ and
‘Money,’ as well as shrieking vocals in ‘Welcome to the Machine,’ ‘Bring the Boys Back Home,’
‘The Trial,’ and ‘Your Possible Pasts’); wide pitch range (vocals in ‘One of My Turns,’ ‘When
the Tigers Broke Free,’ ‘The Post War Dream,’ and ‘The Hero’s Return’); and an aggressive, per-
sistent one-note bass fguration in a perpetuum mobile fashion, a Floydian signature that accom-
panies an entire song or section (such as ‘One of These Days,’ ‘Sheep,’ ‘Another Brick in the
Wall, Part 1,’ ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives,’ ‘Run Like Hell,’ and, less predominantly, ‘The
Hero’s Return’).32
Both ‘Welcome to the Machine’ and ‘Have a Cigar,’ the songs that follow the frst track of
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ on Wish You Were Here, express anger. Ironically sung from the
viewpoint of the music industry (as in, ‘the machine’), both pieces mark an accusation against
a cynical and careless industry that arguably contributed to Barrett’s condition. Their musical
tone is appropriately harsh and cold, featuring an aggressive sound palette (including the vocal
timbres), sharp tone attack in the electronics (‘Welcome .  .  .’) and electric guitars (‘Have a
Cigar’), and arguably an ‘angry’ harmonic progression.33 These are followed by the song ‘Wish
You Were Here,’ one of the only true ballads in the Floyd repertoire. Its heartfelt lyrics and title,
coupled with a straightforward composition and a mostly acoustic arrangement, contribute to
the stage of yearning, thus taking listeners backwards on the bereavement map. It is, therefore,
quite efective that a bubbling anger gradually fnds its way back at the beginning of the closing
track, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts VI–IX,’ where the emotional level reaches its peak
in a climax for the entire album.
The closing track carries several similarities to the aforementioned ‘angry’ songs from various
albums. It begins with a perpetuum mobile bass fguration of a single note over a 12/8 meter. This
steady bass line, coupled with a relatively fast tempo, produces an unsettling atmosphere that
increases with the arrival of a vigorous slide guitar solo (2:30+). While several guitar solos are
spread throughout ‘Shine On,’ the one in Part VI is clearly the most heated one. The peak of
the solo is transcribed in Figure 17.9. The guitar’s sound is saturated with a distortion efect, and
as the only solo in the piece to feature a slide guitar, it contains numerous glissandi. From the
faintest pianissimo at the beginning of the track, the solo and the ftting accompaniment generate
a buildup using dynamics, texture, and register, thus resulting in a massive increase in intensity.
Extended ascending glissandi build tension and take each a segment of the solo into a higher
register. Likewise, persistent melodic cells vamp and then elevate into a higher octave, like an
anger that keeps bubbling and is about to burst (repeated patterns in Figure 17.9 are marked
with circles). This is enhanced by a rhythm guitar that plays an extended series of syncopated
chords, which undermine the meter and contribute to the sense of anger (see the square in
Figure 17.9). Tellingly, many of these features match prosodic cues that express anger in speech –
fast rate, high average pitch, wide pitch range, high intensity, and rising pitch contour – as well
as acoustic cues in music performance associated with anger: high sound level (this section
marks one of the dynamic peaks of the entire piece), sharp timbre (mostly evident in the leading
distortion guitar), fast mean tempo (especially in comparison with the following sections that
represent depression and acceptance), and staccato articulation and accents on unstable notes
(both featured in the syncopated rhythm guitar).34

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Figure 17.9 Repetition and build up in the slide guitar solo, refecting anger

Figure 17.10 The climax of ‘Shine On’ using two slide guitars

As in several other Pink Floyd songs, the climax of ‘Shine On’ is an instrumental phrase
rather than a sung one: Once the slide guitar solo reaches its highest peak, a second guitar joins
in, and together they wail parallel descending scales.35 Shown in Figure 17.10, this dramatic
descent is enhanced as the guitars exchange places every two notes and slide into the other scale.
The gradual climb of the guitar solo to the summit, joined by this intense fall, perfectly encap-
sulates Barrett’s story: a meteoric rise of a bright diamond, followed by his traumatic collapse.
Alongside the sung refrain, ‘Shine On’ has a thematic instrumental section led by the gui-
tar. This theme occurs twice in the piece: in Part IV, between two sung segments, and in Part

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329

Figure 17.11 The instrumental theme in Part IV (as part of the yearning stage) and in Part II (transitioning from the anger stage back to yeaning)
 Gilad Cohen

VI, just before the vocal segment returns (Figure 17.1 shows the form of the song). While the
melody and harmony of both occurrences are very similar, their mood is signifcantly diferent.
Indeed, each occurrence refects a diferent stage in the bereavement map. Figure 17.11 shows
these two occurrences. The frst one takes place in a section associated with the yearning stage,
and its melody, played by two guitars in octaves, is appropriately mellow and melancholic and
adopts the preceding meter of 12/4. In the second occurrence, the melody derives from the
‘angry’ guitar solo of Part VI, and suitably, it is played by a single guitar with a pungent sound
over a 12/8 meter and an aggressive bass line that continues from the preceding solo. After four
measures, however, the atmosphere changes at once, and, in the middle of the phrase, the meter
switches to 12/4. This abrupt change in mood refects the switch in emotional content as it pre-
pares the return of the vocal section and, thus, marks a return to the stage of yearning.
These diferent treatments of the same thematic material demonstrate the emotional journey
of the piece, charge it with a sense of development from the stage of yearning to the stage of
anger, and mark the return to the stage of yearning.

Te nostalgic jam
Notably, there is one section in the piece whose mood does not correlate with any of the
common emotional responses to loss. Part VIII showcases a funky 4/4 groove that is based on a
single chord (6:09–9:07), and, like similar ‘groovy jams’ in other Pink Floyd songs, it immedi-
ately brings to mind the band’s free live jams with Barrett.36 In the context of ‘Shine On,’ this
brief section ofers a nostalgic recollection of the piece’s subject matter. Like a memory that
has foated into consciousness from the past, this section ends when the groove evaporates in a
gradual fade out. A reversed drum pattern suitably brings the listener back to the present and
leads the music into the stage of depression (8:13–9:07).

Depression
For centuries, slow music with a constant pulse has been associated with mourning, most
famously in funeral marches such as the slow movements in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12
in A♭ Major and Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭ Minor. In Pink Floyd’s song ‘Dogs,’ the
sombre metaphor ‘dragged down by the stone’ is followed by a prolonged interlude with such
constant pulse of a ride cymbal and extremely slow harmonic rhythm, and the agony in the
line ‘all alone, dying of cancer’ is similarly illustrated by a switch to a half-time groove and a
lamenting guitar duet.37
Other songs in Pink Floyd’s corpus that evoke sadness through slow and constant pulse
include ‘Don’t Leave Me Now,’ ‘When the Tigers Broke Free,’ and the one-minute song ‘Good-
bye Cruel Word’ from The Wall, which exemplifes the band’s use of sound manipulation for
enhancing an emotion. One of the most vulnerable vocal performances by Roger Waters (fea-
turing pitchy singing and untypically pronounced British accent) is joined by a close mic-ing
recording technique (which creates an impression of intimacy between the singer and the lis-
tener), together granting the dreary lyrics a painful sincerity: ‘Goodbye cruel world/I’m leaving
you today . . . goodbye.’ Just before the last word of the song, both the minimalist accompani-
ment (consisting merely of leaping octaves on a bass guitar and sustained organ chords) and the
heavy reverb efect drop, leaving the voice alone to mutter a hasty ‘goodbye’ using a completely
dry mix. The sudden disappearance of the reverb and all instruments, which also prevents a
proper harmonic closure, makes the fnal ‘goodbye’ almost unbearable in its loneliness.

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Figure 17.12 The beginning of the funeral march in Part IX, which represents the stage of depression

Part IX of ‘Shine On’ similarly expresses depression through a series of methods. Rhythmi-
cally, it resembles the previously mentioned funeral marches by employing slow tempo and
harmonic rhythm as well as a constant pulse, thus refecting the stage of depression, which ‘feels
as though it will last forever’ and makes one feel ‘heavy.’38 Written solely by keyboard player
Richard Wright, this section features a slow harmonic progression that employs a richer chord
palette than any of the other progressions in the piece. It is also the only one to temporarily
depart from the decisive tonic, as Figure 17.12 shows. This progression has a gloomy character
due to a series of harmonic tools: a descending chromatic inner motion in the frst two chords
(Gm and B♭m); tonicisation of F minor using its 4^ B♭m; a half-diminished chord, with its mel-
ancholic combination of a perfect ffth and a tritone; and an extended dominant, which, using
various inversions, builds tension and a desire to resolve to the tonic. Finally, the spacious horn-
like keyboard lament hovering above is characterised by soft dynamics, dull timbre, and slow
tone attacks (especially in comparison with the guitar solos in the yearning and anger stages) as
well as legato articulation and a fnal ritardando (11:22–11:24). All of these features coincide
with acoustic cues that are widely suggested in the literature to express sadness, making this the
most mournful moment in the entire piece and clearly representing the depression stage in the
bereavement sequence.39

Acceptance
Considering that a large part of Pink Floyd’s output focuses on negative emotions, it is interest-
ing that all of their concept albums (recorded between 1973 and 1983) conclude on a brighter
tone, thus bringing these feelings into a closure and ofering a sense of relief and resolution. The
1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon portrays pressures of modern life, insanity, and death through
mostly minor-key songs that range from anger to melancholy, but it ends with two relatively
high-spirit songs in D major whose messages, although vague, can be said to ofer comfort

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(‘I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon’; ‘. . . and everything under the sun is in tune, but
the sun is eclipsed by the moon’).40 Loosely based on George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal
Farm, the bleak 1977 LP Animals features a bookend format with two halves of the same song
opening and closing the album. While the frst track (‘Pigs on the Wing, Part I’) introduces a
pessimistic outlook that characterised most of the album (‘If you don’t care what happens to
me . . . we will zigzag our way . . .’) using a modest sound palette of voice and acoustic guitar,
the closing track (‘Pigs on the Wing, Part II’) ofers hope and warmth (‘You know that I care
about you’) and features a Floydian thumbprint of two almost identical acoustic guitar parts
panned to the sides. Comparing to the loneliness expressed in the opening track, these two
guitars illustrate a notion of togetherness. Both The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983),
probably the grimmest albums in Pink Floyd’s corpus, close with ‘happy endings’ in the form of
the optimistic ‘Outside the Wall’ and ‘Two Suns in the Sunset,’ respectively. The sense of relief
at the end of each of these fve albums (including Wish You Were Here) is especially evident as it
follows negative emotions. Even the early, non-concept albums The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
(1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) end with songs that are lighter than most of the preceding
material (the childlike ‘Bike’ and the whimsical ‘Jugband Blues’ with its reassuring fnal A-major
chord, respectively).
While Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd’s only concept album whose ending is completely
instrumental, the sense of completion, resolution, and acceptance that it ofers is nonetheless
unmistakable. The lamenting keyboard solo in the depression section ends frmly with a step-
wise descent starting from 4^ (11:22–11:24); see square in Figure  17.13. Once it reaches the
tonic, G, everything changes: the rhythm stops and most of the instruments withdraw from
the texture, leaving behind a bed of keyboard layers that is reminiscent of the opening of the
album. After 25 minutes of constant G-minor tonality, the closing segment of ‘Shine On You
Crazy Diamond’ features a surprising G-major key. The use of a Picardy third in the fnal chord

Figure 17.13 The ‘acceptance’ section, which employs a Picardy third and quotes Syd Barrett’s song ‘See
Emily Play’

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Figure 17.14 The bereavement map of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’

of a piece in minor is common in Western art music tonal practice, but, in a typical Floydian
fashion, the major tonic that closes ‘Shine On’ is stretched over more than a minute. The horn-
like keyboard continues its improvisation from the previous section, but, once in a major mode,
it now ofers comfort. A meditative feeling is generated by the spacious melody and the static,
shimmering chords. This is the only peaceful moment in both the piece and the album. Fol-
lowing shock, yearning, anger, and depression, the album closes with a clear sense of acceptance
from the uplifting addition of the Picardy third.
As mentioned, new studies suggest that the goal of bereavement should be an adaption to the
loss rather than detachment from the deceased.41 ‘Shine On’ refects this approach. The very last
melodic phrase of the piece quotes Pink Floyd’s second single, ‘See Emily Play,’ which was writ-
ten and sung by Barrett. Almost inaudible, this gesture suggests integrating Barrett’s memory
rather than putting it away. It is no surprise, then, that Richard Wright, who plays these last
notes on the keyboard, said in an interview a year before he died that he thinks ‘there is still a
little bit of Syd in him.’42
The ‘bereavement map’ (Figure 17.14) summarises the correlation between ‘Shine On You
Crazy Diamond’ and popular stage models of grief. The illustrated waveform demonstrates the
quietness of the stage of shock; the long, gradual increase in volume during the stage of anger;
and the fade out during the stage of acceptance.

Conclusion
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ draws a wide emotional arc from beginning to end that imbues
the piece with a powerful, genuine framework. Enhanced by the album’s three inner songs,
both tracks of ‘Shine On’ convey common emotional reactions to loss, which, both in content
and order, ft popular stage models of grief. Through meticulous details in melody, harmony,

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 Gilad Cohen

rhythm, instrumentation, and timbre, each section expresses a distinct stage. Several motivic
tools enhance the sense of progression throughout the song in accord with this bereavement
map: the short yearning motif repeats throughout the piece, develops, and acts as a catalyst to
trigger substantial musical changes; the repeated instrumental theme is altered during its two
occurrences based on its position in this grief sequence; and multiple guitar solos lead the song
toward its musical and emotional climax. Through mostly non-verbal means, ‘Shine On’ thus
succeeds twice. First, it delivers a sophisticated psychological concept: a complete procedure of
bereaving from a loss. Expressing such non-musical objective through music can inspire both
scholars and musicians to look at the structuring of pieces using similar or other psychological
narratives. Second, ‘Shine On’ demonstrates one of the biggest achievements of Pink Floyd’s
music: its capacity to communicate specifc, direct emotional messages that resonate with real
human conditions.
Both ‘Shine On’ and the entire album Wish You Were Here have, arguably, ofered an emo-
tional outlet as well as comfort for both the creators and their audience. While, according to
Wright, Barrett’s ghost kept lingering in the band’s music, ‘Shine On’ has remained the only
piece in the repertoire that is unanimously about Barrett and attempts to convey the band’s feel-
ings surrounding his absence. Roger Waters says that ‘Shine On’ expresses a deep sense of loss of
a relationship, and while he has never recovered from the loss of Barrett, he takes comfort from
the pain.43 When trying to explain the emotional resonance of the piece, he says: ‘I suppose it’s
honest and heartfelt and quite poetically expressed’ and ‘there’s a truthful feeling in that piece.’44

Notes
1 Thanks to Scott Burnham, Barbara White, Erin Mickelwaite, Brady Bock, and two anonymous refer-
ees for their valuable help and feedback. The seed for this article came from a talk I gave at the confer-
ence ‘Pink Floyd: Sound, Sight and Structure’ that I initiated and produced with composer Dave Molk
at Princeton University in 2014, as well as from my doctoral dissertation ‘Expansive Rock: Large-Scale
Structure in the Music of Pink Floyd.’ A  version of this chapter was originally published in Music
Theory Spectrum, 40(1):106–120, ISSN 0195-6167, electronic ISSN 1533-8339. VC The Author(s)
2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Music Theory. https://doi.
org/10.1093/mts/mty011.
2 Mason, N. (2011). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. Reissued 2011. London: Phoenix, pages
96, 111; Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. New York: Dell Publishing,
page 106.
3 Ibid. Mason (2011):105.
4 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):198–199.
5 Wright, R. (2008). ‘Interviewed by Mark Paytress’, MOJO, November. Retrieved from www.
davidgilmour.com/press/2008/october/richard_ wright/MOJO_November08.pdf; Gilmour, D.
(1988). ‘Interviewed by Billy Pinnell’, 3MMM FM Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved from www.pink-
foyd.org/artint/dgari88.htm; Gilmour, D., Waters, R., Mason, N. and Wright, R. (1984). ‘Inter-
viewed by Charlie Kendall’, The Source, NBC, New York, April. Retrieved from www.pink-foyd.
org/artint/27.htm; Waters, R. (2002a). ‘New Indian Express. Bangalore, April 2002’. Retrieved 21
February 2018, from www.pink-foyd.org/artint/wtbang0402.htm; Waters, R. (2002b). ‘Interview by
Everett True’, Melbourne, 5 April. Retrieved from www.pink- foyd.org/artint/wat050502.htm. Mac-
Donald, B. (ed.). (1997). Pink Floyd: Through the Eyes of . . . the Band, Its Fans, Friends and Foes. New
York: Da Capo Press, page 265.
6 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):198.
7 The band’s view of Barrett’s loss also resonates in the way his image fades out in the concert screen
flm that was projected during the performances of ‘Shine On’ in Pink Floyd’s 1975 concerts (Op. cit.
Mason [2011]).
8 The frst stage models of grief were proposed in the 1960s by John Bowlby and Colin Murray Parkes,
followed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. See Maciejewski, P. K., Zhang, B., Block, S. D. and Prigerson,

334
 ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’

H. G. (2007). ‘An Empirical Examination of the Stage Theory of Grief ’, JAMA, 297(7):716–723;
Rothaupt, J. W. and Becker, K. (2007). ‘A Literature Review of Western Bereavement Theory: From
Decathecting to Continuing Bonds’, The Family Journal, 14:6–15. These models were extrapolated to
bereaving diferent types of loss and in 1993 were synthesised by Selby Jacobs. Over the years the stage
theory has gained criticism, and other theories of grief were developed, including nonlinear theories
such as task models (Ibid. Rothaupt and Becker [2007]).
9 Ibid. Rothaupt and Becker (2007); Ibid. Maciejewski et al. (2007); also Kübler-Ross, E. and Kessler, D.
(2005). On Grief and Grieving. New York: Scribner, page 18.
10 In 2007 Maciejewski et al. (Op. cit.) conducted an empirical examination of the stage theory of grief,
in which the researchers surveyed grieving people, asked them about their emotional responses, and
correlated the data with the stage model. While previous research had largely focused on other stages,
mainly depression, it was found that yearning was, in fact, signifcantly more common among those
interviewed. In their review of Western bereavement theories, Rothaupt and Becker (Op. cit. 2007)
show that the traditional view of detachment from the deceased and the breaking of emotional bonds
as the ultimate goals of grief work has changed over the past 20 years, and new studies suggest instead
an adaption to the loss.
11 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):197; Op. cit. Mason (2011):96, 105, 111, 113; Blake, M. (2008). Comfortably
Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, pages 195, 238, 389, 398; Op.
cit. Wright (2008); Op. cit. Gilmour et al. (1984).
12 These studies include analyses of Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, op. 57 (see
Monroe, D. (2008). ‘Confict and Meaning in Carl Nielsen’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, Op.
57 (1928)’, D.M.A. diss., Ohio State University); Beethoven’s Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe, Op.
26 (see Perry, J. (1997). ‘Beethoven and the Romantic Unique Subject: The Dialectic of Afect and
Form in the “Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe,” Op. 26, III’, Indiana Theory Review, 18(2):47–73);
selected elegiac works for Horn from the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries (see Baker, S. H. (2010).
‘In Memoriam: Nine Elegiac Works for Horn, 1943–2004’, D.M.A. diss., University of Cincinnati);
selected wind band music (see Drufel, B. J. (2012). ‘In-Depth Analysis and Program Notes on a Selec-
tion of Wind Band Music’, M.A. thesis, Minnesota State University); and three pieces following the
September 11th attacks written by John Adams, John Corigliano, and Steve Reich (see Phillips, A.
(2012). ‘For Such a Time as This: Classical Music and 9/11’, Ph.D. diss., Baylor University). While
he does not analyse that piece in his dissertation, Benjamin J. Drufel mentions that Ronald Lo Presti’s
Elegy for a Young American refects all of the stages in the model by order (Ibid. Drufel [2012]:54).
13 Macan, E. (1997). Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford
University Press, pages 112–125.
14 Rose, P. A. (1998). Which One’s Pink? An Analysis of the Concept Albums of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd.
Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Collector’s Guide, pages 40–59.
15 Cohen, G. (2014). ‘In Pink Floyd’s River, Time Is Endless’, theconversation.com. Retrieved from https://
theconversation.com/in-pink-foyds-river- time-is-endless-33707.
16 Whiteley, S. (1990). ‘Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix’, Popular
Music, 9(1):37–60, especially pages 38, 46; Yodfat, A. (2014). ‘The Pink Time’, in Katorza, A. (ed.).
(2012), Pink Floyd: Tearing Down the Wall. Tel-Aviv: Resling, pages 221–226, 211–240. This approach
gets to its extreme in Pink Floyd’s latest album, The Endless River (Op. cit. Cohen [2014]).
17 Op. cit. Kübler-Ross and Kessler (2005) describe the frst stage of grief in the words ‘paralysed with
shock’ (2005:8). Deryck Cooke (1959) suggests that slow music consisting of one single note has ‘no
sense of outgoing or incoming emotion, but only of a monotonous deadness’ (Cooke, D. (1959). The
Language of Music. London: Oxford University Press, page 109), which can possibly be extrapolated to
the single chord that occupies the beginning of ‘Shine On.’
18 Ibid. Kübler-Ross and Kessler (2005):8. In the concert screen flm that was projected during this sec-
tion of ‘Shine On’ in Pink Floyd’s 1975 concerts, young Barrett is seen in a blurred, dream-like picture,
as if being thought of through lenses of shock and denial (Op. cit. Mason [2011]).
19 Op. cit. Kübler-Ross and Kessler (2005):10.
20 Ibid:11. Tellingly, Nick Mason directly refers to the need of the band to ‘come out of denial’ in regard
to Barrett in the quote given earlier (Op. cit. Mason [2011]:105).
21 Waters, R. (1993). ‘Interviewed by Nick Sedgwick’, Wish You Were Here Songbook, October. Retrieved
from www.pink-foyd.org/artint/100.htm.
22 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):203–204.
23 Op. cit. Waters (1993); Op. cit. Mason (2011):204.

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 Gilad Cohen

24 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):197. It is rumored online that this phrase was called ‘Syd’s Theme’ by the band
while working on the piece. www. bruder-franziskus.de/pinkfoyd/faq/wywh.html.
25 Monelle, R. (2000). The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
page 17.
26 Other Pink Floyd songs that are saturated with a minor-seven tonic include ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’
‘Atom Heart Mother,’ ‘Any Colour You Like,’ and ‘Dogs’ (the latter with an added ninth).
27 Both Monroe (2008) and Tagg (1982) also associate the stage of yearning with a search after a musical
resolution or cadence. See Op. cit. Monroe (2008):75 and Tagg, P. (1982). ‘Analysing Popular Music:
Theory, Method and Practice’, Popular Music 2: Theory and Method, 37–67.
28 All music transcriptions are mine.
29 The harmonic pendulum of i and IV is a central harmonic device in the Pink Floyd repertoire. Exam-
ples include the ending of ‘Pow R. Toc H.,’ the guitar solos in ‘Atom Heart Mother’ and ‘Echoes,’ and
the majority of three songs from the 1973 LP The Dark Side of the Moon: ‘Breathe (In the Air),’ ‘The
Great Gig in the Sky,’ and ‘Any Colour You Like.’ Roger Waters indicates that jams over this harmonic
pattern were part of the writing process for this album, where indeed it functions like a harmonic motif
(Longfellow, M. Dir. (2003). Classic Albums: Pink Floyd: The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon. DVD.
Isis Productions/Eagle Rock Entertainment). This progression is also discussed in Meron-Dvoyris, M.
2014. ‘Us and Them’, in Op. cit. Katorza (2012):79–118.
30 Op. cit. Phillips (2012):53; also see, Gabrielsson, A. and Lindstro¨m, E. (2010). ‘The Role of Structure
in the Musical Expression of Emotions’, in Juslin, P. N. and Sloboda, J. A. (eds.), Handbook of Music and
Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications. New York: Oxford University Press, pages 389–390, 367–400.
31 It is worth mentioning that although anger is a common emotion in Pink Floyd’s output, it is often
disguised using tools such as cynicism.
32 In ‘Echoes,’ a song whose lyrics are far from conveying anger, a similar bass fguration occurs before the
reprise, where it seems to express softer emotions due to the soothing keyboard layers surrounding it.
33 Sharp tone attack have been associated with strong feelings including anger (see Op. cit. Gabrielsson
and Lindstro¨m [2010]:391; Juslin and Timmers [2010]:463). In regard to harmony, I suggest that in
Pink Floyd’s language, the Dorian dyad i IV usually communicates melancholy or bittersweetness by
featuring a chord borrowed from the parallel major and a raised ♯6^; e.g., ‘Breathe (in the Air),’ ‘The
Great Gig in the Sky,’ ‘Pow R. Toc H.,’ and ‘Any Colour You Like,’ whereas the natural-minor dyad
i-VI, which highlights 6^ instead, is used in songs or sections that express harder feelings such as anger
(e.g., ‘Have a Cigar,’ ‘Welcome to the Machine,’ ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives,’ ‘Is There Anybody
Out There?’, and ‘Us and Them’ [chorus], as well as the songs ‘4:33am (Running Shoes)’ and ‘4:41am
(Sexual Revolution)’ from Roger Waters’ solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking).
34 Prosodic cues in speech and acoustic cues in performance that are suggested to express anger are
described in Thompson, W. F. and Balkwill, L.-L. (2010). ‘Cross-Cultural Similarities and Diferences’,
in Juslin, P. N. and Sloboda, J. (eds.), A Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications.
New York: Oxford University Press 755–788, especially page 777; also see Juslin, P. N. and Timmers,
R. (2010). ‘Expression and Communication of Emotion in Music Performance’, in Juslin, P. N. and
Sloboda, J. (eds.), A Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications. New York: Oxford
University Press, page 463.
35 In my analysis of ‘Dogs,’ I wrote that ‘in Pink Floyd music, when the emotion becomes too strong for
singing, Gilmour takes a solo.’ See Cohen, G. (2015). ‘Expansive Form in Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”’, Music
Theory Online, 21(2). All instrumental sections in ‘Dogs’ evoke emotions that are catalysed by preceding
lyrics; specifcally, each of the scornful lines ‘you get the chance to put the knife in’ and ‘you believe
at heart everyone’s a killer’ is followed by a fttingly aggressive guitar solo. ‘Angry’ guitar solos that
similarly mark the climax of a song occur in ‘Time’ (following the text ‘No one told you when to run,
you missed the starting gun’); ‘One of My Turns’ (following ‘And I can feel one of my turns coming
on . . . dry as a funeral drum’); ‘The Thin Ice’ (following ‘With your fear fowing out behind you/As
you claw the thin ice’); and ‘Mother’ (following ‘Of course mama’s gonna help build the wall’). Having
multiple soloing guitars emphasises these climatic moments, and it occurs in the guitar solos in ‘Dogs,’
‘Atom Heart Mother,’ and ‘If.’
36 This section showcases an archetypical device in Pink Floyd music that I  call ‘the groovy jam’: a
rhythmic instrumental section in 4/4 with a fxed texture, static harmony, and steady or slow-changing
dynamics, which sometimes features a spacious guitar solo hovering on top. It is usually based on con-
stant alternation between two chords, most often a minor tonic (i) and a major four (IV), as mentioned
earlier. Recurring throughout the band’s corpus, these instrumental sections seem to be descendants

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 ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’

of the band’s early live jams, a link drawn by David Gilmour when explaining the origin of the instru-
mental ‘Any Colour You Like’ (see Op. cit. MacDonald [1997]:168; see also Op. cit. Cohen [2015]).
Groovy jams that employ two diferent chords can be found in ‘One of These Days’ as well as in fve
tracks of the mostly instrumental 2014 LP The Endless River (Cohen 2014). The early instrumentals
‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene,’ ‘Dramatic Theme,’ and ‘Obscured by Clouds’ are entirely based on
groovy jams over a single chord.
37 See Op. cit. Cohen (2015).
38 See Op. cit. Kübler-Ross and Kessler (2005):20–21.
39 Various studies based on empirical tests suggest that acoustic cues such as low sound level, slow mean
tempo, legato articulation, dull timbre, and fnal ritardando express sadness (Op. cit. Juslin and Timmers
[2010]:463). Contour theory suggests that some of these might contribute to the perception of music
as sad because they resemble physical characteristics of human sadness (see Op. cit. Phillips [2012]:6;
Davies, S. (2010). ‘Emotions Expressed and Aroused by Music: Philosophical Perspectives’, in Op. cit.
Juslin and Sloboda (2010):15–44, especially page 31.
40 O’Donnell (2005) views the tonal plan of the entire The Dark Side of the Moon as a single arc that
ends on a frm D-major tonic, thus strengthening the sense of closure at the end of the album. See
O’Donnell, S. (2005). ‘On the Path: Tracing Tonal Coherence in Dark Side of the Moon’, in Reising,
R. (ed.), ‘Speak to Me’: The Legacy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Publishing, pages 87–103.
41 Op. cit. Rothaupt and Becker (2007).
42 Op. cit. Wright (2008).
43 Op. cit. Waters (2002b).
44 Ibid; Op. cit. MacDonald (1996):265.

Audio and visual recordings cited in this chapter

Floyd, Pink. (2011a). The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Capitol Records, 50999 028935 2 5. Originally
released in 1967.
———. (2011b). A Saucerful of Secrets. EMI, 50999 028936 2 4. Originally released in 1968.
———. (2011h). The Dark Side of the Moon. EMI, 50999 028955 2 9. Originally released in 1973.
———. (2011i). Wish You Were Here. EMI, 50999 028945 2 2 5. Originally released in 1975.
———. (2011j). Animals. Capitol Records, 50999 028951 2 3. Originally released in 1977.
———. (2011k). The Wall. EMI, 50999 028944 2 3. Originally released in 1979.
———. (2011l). The Final Cut. EMI, 50999 028956 2 8. Originally released in 1983.
Waters, R. (1984) The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. Harvest, 2401051.

337
 18
‘A CERTAIN UNEASE IN
THE AIR’
Transitional aspects of Pink Floyd’s Animals

Edward Macan

Introduction
It is now more than 25 years since Pink Floyd released their fnal studio album, The Division
Bell.1 For the most part, critics and fans reached consensus years, if not decades, ago about
the relative merits of the band’s recordings. A search of the Internet using ‘Pink Floyd albums
ranked,’ one fnds several lists; the ranking of most of the band’s albums on these lists would not
have been a surprise 30–40 years ago. Perhaps the most signifcant exception is the band’s tenth
studio release, Animals, which has risen steadily in the estimation of critics and fans alike over
the past few decades.2
There are several probable reasons for the change in attitude to Animals. First, for years Ani-
mals was eclipsed by the enormous success of the albums that preceded and succeeded it. To be
sure, Animals, released in January 1977, was quite successful by the standards of other major rock
acts of the day, reaching number three in the American and number two in the British charts.
However, unlike the band’s two previous albums, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish
You Were Here (1975), and their subsequent album, The Wall (1979), it did not reach number
one in the United States; furthermore, it achieved neither the phenomenal staying power of
TDSOTM (which was on the US charts for 741 consecutive weeks from 1973 to 1988) nor
the cultural notoriety of The Wall, for which the movie of the same name served both as visual
interpretation and epic promotional video.
Perhaps the transitional role of Animals in the band’s development also tended to work
against a quick recognition of its signifcance. It is the fnal Pink Floyd album on which the
‘classic’ lineup of David Gilmour (guitar, vocals), Roger Waters (bass, vocals), Richard Wright
(keyboards, vocals) and Nick Mason (drums) function as a real band, working together on an
at least nominally democratic basis and playing all the album’s music.3 Subsequent Floyd albums
were more along the lines of a project than a band, with one member (i.e. Waters or Gilmour)
dominating the songwriting, acting as musical director in conjunction with an outside producer
who exercised signifcant creative input, and utilising a large cast of session musicians whose
work sometimes fgured more prominently in the album’s fnal sound than that of some of the
nominal band members (i.e. Wright, Mason).
It is also transitional in another sense: as something of a bridge between the band’s musically
experimental and ‘progressive’ but largely ‘apolitical’ albums of the late 1960s and earlier 1970s

338 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-24

 ‘A certain unease in the air’

and their more mainstream but overtly sociopolitical utterances of the early 1980s. To be sure,
Pink Floyd’s music from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s can be understood as protest
music – of a sort. Unlike most contemporaneous rock, it situated its ‘protest’ not primarily
in lyrics, subject matter, album cover imagery, or fashion but rather, in the spirit of Theodor
Adorno’s negative dialectics, in the alienating power of the band’s experimental musical style.4
Animals, however, marked a turn toward the more familiar type of protest in rock music: as
Nicholas Schafner (1991) memorably remarked, ‘it ofers the frst one-hundred-proof distilla-
tion of Roger’s sociopolitical venom.’5 The album’s turn toward more overt political expression,
in turn, fostered a shift in aesthetic sensibility (although, as I think will emerge subsequently, not
as radical as some have supposed) that invited comparison with the frst wave of British punk,
which was just emerging at the time Animals was released. Indeed, a number of critics praised
the album for capturing the sense of bleakness and disillusionment that marked late-1970s Brit-
ain in a manner that was without parallel for a band of their generation: NME described Animals
as ‘extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic.’ In contrast, Melody Maker simply
described the album as ‘punk Floyd.’6
In more recent years, as Animals has emerged from the shadows of the band’s discography
to be hailed as one of their most signifcant achievements, there has been an understandable
tendency to link it with the dystopianism of their subsequent The Wall and The Final Cut and
credit its signifcance to the newly revealed ‘sociopolitical venom.’ Indeed, Waters himself has
taken this stance.7 I believe this view is, at best, only partly correct: it misses the album’s ‘double-
ness,’ its distillation of a brief moment of historical transition that audiences in 1977 could not
possibly have fully comprehended but which I believe is a major aspect of its appeal to modern
listeners. If Animals is the frst instalment of a ‘Dystopian Trilogy’ by a politically committed
but essentially mainstream eighties hard rock band, it is simultaneously the fnal statement of a
musically ambitious and adventurous seventies band, and I will argue subsequently that it is the
album’s unique fusion of their epic, expansive yet structurally cohesive, and at times still trippy
seventies approach with the abrasiveness and intensity of their early eighties output – not any
supposed sociopolitical profundity – that has captured the imagination of modern listeners.

Making Animals
Pink Floyd convened at their Britannia Row Studio in April 1976 to begin work on a new stu-
dio album. Although the band had ceded Roger Waters sole responsibility for lyrics and overall
conceptual direction for the previous two albums, the creation of the music itself had been an
entirely democratic process. By the time WYWH was released in 1975, Waters was expressing
dissatisfaction with this state of afairs, grousing about,

the very drawn-out nature of the overture bits that go on and on and on. . . . I think
we made a basic error in not arranging it in a diferent way so that some of the ideas
were expounded lyrically before they were developed musically.8

He thus arrived at the sessions for the new album prepared to take a much more proactive
role in shaping the music to his overarching conceptual framework. In this, he would be helped
by the fact that the band’s other two songwriters, David Gilmour and Richard Wright, were
immersed in family issues: Gilmour had just become a father, while Wright was dealing with
marital difculties.9 The circumstances thus were right for Waters to dominate the album’s crea-
tive direction to an unprecedented degree (although, as it turned out, the making of Animals
was positively democratic compared to the band’s next two albums).

339
 Edward Macan

From the beginning, the band agreed the foundation of the album would be reworked
versions of two lengthy songs they had composed during the WYWH sessions and performed
throughout the supporting tour for that album: ‘You’ve Got to Be Crazy,’ co-written by Gil-
mour and Waters, and ‘Raving and Drooling,’ written by Waters. Before too long, Waters
settled on the conceptual direction, basing the new album on George Orwell’s novella Animal
Farm. ‘You’ve Got to Be Crazy’ was musically and lyrically reworked into ‘Dogs,’ ‘Raving and
Drooling’ into ‘Sheep’; Waters composed a new song of similar scope, ‘Pigs: Three Diferent
Ones,’ which was placed in between. Near the end of the sessions (the band wrapped up record-
ing in December 1976), Waters contributed two additional songs, both short and folk-like, ‘Pigs
on the Wing Part One’ and ‘Pigs on the Wing Part Two,’ which were placed at the beginning of
side one of the LP and the end of side two. At that point, the album had reached its fnal form.
Waters’ choice of Orwell’s Animal Farm as the basis of the new album’s concept was not
unproblematic. As is well known, Orwell was a disillusioned socialist, and both Animal Farm
(1945) and his subsequent 1984 (1949) probe the degeneration of the socialist project in Stalin’s
Soviet Union into a vehicle for repression and state-sponsored terror. Waters’ intent was quite
diferent: to illustrate how the dynamics of late industrial capitalism had brought Great Britain
to the dysfunctional state it had reached in the late 1970s. Given this very diferent program,
Waters could not really give dogs, pigs, and sheep the same precise symbolic meanings Orwell
had attached to them in Animal Farm. Waters also forfeited a good deal of nuance by eschewing
the other animals that played such a signifcant role in Orwell’s novella: for instance, the horses
(exemplifed by Boxer), whose loyalty and dedication powered the revolution but whose intel-
ligence made them potentially dangerous critics of it, and the wily cat (Orwell never names her)
who always managed to strike the right political stance at the right time.
These problems, however, were not insurmountable. What ultimately makes Waters’ Animals
pale next to Orwell’s Animal Farm as political commentary is its failure to depict a coherent
dynamic of social relationships between the animals. By memorably sketching the doings of the
pigs, dogs, horses, sheep, and other animals, Orwell’s Animal Farm enables us to grasp them as
symbols of specifc segments of human society, understand their motivations, comprehend the
nature of the injustices perpetrated by certain animals, and recognise the ethical and strategic
failures which led to the corruption of the revolution. Waters, by comparison, ofers a far less
detailed picture of how the relational dynamics between the various animals lead to the societal
dysfunction he decries. He sketches their failures clearly enough: his pigs symbolise a corrupt,
manipulative leadership; his dogs ruthless, violent individuals who game the system to get their
proverbial piece of the pie; and his sheep the clueless, conformist masses who do not recognise
impending disaster until it strikes. Ultimately, Waters’ animals work better as psychological
sketches of certain personality types than as metaphors underpinning a political allegory; the
fact his symbols are more amorphous than Orwell’s (for instance, as will be shown in the follow-
ing, there is a certain overlap between his dogs and pigs, which in Orwell are clearly diferenti-
ated) further weakens the possibility of illuminating political analysis. It is in the musical realm
that Animals achieves its coherence.

LP side 1: structural details

Dogs: alienation and self-destruction

The frst of the album’s three major tracks is ‘Dogs.’ Clocking in at just over 17 minutes and
occupying nearly all of side one of the LP medium, it coheres remarkably well for a song of
its length. Its structural outline, A B A’ A B C, evokes classical sonata-allegro form; this almost

340
 ‘A certain unease in the air’

certainly was not intentional but shows the band’s penchant for creating the tight, large-scale
structures that were a hallmark of early seventies progressive rock was still intact in 1977. Waters’
lyric, mostly written in the second person (‘You’ve got to be crazy/gotta have a real need’),
addresses the ruthless overachiever who is willing to sacrifce family, friends, colleagues, and
personal ethics to material success and worldly position.
The song fades in with Gilmour strumming a syncopated 16-bar progression on acoustic
guitar that is at once jazzy and folky, accompanied by Wright’s softly swelling Farfsa organ
chords. The progression in question, which occupies the track’s frst 37 seconds, consists of four
chords: D minor ninth, B♭ major, A eleventh (no third), and B♭ seventh, with the seventh, A♭,
in the bass. Although the jazz-derived D minor ninth and A eleventh chords are a bit unusual
for Floyd, the progression of the frst three chords is conventional enough: tonic, submediant,
and dominant in D minor, with a vacillation between raised and lowered sixths (in this case B♭
and B) that is common in British rock. The fourth chord, however, with its fatted ffth, A♭, is
disruptive, and results in the implied bass line D-B♭-A-A♭: the interval separating D and A♭ is
the tritone, and as a result, the progression feels open-ended and incomplete.
Gilmour sings the frst verse in conjunction with the second repetition of the progression;
when he begins to sing the second verse, Hammond organ, bass, and drums make a dramatically
late entrance, ‘heavying up’ the music signifcantly. Gilmour develops this heavier aspect during
the next repetition of the progression when he takes his frst guitar solo (on Fender Telecaster
rather than his usual Stratocaster). When he begins singing the third verse, he layers in electric
guitar accompaniment (although the acoustic strumming remains audible in the background);
the section’s fnal repetition of the progression comprises an instrumental outro that reduces the
music’s textural and timbral activity.
The song’s second section, from just after 3:40, is more dolorous in character, with a half-
time feel. It begins with Gilmour’s overdubbed dual guitar phrases that suggest a quasi-classical,
overture-like theme in D minor: these engage in call-and-response with a third guitar part
comprising decorative string bends bathed in reverb and echo, and are supported by Wright on
ARP string ensemble and Rhodes electric piano. The overture-like theme is succeeded by qui-
etly strummed acoustic guitar chords that vacillate hypnotically between D minor and C major,
over a surreal collage of barking and howling dogs, some of them heavily processed, prefguring
things to come. Eventually, Gilmour launches into a solo over the vacillating chords, this one
more abrasive in its timbre than his frst one.
Finally, just before 6:50 Gilmour sings a new ‘alternate’ verse, to which Wright contributes
backing vocals, that unfolds over a chord progression that is similar to, but more conventional
than, the earlier one: D minor-C major-B♭ major-A major. We note again the ubiquitous
descending bass line, now D-C-B♭-A; the gesture of melodic descent, especially in the bass,
recurs across much of the remainder of the album and becomes both a tool of structural uni-
fcation and an agent of the album’s prevailing depressive character. During this verse, Waters’
lyric introduces a new image – ‘the stone,’ which ultimately will drag his protagonist down to a
watery grave – that he develops across the remainder of the song.
The remarkable third section, which begins about 8:00, comprises four repetitions of the
D min 9-B♭-A 11-B♭ 7/A♭ progression of section one. Essentially a duet for Wright and
Mason accompanied by a myriad of taped efects, it is mysterious and hallucinatory, its sense
of timelessness heightened by its slow harmonic rhythm slow harmonic rhythm (throughout,
the sustained synthesiser chords change once every 14 seconds). Mason creates a very unobtru-
sive three-beat feel with a reverberating kick drum accent on beat one accompanied by a soft
eighth note ride cymbal pattern, while the fnal word sang by Gilmour in the previous section,
‘stone,’ reverberates on and on, eventually becoming ‘own,’ and fnally a pulsing long ‘o’ sound.

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During the second repetition of the progression (from 9:09), the band begins to layer in a col-
lage of barking and howling dogs, many of them heavily processed, some run through a vocoder
(a popular efects device in the late seventies and eighties music used to create machine-like,
robotic vocals), which drift in and out of the texture. Wright begins to spin out a high, thin
synth melody at the beginning of the third repetition (from 10:04); Mason, for his part, con-
tributes a very trippy efect through a metric modulation that shifts the meter from three to four
beats, even as the reverberating kick drum accents continue to mark beat one as before.10 The
‘barking dogs’ fade, replaced by the sound of someone whistling to their dog, again very heav-
ily processed. During the fourth and fnal repetition of the progression, from 10:59, Wright’s
slow, winding lead line continues, as the whistling gives way to a return of the heavily processed
dog barks and howls. While the intent of this section is not entirely clear – indeed, its sense of
mystery and metaphysical depth seems to transcend the putative subject matter – one suspects
it is intended as a metaphor of the alienation and haunted conscience of the ‘Dog,’ who has
sacrifced everything to material success and worldly position.
At 11:40, the strummed acoustic guitar chords that opened the song reemerge out of the
sonic fog, marking a recapitulation of sorts and the beginning of the fourth section. Only
gradually does Wright’s snaky synth lead of the previous section fade out, at which point the
vocals reenter: only now it is Waters, rather than Gilmour, who is singing. Waters’ frst verse
(from 12:17) represents a divergence from the ‘Dogs’ lyrics up to this point: it is the one time
he speaks in the frst rather than the second person (‘Gotta admit/I’m a little bit confused’), and
the frst time his lyric aligns with Orwell’s construct of the Dog as an unwitting pawn. After
another vocal verse, now accompanied by the full band, Gilmour launches into his third guitar
solo, accompanied by ‘furious’ drumming by Mason that creates a double-time feel. Just before
14:00, Gilmour marks of his solo with a trippy sequence of descending augmented triads that
momentarily dissolve the sense of D minor tonality into a whole-tone haze.
At 14:10, the band recapitulate the frst part of the second section, the guitar ‘overture’
theme. This is not, however, followed by the second part of the second section (i.e. the ‘barking
dog’ episode and new verse initially heard at 6:48). Instead, at 15:20 the ‘overture’ spills into a
new, climactic section based around hypnotic repetitions of yet another descending bass fgure,
F-E-D-C, harmonised (usually) F major-C major/E-D minor-C major; the harmonic rhythm
is now much faster, lending the music a new sense of drive and urgency. Waters’ vocal essentially
doubles the bass line; about two-thirds of the way through, his voice begins to harmonise with
itself via tape delay, and as the song approaches its culmination, he overdubs yet a third harmony
vocal part.11
The lyric of this fnal section, often praised for its alliterative technique (‘Who was born in a
house full of pain/who was trained not to spit in the fan’) is the one passage of Animals that con-
veys something approaching an Orwellian level of sociopolitical insight. Here Waters lays bare
the capitalist program of social conditioning that produces the Dog and, as the song reaches its
climax amidst Gilmour’s ‘howling’ guitar feedback, transforms the ‘stone’ image introduced in
the song’s second section into a metaphor for the twisted values system that ultimately destroys
the Dog: ‘Who was ground down in the end/who was found dead by the phone/who was
dragged down by the stone/who was dragged down by the stone.’
‘Dogs’ ranks with ‘Echoes’ and ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ among the band’s weightiest
epics. In addition to its impressive musical architecture, ‘Dogs’ is arguably the fnal example of
the band operating outside the musical mainstream, its hallucinatory middle section evoking
their more frankly experimental music of the late sixties and early seventies. Finally, it has by
some length the best lyric of the album, as Waters lays bare the warped values system of late

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industrial capitalism that drives the Dog to its ultimately self-destructive end. ‘Dogs’ is a song
that – pardon the pun – still has a powerful bite more than 40 years after its release.

LP side 2: structural details

Pigs and sheep: confict and control

Side two of the LP medium begins with Waters’ ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones’), newly composed
to both complement and contrast with the album’s two pre-existing lengthy tracks. Orwell’s
Pigs are the overlords of the Animal Farm; they are depicted as more intelligent than the Dogs,
manipulating and harnessing the violent tendencies of the latter to maintain their grip on
power. Orwell intended his Pig-Dog partnership as a metaphor for the Soviet state, where the
ruling Politburo (the Pigs) relied on a huge cadre of the secret police (the Dogs), who were
charged with implementing the Politburo’s program (which by the early 1930s essentially had
become Stalin’s program) with whatever level of violence was deemed necessary.
The fact that Waters presents us with three diferent pigs rather than just one weakens the
clarity of his Pig metaphor. His frst Pig is recognisable enough: to use modern parlance, the
one-percenter, the wealthy neoliberal capitalist overlord ‘whose hand is on his heart.’ His second
Pig is more problematic: the gangster, who’s ‘hot stuf with a hat pin/and good fun with a
handgun.’ Here the metaphor comes dangerously close to breaking down since it is not clear
why this individual is a Pig rather than a Dog. The third Pig is the tyrannical moralist: here
Waters calls out Mary Whitehouse, founder and frst president of the National Viewers’ and
Listeners’ Association, which led a campaign to clean up British television and radio program-
ming during the late sixties and seventies.12 The problem with having three diferent pigs (here
one suspects Waters is punning of the traditional children’s story of the three pigs) is that for
the Pig metaphor to work efectively in a larger allegory, its meaning must be fxed. It may be
Waters’ three pigs are essentially similar, but other than the will to dominate, the commonalities
are not adequately sketched, and the distinction between Pig and Dog is never entirely clarifed.
However, as Schafner (1991) notes, whatever the shortcomings of the lyrics, the music ‘gen-
erates its considerable energy through sheer, unbridled contempt.’13 Elements of ‘Pigs (Three
Diferent Ones)’ are anticipated by the band’s earlier ‘Money’ (DSOTM) and ‘Have a Cigar’
(WYWH), both of which represent highly personal Pink Floyd takes on the late sixties/early
seventies R & B and funk, but ‘Pigs’ is sparer and far more abrasive (both in its lyrics and its
music) than either. Indeed, much of ‘Pigs’ conveys the band, for the frst time, as a stripped-
down guitar-bass-drums power trio, with Wright’s atmospheric synth, organ, and electric piano
patinas notable for their absence. While ‘Pigs’ has less variety and richness of musical content
than ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep,’ it is more in tune with late seventies developments: it is the track that
comes closest to ‘punk Floyd,’ and that best prefgures the harsher, more guitar-centred sonic
world of the band’s next two albums.
Like ‘Dogs,’ ‘Pigs’ falls into a six-section format, in this case, A B C A B A, which suggests yet
another almost certainly unintentional classical precedent, sonata-rondo form. The song opens
with a loud, reverberating ‘oink,’ followed by Wright’s solemn, cathedral-like Hammond organ
fgure. Based on vacillating E minor and C major chords, it both establishes E minor tonality
and serves as a backdrop for a lyrical, trebly, and melancholy bass guitar melody. If this bass guitar
part does not sound like Roger Waters’ usual approach, that is because it is not Waters playing;
on both ‘Pigs’ and ‘Sheep,’ Gilmour plays the bass parts, with Waters contributing textural guitar
parts instead.14 After the bass melody winds down, Gilmour begins syncopated guitar rifng on

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the E minor-C major progression, even as Wright layers in a ghostly ARP string ensemble line
above the Hammond fgure. Finally, just past a minute in, Mason’s drum fll shifts us into the
second section, comprising the frst two verses and choruses.
It is the second section that confronts us with the new, stripped-down Floyd. Waters’ frst
verse, which presents the frst of the three Pigs (‘Big man/pig man’), is accompanied by a syn-
copated bass-drums groove and Gilmour’s abrasive of-beat staccato guitar rifng; while the
chord changes are simple enough (essentially E minor-C major-G major-E minor), the phrase
structures are asymmetrical and unpredictable, as they often are in Waters’ songs, creating a
sense of edginess. The chorus (from 1:49) abruptly shifts to A tonality and mainly consists of a
single chord that vacillates between A major and minor; Wright contributes sparse syncopated
acoustic piano chords, Mason a peculiarly trashy eighth note ride fgure on woodblock. The
second verse, which presents the second of the three Pigs (‘Bus stop rat bag’) begins at 2:45 and
proceeds in the manner of the frst, with the verse in E minor, the chorus in A major/minor.
The third section (from 4:13) seems intended to mirror the trippy third section of ‘Dogs,’
although within the confnes of this song’s sparer and spikier aesthetic. It is based on a heav-
ily chorused 16-bar electric guitar progression that descends by step from E minor through D
major and C major before stopping on Bb major; as with the ‘Dogs’ progression, the fact that
the roots of the progression’s frst and last chords are a tritone apart creates an incomplete, open-
ended feeling. We hear this progression six times in all; at the end of the second, fourth, and
sixth repetitions, the B♭ major triad is followed by (implied) B major harmony, which makes
the subsequent return to E minor more emphatic. This section is more rhythmically energised
than the analogous section of ‘Dogs’ and illustrates a gradual crescendo as more and more parts
are layered in: a steady bass-drums groove, a multitude of pig oinks and grunts (which, like the
barks and howls of ‘Dogs,’ are heavily processed), a series of decorative single-line string bends
bathed in reverb and echo, and fnally, Gilmour’s guitar solo, played through a Heil talkbox.
This entire massive texture is suddenly cut of at 7:10 by the recapitulation of Wright’s
somber organ fgure, which once again serves as a backdrop for Gilmour’s trebly bass guitar
obbligato. As before, the organ prelude gives way to the verse, where we are introduced to
the third and fnal Pig (‘Hey you, Whitehouse’) at 8:09. The subsequent chorus spills into the
sixth and fnal section: a Gilmour guitar solo over yet another descending bass fgure, this one
a variant of Wright’s prelude that descends from E minor to C major via D major. A rhetorical
masterpiece, Gilmour opens the solo with a long ‘stutter’ on E before starting a slow, tortured
ascent that outlines the E hexatonic minor scale. The guitar line becomes increasingly jagged
as Gilmour demonstrates a kind of virtuosity that was new to him but that he would further
develop on The Wall. As his solo becomes more agitated, the bass begins a driving ascending
eighth-note fgure that pushes the solo along; Mason, for his part, contributes some of his most
committed and intense drumming since the late 1960s, with an especially fery series of flls just
as the solo is fading out.15 Tragic, corrosive, and bitter all at once, this section represents one
of Gilmour’s fnest recorded moments and heaps scorn on the subjects of Waters’ lyric more
eloquently and powerfully than the lyric itself.

Pigs and sheep: confict and control

Gilmour’s riveting solo fades out just as a new sound is emerging: the bleating of many sheep.
Out of this pastoral background emerges Rick Wright’s ruminative Rhodes electric piano
prelude. Set in D minor (the tonality of ‘Dogs’ – more on this momentarily), Wright’s prelude
to ‘Sheep,’ cast in a kind of pastoral jazz idiom, has frequently been criticised over the years for
having little to do with the remainder of the song. That is precisely its point. British listeners

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were conditioned by the twentieth-century symphonic school of Ralph Vaughan Williams

and his acolytes to equate musical pastoralism with the British countryside; innocence; and an
Edenic, utopian world. Metaphorically, Wright’s prelude strikes all these chords. The fact that it
is unconnected with what follows points up the fact that Roger Waters’ Sheep live in an imagi-
nary Eden of their own mind with little connection to the world as it actually is. As such, the
Prelude is crucial to the conceit of the song at large. (Indeed, Waters’ lyric begins, ‘Harmlessly
passing your time in the grassland away/only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air . . .’).
In the band’s earlier DSOTM and WYWH days, Wright would have been given a songwriting
credit for this contribution, which occupies nearly 20% of the song’s overall length. It is symp-
tomatic of the Dog-like frame of mind that Waters was entering during this phase of the band’s
existence that he did not receive one here.
From about 30 seconds in, Wright’s solo is quietly accompanied by a throbbing 12/8 bass
fgure; from about 1:20 in, it grows tonally unstable, moving briefy through A and then B
minor. This proves to be a transition into the second section of ‘Sheep,’ which comprises
the frst two verses and choruses. The 12/8 bass fgure, rendered at a (for Floyd, at least)
brisk tempo, becomes the song’s musical backbone. Driven by Mason’s propulsive drum-
ming and overlaid with Gilmour’s ringing power chords and Wright’s Hammond (and, at
the end of each verse, his trippy VCS3 efect – for instance, 2:18 to 2:23), it contains the
proto-industrial essences of ‘One of These Days’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’ but is more
pressing and urgent than either. The verse is set in E minor, the key of ‘Pigs,’ although the
tonality of the chorus (from 2:26), with its vacillating F♯7 and A  major chords, is more
ambiguous. The fact that ‘Sheep’ is not set in a new key but serves as the forum for a
tug-of-war between D minor, the key of ‘Dogs,’ and E minor, the key of ‘Pigs,’ metaphori-
cally expresses Waters’ Sheep as a mindless mob subject to the manipulation of forces more
powerful than they.
In the opening verse, Waters returns to the second person of the ‘Dogs’ and ‘Pigs’ lyrics:
speaking in a prophetic, pseudo-biblical tone, he warns, ‘You better watch out/there may be
dogs about/I’ve looked over Jordan, and I’ve seen/Things are not what they seem.’ In verse
two, he depicts the descent of the Sheep into the slaughterhouse, the ‘valley of steel,’ adding:
‘now things are really what they seem/no, this is no bad dream.’16 Throughout ‘Sheep,’ Waters
renders a bravura vocal performance, singing high in his range with an urgent, almost slightly
mad delivery that contributes much to the song’s intensity and power.
As with ‘Dogs’ and ‘Pigs,’ the third section of ‘Sheep’ is a lengthy instrumental section. It
begins at 3:48 with just bass, which continues its drone pulse on E, and synth, which weaves
a series of unfocused, meandering chords, heavy with flter sweeps, that evoke the stasis of the
analogous section of ‘Dogs’; in fact, at 4:07 the echoing ‘stone’ loop of ‘Dogs’ briefy emerges
from the sonic fog. A  deep synth E at 4:19 refocuses the music; at 4:34, drums and guitar
re-enter, and the synth chords suddenly become more focused and purposeful, rising relent-
lessly beneath an ascending E Dorian scale, the album’s frst sustained gesture of melodic ascent
and a foretaste of the heroic energy that will mark the song’s climax. This segment spills into
an instrumental recap of the chord changes of both the verse (E minor-A minor) and chorus
(F 7-A major).
Suddenly, at 5:34 the drums and guitar drop out again, and there is a surprising tonal shift to a
sustained D minor synth chord, supported by a pulsing bass D (although we may retrospectively
hear the previous A major chord as its dominant); for the second time in the song, we have
entered the tonal realm of ‘Dogs.’ For nearly a minute, the harmony vacillates uneasily between
D minor and D diminished seventh, the latter sketched by Minimoog arpeggios that drift omi-
nously downward (5:57), or stabbing, heavily processed Hammond organ chords (6:11), which

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take on a distinctly industrial character, evoking the slaughterhouse machinery that is processing
what is left of the sheep as their remains are conveyed down the assembly line.
Finally, at 6:27 Waters, speaking through a vocoder, launches into his notorious parody of
Psalm 23. As he approaches the end of his soliloquy, the underlying bass/synth harmony grows
unstable, drifting out of D minor into B, then A minor. This section arguably represents the
weakest lyric of the album. In part, this is because it is simply unclear why Waters is referenc-
ing Psalm 23: perhaps because of its pastoral imagery, although one wonders how many of his
listeners were aware of this. More problematically, he presents the coming overthrow of the
Dogs by the Sheep in frankly ridiculous terms: ‘When cometh the day we lowly ones/through
quiet refection and great dedication/master the art of karate/lo we shall rise up, and then we’ll
make the buggers’ eyes water.’ This seeming bit of silliness (or satire – one of the weaknesses of
the lyrics is that it is unclear which) undermines the allegory that, to this point, Waters seemed
to be making an earnest efort to craft.
Upon the completion of the Psalm 23 parody, the band move abruptly into the song’s fourth
section, the return of the verse and chorus (from 7:13), which describes the overthrow of the
Dogs by the Sheep. Of course, for the reason stated previously, we have no idea how the Sheep
actually achieved it, but Waters appears to lack faith in the long-term prospects of this ‘revolu-
tion’: ‘Have you heard the news/the dogs are dead/you better go home and do as you’re told/
get out of the road if you want to grow old.’ The Sheep, having somehow overthrown their
oppressor, immediately will return to their old apathy and mindless obedience.
Indeed, one wonders if there was a ‘revolution’ at all. After all, the verse returns in
E minor, the key of ‘Pigs’; did the Pigs perhaps engineer the success of this ‘revolution’ simply
to eliminate a dangerous rival while giving the Sheep an illusion of freedom? Unfortunately,
none of this is made clear, which ultimately weakens Animals as a concept and an attempt at a
serious sociopolitical statement. However, from a purely musical perspective, the Revolution is
both real and successful. At the conclusion of the verse and chorus at 8:07, the band launch into
the song’s ffth and fnal section, a dynamic instrumental victory fanfare in E modal major – the
album’s frst substantial passage of major tonality since ‘Dogs’ began some 36:30 earlier – that
represents one of the most bracing passages in Pink Floyd’s entire output.17 It is repeated four
times in all, each time with more parts layered in, until, shortly after ten minutes, it begins to
fade into the bleating that opened the track, the Sheep having heeded the advice to ‘go home’
and ‘get out of the road.’
In November 1976, as the Animals recording sessions were winding down, Waters recorded
two short songs, each less than a minute and a half in length, featuring himself on vocals and
acoustic guitar; no other member of the band was involved. Titled ‘Pigs on the Wing, Parts
One and Two,’ it is essentially a single song with two verses, one placed at the beginning of
side one of the LP, the other at the end of side two. While the songs show fngerprints of
Waters’ authorship (asymmetrical phrase lengths, shifting meters, occasional irregular chord
changes), ultimately they are quiet love songs in G major, focusing on the importance of human
relationships in the midst of a cold and unstable world, that not only share little in common
conceptually or musically with the far more substantial tracks they frame but seem overwhelmed
by them. Waters’ justifcation for the addition of the two tracks to the album was that without
them, Animals would have been ‘just a kind of scream of rage.’18 This did not sit well with the
rest of the band, particularly Gilmour, who reckons he was responsible for roughly 90% of the
music of ‘Dogs,’ which occupies over 40% of the album, but who, because copyright royalties
were allotted per number of songs, ended up receiving only a small cut.19 In fact, Animals would
have been a complete statement had it faded in with the swelling guitar chords of ‘Dogs’ and
faded out with the bleating of ‘Sheep.’ The main importance of ‘Pigs on the Wing’ is the link to

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the memorable cover art – conceived, unsurprisingly, by Roger Waters – that shows a pig foat-
ing through smoggy skies over London’s Battersea Power Plant, the fusion of gritty realism (the
grimy industrial landscape) and trippy surrealism (the foating pig) perfectly complementing
the album’s musical content and ofering yet another pointer to the album’s transitional nature.

Maturity and decline

Sheinbaum (2008) has criticised my use of an early-middle-late/emergence-maturity-decline
narrative in my descriptions of the output of the major progressive rock bands.20 He argues
that such a narrative, which depicts the passage from prog rock’s seventies to eighties phase not
only as a passage from ‘maturity’ to ‘decline,’ but from ‘authenticity’ to ‘sellout,’ both masks the
continuities of their more commercial and pop-oriented approach of the1980s with their earlier
output and discounts the possibility the shift toward a more mainstream approach represents a
progression of sorts, an acknowledgement of and engagement with major cultural shifts.
I acknowledge there is something to be said for this argument. Given the signifcant shift in
political consciousness that took place in Western societies ca. 1980, the historical and cultural
relevance of the music of the major prog-rock bands would have been signifcantly compro-
mised had they soldiered on as if nothing had changed: as Adorno (2004) has remarked, ‘Noth-
ing in art is successfully binding except that which can be totally flled by the historical state of
consciousness which determines its own substance.’21 Furthermore, as I have said elsewhere, the
1980s prog-rock ‘decline’ (or ‘sellout’) narrative does not ft Pink Floyd as comfortably as many
of the other major seventies prog-rock bands, given that Floyd’s music becomes both more
abrasive and more politically motivated in the early eighties, in contrast especially to the music
of Yes and Genesis, which becomes not only more conventional in its syntax and concise in its
structures (as did Floyd’s) but smoother in its surfaces and more invested in the pop topics these
bands would have considered ‘trite’ ten years earlier.22
Nonetheless, I think there is still something to be said for the ‘maturity-decline’ narrative of
prog rock’s passage from the seventies to the eighties. To be sure, I am not simply arguing that
the seventies music of these bands is superior because it is more epic, complex, and ‘authentic’
(in the sense its production suggests an idealised live performance), their eighties music inferior
because it is more concise, simple, and ‘inauthentic’ (in a sense its heavily produced studio
tracks foreground record label mediation between musicians and audience). Rather, I argue, in
the spirit of Adorno’s negative dialectics, that even when these bands attempt to convey truly
progressive cultural perspectives in their 1980s output, it is difcult for them to do so through
the conventional, mostly straightforward musical formulae they commit themselves to. In this
respect, I believe the assertion I made in the closing pages of Rocking the Classics (1996) remains
correct: the one major British prog-rock band of the seventies that remained genuinely ‘pro-
gressive’ into the eighties were King Crimson who, even as they adjusted their style to refect
changed cultural conditions, consistently worked against the grain of contemporaneous pop
music conventions.
Indeed, I  think there are some weaknesses in Sheinbaum’s (2019) arguments against the
maturity-decline narrative. First, I am not convinced that the eighties output of the two bands
Sheinbaum focuses on, Yes and Rush, actually represents late-period output – in the overall
context of their careers, middle period might be more accurate.23 Second, I think Sheinbaum’s
attempt to elevate the eighties output of these bands by comparing it to Beethoven’s late style
is problematic; indeed, as Sheinbaum himself admits, ‘The notion that Beethovenian “late style
is in, but oddly apart from the present” is in clear distinction to the ways post-1980 progres-
sive rock constructed its sense of late style through interacting with the musical trends of its

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present.’24 While fans of Pink Floyd may bristle at comparisons of The Wall and The Final Cut
with Yes’s Drama and 90125 or Genesis’ Duke and ABACAB, I think comparing the post-1977
output of any of these bands with their 1970–77 output will reveal fundamental shifts that are
difcult to describe as ‘progression.’ Here we will conclude by discussing Animals in the context
of what followed it, a discussion that I think also may shed some light on the rising esteem in
which the album has been held in recent years.

Conclusions
There is little doubt the starkly dystopian content of Animals marks it as a transitional album.
However, as I have already stated, it seems unlikely it is the album’s newfound ‘sociopolitical
venom’ that is the primary cause for its steadily rising reputation in recent decades. To be sure,
at their best, Waters’ lyrics deliver a stinging rebuke to late industrial capitalist society; over the
course of the album, though, the Orwellian concept simply is not sustained consistently enough
to deliver the systemic critique Waters doubtless aspired to. We can honour Floyd for, perhaps
uniquely amongst the major bands of their generation, not only carrying sociopolitical critique
into the late seventies and beyond, but sharpening it; however, it is doubtful many listeners
today, 40-plus years later, listen to Animals for its sociopolitical critique.
While Animals struggles to cohere conceptually, however, it has no such struggle musically.
One of the most compelling aspects of Animals is its new intensity of rhythm and abrasiveness of
timbre: as Schafner (1991) puts it, ‘Musically, Pink Floyd have never – before or since, in any
incarnation – rocked out so uncompromisingly, or with more conviction.’25 There may well be
something to the oft-stated observation the album represents ‘punk Floyd.’ A less noted aspect
of Animals, however, is its large-scale, album-length structural coherence, which puts it squarely
within the lineage of Floyd’s ‘progressive’ seventies output. While one can regret the somewhat
unfortunate decision to frame the album with the essentially extraneous ‘Pigs on the Wing,
parts one and two,’ the three principal tracks in between cohere into a unifed musical statement
in which, to repeat the hoary old cliché, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
On the one hand, they demonstrate well-conceived contrasts of style, tempo, instrumental
color, and mood from one song to the next. On the other, they are unifed by musical gestures
such as the succession of interrelated descending bass patterns; structural ‘rhymes’ (e.g., fve- or
six-part structures in which the third section is a lengthy atmospheric instrumental, the fnal
section, an explosive climax); imaginative usage of musical metaphors to highlight key concep-
tual insights;26 and the album-long tonal action whereby D minor is introduced frst (‘Dogs’), E
minor next (‘Pigs’), then the two keys struggle for supremacy (‘Sheep’), with E (the ‘Pigs’ key)
emerging triumphant – but E major, not E minor.
Indeed, I  would argue that no Pink Floyd album after Animals ever evinced this level of
musical cohesion or ambition again. On The Wall, the follow-up to Animals, as Waters seized
nearly complete creative control, he sought to make the music subsidiary to his conceptual
vision: as a result, the tension between musical autonomy and conceptual unity that marked
the band’s three previous albums was neutralised, and large-scale musical coherence tended to
decrease in proportion to the increase in conceptual coherence.
Furthermore, as I have discussed elsewhere, with The Wall the band ceased to operate outside
the mainstream and consciously conform to the commercial norms of the day.27 On the surface
they appeared to be travelling in precisely the opposite direction of nearly every other British
band of their generation, creating a harsher, more abrasive sonic world at just the point when
their peers were creating smoother, more polished ones. Beneath the surface abrasion, however,
lay hard rock formulae that had become familiar and commercially mainstream by the end of

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the seventies; indeed, the producer of The Wall, Bob Ezrin, coached the band in strategies for
creating hit singles.28 Paradoxically, despite its apparent turn toward a ‘harder’ sound, The Wall is
both more conventional and less distinctive than what preceded it.
Here is where the argument that the turn toward a more commercially oriented sound taken
by the major prog-rock bands during the 1980s represents ‘progression’ becomes problematic:
as I have argued elsewhere, at the point that listeners easily can follow a series of conventional
musical formulae, they are less, rather than more, likely to focus on the more profound implica-
tions of the lyrics. In the specifc case of The Wall, in all likelihood, the turn toward mainstream
musical syntax actually makes the music a less efective vehicle for conveying Waters’ jarring,
potentially liberating sociopolitical message.29 For some years after its release, many critics and
fans rated The Wall second only to DSOTM in the Pink Floyd canon. The fact that in recent
years Animals increasingly often is surpassing The Wall in polls suggests listeners are responding
to the Janus-like historical moment it captures, a moment that simultaneously acknowledges
the end of sixties utopianism and marks a late expression of the spirit of sixties experimentation
and musical progressivism.30

Notes
1 I am of course aware of Endless River (2014), based around previously unreleased tracks recorded during
the Division Bell sessions featuring keyboardist Richard Wright, who died in 2008. I think classifying
it as a ‘Pink Floyd studio album’ without qualifcation is problematic, for the same reason, for instance,
I hesitate to call albums released after Jimi Hendrix’s death containing previously unreleased studio
material ‘Jimi Hendrix studio albums.’
2 For instance, a Rolling Stone reader’s poll of 2013 ranks Animals as Floyd’s second greatest album,
after DSOTM. This would have been an unthinkable result in 1983. See rollingstone.com/music/
music-lists/readers-poll-your-10-favorite-pink-foyd-albums-11115/10-the-division-bell-216225/.
3 At least on the LP medium. On the eight-track tape medium, guitarist Terence Charles ‘Snowy’ White
is featured on a short segment of ‘Pigs on the Wing’ that was not included on the LP.
4 See, Macan, E. (2013). ‘The Music’s Not All That Matters, after All: British Progressive Rock as Social
Criticism’, in Friedman, J. (ed.). The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music. New York:
Routledge, pages 123–141. This addresses the tension that exists in much progressive rock of the 1970s
between conventional social criticism, conveyed mainly through the lyrics, and the modernist cultiva-
tion of a difcult, ‘hermetic’ musical style, positioned against the philistinism of mainstream culture.
5 Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. New York: Harmony Books, page 215.
6 Manning, T. (2006). The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd. London and New York: Penguin Books, page 104.
7 Ibid.
8 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):199.
9 Op. cit. Manning (2006):102.
10 From 10:04, Mason treats the reverberating kick as beat one, plays two snare sixteenths on beat three,
and treats the silences in between as beats two and four. The time between each kick accent does not
change from what it had been before, so the four beats take place in the same duration that the three
beats had previously unfolded in. Mason accomplished a similarly trippy metric modulation in ‘Shine
On, You Crazy Diamond’ from Wish You Were Here; see Macan, E. (1996). Rocking the Classics: English
Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, page 119, for details.
11 In live performances of ‘Dogs,’ Gilmour and Wright sang the harmony vocals. Incidentally, it is inter-
esting to compare the climactic section of ‘Dogs’ to Waters’ ‘Eclipse,’ the fnal song of DSOTM, which
similarly is built on a descending ground bass and relies on an alliterative lyric and a gradual piling on
of vocal harmonies to achieve its climactic efect. Of course, the fact ‘Eclipse’ is in a major rather than
a minor key gives it a very diferent afect.
12 Those of us who came of age in the U.S. during the late seventies/early eighties will remember the
Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), co-founded by Senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore, which
played a somewhat analogous role in American culture to that of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’
Association in the U.K.; just as Whitehouse drew Waters’ ire, Gore earned the scorn of Frank Zappa,
who testifed in front of the PMRC in Congress.

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13 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):214.

14 During the ‘In the Flesh’ tour that supported Animals, Waters played bass on ‘Dogs’ but rhythm guitar
on ‘Pigs’ and ‘Sheep’; the band hired Terence Charles ‘Snowy’ White to join them for the duration of
the tour, with White playing rhythm guitar on ‘Dogs’ but bass on ‘Pigs’ and ‘Sheep.’
15 I believe Mason has never been properly credited for the intensity his drumming brings to Animals;
I fnd much of his seventies work to be a bit tepid and consider Animals to constitute his best work
as a drummer since Ummagumma (1969). Perhaps unsurprisingly, unlike Gilmour or Wright, who did
not have fond memories of the sessions for this album, Mason enjoyed them, see Op. cit. Manning
(2006):102.
16 Although I doubt this was Waters’ intention at the time he wrote the lyric, the frst time I heard ‘Sheep’
was the frst time I had ever considered the slaughterhouse experience from the animal’s point of view
and the frst time I considered becoming vegetarian – although it would be another three and a half
decades before I did so.
17 The large-scale structure of ‘Sheep’ is, therefore, A B C B D, the ‘C’ section being essentially new but
referencing the B section, and briefy, ‘Dogs.’
18 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):214.
19 Op. cit. Manning (2006):103.
20 Sheinbaum, J. (2008). ‘Periods in Progressive Rock and the Problem of Authenticity’, Current Musicol-
ogy, 85:29–51, and also Sheinbaum, J. (2019). Good Music: What It Is and Who Gets to Decide. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, chapter 4, ‘Authentic: Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Val-
ues’, especially pages 138–152.
21 Adorno, T. (2004). Philosophy of Modern Music. New York: Continuum, page 213.
22 Op. cit. Macan (2013):138.
23 A central problem with Sheinbaum’s (2019) argument against my maturity/decline narrative of pro-
gressive rock is his cursory dismissal of Adorno’s critique of the standardised structures of American
popular music. Scheinbaum places Adorno’s dislike of American popular music in the context of his
experience as a Jew feeing Nazi Germany; see Good Music, 34–38. This allows him to completely
ignore Adorno’s Marxism, and thus his notion of negative dialectics, apart from which Adorno’s cri-
tique of American popular music makes no sense. If there is validity to Adorno’s notion of negative
dialectics, then the assertion that a music that has cast itself as aesthetically and socially progressive
enters a decline at the point its musical syntax become overly familiar must be taken seriously. If, on the
other hand, Sheinbaum believes it is problematic to speak of a style declining at the point its structures
and other musical gestures become overcoded, then it is incumbent on him to demonstrate why the
notion of negative dialectics is invalid, or at least inapplicable to the style in question.
24 Op. cit. Sheinbaum (2019):141. While there is a goodly percentage (I do not know that it is a major-
ity) of scholars and audiences who would assert late Beethoven is, in fact, the greatest Beethoven, two
generations out from the end of British progressive rock’s golden age, based on polls and the content of
fan pages, the proportion of Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Pink Floyd fans that would
rank the eighties outputs of these bands above their seventies outputs is somewhere between small and
miniscule and seems unlikely to grow substantially.
25 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):215.
26 In past reviews, I  have seen the album criticised for its ‘crude’ musical metaphors – the barking/
howling of the dogs, oinking/grunting of the pigs, and the bleating of the sheep – but I hope I have
demonstrated here that the album has its share of more nuanced, subtle musical metaphors.
27 Macan, E. (2007). ‘Theodor Adorno, Pink Floyd, and the Psychedelics of Alienation’, in Reisch, G.
(ed.), Pink Floyd and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, pages 117–119, and ‘The Music’s Not All That
Matters’, pages 138–139.
28 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):228.
29 Op. cit. Macan (2007):117–119 and 138–139.
30 Here I would have to acknowledge another factor in the declining regard in which The Wall is held
may be the heavy-handedness of its conceptual apparatus, which modern audiences may be less forgiv-
ing of than its original audience. That, however, is a topic for another day.

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 19
BEHIND THE WALL
A tool for condemning totalitarianism

Jean-René Larue

Introduction
In February 2017, Roger Waters declared that he wanted to organise a concert, The Wall, on
the US-Mexico border. That proposal was a response from the ex-Pink Floyd bass player to the
campaign pledges of the newly elected President Donald J. Trump to build a giant wall between
the United States and Mexico. The citizens of Mexico (and other Central and South American)
were to be contained behind the wall, a wall not only physically separating the two countries
but symbolically representing the diference between cultures. Waters, it can be assumed, knew
his suggestion to stage The Wall on the boarder was a provocative act; it was as symbolic as the
physical wall itself.
Waters had already used The Wall as a political statement. In 1990 shortly after the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet control of East Germany, he performed the entire album
in Germany. As for President Trump, Waters has been a long-time critic of the man. But as
part of the Us + Them tour (2017–18) Waters did not hold back; in English and Spanish, ‘Fuck
Trump and his wall’ was on one side of the giant pig blimp (from Animals); its face was that of
Trump, and on the other side of the pig was, ‘Ignorant lying racist sexist pig.’ Behind Waters
were projected even more words and images demeaning Donald Trump.1 The point is, Roger
Waters is a politically aware man who is not afraid to express his views. When some people
walked out of his US shows, he commented, ‘I fnd it slightly surprising that anybody could
have been listening to my songs for 50 years without understanding.’2
This chapter looks at The Wall and why Waters’ suggestion had so much political currency.
As the 11th opus of Pink Floyd’s output, The Wall (1979) is a reference point in the history of
rock music as theatre. The Wall is an emblematic album that was an instant international success
when released and continues to sell on vinyl and as a download. What makes The Wall popular?
What kind of messages seem to connect with listeners and audiences? How can messages from
1979 still be attractive to contemporary generations? Why, in 2017, would Roger Waters’ pro-
posal be received as a political act of resistance?
The answer to these questions lies both in the autobiographical aspects and the personal and
social-political issues covered in the album (and stage show and flm).3 The aim of this chapter is
to determine how what we may term this intimate work of Roger Waters expresses his neurosis,

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-25 351

 Jean-René Larue

traumas, experiences and politics and how it acts as art to denounce totalitarianism. To address
these aspects, this chapter employs three diferent approaches.
We will frst retrace the origins of the album, from the initial idea to the 1982 movie. This
will require highlighting the origin of the concept of The Wall and the way the album was
written and produced. In the second part, we will approach the political aspects of The Wall.
This album contains an important autobiographical part but also universal values and a strong
political message. Our aim will be to highlight these political aspects and to describe how Roger
Waters addresses them. In the last part, we will discuss the diferent uses Roger Waters has made
of The Wall over the decades to challenge totalitarianism. Through these three approaches we
may, therefore, make visible some of the reasons the messages of The Wall continue to be topical
and express universal concerns.

Te history of Te Wall
Released in 1979, The Wall (double album on vinyl) is much more than Pink Floyd’s 11th
album. It is, frst, a simultaneously musical, dramatic and cinematographic project, that is
musically, technically, theatrically and artistically a colossus. The Wall was never conceived as
‘another’ album but as a giant piece of performance storytelling combining meaningful music,
outstanding staging and incredible visual efects. A movie was also envisaged, and it was released
in 1982. There was nothing small or ephemeral in the conception Waters had of his ‘wall.’
The Wall is Roger Waters. As a founding member, bass player and principal songwriter
of Pink Floyd, The Wall, like The Final Cut, is a Waters project; both use Waters’ social-
psychological experiences and feelings as the resource for constructing unifying concepts. Both
albums tell narratives of real, reconstructed and imagined experiences that can be traced back
to Waters’ own life, from childhood to adulthood. The key to this may be Waters’ image of
himself and his music.
A convenient staring point to look at Waters’ self-image and how he viewed his music is
1973. Waters, it seemed, experienced discomfort with the global success of The Dark Side of
the Moon (1973). Success brought wealth. New houses in London and the English countryside
followed, alongside expensive cars, antiques, vintage guitars and sit-on lawnmowers. Richard
Wright said he felt more motivated to ‘jump on my lawnmower and shoot around the garden’
than make music and that he did not, as other band members did, feel ‘guilt about having a lot
of money.’4 Pink Floyd was now a brand, with a product millions of people wanted to buy, and
was, as such, a business. Apart from taking money for unnecessary sponsorship5 and regretting
it, the members of Pink Floyd now had the business clout (power) to do things even more their
way than they had before. Rather than taking the money and going their separate ways, the
band used their success to write Wish You Were Here (1975) – a critique of the music business
and the problems success can bring to artists. This, the main conceptual theme, was largely
devised by Waters.
Waters’ conception of what a Pink Floyd concert was about was not always shared with their
audiences. A now-infamous incident in 1977 when Waters shouted to the audience, ‘For fuck’s
sake, stop letting of freworks and shouting and screaming. I’m trying to sing a song! I mean
I don’t care. If you don’t want to hear it. You know: fuck you!’ could be seen as the ‘signifcant
event’ that provided the seed for The Wall.
Waters had an image of himself, of the band and of what they were about. This did not
include pandering to audiences. Pink Floyd were to be experienced; they were serious musi-
cians, and Waters expected audiences to respect them. Waters consequently wished his message
to be heard and understood. He did not only want to entertain people. At this time Waters is

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quoted as saying, ‘Rock and roll is becoming greed disguised as entertainment, just as war has
become greed disguised as politics.’6 Waters does not, therefore, in his own mind, make enter-
tainment music but meaningful music. Audiences shouting, throwing freworks and generally
messing about at a Pink Floyd concert broke his expectation and the barrier between him (or
them) and the spectators. From this event, Waters started to imagine a concert during which the
audience and the musicians would be separated by a giant wall, breaking any eye contact, giving
way to sound only. Bob Ezrin, who became co-producer of The Wall, mentions this time when
the concept of the album was starting to take shape:

Roger talked to me about his alienation feeling towards the audience and his desire at
times to put a wall between them. I remember I casually answered: ‘Well, why don’t
you do it?’ A year and a half later, I received a call asking me to come to his house to
talk about the chance to work together on his project called The Wall.7

In the same issue of Mojo magazine, Waters talked about the origin of the concept The Wall,

Originally, I had two images of the building of a wall all along the stage, and of the
sadomasochist relationship between the audience and the band, the idea that the audi-
ence would be bombed, with those people torn apart but applauding stronger than
ever because they would be at the centre of the action, even as victims. . . . The germ
of the thing – I still have this somewhere – is a sketch on an A4 sheet of paper, of a
stadium with a wall athwart. It looks exactly like what it was in the show.

This cynical vision of the relationship between the fans and the group is specifc to Waters.
The idea of The Wall is his. This explains the large number of autobiographical elements we
fnd in The Wall and why Waters wanted total control on this project. This wish to keep control
of the artwork can be found in the sharing of the credits between the diferent musicians of the
band, as Waters explains,

What happened in fact is that The Wall was the frst album for which we had not
divided the production credits between all the members of the band. At the beginning
of the process, when I said that I wanted Bob Ezrin to come and that he would be
paid, I said, ‘I will also produce the record, Dave also [David Gilmour, guitar player],
and we will also be paid, but Nick [Mason, drum player], you don’t get into the pro-
duction of the disc in the end, neither you, Rick [Wright, keyboard player]. So you
will not receive credits’.8

This quote makes two things clear. The frst is the authoritarian role Waters took in the project.
The second is the way Bob Ezrin, producer of The Wall, was imposed on the rest of the band.
From this instant, the project seems to have been built around two fgures: Waters and Ezrin.
This project is so personal that the issue of the involvement of the other members of Pink
Floyd can be raised. If The Wall is the artwork of Roger Waters, why should David Gilmour,
Nick Mason and Richard Wright take part in it? The answer lies in the ambition of the project,
both from a musical and fnancial perspective. Waters’ idea could only be actualised under Pink
Floyd’s name; Waters may not have needed Gilmour, Mason or Wright, but he did need the
brand. Consequently, the entire band was attached to the bassist’s project. The Pink Floyd brand
had equity. At the end of 1978, all the members of the band went into the studio to work on
The Wall.9

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Most of the compositions had been already devised before the frst studio sessions took place
at Britannia Row Studios. During November and December 1978, Pink Floyd’s members went
to France to continue work on the project. An important part of the album was produced there
before a last step during which the album was completed and mixed in the United States, in
New York. Producing this album was an opportunity for Bob Ezrin to show his expertise as a
producer. But Bob Ezrin’s talent was not restricted to his knowledge of recording studios. He
suggested the idea of the main character, ‘Pink.’10 While Waters wished Pink to be the hero
of the story, Ezrin thought it could be more interesting to develop a character acting as a tor-
mented rock star. Thus, the Pink character was born as a kind of rock star synecdoche, or, as
Ezrin says, ‘What we needed was a Gestalt, a character who would be the synthesis of all the
rockers we had known and loved. With such a hero, we could go far.’11
Thus, it is Pink’s story The Wall tells. The story of a child whose father has been stolen
(killed) by the Second World War and who is left under the grip of an oppressive and possessive
mother. Pink’s childhood is also about school, a place of sufering where he endures violence
from teachers who want to destroy his personality to make him bend and conform to ‘society.’
As an adult, his emotional life is difcult; he sufers trauma, in addition to having a wife who is
as oppressive as was his mother. In the end, his life as a successful rock star leads him into mad-
ness and raving behaviour12 (like the fans at the 1977 concert). Pink sees himself as a ruthless
dictator. Each step in his life is represented by the addition of a brick in the mental wall Pink
builds for himself; the wall is to protect him from the world outside.
The tracks on The Wall are arranged as follows:

Side one/Disc one

No. Title Lead vocals Length

1. In the Flesh? Waters 3:16

2. The Thin Ice Waters, Gilmour 2:27
3. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 Waters 3:11
4. The Happiest Days of Our Lives Waters 1:46
5. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 Waters, Gilmour 3:59
6. Mother Waters, Gilmour 5:32

Side two/Disc one

No. Title Lead vocals Length
1. Goodbye Blue Sky Gilmour 2:45
2. Empty Spaces Waters 2:10
3. Young Lust (writers: Waters, Gilmour) Gilmour 3:25
4. One of My Turns Waters 3:41
5. Don’t Leave Me Now Waters 4:08
6. Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3 Waters 1:18
7. Goodbye Cruel World Waters 1:16

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Side three/Disc two

No. Title Lead vocals Length
1. Hey You Gilmour, Waters 4:40
2. Is There Anybody Out There? Waters, Gilmour 2:44
3. Nobody Home Waters 3:26
4. Vera Waters 1:35
5. Bring the Boys Back Home Waters 1:21
6. Comfortably Numb (writers: Gilmour, Waters 6:23
Gilmour, Waters)

Side four/Disc two

No. Title Lead vocals Length
1. The Show Must Go On Gilmour 1:36
2. In the Flesh Waters 4:15
3. Run Like Hell (writers: Waters, Gilmour) Waters, Gilmour 4:20
4. Waiting for the Worms Waters, Gilmour 4:04
5. Stop Waters 0:30
6. The Trial (writers: Waters, Ezrin) Waters 5:13
7. Outside the Wall Waters 1:41

Te tracks
The album opens with ‘In the Flesh?’ which is an invitation to discover Pink’s story by looking
behind his cold eyes and his disguise.
The song ends with a bomb dropping, reminding listeners of the Second World War and the
death of his father. A frst autobiographical element comes herein. Waters’ father, Eric Fletcher
Waters, was killed at Anzio (Italy) in 1944.
‘The Thin Ice’ concerns the frst years of Pink’s life during which he does not know what
really happened to his father. This song simultaneously raises the insecure innocence in which
Pink lives but also the burden of war on the following generations with lines such as, ‘dragging
behind you the silent reproach of a million tear-stained eyes.’ Another interpretation can touch
on the narrow boundary between mental health and madness, which is already present in Pink.
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ describes the moment when Pink learns the truth about
his father and starts withdrawing into himself. He mentally starts building a wall, and his father’s
death is the frst brick, the elementary brick. Pink expresses this in the lyrics about ‘daddy’
going away and leaving just a memory.
Another metaphor may be read here: the ironic metaphor of a rock star touring to escape
the matrimonial home.
‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’ evokes Pink’s school start and especially the violent behav-
iour of the teachers, who wound children to destroy any oppositional spirit, ‘exposing every
weakness however carefully hidden by the kids.’ The end of the song explains that the teachers
themselves are bullied by their wives and pass their sufering on to their pupils.

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‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ describes Pink’s dream – he imagines destroying the
school and the teachers. It is an uprising moment for Pink. Waters expresses herein all his anger
towards the school system, which he claims is guilty of crushing spirits.
‘Mother’ is a dialogue between Pink and his protective mother. She takes part in the building
of his wall by isolating him from the rest of the world. There again, the song is partly autobio-
graphical because Waters was also raised by his mother.
‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ again evokes the consequences of the war for Pink, who gets depressed.
The emptiness caused by the absence of his father is underlined once again and shows the
trauma Waters may have had.
‘Empty Spaces’ takes us to Pink’s adulthood. He is married but cannot communicate with
his wife, from whom he is separated by his bigger and bigger wall. Here is a reference to Waters’
failed marriage with Judith Trim.
‘Young Lust’ tells about Pink becoming a rock star. Far from his wife, he goes out with
groupies, exactly like Waters. At the end of the song, Pink learns that his wife has a lover. It is
a new brick he adds to his psychological wall.
‘One of My Turns’ presents us a sight during which Pink invites a groupie into his hotel
room, abandons her and ends up destroying the room because of anger. Pink’s infdelity echoes
Roger Waters’ during his marriage with Judith Trim.
‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ is a song where Pink tries to get used to his wife’s infdelity. He holds
sufering against her. This track is a cry from Pink, who feels increasingly lonely and locked into
his inner world. In the song Waters laments the failure of his own marriage, asking his absent
wife how she could leave now.
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3’ is the paroxysm of The Wall. It is inside this song that Pink
fnishes building his wall and prefers loneliness to a social life.
‘Goodbye Cruel World’ is an extension of ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3.’ There, Pink
fnishes his withdraws from the society which has hurt him.
‘Hey You’ is the frst step to come back to reality. Pink understands he should not have with-
drawn from society. He calls for help, but his own wall prevents him from communicating. The
words ‘and the worms ate into his brain’ underline his unstable mental health.
‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ shows Pink’s madness is getting worse. Locked behind his
wall, he wonders if there is still anybody outside.
‘Nobody Home’ focuses on Pink’s loneliness. He cannot talk to anyone behind his wall. He
can only describe his items. Nobody answers him on the phone, not even his wife.
‘Vera’ is a song referring to Vera Lynn, a famous English singer during the Second World
War. Known for her song ‘We’ll Meet Again,’ the song shows Roger Waters’ irony. The sentence
‘Vera, Vera, what has become of you?’ suggests that Vera Lynn herself disappeared, contrary to
what she had promised (‘We’ll Meet Again’). It can also be interpreted as a sign that Pink has
lost hope. The reference to a popular song during World War II is again a way for Waters to
mention his father’s death. Once again, ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ touches on the absence
of a father who did not come back from war. At the end of the song, Pink’s manager comes to
take him to go on stage and says: ‘Time to go!’
‘Comfortably Numb’ is a sign of Pink’s deep depression. Locked in his room, he refuses
to come out to go on stage. Somebody calls the doctor to inject a stimulant so that Pink can
continue his life as a rock star. Roger Waters criticises in this song the managers who would do
anything to make money, even if they put their rock stars’ lives at risk.
‘The Show Must Go On’ continues the story of ‘Comfortably Numb.’ Pink goes on stage
under stimulants, raising once again the idea of managers’ greed. Pink discusses what he must

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do now that his wall is built: he realises a lonely life is dull. He then decides that ‘the show must
go on,’ but he is so stressed by this idea that he hallucinates.
‘In the Flesh’ is the climax of Pink’s raving. He fancies he is a fascist dictator, chasing foreign-
ers, Jews and homosexuals away.
‘Run Like Hell’ is the extension of ‘In the Flesh’ during which Pink/dictator is the chief of the
‘crossed hammers’ and advises the inhabitants to escape before his followers come to destroy the city.
‘Waiting for the Worms’ is the continuity of Pink’s raving. He lets worms control his mind.
During his hallucination, he promises the return to an authoritarian: ‘Britannia rule again,’ and
racist England: ‘send our coloured cousins home again.’
‘Stop’ is the end of Pink’s hallucination. His lucidity back, he wonders whether he is respon-
sible for everything, and he psychologically sues himself, questioning his own guiltiness. ‘The
Trial’ corresponds to this trial Pink dictates to himself. He imagines a rough prosecutor accusing
him of having nearly human feelings. The lawyer interviews Pink’s teacher, who accuses him,
and Pink’s wife, who attacks him before changing into his mother. The judge convicts Pink and
orders him to destroy his wall: he exclaims, ‘Tear down the wall!’
‘Outside the Wall’ is about the wall we all have between us and the world. The song warns
against becoming withdrawn into yourself and excluding people from your life.
Waters’ life, real, reconstructed and imagined, along with his perspectives on music and poli-
tics, are imprinted on every aspect of The Wall; every track is typical Roger Waters.
The Wall was not Waters’ frst autobiographical work – elements of his life and relationships
can be seen in previous albums – but The Wall stands because of its ambition in size, intensity
and scale of production. From the premise of its creation, the idea to make a theatrical per-
formance was already in Waters’ mind. For that reason, The Wall stands out from the previous
concept albums like The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here or Animals. As Waters says,

We wanted to get rid of the old pattern of pop concert on a square stage settled at
the bottom of a rectangular hall and stringing a series of songs. Our idea is to put the
sound all around the audience and us at the centre. Then the performance becomes
more theatrical.13

Anyone who knows the works of Pink Floyd and Waters also knows, as Waters said him-
self, they break conventional codes and question concert tradition to develop his own personal
vision of the artwork, and they are often political.

Success: Te Wall goes big

On the November 16, 1979, the single ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ is released in the
United Kingdom. On November 30, 1979, the album is out in the United Kingdom, and on
December 8, it is released in the United States and worldwide. The double album is a global
success, selling over 300,000 in December 1979 in the United Kingdom and, as of 2018, sur-
passing 13 million in the United States.
The Wall was conceived, however, as a massive multi-media project, encompassing music,
art, performance, stage shows and a flm. In its 40-year life, The Wall lives on in successive re-
incarnations using the latest technology.
Mark Fisher oversaw the conception of the live show in 1978. Assisted by Jonathan Park, he
spearheaded the creation of about 450 cardboard bricks, each measuring 5 × 2.5 feet, making
possible the construction of a wall 32.8 feet high and 164 feet wide.

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The staging of the concert not only included the wall but also a round screen as the stage
background, and this was an incredible technical feat. The screen and the wall were used as a
support bracket for the movies produced by Gerald Scarfe and broadcast thanks to three 35-mm
video projectors synchronised on an 8-track tape recorder. All of this was synchronised with
the sound efects on pre-recorded soundtracks with a click and a countdown in the musicians’
headsets. Let us also not forget there were, besides the entertainment, giant infatable puppets
of Pink’s mother, teacher and wife.14
The concerts were fully shot twice, frst at the Nassau Coliseum on February 27, 1980, by
means of two cameras, then four or fve shows during the London concerts at the Earl’s Court
in August  1980 for the purpose of a movie edited by Howard Lamden. Unfortunately, this
documentary flm has never been broadcast.
In April 1981, Alan Parker started to work on the flm adaptation of The Wall. The video
shoot started on September 7, 1981, and lasted for 61 days. The movie presents an innovative
construction for a rock band, as it mixes live action, animation and music. The animation foot-
age was produced by Gerald Scarfe. More than 10,000 sketches were necessary, and some of
them were projected during the concerts of The Wall tour.
The movie was presented for the frst time ever on May 23, 1982, at the Festival de Cannes
(France) out of competition. Its ofcial release was on July 14 in the United Kingdom. Ameri-
cans had to wait until the following August 6 to see it on the screen, and only in New York. The
flm was a commercial success and remains one of the most successful examples of an association
between rock music and cinema.
This brief summary of the genesis and history of The Wall shows Waters’ important musical
and biographical imprints. The Wall appears to be one of the rare examples of a multimedia
work of art in the history of rock music and in that sense can be qualifed as a total work of art
in the mould of the German Gesamtkunstwerk. Waters’ work reminds us of Richard Wagner’s.
Nevertheless, this work of art is not exempt from a strong political message even if it is marked
by technical and artistic innovations.

Political aspects of Te Wall

Besides the personal elements of Waters’ life, an autobiographical composition generally implies
inclusion of the manifestation of his beliefs. This is what can be found in The Wall. Besides writ-
ing references to his life, Waters also marked the album with his political position and attitudes.
Waters said in an interview for the French magazine Télérama (December 19, 2001),

I can only write about the reality I see, about what is around me. But inside each
of my songs, I see more a feeling of discontent than a pure despair. All of my lyrics,
I believe, only express a desire to communicate. If you take an artwork like Guernica,
by Picasso. It is an artwork with an unprecedented violence, a priori, you can feel all
of the artist’s anger and distress. But you can also see a humanitarian message in it. It
provides a desire to gather men in the face of this horror. If those feelings were not
inside the artwork, you could not watch it: only ruins and dead bodies. Relatively
speaking, you could say the same of my songs.15

Waters is not only a musician, but he is also an author with a lot of things on his mind. His
compositions allow him to speak out, denounce what he dislikes and try to get others to feel
and see the world as he does. He expresses his anger against a society he regards as in need of
common sense, kindness and tolerance, the Us + Them tour being an ideal example of his

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recent resistance politics. Yet there is an uneasiness in this; criticism spearheads the narrative
structure of The Wall, yet the audience tend to come to experience Pink Floyd rather than to
listen to Pink Floyd. Regardless of this, the topics and issues addressed by Waters are neither
irrelevant or historically limited; they seem to have universal appeal.
Criticising ‘society,’ in particular capitalist social structures, is a theme Waters returned to
again and again to after he took on lead songwriting duties for Pink Floyd. On The Dark Side
of the Moon, Waters criticises the alienating nature and properties of capitalist society – money
and power. In Wish You Were Here, ‘Welcome To The Machine’ and ‘Have A Cigar’ critique
the music industry for exploiting artists. Inside this criticism of business and commodifcation
of music, there is one of the frst keys to understand Waters’ aversion to President Donald J.
Trump. The American president is indeed known for his love for money, support for uncon-
trolled capitalism and ostentatious lifestyle. Paradoxically, Waters is a wealthy man. The music
business has made him successful. As he admitted in 2003 in an interview for the newspaper
Libération (May 6),

I remember the week when the album [The Dark Side of the Moon] entered the charts.
It was an important moment for me when I had to decide whether I kept the money
or not, whether I would become a capitalist.16

The contradiction between Waters’ beliefs and the money he makes is one source of his
critiques of the capitalist system. His political commitment is a way to show he did not become
what he is fghting. You should, Waters might argue, criticise capitalism to show you do not
support it.
In terms that echo the work of French Marxist Louis Althusser, Waters criticises the struc-
tures by which the ‘state’ (any state) and the powerful maintain authority and control over citi-
zens and in so doing can exploit them. Waters seems to see society as an ideological machine
(in Althusser’s phrase, ‘ideological state apparatus’) in which education, politics, law and money
have a degree of autonomy, but nevertheless oppress the essential humanity of individuals. This
is what Waters touches on when he talks about an ‘underground machine’ in 1976,

The idea is that the machine is hidden. Some underground power and thus bad power
leads us towards our various bitter destinies. The hero was exposed to this power. One
way or another, he went down into the machinery and he saw, and the Machine (the
Power) admitted this fact and says to him he is monitored because he ‘knows’. And
it lets him know that all his actions are Pavlovian responses, that all is conditioned
refexes and that all his responses do not come from himself. And in fact, he does
not exist anymore, except to the extent that he feels within himself that something is
going completely wrong. And that is his only truth. And then he goes, he leaves the
machinery and enters the room (the world) and the door opens and he realises it is
true that people are all zombies.17

In The Wall, Waters attacks this ‘underground machine,’ societal structures such as the fam-
ily, formal education, legal systems, political parties and ideologies, media organisations and
the ‘state.’ Moreover, the illustrations in the double pages of the booklet of the album sum up
the whole frame of reference of The Wall. One can see the main characters representing the
diferent structures questioned by Waters – the woman (Family), the mother (Family), the
teacher (School), the judge (Justice) and the crossed hammers symbolising tyranny (State). It
may be noted that the three caricatures of the woman, the mother and the teacher are also

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presented as giant puppets during the shows, proving they play a key role in Waters’ message,
that message being those who do the business of the state and powerful are themselves puppets
in the system.
One of the frst structures Waters criticises is ‘family.’ Pink’s mother is protective and domi-
neering. She falls onto him like a jet plane, a mirror image of the movie, where a Stuka bomber
drops bombs onto his father. Then she wraps her arms around him, and they become impen-
etrable walls, preventing him from thriving as a person, despite external success. She protects,
but she, ‘Mama,’ is ‘gonna put all of her fears into you.’ Waters denounces herein the authori-
tarian aspect the family can represent when it prevents the child from emancipating itself as an
independent being.
Formal state education, the schools, is next. In ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,’ Waters
criticises the school system for controlling the minds of children, exclaiming that ‘We don’t
need no education’ because we ‘don’t need no thought control.’
It is not education in itself that Waters is criticising but a social structure that has the pur-
pose to mould children into citizens the system needs in order to survive. He knows we need
education; we need to know and to have knowledge, but we must fght against deference and
servitude. The teacher’s profle reminds us that individuals’ standardisation, even the denial of
their identity and the humiliation imposed on children, are real and not necessary. In the flm,
the children, wearing orange masks, are directed towards the machine that grinds people; the
system makes mincemeat of them. A  key moment in this process is when a teacher mocks
Pink’s poetic aspirations – he shames and stigmatises Pink for having thoughts and aspirations
to be something diferent. For the teacher, an agent of the system, this kind of aspiration would
never do. The teacher is a victim of the hegemony of the economic, social, political and cul-
tural structures of society; he, therefore, it may be assumed, is expressing what he believes to
be a sense of realism – how can anyone be diferent in a system that needs conformity in order
to survive? To challenge the system would be counter-intuitive, leading to unhappiness. The
paradox is Pink is creative, yet wants acceptance and love, but faces derision and ridicule; the
teacher in his personal life also experiences derision and ridicule from his wife. There is a chain
of dysfunctional relationships; hence, the message may be, whoever you are, the system ‘fucks
you up’; therefore, fuck the system.
In Waters’ critique of ‘the school’ system there is an Orwellian vision that is destructive of
freedom and the open society. Waters had already used this in Animals (1977) when telling of
the power of one group over another, rooted in strength and terror. Waters somewhat simplifes
Orwell’s vision by reducing to it to three categories of animals in a political power hierarchy:
the sheep are led by pigs and are guarded by dogs. Waters’ universe is anchored in an extremely
pessimistic description of social relationships between groups (or classes). In The Wall, many ele-
ments of Pink’s relationships with others refer to this, especially Pink’s representation recalling
Winston Smith and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ in the flm (1984) Nineteen Eighty-Four.18
The flm version and its animated counterpart of ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ also
echo Gerald Scarfe’s pronounced dislike for the school system. Scarfe admits he expressed his
mixed feelings towards his own education through the flm. The scenes showing a carousel tak-
ing children to be shredded and made into standardised products was Scarfe’s idea. The message
is clear: teaching is mechanised, a standardising system (the masks the children wear, rejecting
any identity, any originality), a machine for grinding people into the kind of compliant worker
the system requires. Interestingly, this message was taken up by Soweto’s Black youth in South
Africa to denounce the Apartheid educational system. The use of the song was so powerful that
the South African White government censored it on May 6, 1980. Selling and broadcasting the
album was forbidden (as cited in Gonin, 2015).

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One of the structures criticised is obviously the State, especially a state which either controls
and maintains the pretence of democracy or replaces it for outright dictatorship. It is no coin-
cidence that the crossed hammers recall the swastika. Waters denounces fascism simultaneously
as the cause of his father’s death and as the denial of any divergent thinking when its ideology
is accepted or not challenged. Waters, as an artist, is defending freedom of speech and, as such,
attacks anything that can harm creativity like an oppressing school or fascism.
The last structure The Wall attacks is the legal system. In ‘The Trial,’ the judge is depicted as a
backside, suggesting he ‘talks out of his arse’. The symbolism is probably not at the highest poetic level
but has the merit of clearly expressing Waters’ attitude towards aspects of the legal system. Accord-
ing to Gerald Scarfe, this imagery comes from a sentence by Charles Dickens, ‘The law was an ass.’19
This vehement critique of Justice may look paradoxical and merits clarifcation. Waters does
not denounce the principle of justice as such but the fact that it is linked to the State and that a
judge, according to his ideas, may not always be completely impartial. Besides, the judge accuses
Pink of having human feelings and ridicules the adult Pink in much the same way as he was
ridiculed when a school pupil. The judge and the teacher both act, unknowingly, on behalf of
the State. Both are agents using their ofcial positions to maintain control; both use the soft
power of psychological fear, with the possibility of physical pain if compliance is not given.

Structure and narrative

In The Wall, Waters questions ideological structures but also rock-music formats. The album
structure is not consistent with a standard rock album. However, the paradox is that The Wall
questions state structures and usual musical structures but has itself a particularly infexible and
complex setting. The Wall has an infexible formal structure despite being a critique of tradi-
tional rock albums. As Gonin (2015) observes,

Those structures were in The Wall even more infexible considering that the show
itself was driven by the building of the wall and that the setting to the millimetre of
the timing prevented, from the moment of conception, to indulge in any instrumental
freedom which de facto became inappropriate.20

This questioning of formal structures may also be found in Alan Parker’s flm Pink Floyd –
The Wall (1982). Indeed, the result is part of the flm’s singularity of narration. Its narration
obeys the music. According to Alan Parker,

It is a very unconventional artwork, very revolutionary, in a way that there is no dia-

logue to push the narration of the story forward, and because of its fragmented nature
makes very hard the actor’s performances in keeping with the story. . . . The movie is
in the end a journey into memory and madness, and really shows the most extreme
limits of this man’s madness.21

The autobiographical aspect of the album led Waters to use these themes to express his
understanding of contemporary of society, an understanding that is pessimistic. But his pessimis-
tic view is not limited to the societal level – it extends to and incorporates the role and place of
individuals. One of the themes that allows for this is Waters’ use and view of ‘war.’
All through the album, the war is a recurring theme that punctuates the narration. Obvi-
ously, the loss of his father during the Second World War is key to this. The absence of a pater-
nal presence was a trauma in the life of Waters, as it was for many of his generation.

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In The Wall, several songs clearly refer to war. The song ‘In the Flesh?’ which opens the
album, is one of the most striking songs, with the sound of the ‘trumpets of Jericho,’ reminiscent
of the German planes Junkers Ju 87, known as the ‘Stuka.’ The distinctive sound of the Stuka is
often used to symbolise Nazis’ bombing. Its use in The Wall enables Waters to place the story in
a precise background. Moreover, the sound of Stuka appears after the lyrics: ‘Drop it on ‘em!’
referring to the bassist’s idea to bomb the audience. Bombs dropping are followed by a baby
crying, a symbol of the war victims and possibly Pink as a baby, crying for the loss of his father.
These sound efects are important to The Wall because they enable the audience to visualise the
story and how the events being depicted impacted the lives of ordinary people.
The second song discussing war is ‘The Thin Ice.’ Here again, it consists of evoking the bur-
den of war on the successive generations. That burden consists of and is expressed in the lyrics,
‘Dragging behind you the silent reproach’ and the ‘million tear-stained eyes.’
Very close to ‘The Thin Ice,’ the song ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ talks about the
moment when Pink learns the truth about his father. The loss of the father is the frst brick
which constitutes Pink’s psychological wall. Herein, Waters expresses the idea that all the mis-
fortunes which will occur in Pink’s life are rooted in this initial loss. The horrors of the war can,
therefore, afect generations. This can also be seen in ‘Goodbye Blue Sky.’
‘Look, mommy. There’s an airplane up in the sky’ is said in a child’s voice (by Roger’s son)
at the opening of ‘Goodbye Blue Sky.’ Accompanied by the noise of a plane, the child’s voice
is soon followed by the sense of long-term trauma: ‘The fames are all long gone, but the pain
lingers on.’
Finally, the song ‘Vera’ is about Vera Lynn, famous singer and allied forces mascot during
the Second World War. The lyrics ‘What has become of you?’ evoke this promise which was
not kept. There is a feeling here, but it is the collapse of Pink’s last hope, as Waters and a choir
sing to drumming rhythms, to ‘bring the boys back home’ so as not to ‘leave the children on
their own.’
All these songs show the importance of war to the album. And if one listens to The Wall as a
musical autobiography of Waters, then one may understand the importance war had in his life
and why he has constantly, in face of criticism and censorship, advocated tolerance and peace.

Te Wall
Another theme addressed in The Wall is totalitarianism and self-protection. Totalitarianism is
addressed throughout The Wall – especially through Pink’s delusion when he sees himself as a
dictator in front of the crowd. Gerald Scarfe’s symbol of the ‘crossed hammers’ symbolises Pink’s
fascist delirium. Scarfe says,

This way, we have to put a caring protection all around us not to be harmed. We
do not really feel vulnerable and we put a wall all around ourselves. And this is this
danger that Roger denounces in his artwork, I think, if you withdraw too much, you
become insensitive and a kind of machine or robot. . . . And the danger to become
a machine without thinking is to lose one’s spirit and to turn to fascism or whatever.
Then I refected upon the form of symbols which would be the most brutal keeping
this in mind. And then, the frst thing that came to mind, was the hammer, because it
is metal, it crushes things, it does not stop; it goes on . . . and the other thing was to
have it to walk, because it has within echoes of fascism and of Nazism and so on . . .
and this is how it happened, those tools for destruction without a face and spirit,
which only move forward without respite.22

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There are several ideas in this portrayal of totalitarianism. There is the idea that dictators may
be the result of a traumatic childhood, a school which broke dreams or a mother who was too
oppressive. Waters, it could be argued, came to dominate and dictate to the other members of
Pink Floyd. And in The Wall, Pink is a rock star. One may herein see Waters’ message explaining
that a rock star can become oppressive. One may wonder if there is in this a reassessment Waters
is expressing of his own behaviour.
The last question approached, and the most obvious, is withdrawal. In The Wall, the wall
has a symbolic function. It is a metaphor for the isolation Pink experiences. The construction
of the wall formed brick by brick, following the difculties encountered by Pink. But once the
wall is fnished in ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3’ and ‘Goodbye Cruel World,’ the song ‘Hey
You’ follows. This song expresses Pink’s regrets. Once the wall is fnished, he regrets he built
it; he understands that withdrawing is not solution to his inner torments and the problems of
the world. Hence, the wish to build a wall on the US–Mexico border can never for Waters be
a solution, that is, if there is a real problem the wall was proposed to solve. In the song ‘Waiting
for the Worms,’ some lyrics are adaptable to the Trump wall. The paradox of the multi-cultural
demographic and notion of individual rights so prized by Americans also makes the idea of a
wall ironic.

Reuse of Te Wall
After the giant concerts of 1980–81 and the flm release in 1982, there was room for doubt
about a new production of The Wall. Nobody knew if Waters would recreate a live version of
The Wall, especially since he had left Pink Floyd in 1985.
On November  9, 1989, history came to meet Waters. The destruction of ‘The Wall of
Shame,’ erected in and dividing Berlin since 1961, was a major world event. It signalled the
dismantling of the Soviet Bloc and maybe, it was hoped, the end of totalitarianism for East
Berliners.23 As a symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall represents everything Roger Waters
fghts against: self-withdrawal, war, totalitarianism.
On July 21, 1990, on Potsdamer Platz, Waters performed his biggest concert ever: The Wall
Live in Berlin. More than 350,000 people gathered to attend this gigantic show. The Wall shows
had already been a signifcant technical achievement. The Wall in Berlin project was even more
technical: 2,500 cardboard bricks for a wall 82 feet high and 551 feet long. The estimated cost
of the project amounted to nearly 8 million US dollars; comparatively, the concerts of 1980–81
cost about 1  million dollars. As sales of tickets could not be sufcient to defray the cost, it
was decided to negotiate television rights for the entire world, and Roger Waters had to add
500,000 dollars into the deal.
As no member of Pink Floyd would be present during the show, except Waters, the concert
was an occasion to gather the biggest stars of the time. Thus, The Wall was performed by Van
Morrison, the band the Scorpions, Bryan Adams, Paul Carrack, Sinead O’Connor, Marianne
Faithfull, Cyndi Lauper, the band and choir of East Berlin radio, the military band of the Soviet
Army and musicians such as the fautist James Galway. The large number of musicians gathered
from various musical backgrounds, reinforcing the universal aspect of The Wall and celebration
of German unifcation. ‘If this concert is to celebrate anything,’ Waters said, ‘it’s that the Berlin
Wall coming down can be seen as a liberating of the human spirit.’24 Thus, a particularly auto-
biographical artwork ended up becoming a tool for denouncing war.
In 2010, nearly 20 years after The Wall Live in Berlin concert, Waters decided to recreate
The Wall with an international tour called The Wall Live. This was an occasion for Waters
to play the whole album again with his own musicians. The tour ran from September  15,

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2010, in Toronto until September 21, 2013, in Paris. This new tour had some variations from
the previous ones. The frst signifcant new element was ‘the missing relatives’ wall. Waters
reached out via social networks, asking people to give him a picture of a loved one lost dur-
ing the war. People also had to give personal information to the composer – date of birth and
death. The images of these missing relatives, civilians or military, would appear on the wall
alongside Eric Fletcher Waters. During each show, missing persons would become an ‘another
brick in the wall.’
Over the shows when the wall was built and destroyed all around the world, one of the miss-
ing people became particularly important, Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes. A catastrophic
coincidence after the London bombings (July 2005) led to de Menezes being mistakenly identi-
fed as potential suicide bomber. He was shot and killed by armed police. de Menezes had told
his mother, in Brazil, ‘It’s a clean place, mum. The people are educated. There’s no violence
in England. No one goes around carrying guns, not even police.’25 This was an occasion for
Waters to highlight the innocent victims of conficts. This theme of innocence and loss was
used throughout the show.
During the song ‘Bring the Boys Back Home,’ the following quotation was projected close
to images of war and famine:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fred signifes in the
fnal sense, a theft. From those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and
are not clothed.26

Written by Dwight Eisenhower, American general during the Second World War and presi-
dent of the United States from 1953 to 1961, this quotation alone sums up Waters’ pacifst
beliefs.
Another powerful image, broadcast during one of the bridges of ‘Run Like Hell,’ is the
killing of two journalists in Baghdad, Iraq, Namir Noor-Eldeen (22 years old) and Saeed
Chmagh (40 years old), whose cameras were mistakenly taken as weapons by the American
military. The case, disclosed by Wikileaks, is shown on massive projection screens – with
dialogue between the US pilot and his command scrolling along the wall. From time to
time, a pair of eyes projected over the full length of the wall scans the crowd, as an ultimate
reference to the concept and actual practice by governments of Big Brother surveillance of
people.27
But it was another modifcation Waters made to The Wall that created more controversy. As
often done during Pink Floyd’s concerts since the album Animals, an infatable pig went out
over the crowd. During the 2010–13 tour, the pig was wearing diferent symbols like a US dol-
lar, the Soviet ‘hammer and sickle,’ Mercedes and Shell logos but also a Star of David. French
magazine The algemeiner28 gave voice to strong reactions from some elements of the Jewish
community. Rabbi Abraham Cooper denounced Waters as ‘anti-semitic,’ ‘a Jew hater’ and ‘Nazi
sympathizer’ – Waters’ messages or intent were clearly not understood by Rabbi Cooper. The
case was so much in the news that Waters posted an open letter on his Facebook page in which
he clarifed his political views, stating that his criticism was of the policies of the State of Israel
and not the Jewish religion. He specifed that other signs, logos and symbols, including Chris-
tian and Islamic symbols (crucifx and crescent) and corporate logos were shown during the
shows.29 Rabbi Cooper may not have known that Waters is a good friend of Simon Wiesenthal’s
nephew and has a Jewish daughter-in-law and Jewish grandchildren. But claims that Waters
is a ‘Nazi sympathizer’ are difcult to state, especially from someone with the education and

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position of Rabbi Cooper. Waters, nevertheless, thought it necessary to entertain such accusa-
tions. In his Facebook (2013) letter, Waters says,

Not only did my father, 2nd Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, die in Italy on Febru-
ary 18th 1944 fghting the Nazis, but I was brought up in post war England where
I received the most thorough education on the subject of Nazism and where I was
spared no horrifc detail of the heinous crimes committed in the name of that most
foul ideology. I remember my mother’s friends Claudette and Maria, I remember their
tattoos, they were survivors, two of the lucky ones.
My Mother spent the whole of the rest of her life, involved politically to make sure
the future for her children and grandchildren, in fact for everyone’s children and grand-
children, black, white, Gentile, Jew, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, et al., had
no Sword of Damocles in the form of the despised Nazi Creed hanging over their heads.
I for my part, as best I can, have continued along my parent’s path. At the age of
nearly 70, in the spirit of my Father and Mother and all they did, I have stood my
ground, as best I can, in defence of Mistress Liberty.
The Wall Show, so lamely attacked by you, is many things. It is thoughtful, life
afrming, ecumenical, humane, loving, anti-war, anti-colonial, pro universal access
to the law, pro liberty, pro collaboration, pro dialogue, pro peace, anti-authoritarian,
anti-fascist, anti-apartheid, anti-dogma, international in spirit, musical and satirical.

Waters was clearly disturbed by the unfounded acquisitions by Rabbi Cooper, which have
continued until the present day. But Waters makes the point,

At one show, a year or so ago, an older vet, Vietnam era, at a guess, blocked my exit,
he put out his hand which I took, he did not let go, he looked me in the eyes and he
said, ‘Your Father would be proud of you.’
Tears burn my eyes.
The Wall is reaching out to you and all the other Rabbi Cooper’s out there.
Come to the show!
Love
Roger

Waters added a PS to his letter,

The infatable pig that so ofended . . . has appeared at every Wall Show since Sep-
tember 2010 . . . yours is the frst complaint. Also the pig in question represents evil,
and more specifcally the evil of errant government. We make a gift of this symbol of
repression to the audience at the end of every show and the people always do the right
thing. They destroy it.

Thus, we can observe that Waters reuses The Wall over the decades by adapting his political
message to news but always to denounce war, totalitarianism, political structures and hate. In
1990, the fall of Berlin Wall was for Waters an occasion to remind everyone the human values
of tolerance and openness he stands for. It is, therefore, not surprising to fnd that in 2017, Pink
Floyd’s legendary bassist decided to use this major artwork of the twentieth century to openly
assert his opposition to President Trump’s US-Mexico wall.

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This reuse of The Wall and its universal message also shows Waters’ wish to create deeply
considered music that has popular appeal. This is one of the characteristic traits of progres-
sive rock music and that of Waters and Pink Floyd. To widen rock horizons by drawing on
occidental academic music, by incorporating new instruments (synthesisers) but also oriental
instruments, by rejecting the classical form of a rock song (verse/chorus), by trying to create a
complete artwork in the spirit of the German Gesamtkunstwerk – these aspects defne progressive
rock, to the extent that we may wonder if this musical genre is part of superfcial music, as the
German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno discussed.
In his article ‘On Popular Music’ (1937), Adorno defnes superfcial music (popular music)
as a standardised music, contrary to serious music (academic western music). This claim may
not be Adorno’s most insightful one or the one he is often most remembered as making.
Nonetheless, from his point of view, popular music is standardised to please the auditor. Thus,
the structure of popular music is pre-set, always the same way so as not to surprise the listener.
According to Adorno (1937),

Composition hears for the auditor. This is how popular music prevents the auditor
from feeling his own spontaneity and creates conditioned refexes. Not only is the
auditor not asked any efort to follow its movement but also this music really gives
him the patterns whereby anything that exists must fnd its position. Popular music is
‘predigested’.30

The Wall does not ft this defnition. Its structure is diferent from the usual pattern of rock
music. The music of The Wall is not, in Adorno’s (1937) defnition of the popular, ‘substitutable’
or ‘like a cog in a machine.’
The Wall is not an artwork of light music in the Adornian sense but a politicised work of art
that is serious and popular.

Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, the diferent political aspects of The Wall as a tool for denounc-
ing totalitarianism have been examined. The Wall is, however, about more than an anti-
totalitarianism polemic; it is also a multifaceted series of artworks that liberated the band Pink
Floyd from the usual structures of rock music. Yet the core message is political: The Wall is
the symbol for people who want to break down the walls, communicating messages of peace
and freedom in opposition to authoritarian structures. And while the capitalist versus com-
munist divide is no longer in the collective consciousness of the Western zeitgeist, as it was in
1989, this album represents the quintessence of Waters’ political commitment and contributes
to constructing the myth of the free and rebellious rock musician. Both autobiographical and
a universal artwork, The Wall reconciles this paradox to go beyond conventions. Hence, when
Adorno (1937) critiqued popular music as low culture, he clearly did not envisage the political
power of popular music, especially the level of art-as-politics achieved in The Wall. Nor can the
longevity of The Wall be overlooked: Roger Waters continued, throughout the 2010–13 tour,
to incorporate current world events, politics and social issues into performances of The Wall and
his Us + Them tour 2017–18.
The importance of the universal message of tolerance and peace within The Wall, but also its
reuse of signifcant historical events, made The Wall a major work of the twentieth century. It
is an integral part of all this music which erased the border between academic occidental music

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and popular music. With The Wall, Waters was able to break down the wall between opposing
perceptions of musical forms and performance traditions and, in a world of oppositions, may
have made some people remember they are citizens of the world.

Notes
1 Donald Trump is shown with lipstick and breasts and wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood, and some of his
most ofensive quotes about Mexico and women are then screened, followed by the words ‘Fuck Trump.’
In the United States, people did walk out of the show, and American Express withdrew its sponsorship.
2 Quote in LoudWire, January  10, 2019, ‘Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Wants to Perform “The Wall”
on US-Mexico Border’, Graham Hartmann. Retrieved from loudwire.com/pink-foyd-roger-
waters-the-wall-us-mexico-border/.
3 The frst performance of the The Wall was on February 7, 1980, in Los Angeles.
4 See Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, page 164.
5 This was in 1974 for Gini, the popular French soft drink.
6 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):188.
7 ‘Why Does the Wall Still Haunt Roger Waters?’ (2009, December). Mojo, No. 193.
8 Gonin, P. (2015). Pink Floyd the Wall. Marseille: Le Mot et le reste, page 20.
9 The members also needed money. Mismanagement, negligence and fraud by the band’s fnance advisor
Norton Warburg plus high tax rates at the time (circa 83%) meant a new, successful project was needed.
10 Originally, Pink was called Punch and his wife Judy in reference to the adventures of Punch and Judy,
the two puppets being an integral part of English cultural heritage like La Commedia dell’Arte in Italy.
Nevertheless, keeping the image of Punch would undoubtedly set The Wall in a typically British col-
lective imagination.
11 Quoted in Blake, M. (2007). Pigs Might Fly, l’histoire cachée de Pink Floyd. Valion, F. (trans.). Paris:
Tournon, page 229.
12 Op. cit. Schafner (1991):177 recounts Roy Harper’s ‘rage’ at the 1975 Knebworth Festival. Harper, it is
alleged, demolished one of Pink Floyd’s vans on fnding his stage outft had gone missing. This event,
Schafner claims, may have been the inspiration for Pink’s rage in his hotel room.
13 Povey, G. (2008/2009). Pink Floyd. Canal, D.-A. (trans.). Paris: Place des Victoires, page 224.
14 See Op. cit. Gonin (2015), for more information.
15 Cassavetti, H. (2001, 19 December). ‘Roger Waters: “Dans Pink Floyd, je faisais les trois quarts du
boulot”’, Télérama, 2710:19. Retrieved from telerama.fr/musique/roger-waters-dans-pink-foyd-je-
faisais-les-trois-quarts-du-boulot,114587.php.
16 Aeschimann, E. (2003). ‘Pink Floyd’. 6 May. Libération, n.p.
17 January 1, 1976, Rock & Folk, n°108. Issue dedicated to an interview with the members of Pink Floyd,
in French.
18 Also see the television commercial ‘Why 1984 won’t be like 1984’ for the Apple Macintosh. It pro-
motes the concept of the computer bringing freedom rather than control.
19 This sentence can be found in Oliver Twist, 1838. The word ‘ass’ actually has a diferent meaning in
UK English: it also means ‘donkey’. The sentence we fnd in Dickens, in Mr. Bumble’s dialogue, is as
follows: ‘If the law supposes that’, said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the
law is a ass – a idiot.’ This aphorism is said to come from a play published by Georges Chapman in 1654
entitled Revenge of Honour.
20 Op. cit. Gonin (2015):32.
21 Quoted in Scarfe, G. (2010). The Making of Pink Floyd The Wall. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, page 162.
22 Quoted in Op. cit. Gonin (2015):103–104.
23 Fall of the Berlin Wall 1989. Demolished in 1991.
24 Kay, S. (2016). Rockin’ the Free World! How the Rock & Roll Revolution Changed America and the World.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, page 36.
25 25 July  2005 the Independent. Article by Cahal Milmo and Tom Phillips in Gonzaga. independent.
co.uk/news/uk/crime/jean-charles-de-menezes-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-301474.
html.
26 See Op. cit. Gonin (2015):165.
27 See www.amnestyusa.org/solving-the-big-brother-problem-of-mass-surveillance/ for more information.

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 Jean-René Larue

28 24 July  2013, the algemeiner. ‘Pig Balloon at Roger Waters Concert Features Star of David;
Wiesenthal Center Calls Him ‘Open Hater of Jews’. Retrieved from algemeiner.com/2013/07/24/
massive-pig-balloon-at-roger-waters-concert-features-star-of-david-video/.
29 See Waters’ original response at facebook.com/notes/roger-waters-the-wall/an-open-letter-from-
roger-waters/688037331210720 and subsequent interviews with RJ Cubarrubia of RollingStone,
rollingstone.com/music/music-news/roger-waters-addresses-star-of-david-controversy-61250/.
30 Adorno, T. W. (1937). Sur la musique populaire. Translated from English by S. G. Retrieved from lec-
turecritique.org/sites/default/fles/Adorno_1937_traduction.pdf, page 4.

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 20
HEY YOU! SUBJECTIVITY
AND THE IDEOLOGICAL
REPRESSIVE STATE
APPARATUSES IN PINK
FLOYD’S THE WALL
Tina Richardson

Introduction
Pink Floyd’s long musical history (spanning two decades at its peak) had always refected the
cultural zeitgeist, even at a time when it was at odds with other musical movements of the day, as
was the case in the late 1970s with the advent of punk rock. While it is often reported that punk
heralded the demise of progressive (or psychedelic) rock – ‘Never trust a fuckin’ hippie,’ Johnny
Rotten is often wrongly claimed to have said1 – Pink Floyd’s single from The Wall, ‘Another
Brick in the Wall,’ was number 1 for fve weeks in 1979 (UK music charts). Alan Parker’s flm
Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) followed, and Pink Floyd entered flm history.
Parker’s flm, which responded directly to Roger Waters’ lyrics, presents us with the protago-
nist Pink, a rock star who is at odds with his position as a revered musician: he is both a victim
of the system of music production and a fascist proponent of it. Early in the flm, we see him in
his hotel room, barely conscious, waiting for the gig to start. Pink (played by Bob Geldof) looks
both physically ill and mentally exhausted (and psychologically removed from the hotel room he
occupies). His agent, and the doctor employed by him, inject him back to consciousness – ‘Just
a little pinprick’ – so that he can perform for the audience. Within a short space of time, Pink is
on stage at a Nazi-style rally as he sings the lyrics to ‘In the Flesh,’ telling the audience ‘So ya . . .
Thought ya . . . Might like to . . . Go to the show.’ It is this relationship with the audience – one
in which he hides from them but also presents himself to them as if he were their leader – that
creates cognitive dissonance in him.
In his book Which One’s Pink? Phil Rose (2002) acknowledges the cultural moment as it
was for rock audiences in the 1970s. He describes an early scene where we see Pink’s reaction
to his fans, ‘As the emergency doors break open at the concert venue, crowds of frantic people
are seen running down an empty corridor. In his imagination Pink superimposes on this scene
the trampling feet and screaming faces of battle.’2 It seems, for Pink, that if he must deal with his
fans, it will be from the position of someone who is at war. A war that appears externalised for
Pink is really internal and existential.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-26 369

 Tina Richardson

We see many images of Pink sitting in a chair, alone in his hotel room, holding a cigarette
which is turning to ash. This dialectic – the ‘marauding hordes’ (of music fandom, of battle, of
collective violence) versus the ‘estranged loner’ – sets up the story of Pink’s life (and along with
that a multiplicity of contradictions) as it unfolds in the narrative presented to us through the
album and flm. At the same time, it creates for the cultural theorist another position open to
interpretation, that of the structures of socio-political, cultural space and power as they pertain
to their infuence on the individual (in Pink’s case, as they are imposed upon the individual).
Nevertheless, we need to be careful not to set up these oppositions in too binary a way, since by
using phrases like ‘social structure versus the individual,’ we imply that these phenomena sit in
clearly delineated camps. The very structures of society that are so prominent in The Wall – the
army, the family, education, the media, the judiciary – are what creates the subject in the frst
place – the subject, which for Louis Althusser, is never an individual: the subject is always the
subject of the ideology of societal structures.3
This chapter examines the narrative of Pink’s existential anguish as it pertains to the ideo-
logical and repressive structures that surround him. By using Althusser’s theory as defned in
‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,’ I will discuss how these structures have the
simultaneous efect of forming Pink as a subject yet overwhelming him to the extent that his
psyche is fractured and all that is left for him to do is to create a wall to protect himself from the
outside world. It is the closing scene ‘The Trial’ that will be analysed to explore the compromise
the subject has to make regarding their own position within these structures of power. Follow-
ing this, the chapter also examines Pink’s existential crisis in the context of the symbolism of
the wall. But frst, we need to examine Althusser’s concept of the ‘subject’ in some more depth.

Hey you! the hailed subject

Althusser (2006) provides us with a concrete example of how the individual becomes a subject. He
sets up a situation whereby a person in the street is ‘hailed’ by a policeman. ‘Hey, you there!,’ the shout
rings out, and the hailed person turns towards the call: ‘By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’4 This ‘operation,’ as Althusser (2006) calls it, ‘is known
as interpellation or hailing,’ and inherent in this process is the subject acknowledging that it is s/he
that is being called, even though there is no sequence of events whereby the individual was not a
subject prior to the call. For Althusser (2006), there is no time outside of ideology because ‘individu-
als are always-already subjects.’5 He explains that a child, even before they are born, is assigned a place
in the structure: for instance, often a gender and a surname from the father’s side. For our character
Pink, we hear this hailing in the track ‘Hey You.’ While the lyrics, as they form part of the narra-
tive, at frst appear as if they are being said by the character Pink, upon analysis they are, instead,
addressing him, interpellating him: ‘Hey you! Out there beyond the wall.’ Pink recognises himself
in the hail, ‘Hey you! Out there on your own . . . Sitting naked by the phone.’ The function of
recognition is key in Althusser’s (2006) theory of the ideological subject:

when we recognize somebody of our (previous) acquaintance (re-connaissance) in the

street, we show him that we have recognized him (and have recognized that he has
recognized us) by saying to him ‘Hello, my friend,’ and shaking his hand.6

With this example, we can see how the process is embedded in a custom in the form of
shaking hands, what Althusser (2006) describes as a ‘material ritual practice of ideological rec-
ognition of everyday life.’ It is the practice and the structure within which these formalities sit,
that makes a person a ‘concrete subject.’7

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 Hey you!

For our dubious hero Pink, these rituals are multifarious. We have the apparent fascist ideol-
ogy manifest in the marching soldiers and goose-stepping hammers of Gerald Scarfe’s graphics,
but we also see Pink kissing babies in a clichéd politician’s style. At the rally Pink delivers a
crossed-arms salute to the audience, and they cheer him for the leader he is or the rock star per-
sona he has managed to muster up with the help of drugs from the doctor. The crowd literally
hails him, and he takes his place within the apparatus as a subject. Of course, this is not the sub-
ject as a citizen (although that is something we could attribute to the members of the audience
of the gig) but is what Althusser (2006) describes as a ‘concrete subject’ who displays material
practices that take place within a specifc ideological system. The album art of The Wall shows
the various repressive structures in Pink’s life: the screaming head of Pink, with the marching
hammers and the ‘army’ inside the mouth, the wife (the one with a wide lipstick mouth and
viper tongue), the teacher (the bug-eyed creature with pens in the shirt pocket), the judge
(looking, a stern white-haired guy) and the mother (the frowning one with a Y-shaped head).8
As for the apparatuses themselves, in our previous example, we see a representation of what
would best be described, going by Althusser’s model, as the repressive State Apparatuses. These
include: ‘the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons,’
being, as they are, located in ‘the public domain.’9 In classifying the Ideological State Appara-
tuses, we are presented with, the family, the education system, politics, media and culture, reli-
gion and the judiciary, mostly appearing, although not exclusively, in private space. These are
all represented in the flm of The Wall. Althusser (2006) explains that the repressive apparatuses
work ‘by violence’ and the ideological ‘by ideology’; however, he makes it clear to us that both
sets of apparatuses work from both an ideological and violent perspective by degree. It is just
that they prioritise one over the other.
While religion does not appear overtly in Pink Floyd – The Wall, all the other ideological
apparatuses are given much emphasis, especially education. One example, where the forceful
aspect of the repressive apparatuses can be observed, is in the riot scene during the track ‘Wait-
ing for the Worms.’ We see Pink sing about cutting out ‘the deadwood,’ about ‘cleaning up the
city’ and waiting to ‘follow the worms’ by putting on a ‘black shirt’ so that one will follow the
order of the dictator and ‘weed out the weaklings.’ Later in the lyrics, he announces a ‘Waiting
for the fnal solution.’ During this scene, we also witness a violent animation, when a black-
shirted man visibly ‘beats the brains out’ of an individual. If this bodily violence is something
meted out by the State (if we use Althusser’s model), for Michel Foucault (1991) this is some-
what more complex,

This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can
also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and
yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought
out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a
physical order.10

Foucault (1991) is referring to the infuence of ideology on the subject with regard to the
body and its place in the ‘political feld’ in terms of how it is made to ‘carry out tasks, to perform
ceremonies, to emit signs.’11 Foucault’s (1991) model of subjection, while still recognising the
materiality of a given situation, is rather more concerned with ‘reciprocal relations’ that come
about through a body being both ‘productive’ and ‘subjected.’12 Foucault’s long exploration of
power, throughout his canon of work, demonstrates how the State’s manipulation of power can
be turned inwards in the individual, such that they take up that position themselves and self-
surveil. The example he ofers is Jeremey Bentham’s Panopticon model of the prison where the

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guard is in the centre, and all the cells face inward, with the inmates unaware of whether they
are being watched.
In the scene of the flm just before the riot scene (the one accompanied by the song ‘Run
Like Hell’), we are presented with the audience in the auditorium going through their fascist
salute rituals in preparation for the arrival of their leader, Pink. These are examples of the signs
emitted by the body referred to by Foucault (1991). Although they are writ large in this exam-
ple, in social reality, they are much more enculturated so as to be seamless with everyday life
and practices. This scene also shows a Scarfe animation of three individuals hanging on the scaf-
fold, an ‘instrument of violence’ discussed in depth by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1991
[1975]). The scafold represents a time when ‘the tortured body’ is made available for people
to view publicly, so that ‘the truth of the crime’ can be witnessed by all.13 The bodily punish-
ment (whether torture and death) is preceded by some form of judgement on the subjected
individual, and it is this that the rest of this chapter will concern itself with: the processes of
subjection as they are applied within the State Apparatuses and appear in Pink Floyd – The Wall.

Caught red-handed
In ‘The Trial’ scene towards the end of the flm, Pink is accused of being ‘caught red-handed
showing feelings . . . of an almost human nature.’ This is his crime, and an array of witnesses
testify to his guilt, including the schoolmaster, his ex-wife and his mother. In the animation
that accompanies this scene, Pink appears as both an unclothed pink ragdoll fopped at the base
of a gigantic wall and a pink, naked, faceless man free-foating in the sky. During the trial, Pink
is not given the opportunity to speak. He has no voice. In his essay ‘Dominici or the Triumph
of Literature,’ Barthes (1993) discusses a high-profle trial of a French farmer in 1952, where
the defendant was accused of murdering his wife, daughter and another man. Barthes believed
that the Gaston Dominici trial was problematic in that the language used by the judge was far
beyond the education and understanding of the vernacular language used by Dominici. Bar-
thes (1993) explains that the language adopted by the courts treats individuals as objects but at
the same time pretends to endow them with an individuality of which their guilt can then be
attributed – a neat trick of those adept at language, with the power over material structures that
can be imposed on the individual. Barthes (1993) explains,

Utilitarian, taking no account of any state of consciousness, this psychology has the
pretension of giving as a basis for actions a pre-existing inner person nevertheless, it
postulates ‘the soul’: it judges man as a ‘conscience’ without being embarrassed by
having previously described him as an object.14

In ‘The Trial’ scene of Pink Floyd – The Wall, Pink is subjected to something similar, although
more complicated. He is, instead, accused of being an individual, of having feelings, of being
too sensitive. The schoolmaster, in his testimony, states, ‘I could . . . have fayed him into shape.’
He is seen as an object (he is faceless) and, also, as being too much of a person: in other
words, not subjected enough. His very crime is that he is not a well-subjected individual; he
does not function efectively within the structure. Even if that structure is not a usual one for
an individual – the music business – it nevertheless is an ideological structure that requires a
particular set of behaviours and a subconscious agreement that one is ‘playing a part,’ taking up
a position. Nevertheless, Pink does recognise his place in the apparatus. We see him ‘function in
the practical rituals’; however, he is such a ‘unique subject’ as to warrant a unique set of rituals,

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those required of the rock singer.15 That, along with his troubled past (played out through the
flm and album), means he is unable to manage his subjected place in the particular apparatus
that has formed around him as a pop idol.
Like Dominici, Pink is also an individual who is ill equipped to cope with the apparatus of
the courts, although for diferent reasons. Barthes (1993) describes the ‘two mentalities’ in play
in Dominici’s trial: ‘that of the old peasant from the Alps and that of the judiciary.’16 For Pink,
it is that of the ‘broken’ pop star and that of the judiciary. They are both speaking diferent lan-
guages. Dominici does not have access to the language of the law, and Pink is so psychologically
withdrawn he is unable to speak to defend himself – although, one could argue that, even if he
could, it would be the language of the mentally ill, a narrative that would not be recognised by
the apparatus of the law. Instead, what we hear are Pink’s own thoughts, an acknowledgement
of his mental state. He asks if he is ‘crazy’ if he has ‘gone fshing’ and that they have taken his
‘marbles away.’17
This concept of a lack of access to specifc tools within existing power structures is also
refected in Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925).18 Near the end of the novel, in an anecdote told by
the priest to K, we hear a story of a man trying to access, via a doorkeeper, the law. The law
is represented in the tale as a physical space beyond the door. The doorkeeper says he is one of
many who guard the rooms of the law. The man waits for years to gain entry, via this one single
doorkeeper, forgetting that there are other ways in. He eventually starts to lose his mental facul-
ties and becomes physically ill. He beckons the doorkeeper:

‘What is it you want to know now?’ asks the doorkeeper, ‘You’re insatiable’. ‘Everyone
wants access to the law,’ says the man, ‘how come, over all these years, no-one but me
has asked to be let in?’ The doorkeeper can see the man’s come to his end, his hearing
has faded, and so that he can be heard, he shouts to him: ‘Nobody else could have got
in this way, as this entrance was meant only for you. Now I’ll go and close it’.19

For both Dominici and Pink, we see this same Kafkaesque concept manifest in the singular
way the law is designed specifcally to exclude them as individuals yet presents itself in such a
way as to be tailored for their particular situation, their individual crime. ‘Do they not have in
common the same language,’ Barthes asks (1993), but we can see that that door has already been
closed for Dominici because it was never open.20 Pink also realises that he lost the same oppor-
tunity at some point in his own story, like the protagonist in Kafka’s tale: ‘I am crazy . . . Bars in
the window.’ Nevertheless, Pink’s wall is not the walls of a real prison or even a mental institu-
tion, but his mind.21 The Wall is his attempt to unshackle himself from the apparatuses, and his
way of coping is by creating a repressive edifce of his own. It is a wall of self-protection that
has been built up over time. It is a structure that keeps all the other structures out, those ideo-
logical apparatuses that have so strongly infuenced his personal history – the family, education,
communications and culture in particular. And it is not accidental that these apparatuses are
what Althusser (2006) describes as the ‘private institutions.’ Citing Antonio Gramsci,22 Althusser
(2006) explains that these apparatuses are considered to be in the private domain because of the
way ‘bourgeois law’ operates by frst making a distinction between public and private and then
exercising its right to control over the private:

The domain of the State escapes it because it is above the law: the State, which is the
State of the ruling class, is neither public or private; on the contrary, it is the precondi-
tion for any distinction between public and private.23

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In this regard, what is particularly pertinent to our story of Pink is the absolute intrusion into
Pink’s private life by the state. The testimonies in court also include those by his ex-wife and
mother. His ex-wife testifes against him. She hopes they ‘throw away the key’ (to his prison)
and says he ‘should have talked to her more’ and, in an increasingly accusing manner, says he
should have ‘not gone his own way.’
And even though his mother does not testify against him, she succeeds in infantilising him
by calling him ‘baby,’ telling him to ‘come to mother,’ that she will hold him in her arms. She
then appeals to the judge, saying she never wanted Pink to get into trouble and to let her ‘take
him home.’
In her portrayal of Pink as still a baby (and the ragdoll imagery and feshy nakedness in
Scarfe’s animation of Pink), we are reminded of what Althusser (2006) says of the ‘always-
already’ subject: that ‘before its birth, the child is . . . appointed as a subject in and by the specifc
familial ideological confguration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived.’ He goes
on to say, ‘I hardly need add that this familial ideological confguration is, in its uniqueness,
highly structured and that it is in this implacable and more or less “pathological” . . . structure
that the former subject-to-be will have to “fnd” “its” place.’24 It is Pink’s struggle to fnd his
own place that has led him to court, along with his inability to be successfully interpellated by
the various apparatuses that exist around him.

Te verdict
Everything changes for Pink at the point the judge bluntly and succinctly summarises the
evidence against Pink. He says the evidence is ‘incontrovertible,’ that there is ‘no need for the
jury to retire.’ The judge has made his decision without the jury. He says there is no one ‘more
deserving the full penalty of the law.’
This is the moment that we understand that Pink has become another type of subject.
These very words are performative and change him from that moment on. This statement by
the judge, uttered as it was in the domain of the judiciary, enables the judge to exert the power
of the law by simply stating it as such. The discourse of the law makes ‘truth’ of the situation.
Foucault (1980) states, ‘ “Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the
production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.’25 For Foucault,
statements appear within a discourse, exist within material practices and appear as utterances that
exert power by those who have the authority to do so. We can see the actual moment this takes
place when the judge announces Pink’s sentence, that he is to ‘be exposed before . . . [his] peers.’
In his discussion on Foucault’s essay ‘Truth and Judicial Forms,’ Macmillan (2009) explains,

Disciplinary power works in an empty space that it totally saturates and controls; its
aim is to construct individuals in accordance with a given norm – reasoning in terms
of what is mandatory and forbidden.26

It is at this point, simply at the say-so of the judge, that Pink becomes a criminal (his crime,
as we remember, is ‘showing feeling of an almost human nature’). This proclamation is a form
of subjectivation that ‘names and makes.’ As Deborah Youdell (2006) explains in her discussion
on performative politics regarding Foucault and Althusser, citing Butler (1997a, 1997b), she
states, ‘all categorical names and claims to action are potentially performatively constitutive
of the subjects to whom they refer.’27 The statement by the judge of Pink’s guilt makes him a
criminal simply by naming him. That is all that is required: an utterance from someone with the
power to make that utterance and for it to efect change. It is, in a sense, irrelevant to anything

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regarding truth (in the everyday sense we use the word, at least). First, for Foucault, there is
no truth that can be accounted for outside of its own historical episteme. Truth is constituted
in the moment by the subject’s relationship to his/her conditions of existence. In ‘Truth and
Power,’ Foucault (1980) explains how the subject is under the infuence of various propagated
discourses that exist in his environment under the rubric of ‘truth’ – ‘ “Truth” is to be under-
stood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation
and operation of statements.’28 For Foucault (2005), a statement designates a feld of discourse
because ‘it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various
felds of use, is subjected to transferences and modifcations, is integrated into operations and
strategies in which its identity is maintained or efaced.’29
We can see where Foucault overlaps with Althusser here. In the previous, Foucault
(1980/2005) is talking about material structures, what Althusser (2006) describes as ‘the mate-
rial existence of an ideological apparatus.’ It is material because it asserts and maintains ‘concrete
individuals as subjects.’ For both Foucault (1980/2005) and Althusser (2006), power is formed
within confgurations that are actual and have the propensity to form and change individuals.
The judge announces that because Pink has revealed the destruction of his personal wall as
being his deepest fear, his sentence is to ‘tear down’ his wall.
Pink goes into a psychological-existential crisis, and we see images from his past interspersed
with Scarfe’s animation. There are fashbacks of fascist salutes by Pink, beatings by the school-
master, scenes of love-making, Pink screaming, street violence, Pink behind bars and so on.
Repeated over and over again are the words ‘Tear down the wall!’
This is the equivalent moment for Barthes’ ‘Dominici, or the Triumph of Literature’ when
Dominici hears his verdict. As Barthes (1993) states: ‘literature has just condemned a man to the
guillotine.’30 Instead, Pink is destined to be exposed in front of his peers, and this can only be
carried out by bringing down the wall that has been constructed all around him.
But, all along, this trial was not occurring in ‘real’ space or time. The trial was conjured up
in Pink’s mind. The judiciary (the Repressive State Apparatus) and the rock music business (the
Ideological State Apparatuses of culture and the media) are confated. Rose (2002) says that
the trial ‘is clearly Waters portrayal of Pink’s super-ego,’ going on to quote Ronald Fairbairn
at length, explaining that many of the symbols that appear in the trial in the form of Scarfe’s
imagery are negative unconscious objects that have been repressed by Pink and when in crisis
are released into the world and seen as external to himself. ‘Pink’s deepest fear,’ according to
Rose (2002) ‘was to expose his weaknesses. . . . By tearing down the wall, Pink displays his
realisation about the detrimental efects of narcissism . . . on others.’31

Absurd walls
It is no coincidence that Albert Camus (1981) talks of the absurdity of our quotidian material
activities and how if ‘the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the
link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the frst sign of absurdity.’32 So, it seems there
is a price to pay for the struggle against subjectivation that we see Pink display throughout the
flm leading up to the trial. He is unable to conform to the familial structure (he is unfaithful);
he cannot even execute the task of getting himself onto the stage to perform for his fans without
being given drugs. This is the void of which Camus (1981) speaks and interprets as absurdity:

[w]eariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time, it inau-
gurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what fol-
lows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain, or it is the defnitive awakening.33

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At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. Despite
the absurdity of the human condition, we can see that Camus (1981) is also ofering a possibility
of redemption here. Rose (2002) also discusses this at the end of his analysis of the trial; citing
Waters, he says that ‘the show is about redemption, and we are redeemed when we tear our
walls down and expose our weaknesses to our fellow man.’34 This reference to ‘our fellow man’
is pertinent because our relationship with our ‘self ’ cannot be separated from our relationship
with the ‘other.’ Youdell (2006) also acknowledges the construction of the self in contrast to the
materiality of the apparatus of our everyday lives:

Rather than asking what structures and institutions (economic, social, or linguistic)
produce material inequality, this move reconfgures this concern and asks how the self
comes into being, what the costs of the self might be, and how the self might be made
again diferently.35

Her reference to inequality and language is especially relevant for Barthes’ Dominici.
However, with regard to Pink (even if we do not consider him underprivileged when it comes
to inequality), it is his inability to form close and meaningful relationships that we need to
examine in terms of self/other, and a useful place to start, especially since Pink has labelled
himself ‘crazy,’ is with R. D. Laing’s discussion in Self and Others (1972a).36
Laing (1972a) provides a useful example of our bodily and psychic boundaries that might
help us understand Pink’s mental state better, especially the symbolism of the wall. This example,
while appearing to draw lines where the body (and self) ends and the other begins, demonstrates
the complexity of Laing’s (1972a) model. Laing states,

I think of me being inside my body and at the same time, the inside of my body being
somehow ‘inside’ my private space. If someone comes into my room unasked, he
does not intrude upon me to the same extent as if he were to enter my body without
permission. However, since I am inside my body, my body is also outside me in some
peculiar sense.37

While we can imagine ourselves in the scenario outlined here, instead conjuring up the
image of Pink sitting in the armchair before the gig would be a fruitful one for our purposes
since we can sense the closed-in-ness of his predicament and almost feel the concretisation of
his boundaries in the form of the wall (even though we cannot see the actual wall yet at this
point in the flm). Laing’s book The Divided Self (1959) examines what goes wrong with the
self when our relationship with others, in this case those of family members, goes awry. Laing
(1973a) describes the schizoid individual – also referred to by Rose (2002) when discussing
Pink’s mental state – as being cut of from the outside:

dissociation . . . appears to be available to most people who fnd themselves enclosed
within a threatening experience from which there is no physical escape. . . . The only
way out [is] by a physical withdrawal ‘into’ one’s self and ‘out of ’ the body.38

For Laing (1973a) this is a long-term pathological state that brings about the schizoid condi-
tion and is a form of ‘being-in-the-world’ that is exemplifed in a divided person who is con-
stantly dealing with danger, imposed from all angles, from which there is no escape.
In the imagery of the trial we see Pink in two states of being, as both a foating naked man
and as a small naked ragdoll at the bottom of a huge wall. Both are still and listless. Pink, the

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individual, is not present in these bodies; he is disembodied. Laing (1973a) explains that ‘[t]he
self then seeks by being unembodied to transcend the world and hence be safe.’ The detached
naked Pink is striving to transcend the bodily materiality of the world, drifting in the sky and
eventually turning into a leaf that foats gently on the breeze. Laing says that the self ‘becomes
a vacuum. Everything is there, outside; nothing is here, inside. . . . Yet the self may at the same
time long more than anything for participation in the world.’39
As individuals, despite our ‘right’ to boundaries in regards to the self – whether they are
self-defned, or inscribed under the law – they are nevertheless much more fuid and open than
initially appears. While Laing’s (1973a) previous opening quote gives us a favour of the inside/
outside dichotomy, it is only when we deconstruct these boundaries that we understand how
complex this is. Laing often uses the language of phenomenology, and he sets up these binaries
to demonstrate their limits. We become who we are because of our relationship with others and
vice versa. In this sense, how can we say where we and the other ends and begins?
Pink’s signifcant relationships are laid out starkly for us in the trial; they appear in the form
of the individuals that testify in court. We understand that Pink’s schooling, and his beatings
by the schoolmaster, have been party to forming who he is. Pink was too sensitive, according
to the schoolmaster. As the fascist in the schoolroom, the teacher attacks artists, art and liberal
attitudes, declaring they have ‘let [Pink] get away with murder,’ then asking that he, the teacher,
be allowed to ‘hammer him.’
According to the schoolmaster, Pink’s creative characteristics are not deemed worthy of rec-
ognition. As a musician, this puts Pink at odds with his past in terms of his education. It is not
insignifcant that the constrictive apparatus of education that he was subjected to appear again
and again in the flm. It is also these ‘false’ and ‘untenable positions,’ echoing Laing (1972a), that
make for Pink’s schizoid self. It is not possible for an individual to be subjected over and over
again, as this forces them into a double bind where the likelihood is high, according to Laing
(1973a), of forming schizophrenia: ‘He muddles ego with self, inner and outer, . . . signalling to
us from the void.’40 Either everything comes tumbling in, for the schizophrenic, or everything
is pushed out, for the schizoid personality.
Pink is forced into disengaging from the world around him to protect himself and gain some
control over his life, which so far has been dominated by authoritarian schooling, a dependant
and needy mother and the demands of his high-profle career. He attempts to gain control by
building a wall, and the long-term efects of this are expressed in the lyrics when he realises the
wall is too high and ‘the worms’ have ‘[eaten] into his brain.’
Pink, therefore, cuts himself of. However, this is not a solution to the problem because ‘[t]
he self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness.’41 This is
the double bind; these are the knots that Laing (1972b) believes bind us. It is the reaction to
constricting and impossible relationships, where one is forced to take one of only two negative
routes open to them, resulting in them being either ‘mad’ or ‘bad.’ Thus, the crushing com-
promises that the individual is forced to make, because of the unsustainable positions imposed
upon them, leaves them unable to demarcate the usual spaces that are essential for distinguishing
them as an individual.

Te inside of the outside

Gilles Deleuze (2004) provides a useful description of the person with schizophrenia as being
someone who cannot distinguish the outside from the inside. The surface is beyond reach and
consequently meaning is lost because words lose their sense. According to Deleuze (2004), ‘The
word no longer expresses an attribute of the state of afairs; its fragments merge [and] invade the

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body where they form a mixture and a new state of afairs.’42 In The Wall there is the imagery
of the body being open to the outside: for example, Scarfe’s fowers (represented as stamens and
pistils) turn into the reproductive organs of human copulation. Many times, we see the body
being ‘invaded’ or giving up its contents to the outside. For instance, in the trial we see the
judge (his face appearing as an anus) instructing that Pink’s wall be torn down, defecating the
words as he repeats ‘Tear down the wall.’ In familiar terms Camus (1981) states: ‘[t]he revolt of
the fesh is the absurd,’ and the feshy body is certainly overdetermined in The Wall. As well as
appearing in the trial, there is also a song dedicated to the theme, ‘In the Flesh.’43
We also see the judge appear as a feshy worm, and he is referred to by others as ‘Worm,
your honor’ (there is also a track on the album, already mentioned, entitled ‘Waiting for
the Worms’). In terms of an existentialist-cum-phenomenologist analysis, Jean-Paul Sartre
(1984) says that ‘[n]othingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm,’ explaining that
‘[n]othingness beyond the world accounts for absolute negation.’44 For Sartre (1984) nothing-
ness can come about through being cut of from the world, and we can see this is Pink’s state
of afairs. Quoting G. W. F. Hegel, Sartre (1984) states: ‘Thus being cut from Essence which
is its ground becomes “mere empty immediacy”.’45 Pink’s false image, the one he presents at
the rally, makes for his escape from reality. As Laing (1973a) explains in his own analysis of
this kind of scenario, ‘Love is precluded, and dread takes its place. The fnal efect is an overall
experience of everything having come to a stop. Nothing moves; nothing is alive; everything
is dead, including the self.’46
In the trial, we see the lifeless image of Pink as the ragdoll and foating body. From the
outside, he appears in a limp and unresponsive form. But his inner world of phantasy is played
out for us during the trial. Cutting himself of from the world has not improved his situation
at all, and in the imagery of this scene we can foretell an impending crisis that is forced upon
him through the judgement that he has created in his own mind. Pink believes he is guilty of
his crimes or would not have created the phantasy in the frst place. But he is ill equipped to
deal with his wrongdoings and reconcile with those he has neglected (for instance, his wife).
He is not even able to reconcile with himself and creates the phantasy to work though his crisis
of being. Evoking Laing (1973a), Pink’s body becomes coterminous with the wall, and feels
‘more unreal than real; . . . precariously diferentiated from the rest of the world, so that his
identity and autonomy are always in question.’47 Laing (1973a) explains that for the divided self,
the individual may

lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-
riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial
than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuf he is made of is genuine, good,
valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.48

Pink is torn between dying or disclosure, or, in Laing’s (1972a) words, ‘the choice in phantasy
comes to be to sufocate to death inside, or risk exposing one’s self to whatever terrors there
may be outside.’49 Nevertheless, we can see that even in Pink’s escape from the world, his fears
still seek him out. Over the duration of the flm, we see Pink become increasingly removed
from reality. He lives in his inner world of turmoil, for instance, reliving the scenes of his father’s
life (and death) and remembering his childhood fear of the nuclear bomb. Phantasy and reality,
according to Laing (1973a) become confused, that ‘without an open two-way circuit between
phantasy and reality anything becomes possible in phantasy. . . . Destructiveness in phantasy
can thus rage on, unchecked, until the world and the self are reduced, in phantasy, to dust and
ashes.’50

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Nevertheless, despite this tragic picture that has been painted by Waters and Parker, there is
always the possibility of redemption at the point of crisis. Laing’s (1972b) Knots examines the
bonds that tie us, explaining that a breakdown (of a relationship, in communication or of ideas
about the self) can become a breakthrough in terms of an existential shift that can shatter frmly
held notions about how we see our self and in the process ofer an escape route in the form of
a new perspective: a more complete, unifed individual. Crises that are formed at the limits of
being can be catalysts for self-discovery. Laing’s (1972b) Knots thereby provides us with a poetic
deconstruction of the inside/outside that may resemble what Pink is experiencing leading up
to the trial.51
With echoes of Deleuze’s (2006) concept of the fold in the last two lines, we can see that
providing one believes in a sharp delineation between the inside and the outside, one is always
going to be presented with problems in reconciling the two: they cannot be integrated within a
system that polarises them. But, if one sees the subject as a fold of the outside, there is no such
problem. As Deleuze (2006) observes, ‘the world must be placed in the subject in order that the
subject can be for the world.’52
In the previous prose poem, we see Laing expressing himself in terms which are compat-
ible with Deleuze and Félix Guattari.53 This is because Laing’s subject (individual) borders on
that described in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, where Deleuze and Guattari (1972)
propose a schizophrenic position which has evolved out of a repulsion to capitalist production
(something that could be related to Pink in our example, too, since he is part of the machine
of music production). It is also important to note that the term ‘breakdown,’ for both Laing
and Deleuze and Guattari (1972), is not a negative term. Laing sees the existential breakdown
as being a necessary part of the process of reforming a healthy individual, and as the shouting
of ‘Tear down the wall’ fades towards the end of the trial, we are presented with an image of a
huge wall. Accompanied by the sound of the wind on a stormy night, after a few seconds, the
wall explodes, and we hear Pink screaming.54 The wall that Pink has built to protect himself
from the other and the structures of day-to-day life is torn asunder; it is the bottoming-out that
comes, now, as an existential realisation. As Laing (1973b) says,

The I that I am is not the me that I know, but the wherewith and whereby the me is
known. But if this I that is the wherewith and whereby is not anything that I know,
then it is no thing – nothing. Click – sluice gates open – body guts outside in.55

Conclusion: being made again diferently

Pink Floyd – The Wall does not provide us with defnitive answers to Pink’s fate. Shortly after
the wall explodes, it ends with a fnal song entitled ‘Outside the Wall,’ which refects on those
individuals who were close to Pink and who had tried to reach him. Rose (2002) believes that
‘Pink’s realisation comes too late to make him a tragic fgure,’56 but it is this fnal song, and its
accompanying scene of children clearing up in the street after a bombing raid, that for Waters is
the redemptive track on the album. In the past one-and-a-half hours we have witnessed Pink’s
decline – which we understand probably began in his childhood, with the loss of his father in
the war – his struggle to ft in at school and the punishment meted out by teachers as the norm.
As Alexandre Macmillan (2009) says, ‘[d]iscipline starts from a given norm and attempts to pro-
duce individuals in conformity with that norm.’57 The apparatus of schooling expects certain
behaviours from individuals that represent the ideology of that particular structure. However,
it is a condition of one’s place in the system that the subject appears, according to Althusser
(2006), to ‘freely accept . . . the actions’ required of them. We can see by the schoolmaster’s

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punishments that ‘[i]f he does not do so, “that is wicked”.’58 This is the ‘mad or bad’ of Laingian
theory since we can see that Pink, the child, does not understand why fdgeting – ‘Stand still
laddie’ – or being creatively minded are crimes.
However, this is the function of the double bind, which in Laingian analysis appears to be
simultaneously a side efect of relationships and contingent in relationship formation. If this is
the case, then by projecting those relationships outwards, we can extrapolate the same predic-
tions in the wider social and political feld. Thus, the double bind exists in all relationships: in
both the singular familial other and the larger systems within society, made up of groups of oth-
ers and run by others of authority: you are a free ‘man,’ but ‘eat your greens,’ or, in our example,
‘How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?’
What appear as contradictions in the systems that Pink is subjected to pose a problem for him.
This is especially redolent in his intimate relationships. Laing (1973a) says existential oppositions
can become problematic for certain individuals. Oppositions such as, for example, ‘inside/outside,’
‘me/not me’ and ‘here/there’ can be socially and psychologically problematic to such a degree that
‘the schizoid cleavage disrupts the normal sense of self by disembodying the sense of “I”.’59 And
we witness this in its most troubling aspect in how Pink is represented in the trial: we have his
thoughts (which actually manifest as the trial itself) and the images of his body, with no connection
between the two. So, as well as his inability to function in the apparatus of education, he is just as ill
equipped to take up the test presented to him in the courtroom. According to Macmillan (2009),

The guilty party can win in court only if he has accepted the challenge and success-
fully completed it. The test must end with a victory or a defeat. It is the value of the
participants, not the truth and falsity of a situation considered independently, which is
aimed at through the test.60

We observe the witnesses to Pink’s crime testifying against him, followed by the judgement
by the judge. And it is this very judgement that is the decider of the truth of the situation. The
‘reality’ of the actions undertaken by Pink, those that brought him to court in the frst place, are
irrelevant: those actions are not about truth or falsehood. The truth is what the judge decides is
the truth. Pink is guilty! Pink has been defned as the judicial subject.
Althusser (2006) explains that ideologies are ‘realized in institutions, in their rituals and prac-
tices.’ And Macmillan, (2009) says what we see unfolding in the trial are these ritualistic practices
taking place in the concrete space of the court: ‘truth . . . is the result of strategic interaction
in a ritualized context.’ As Foucault (1991) states, ‘judicial systems defne judicial subjects,’ and
Althusser (2006) explains that if an individual ‘believes in justice, he will submit uncondition-
ally to the rules of the Law.’61 We do see Pink submitting in the end, as he has little choice.
The tearing down of the wall, which is his punishment, is his submitting to the system (thus
becoming Foucault’s juridical subject, or a criminal subject, even). But it is also the place from
which he can be born anew. It is what Zeno Ackerman (2012) describes in his analysis of the
live performance of The Wall as a ‘death struggle.’ Ackerman means this both in terms of the
actual performance itself (on the rock stage, as it is for the real performers in Pink Floyd) but
also with regard to the performance mirrored in Pink’s persona as rock star: ‘the performer
representatively takes on the fght against the dehumanizing structures of power that he himself
has come to embody.’62 And it is Pink’s fght against the system, and his fght against himself as a
representative of that system, which feeds into the multitude of double binds he is subjected to.
As the rock star, Pink is connected to the process of performance yet feels detached from it at
the same time (this is also related to the conformity/freedom dichotomy). Laing (1973a) states,
‘such separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary postulates.’ Our relations with others

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only exist because people are separate from each other but also not isolated entities either. Laing
(1973a) goes on to say that this very process is ‘the potentially tragic paradox,’63 because it is
both essential that we have a relationship with others to be who we are, yet we need to remain
separate for that very same reason. It is this tension that is ever present in our relationship with
others and is related to the economic cost of the self. Similarly, Youdell says something about
the apparatus of society that we can relate directly to Pink in terms of the self and his potential
for redemption. Youdell (2006) observes:

Rather than asking what structures and institutions (economic, social, or linguistic)
produce material inequality, this move reconfgures this concern and asks how the self
comes into being, what the costs of the self might be, and how the self might be made
again diferently.64

So, while we do not know Pink’s future for sure, since the flm ends in an uncertain and
almost circular way, we are, nevertheless, not left feeling hopeless for him. Perhaps there is some
sort of return, a healthier reconnection with his past, a being ‘made again diferently’:

Sometimes, having gone through the looking glass, through the eye of the needle, the
territory is recognized as one’s lost home.65

Notes
1 Written by (fat) Mike Burkett, by NOFX on the compilation album ‘Bored Generation’ (1996),
Epitaph Records (86461–2). First appeared on NOFX’s ‘Leave it Alone’ (1995) 10” single.
2 Rose, P. (2002). Which One’s Pink? An Analysis of the Concept Albums of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd. 1st
edition. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing, page 85.
3 Althusser, L. (2006). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Delhi: Aakar.
4 Ibid:118.
5 Ibid:119.
6 Ibid:117.
7 Ibid:118.
8 See Scarfe, G. (2011). The Making of Pink Floyd the Wall. London: W&N, for the amazing work of
Gerald Scarfe.
9 Op. cit. Althusser (2006):96–97.
10 Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Group, page 26.
11 Ibid:25.
12 Ibid:25–26.
13 Ibid:34.
14 Barthes, R. (1993). Mythologies. London: Vintage, page 45.
15 Op. cit. Althusser (2006):117.
16 Op. cit. Barthes (1993):43.
17 For further discussion on the misunderstanding, or lack of acknowledgement, of the language of the
mentally ill, see Félix Guattari’s work on schizoanalysis.
18 Kafka, F. (1925). The Trial. Planet EBook. Retrieved from planetebook.com/free-ebooks/the-trial.pdf
19 Ibid:256.
20 Op. cit. Barthes (1993):44.
21 At approximately one hour into the flm, we do briefy see Pink in what looks like a mental institution.
22 See, Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
23 Op. cit. Althusser (2006):97.
24 Ibid:119.
25 Op. cit. Foucault (1980):113.
26 Macmillan, A. (2009). ‘Foucault and the Examination: A Reading of “Truth and Judicial Forms”’,
Journal of Power, 2(1):155–172. Quote is on pages 168–169. Also, see Ofcial Charts Company (n.d.).

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‘Another Brick in the Wall’. Retrieved 15 January  2018, from ofcialcharts.com/search/singles/

another-brick-in-the-wall/.
27 Judith Butler explains the diferences between subjectivation and subjection, such that subjectivation
is about becoming a subject, but, in addition, it is also the process that forms an individual in respect
of the power at play that makes them a subject in the frst place. See, Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech:
A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge; Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories
in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press; also see, Youdell, D. (2006). ‘Subjectivation and
Performative Politics: Butler thinking Althusser and Foucault: Intelligibility, Agency and the Raced-
Nationed-Religioned Subjects of Education’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27(4):511–528.
The quote is on page 518.
28 Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Gordon, C.
(ed.) and Gordon, C., Marshall, L., Mepham, J. and Soper, K. (trans.). Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Press, page 113.
29 Op. cit. Foucault (2005):118.
30 Dominici was sentenced to death, despite serious questions around his guilt but later released due to ill
health, although never pardoned. See Op. cit. Barthes (1993):43.
31 Op. cit. Rose (2002):132–134.
32 Camus, A. (1981). The Myth of Sisyphus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, page 19.
33 Ibid.
34 Roger Waters cited in Op. cit. Rose (2002):134.
35 Op. cit. Youdell (2006):512.
36 Laing, R. D. (1972a [1961]). Self and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
37 Op. cit. Laing (1972a):33.
38 Laing, R. D. (1973a). The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin, page 79. Also, see Op. cit. Rose
(2002):133.
39 Ibid. (1973a):80.
40 Ibid. (1973a):109–110.
41 Ibid. (1973a):82–83.
42 Deleuze, G. (2004). The Logic of Sense. Lester, M. (trans.). London and New York: Continuum, page
100.
43 Nevertheless, this track appears in the rally scene and, on a cursory interpretation, does not appear to
be about the bodily fesh of the human but rather the colour of fesh with regard to the prejudice of
skin colour or, perhaps, refers to Pink’s appearance ‘in the fesh’ at the rally itself. See Op. cit. Camus
(1981):20.
44 Sartre, J. (1984). Being and Nothingness. Barnes, H. E. (trans.). London and New York: Washington
Square Press, page 56.
45 Ibid:45.
46 Op. cit. Laing (1973a):82.
47 Ibid:42.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid:45.
50 Ibid:85.
51 Laing, R. D. (1972b). Knots. New York: Random House, page 83.
52 Deleuze, G. (2006). The Fold. Conley, T. (trans.). London and New York: Continuum, page 28.
53 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus. Hurley, R., Seem, M. and Lane, H. R. (trans.).
London and New York: Continuum, (2004). Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972–1980.
Trans. of L’Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
54 A similar scene, although based on diferent causes, appears in The Village of the Damned (Dir. Wolf
Rilla, 1960), where the protagonist, Professor Zellaby, protects himself from the alien invaders, appear-
ing as children who have been inserted into the community, by creating a mental image of a brick wall
to prevent the aliens reading his mind.
55 Laing, R. D. (1973b). The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
page 147.
56 Op. cit. Rose (2002):134.
57 Op. cit. Macmillan (2009):155.
58 Op. cit. Althusser (2006):113.

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59 Op. cit. Laing (1973a):175.

60 Op. cit. Macmillan (2009):161.
61 Op. cit. Althusser (2006):125; Macmillan (2009):161; Foucault (1991):223 and Althusser (2006):113.
62 Ackermann, Z. (2012). ‘Rocking the Culture Industry/Performing Breakdown: Pink Floyd’s The Wall
and the Termination of the Post-War Era’, Popular Music and Society, 35:1:1–23.
63 Op. cit. Laing (1973a):26.
64 Op. cit. Youdell (2006):512.
65 Op. cit. Laing (1973b):104.

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 21
TRUTH AND MANIPULATION
IN PINK FLOYD’S
THE FINAL CUT
Glenn Fosbraey

Introduction
The Final Cut, released on March 21, 1983, is, perhaps, better known for being Pink Floyd’s
‘break-up album’ than the actual music it contains. The assertion on the back cover that it was
‘by Roger Waters’ and ‘performed by Pink Floyd’1 was the fnal step in founding member and
chief songwriter Roger Waters assuming control of the band’s creative direction, and this was to
be his last contribution under the Pink Floyd name.
In early 1982, Pink Floyd entered the studio preparing to record a new clutch of songs called
Spare Bricks that had either been omitted from or were not yet ready for inclusion on The Wall.2
Although four of these songs made it into the project that would become The Final Cut, by the
time it was released, ‘the record [had] gestated into something rather diferent.’3 Dealing with
several themes, including Waters’,

feelings about the death of his father at Anzio in the Second World War . . . [the]
failure of post-war Britain to provide the better world that so many had died for . . .
[Britain’s declaration of war] on Argentina over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands . . .
[and] the atmosphere in Britain at the time . . . The Final Cut became a real tool for
expressing his horror at these events.4

Waters’ discussion of the Second World War and his father was certainly nothing new, begin-
ning with the shell-shocked ‘Corporal Clegg’5 in 1968 and continuing with ‘Free Four,’ ‘Us and
Them’ and several songs on The Wall, but he had yet to be so outspoken about events, such as
the Falklands War, that were ‘as contemporary as the newspapers that . . . [he] read every morn-
ing over breakfast,’6 unleashing ‘an expression of unbridled outrage’7 at politicians and generals
who casually demanded the pointless sacrifces war demanded.8 As it was, then, while ‘past
Pink Floyd albums had been almost self-consciously timeless . . . The Final Cut would emerge
time-locked instead.’9 Despite being awarded Double Platinum status in 1997, The Final Cut
was the lowest-selling Pink Floyd studio album since 1971’s Meddle, and critics have been split
ever since on whether it is ‘Pink Floyd’s worst album,’10 ‘weak’11 or ‘art rock’s crowning master-
piece.’12 Whatever the verdict may be, The Final Cut is certainly the Pink Floyd album that has
received the least amount of written coverage since its release. By way of an example, a search

384 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-27

 Truth and manipulation in Te Final Cut

for ‘Pink Floyd The Final Cut album’ on Google yields 368,000 results, whereas using the same
search parameters, The Wall yields 46,200,000 results, Dark Side of the Moon 1,140,000, Ani-
mals 1,600,000, Wish You Were Here 2,670,000, Meddle 2,520,000, Atom Heart Mother 925,000,
Ummagumma 497,000, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 1,380,000, and post-Waters albums A
Momentary Lapse of Reason 738,000, and The Division Bell 670,000.
Similarly, in Blake’s (2013) biography Pigs Might Fly, The Final Cut is aforded just 8 pages
compared to The Wall’s 36 and Dark Side of the Moon’s 30, and the fgures are similar for Mason’s
(2017) Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd.
This chapter concerns itself with a discussion of ‘truth and manipulation’ in The Final Cut.
By beginning with the notion that ‘all art . . . is a matter of contrivance and manipulation’13 and
analysing the album in terms of intertextuality, autobiography, extra-musical elements, recep-
tion theory, interpretation, brevity and rhetoric, it will aim to discover how much accuracy
there is in the assertion that The Final Cut contained ‘lyrics that were truly carving windows
into Waters’ psyche’.14
We will also look at whether or not Waters stayed faithful to his truth: his intention that the
album be ‘a requiem for the post-war dream,’ a dream which, in his words ‘was about how, with
the introduction of the Welfare State, we felt we were moving forward into something resem-
bling a liberal country where we would all look after one another.’15

Fact, fction, character, voice

If we begin from Hopps’ assertion that ‘All art . . . including that which afects to speak most
directly and in the most heartfelt way, is a matter of contrivance and manipulation,’16 then
every album that has ever been released is mostly fctional, especially those who are attempting
to be real.
Pop music opens itself up to manipulation of truth more than most media, and such manipu-
lations can occur due to song length, self-awareness (and self-consciousness), structure and
syllabic count/rhyme. It is strange, then, that pop music tends to be linked more with the
autobiography of the songwriters (and often singers) than most other media. In literature, for
example, when the personal pronoun ‘I’ is used, the reader will usually detach this character
from the author and assume that the voice of the ‘I’ is a fctional character, therefore creating
a distance between character and creator. So often in pop music, the opposite is true, with the
‘I’ being linked back to the writer and, more often than not, the singer (even if they have not
written the song they are performing). There are numerous examples of this throughout the
ages, with narratives in songs being taken outside their fctional, artifcial status to imply (among
many other things) infdelity (Beyonce’s 2016 track ‘Sorry’); homophobia (pretty much any
track from Eminem’s ‘The Slim Shady LP’); Satan worship (Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath);
and, as was the case with Tyler the Creator, artists have even been ‘rejected [entry to the UK]
under the terms of Home Ofce policy on ‘behaviours unacceptable in the UK’17 in 2015.
When writing The Wall, producer Bob Ezrin suggested broadening out the story to take it
away from being an utterly autobiographical work,18 believing that by creating a third-person
character, Waters could ‘express levels of fear, alienation and isolation that otherwise would have
been unacceptable – and just wrong.’19 While The Final Cut is not as obviously character based
as The Wall, and although Waters’ vocal is on every track, this doesn’t mean that the narrator’s
voice is always that of Waters himself. The issue with one lead vocalist is that, unless diferent
accents or vocal styles are used (like on The Wall track ‘The Trial’), multiple character perspec-
tives are not always apparent, and the assumption is, therefore, made that the only character
present is the singer. Perspectives other than Waters’ may occur, though, where he inhabits

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the voice of another character and speaks from their viewpoints in the frst person. The shift
to another voice is most noticeable, perhaps, in those areas where Waters speaks in the frst
person when describing situations he would not have been able to experience personally. ‘The
Gunner’s Dream’ is an example of this, containing a frst-person narrative from the Gunner:
‘Hurling himself out of a burning plane to his death . . . [thinking] about what it would be like
at the memorial service’20 but later switching to what we might take to be Waters’ voice in the
fnal verse with lines like ‘his dream is driving me insane.’21
It has been noted that in ‘The Post War Dream’ Waters’ use of the colloquial name for the
Japanese during the Second World War, ‘nips,’22 along with the suggestions that ‘all their kids
[commit] suicide,’ did attract criticisms of racism.23 But is the voice in this song his? It is certainly
likely that ‘The Post War Dream’ begins in Waters’ own voice, and the opening lines ‘tell me
true, tell me why/was Jesus crucifed?/Is it for this that Daddy died?’24 indeed link back to his
autobiography, especially when considering that his father ‘was a devout Christian,’25 but this
does not mean that the rest of the song is Waters’ voice and that he is not taking on (or sending
up) the voices of others. The use of the word ‘nips’ is most undoubtedly unusual for Waters’
own voice, especially considering that he went to such great lengths in The Wall to satirise
and ridicule racist language in songs such as ‘Waiting for the Worms,’ and ‘In the Flesh.’ If we
also include in this the use of ‘we’ toward the end of the song, and the fact it’s unlikely Waters
would link himself to ‘Maggie’ in the question ‘what have we done?’26 we could well argue
that another voice is being used within the song. We should also consider that in the lyrical
transcript, ‘what happened to the post-war dream?’27 is surrounded by quotation marks, but
nothing else is, suggesting that this could be Waters’ voice coming through after lines of another
character’s narration. We might put forward the theory, then, that the use of the word ‘nips’ is
Waters lampooning the ‘alarmingly jingoistic atmosphere in Britain at the time.’28 Conjecture
this maybe, but no more so than the assumption that the whole album is made up of Waters’
voice, and Waters’ voice alone. Waters must, of course, understand the risks of such utterances
being associated with himself (he had been long enough in the industry by this point to know
how the system worked), but such a narrow analysis, where lyrics are linked entirely back to the
writer, does not give credit to the creative nature of the lyricist and their right to inhabit other
voices of other characters.
If Waters is using other voices in The Final Cut, then, what does this say about truth? By
bringing in diferent perspectives, is he straying from his own beliefs and vision, or is it a tech-
nique that can be used to ofer more objective observations?
The gap between real-life characters and fctional ones is often thin in pop music. In his song
‘Common People,’29 Jarvis Cocker claimed to have forgotten the girl’s real identity but admitted
to half-truths in his autobiographical lyrics. She may not have studied sculpture, but the line
scanned better in the song. And, although it implies that she wanted to bed him, he resorted to
poetic license to enhance the narrative.30
Just because Waters is using fctional characters, though, it does not necessarily follow that
they are saying fctional things. This is discussed by flm director Christopher Nolan: about
2017’s flm Dunkirk, he says that ‘knowing as I do the artifce that has to be applied to characters
at the centre of a story like this, to make the story clear, to give the audience the right informa-
tion, I felt more comfortable using fctional characters to illustrate this.’31
We also need to appreciate that, just as words associated with Waters’ character may be
applied to a fctional character and not represent his views, the opposite can be true, with words
said by fctional characters created merely as vehicles for the author’s viewpoints. As Bakhtin
(1991) says, ‘the author puts his ideas directly into the mouth of the hero from the standpoint

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of their theoretical or ethical (political, social)’32 and that such characters are refections of the
soul of the active author – by whom he is possessed.33

Editing truth
One of the signifcant ways that songs can manipulate reality is through the editing process.
Waters recounts the inspiration of ‘Two Suns in the Sunset,’ saying, ‘it is about a real moment
in my life . . . I’ve been out on the golf course . . . I’m driving home . . . the feeling suddenly
struck me, well what if? . . . I could almost imagine the blinding fash and the shock wave.’34
But the song does not actually retell this event in the same way Waters describes, for he has
needed to edit it to work within the constraints of a song. An artistic re-imagining has occurred,
and the details about the golf course and driving home have been seen as superfuous and edited
down, leaving just a trace of the actual story behind. Is this a sacrifce of truth, then? If we were
to agree that it was, by the same logic, all news broadcasts are being untruthful by not using
all of the footage they record instead of a slickly edited 30-minute bulletin, and all newspaper
articles are deceitful by not considering every single aspect of a story. Conscious manipulations
are made in any art form, but it does not mean the truth is sacrifced entirely: we are just given
a version of the truth that has been fltered and edited to provide what the writer believes to be
the best overview of reality. The same is most certainly valid with The Final Cut.
Editing in pop music is essential, and the art of brevity, the boiling down of complex themes
and arguments into the three-minute pop song, is a test of the skill lyricists, described by Jimmy
Webb as ‘the Swiss watchmakers of music and literature.’35 Will Self (2011) notes how Morrissey
achieved this in the song ‘Still Ill’ where ‘he is responsible – among other things – for encapsu-
lating two hundred years of philosophical speculation in a single line, “Does the body rule the
mind or does the mind rule the body, I dunno”.’36
Given the breadth of the themes (Second World War; Falklands War; nuclear apocalypse;
removal of world leaders from power; discussion of British manufacture moving abroad), Waters
was never going to be able to go into any of them in any detail. Thousands of full-length texts
have been written on the Second World War and post-war Britain, so to condense this into
just over 2,000 words of lyrics (including titles and spoken-word and sound efects) means it is
nearly impossible for Waters to give any comprehensive account of the situations he is discuss-
ing. Nor does he need to do so. What we are left with, then, is a brief overview, a news bulletin
instead of an in-depth documentary. On The Final Cut, Waters takes on enormous, complex
themes and simplifes them, giving the listener an emotional feel for a situation rather than
detailing the specifcs. While he may not be ofering the whole truth (mainly because he just
has no time to do so), he is distilling and condensing this truth down to its most basic level for
maximum impact and maximum understanding.
One of the prominent examples of this comes in ‘The Post War Dream’ with the lines ‘If
it wasn’t for the nips/Being so good at building ships/The yards would still be open on the
Clyde.’37
In these lines, Waters manages to simplify the drastic decline of British shipyards ‘in the
1950s with the phenomenal rise in Japanese output’38 evidencing the 17 shipyards closed on the
Clyde following the end of the Second World War as they ‘were unable to compete with new
shipbuilding superpowers.’39
Some of the ways that Waters has condensed information have not been quite so successful,
though, and his brushstrokes concerning the Falklands and the Second World War are at times
so broad they are rendering abstract the images he paints. Although we know from research that

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The Final Cut is ‘about’ Waters’ ‘feelings about the death of his father at Anzio in the Second
World War,’40 the main reference points to this come from outside the lyrics themselves, via
the front and back covers, the front showing ‘various Second World War service medals’41 and
the back showing an image of a soldier dressed in uniform and a dedication to ‘Eric Fletcher
Waters 1913–1944,’42 which, when combined with Waters’ name at the top of the back cover
and the second line of ‘The Post War Dream’ (‘is it for this that Daddy died?’)43 should take
away any doubt that Eric Waters is Roger’s father, and he died in the Second World War. Out-
side these elements, Waters uses a sufcient number of words and phrases that link explicitly
to the Second World War, for example, ‘Dresden’; ‘fnal solution’; ‘they disembarked in 45’;44
‘the Holocaust’; and the term ‘post-war’ itself, which usually refers to the period following the
Second World War. Similarly, vague references are made to the Falklands War. Except for the
radio announcement at the start of ‘The Post War Dream,’ one needs to make a series of leaps
to connect the dots to show Waters’ ‘horror at the Falklands War,’45 with the only other explicit
references coming in ‘Get Your Filthy Hands Of My Desert’ and one line in ‘Not Now John’
(‘We showed Argentina/now let’s go and show these.’46)
Editing is also occurring when Waters holds back on things he wants to say. For example,
when pressed in an interview about details of the ‘weak-side’ he mentions in ‘The Final Cut,’ he
dodges the question, asserting that ‘some things are private.’47 Like with the edits he has made
with the historical details, then, Waters is also editing his own feelings, giving outlines of situa-
tions rather than pouring his emotions out onto the page unfltered and unedited. What we are
left with, then, is a version of the truth that Waters wanted to release to the outside world under
the Pink Floyd name. Manipulation of fact is, therefore, a given, but even then it does not mean
that truth is absent. As Marx says,

we treat history as the object of literary criticism, we historicize it, detecting the lim-
ited perspective and partial interests which render its account tendentious. It is not
invalidated as a result, but it is made to disclose the truth about its version of the truth.48

Even though Waters is editing within The Final Cut, his method of persuasion is much more
measured and eloquent than subsequent attempts at tackling similar subject matter during his
solo career. In the song ‘Broken Bones’ from his 2017 album Is This the Life We Really Want,
Waters returns to the subject of the post-war dream with the lines, ‘When World War II was
over, . . . we chose to adhere to abundance/We chose the American Dream.’49
This is a much more direct way of approaching the same subject matter as The Final Cut, and
with the line, ‘Picture a leader with no fucking brains’50 from the song ‘Picture That,’ Waters
goes even further with his economy of words, condensing his message to its absolute bare mini-
mum, perhaps as a nod to how we receive information today, often through bite-size bulletins
on Twitter or Facebook. Compare this to the comparatively ‘long-winded’51 way he talks about
the ‘leaders’ on The Final Cut, and we will see that further edits could have been made to the
album to make it more direct and strip away ambiguity.

Interpretation
What we are supposed to take from The Final Cut (based upon Waters’ own assertions in his
‘Inner View’ interview) is not necessarily achievable based on the text itself, so we are required
to bring in other texts to assist with the process of ‘understanding it.’ The questions, then, are
how much we need to bring with us, what ‘extra’ knowledge is required and how this may
impact the truth.

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Let us start this section by trying to identify how Waters explains his vision of the post-war
dream in The Final Cut. Although never fully detailed, we might take the leap that ‘The Gun-
ner’s Dream’ is the closest we come to it being identifed, where the Gunner describes his dream
in the second verse. If this is indeed the closest we can get to Waters’ manifesto of his post-war
dream, and he is highlighting the Thatcher era as the cause of its demise, then can we take it that
the negative images he lists in ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ are occurring in 1980s Britain?
If, in the Gunner’s dream ‘maniacs do not blow holes in bandsmen by remote control,’52 does
that mean that after the death of the post-war dream, Waters is suggesting they do? If we make
the connection that this line is referring to the 1982 ‘IRA bomb blasts in central London’53
where a ‘device exploded under a bandstand in Regent’s Park, killing seven bandsmen from the
Royal Green Jackets,’54 then we could certainly make a case for it.
If we establish from this that Waters is referring to a real-life event, then we need to look at
some of the other lines to see if similar real-life truths are being told. Does the line ‘no-one kills
the children any more,’55 for example, refer to a specifc incident like the ‘bandsmen’ line, or is
Waters, having established realism with the ‘bandsmen’ line, merely using this connection to
suggest truth when he is not speaking about a particular real-life incident? As an image, it is so
broad that it could be referring to any number of things, but it is undoubtedly deemed signifcant
enough for it to be repeated and end the verse. It could be argued, then, that its role in the song
is to elicit a strong emotional reaction in the listener, and in its generic imagery lies its power, for
the listener will bring in their specifcs, whether that is images of children being killed during the
Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide or any other war-time or post-war atrocity. In this instance,
Waters is ofering the canvas, the paints and the idea, but we are to paint the picture ourselves.
Understanding Waters’ post-war dream without resorting to hearing him explain it through
an interview is a process that is very much reliant on us bringing in outside knowledge. But it
may well be that we are not supposed to comprehend it, as, similar to the ‘no-one fully kills the
children any more’ line, we are being tasked with coming up with our own post-war dream, and
Waters is just giving us a suggestion as to the things we might want to consider.
In 1983, Waters gave a one-hour radio interview to Los Angeles FM rock station KMET56
about The Final Cut, and this interview provides us with his insights into the album’s concept
and the ideas and meanings behind the songs themselves. The temptation to use this interview
as a decoding device is all too tempting and refects how pop music has historically been ana-
lysed, with the lyrics being read as ‘transparent disclosures of the singer’s biography’57 providing
clues to the puzzles of the songs that only the author’s intention could solve.
If we are looking at The Final Cut in this way, then the KMET interview is essential listen-
ing, but we have to consider the possibility (and probably likelihood) that of the 3 million that
bought it on release, the majority would not have listened to the interview. Broadcast only in
America, before a time of Internet radio and YouTube, only those tuning in and only those in
the broadcast vicinity of Los Angeles would be able to access this additional information. All
other listeners at the time would be missing this further insight into Waters’ lyrical intentions.
Other information that would have been available to the listener included previous Pink Floyd
releases (especially The Wall but also lyrics from ‘Us and Them’ and ‘Free Four’ which explore
the theme of war), the single ‘When the Tigers Broke Free,’ a 19-minute VHS short flm of The
Final Cut and any press interviews (which were few and far between).
Gracyk (2001) defnes intertextuality as ‘a blanket term for the idea that a text communicates
its meaning only when it is situated in dialogue with other texts,’58 and we have to consider this
statement when analysing The Final Cut, analysing in which ways texts outside the album itself
determine our listening experiences and to what extent their meanings move away ‘from the
independent text into a network of textual relations.’59

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One of the most useful texts to help us analyse The Final Cut is the single ‘When the Tigers
Broke Free,’ a song that is arguably as autobiographical as Waters ever got, with all metaphor
and symbolism stripped away as he recounts, in spoken word, his father’s story from the Second
World War, including specifc details on the battle at Anzio and his company (Royal Fusiliers,
Company Z). ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ featured as a new song in the flm version of The
Wall, which reached No. 3 on the box-ofce charts and brought in about $22 m,60 but, when
released as a single, ‘scraped into the top 40 and disappeared completely in America.’61 Even
though The Final Cut would undoubtedly have been bought by those who were familiar with
this song, then, there would also have been those who were not, so we cannot assume that this
knowledge was universal among listeners.
The video of The Final Cut, released on VHS in the United Kingdom and Germany via
EMI Music Video in 1983, features four of the album’s songs – ‘The Gunner’s Dream,’ ‘The
Final Cut,’ ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home,’ and ‘Not Now John’ with the screenplay written by
Waters. Essentially functioning like music videos, each of the visuals can infuence how we read
the songs. Carol Vernallis (2004) suggests that ‘in a music video both the song and the image
play shifting roles in articulating the lyrics . . . [and] the image can render certain words more
obscure and others more apparent.’62
This can be seen in the video for ‘The Final Cut,’ which features black-and-white stock
videos of women performing what may have been historically viewed as male-dominated roles:
fying planes, playing cricket, working in factories, engaging in politics (and political activism),
hunting, weightlifting and bricklaying while also showing more stereotypically female roles:
midwifery, modelling, child-rearing, housekeeping and nursing. This music video, which could
well be taken as a feminist statement where women can pursue whatever careers and activities
they please, has no direct relationship whatsoever with the song’s contents and puts forward a
completely diferent ‘truth’ where Waters’ ‘post-war dream’ includes a world where women are
equal to men.
Again, though, we cannot assume that those listening to The Final Cut would have seen this
video. By the end of the decade, over 60% of UK households would own a VCR player, but in
1983, only around 15% of households owned one,63 so exposure to it would have been limited.
Another external text that would infuence our reading of The Final Cut is Rupert Brooke’s
poem ‘The Soldier,’ with its line, ‘some corner of a foreign feld’64 used in ‘The Gunner’s
Dream’ (albeit worded slightly diferently as ‘the corner of some foreign feld’). Knowledge
of this poem, which ‘represents the patriotic ideals that characterised pre-war England’65 and
expresses ‘an idealism about war,’66 adds depth to Waters’ arguments that such patriotism was
misplaced, given ‘the failure of post-war Britain to provide the better world that so many had
died for.’67 This is emphasised further by his re-wording, which draws attention to the point-
less nature of war with the dismissive word ‘some’ before ‘foreign feld,’ suggesting it could be
anywhere at any time as the cycle is endlessly repeating itself.
Even if we are using The Wall as the most probable ‘external text’ listeners would have been
familiar with, as Pink Floyd had no big-star media personality among them, their biographies
would have been mostly unknown, so many listeners coming to The Final Cut may not have
made the connection between Waters and lines like ‘daddy’s fown across the ocean/leaving just
a memory.’68
If we approach The Final Cut without any prior knowledge, then, it can be an extremely
confusing listen, and this is undoubtedly the case with ‘One of the Few,’ one of the songs left
over from the abandoned Spare Bricks project. By bringing the schoolmaster from The Wall into
the song, a character so linked to another project, Waters sacrifces verisimilitude, and even
though he explains his desire to add ‘a bit more to his character’69 and that the schoolmaster

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fought in the war with the character of the Gunner,70 this is in no way clear and serves only as
a somewhat confusing aside from the main narrative that had been established previously. The
fact that this pre-existing character only crops up on this one short track and gets another few
seconds on ‘Not Now John’ begs the question as to why Waters included it if it risked muddying
his overall meaning. About the requiem for the post-war dream, it ofers nothing whatsoever.
The song ‘The Final Cut’ also sounds like it would be more at home on The Wall, with its
general theme of isolation from society (‘Dial the combination, open the priest-hole/And I’ll
tell you what’s behind the wall’),71 the words ‘crazy dream’ and ‘hallucination’ linking with the
theme of ‘Comfortably Numb,’ the mention of a ‘dark side’ link with ‘One of My Turns’ and
‘Don’t Leave Me Now,’ and the song even ending with the narrator wishing to ‘tear the curtain
down’72 (see the line ‘tear down the wall’73 from ‘The Trial’).
Elsewhere on The Final Cut, The Wall resonates, be that through the elongated echo on the
word ‘closer’ on ‘Your Possible Pasts’ mirroring The Wall’s ‘One of My Turns’ or the derogatory
terminology used within The Wall (e.g., ‘coon’ in ‘Waiting for the Worms’) and The Final Cut
(e.g., ‘nips’ in ‘The Post War Dream’).
With The Final Cut having grown out of those four Spare Bricks songs, it is impossible to
ignore that Waters has prioritised the inclusion of them at the expense of The Final Cut having
its own autonomy and unique narrative. As a result, he has sacrifced portraying his real vision
of the post-war dream.
If we are going to read The Final Cut in the way that Waters intended us to per his KMET
interview, then we would likely need to have been exposed to all the texts discussed so far, as
well as having a pretty decent knowledge of the causes of the Falklands War, the aftermath of the
Second World War (including the decline of British manufacture), capitalism and monetarism
in relation to the Conservative government and the names and policies of many world lead-
ers past and present (among them Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Menachem Begin and
Leonid Brezhnev). Not exactly what the average pop music listener would be expected to bone
up on before being able to access a number-one album.
Many listeners in 1983, therefore, may have listened to the album with no outside informa-
tion at all, and their ‘readings’ would have been limited to the record they held in their hands:
the sound of the album itself, the sleeve images, the lyric transcripts and credits. This would
open us up to a whole host of diferent interpretations, including the notion of reception
theory, in which McCaw (2008) suggests that ‘individual and collective responses are relevant
to an understanding of texts as well as to an understanding of the readers themselves and the
cultures to which they belong.’74 This theory contrasts Waters’ intention that the songs on The
Final Cut are ‘a monologue, not a discussion,’75 but the whole essence of this theory is that we
ignore the author’s involvement and focus on the reader’s (or in this case listener’s) interpreta-
tion of the lyrics, concentrating ‘on how readers interacted with texts based upon their lived
experience and individual background (social, cultural, political).’76 This also makes the notion
of truth more elastic, as ‘each of us as listeners becomes a participant in the ongoing process of
understanding the song,’77 meaning that Waters’ truth may not end up being ours. Note that the
notion of a ‘post-war dream’ is purely subjective anyway, tied in with the idea that one person’s
utopia is another’s a dystopia.
There is immediately a specifc mention of the Falklands War only a few seconds into the
album with the following line, presented as a radio broadcast, ‘It was announced today, that the
replacement for the Atlantic Conveyor the container ship lost in the Falklands confict would
be built in Japan.’78 But the Falklands War will have enormously diferent meanings to those
listening in 1983 and those coming to Pink Floyd new in 2018, and the latter may not identify
the signifcance of the Falklands War within the lyrics and how Waters was not only protesting

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against the war itself but against the government at the time, capitalist culture and the demise
of Britain’s shipbuilding industry, with Japanese manufacture increasing as Britain’s diminished.

Contemporary meanings
Autobiographically speaking, as someone born in June  1983, who would become obsessed
with Pink Floyd in my teenage years, by the time I got to The Final Cut, all I knew about the
Falklands War was based around what my parents had told me (including their thoughts on
Thatcher) and hazy memories of seeing photos of ‘Falklands soldier, Simon Weston’79 in the
tabloids. My initial reading of The Final Cut about the Falklands War, then, was that it was
merely an anti-war commentary, and given some of the ‘jingoism’ and pro-Falklands War rheto-
ric I had experienced in the town I grew up in, it had a minimal impact on me. It is only now,
many years later that, through research (into Waters’ intentions, the state of British politics in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, British manufacture in that same period and the Falklands itself) that
I fnd Waters’ lyrics in any way persuasive. If we shift my own experience of The Final Cut to the
discussions of the Second World War, however, my reaction is altogether diferent. The notion
of a lack of ‘hero worship’ for those involved in the Second World War (particularly the war
in Italy) rings true with my own experiences, as my grandfather, Sgt. Major Frank Archibald
Fosbraey of Royal East Kent Regiment (the Bufs), also fought the Italian Campaign and the
Battle of Anzio (Bufs Royal East Kent Regiment).80
His return from fve years of duty was about as far removed as can be from the ticker-tape
parades, Union Flag waving and parties in the streets so associated with the Victory in Europe
(and mentioned in ‘Your Possible Pasts’). Frank Fosbraey landed at Dover in the summer of
1945 and was required to walk 40 miles to his home in Milton Regis, after which he was then
expected to pick up a life with a six-year-old daughter who barely knew him, a wife who had
got used to life without him, and an 30-year career as a British Rail signalman that took him
to retirement.
What is important to note, however, is that while I always made connections between The
Final Cut and my grandfather, it was only on discovering years after frst listening that both Eric
Waters and my grandfather fought at Anzio that the connection deepened and had an impact
on me. It is also worth noting that my connecting The Final Cut to my grandfather led me to
‘misreading’ ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ for many years. As my grandfather had Alzheimer’s
in his fnal years, I took the song to refer to the inglorious switch from hardened war veterans
to ‘overgrown infants’81 as they entered their senior years, were put into retirement and into
nursing homes and were mostly forgotten by society. This led me to become confused by the
lines ‘tyrants and kings’82 and the listing of world leaders, but the emotion within the melody,
vocal style and lexicon overruled this, leaving my initial reading intact, despite my knowledge
now that Waters was implying that these world leaders should be removed from power, stripped
of their dignity and forgotten. Such is the powerful role emotion can play: my reading is deter-
mined by this frst reaction rather than what my intellect is telling me.
‘True artists,’ Booth (1983) claims, ‘we have been told, again and again, take no thought of
their readers,’83 but never has this been less the case with an artist who knows their music is
going to be heard by millions.
With The Wall having sold millions of copies by the time recording of The Final Cut began,
Waters would have been aware that he was writing for a vast audience, probably from all over
the world, some whose frst language was not English. To get his intention across, then, and
make it as transferable as possible, there had to be a more fundamental, basic way to access it,
without the reader requiring all the external knowledge so far discussed.

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Ethos, pathos and logos

Ethos is a technique used to emphasise the strength of a speaker’s own moral character and
experience to establish personal credibility, while pathos is an emotional technique aimed at
eliciting an emotional response from the audience, and logos appeals to reason or logic to
make a persuasive case.84 Taking these three elements of persuasion, how do they apply to The
Final Cut?
We can begin by noting, as ‘a text, once it is separated from its utterer (as well as from the
utterer’s intention) . . . foats within a potentially infnite range of possible interpretations,’85
Waters was never going to be in full control of how his message was interpreted. But he was
able to manipulate his audience by using rhetoric to at least put across an overarching feeling
to the album.
If Waters is to persuade us of his political opinions and to subscribe to ‘the post-war dream,’
he has not got time to appeal to the intellect and so must cut straight through to making us react
with emotion. The Final Cut, then, relies primarily on pathos as its primary mode of persuasion,
but ethos comes into play, as Waters is presenting himself as both knowledgeable, vulnerable
and passionate, which makes his voice and his opinions have an impact. Logos is mostly absent,
which it is in the vast majority of pop music given that it is near impossible to rationally analyse
anything in such a short space of time (this chapter, for example, is attempting to do that, but
has four times the amount of words in which to do it than The Final Cut). However, Waters is
urging the listener to apply logic to his assertions and is undoubtedly using a lot of specifc words
that appeal to the intelligent (and in doing so assert his credentials as an intelligent writer). The
fact that, as discussed earlier, we are required to bring so much existing knowledge to the album
is a testament to that. As pathos is The Final Cut’s primary mode of persuasion, then, how does
Waters ‘attempt . . . to elicit an emotional response from the audience’?86
We can positively identify an efort to cause sadness with the words, poppies, tear-stained,
lost, daddy (used in two separate songs) and desperation, but fear appears to be the over-riding
emotion, evidenced through the words petrifed, cut, suicide, maniacs, scream, shotgun, die,
knives, frightened, warning, war, burning, smoulders, trembling, crucifed, kills, medals, boom,
bang, dead, sacrifcial, graves, fght, minefeld, fres burning, bomb, abuse, dark, anger, ashes
and the word ‘fear’ itself, enhanced through the images we may conjure up when thinking
about ‘Dresden,’ ‘Holocaust’ and ‘fnal solution.’
Alternatively, as a contrast to these negative emotions, Waters uses a series of more posi-
tive images to present the post-war dream such as clear blue skies, end of the rainbow, safely,
dream and relax. The negative language certainly outweighs the positive, though, leaving an
uneasy feeling that is pushed further by the shifts in dynamics, which often lurch from piano to
forte (and back again) without any build-up or warning. It is important to note at this point,
however, that isolating individual words on an album can lead to gross thematic misreadings.
After all, ‘no word can be judged as to whether it is good or bad, correct or incorrect, beautiful
or ugly, or anything else that matters to a writer, in isolation.’87 For example, one can look at
Little Mix’s 2016 album Glory Days, which is almost 100% focused on the themes of relation-
ships and sex, but looked at out of context, specifc words like hate, killer, dead, obsessive,
insanity, and scream warp what it appears to be ‘about.’ While the Glory Days album includes
only seven words that could be taken as ominous or sinister, though, and each of them can be
applied to several innocent phrasings that would drastically alter their meanings (e.g., ‘I hate
pineapple on pizza’; ‘I’ve got a killer headache’; ‘I’m obsessive about my appearance’; ‘this
video game is driving me to insanity’; ‘scream if you want to go faster’), The Final Cut contains
over 40 such utterances in the same number of songs, and it is much harder, if not impossible,

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to fnd light-hearted (or even dual) meanings for words and phrases like ‘fnal solution’ and
‘Holocaust.’
As such, then, it can be concluded that Waters has selected particular words and phrases to
manipulate the listener into feeling a certain way. And the rhetoric does not end with the lyrics.
Further emotional triggers come via the use of sound efects, recorded for maximum impact
using new holophonic sound techniques ‘to . . . reproduce very realistic and three-dimensional
sounds within us,’88 including the sound of the radio broadcaster who opens ‘The Post War
Dream’ with a selection of particular word choices which set the tone for the whole album,
‘nuclear fallout shelter’ (fear), ‘violence’ (fear), ‘lost in the Falklands’ (sadness), ‘built in Japan’
(sadness). Elsewhere on the album, we have the sound of warplanes (fear), explosions (fear) and
a child screaming for his ‘daddy’ (sadness) to reinforce the desired emotional efect (understand-
ing and interpretation).
Sticking with the theme of rhetoric, Aristotle suggests ‘there are three divisions of oratory’:89
deliberative – attempts to make the future, forensic – attempts to change what we see as the truth
about the past (attempts which may of course also afect the future) and epideictic – attempts to
reshape views of the present.90
The Final Cut, it could be argued, attempts to use each one of these techniques. Via ‘Two
Suns in the Sunset’s vision of a tomorrow ‘with an expected high of 4000 degrees Celsius,’91
Waters attempts to make the future by showing the dystopian world we are headed towards
unless we change. ‘Southampton Dock’ and ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ attempt to change
what we see about the past by giving an alternative version of the commonly held belief that war
veterans were treated like heroes upon their return, and ‘The Post War Dream,’ and ‘Get Your
Filthy Hands Of My Desert’ attempt to reshape views of the present by inviting the reader to
question the decisions of the current government.
One of the most striking things about the album is its vocals, with Waters’ ‘heartfelt, hys-
terical, afecting, and occasionally rather afected, strangulated bark.’92 With his vocal on every
track, and none of the lengthy instrumental breaks that characterised the pre-The Wall albums,
Waters’ voice is front and centre in throughout the album. Does this lack of other voices add
more or less truth to the album? By writing the songs and giving them to others to sing, would
Waters have been increasing their impact, or reducing it? The overall efect of the album would
undoubtedly have changed. The vocals, along with the lack of keyboard parts, is a signifcant
factor in separating the sound of The Final Cut from other Pink Floyd albums where Gilmour
and Wright shared the vocal duties with Waters. This is startlingly evident when we look back
at the percentages of Waters’ solo lead vocals across Pink Floyd’s history post-Barrett era when
there was no one defned lead vocalist in the group: Meddle: 17% (Waters solo lead vocal),
Obscured by Clouds: 17%, Dark Side of the Moon: 29%, Wish You Were Here: 40%. Even The Wall,
where Waters sang 58% of the lead vocals, and Animals, where he sang 60%, are incredibly low
when compared with The Final Cut’s 92%. This could well evidence Waters’ growing domi-
nance over the band, but this enormous leap in lead vocal duties from The Wall to The Final
Cut is probably more due to Waters wanting a particular sound to the vocals that he felt only he
could deliver. Wright was out of the band by this point, and although it would be hard to argue
against the notion that Gilmour was a better singer than Waters, his voice may just have been
too clean for the songs on The Final Cut.
Throughout his career in Pink Floyd, Waters altered his vocal style depending on the songs
he was singing. Perhaps most evident on The Wall’s ‘The Trial,’ where Waters inhabits four very
diferent voices, his other vocals on that album are similarly (if not quite as dramatically) altered
depending on the subject matter, ranging from unsettling mocking/sarcastic on ‘Comfortably
Numb,’ through vulnerable on ‘Mother,’ to downright desperate and tortured on ‘Don’t Leave

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Me Now.’ Such is the diference in these styles, the newcomer would be hard pressed to fgure
out the same vocalist contributed to each, and the same is true across his vocals in the rest of
Pink Floyd’s back catalogue (see ‘St. Tropez’ vs ‘Pigs on the Wing 1’, ‘If ’ vs ‘Shine On You
Crazy Diamond Part VII’ and ‘Free Four’ vs ‘Dogs’ as examples.) This chameleonic approach
to his singing suggests that the way he delivered the vocals on The Final Cut, however difcult
they may be for the listener at times, was a deliberate, measured decision, further evidenced
by Mason’s observation that Waters recorded ‘take after take of the same vocal performance.’93
Gilmour’s voice, the quintessential Pink Floyd sound for many listeners (myself included),
always sounded like Gilmour’s voice, whereas Waters was able to alter his voice depending on
what he felt the song required. The Final Cut needed to move between fear, sadness, anger and
vulnerability, often within the same song (see ‘The Hero’s Return’), so it is reasonable to con-
clude, therefore, that if Waters wanted to take on one of the softer singing styles he sometimes
used, he would have done. The singing on The Final Cut, then, is purposely difcult, designed to
afect the listener. Waters’ voice – cracks, faws, of-pitching and all – adds a dash of realism and
desperation (however manufactured) that Gilmour’s just would not have been able to put across,
making the listener feel these emotions are at the very root of The Final Cut.
Waters himself says that ‘A lot of the aggravation came through in the vocal performance,
which, looking back, really was quite tortured.’94 Indeed, but with diferent accounts agreeing
on the fact that Waters took multiple takes to record his vocals, this is then a manufactured tor-
tured sound (acting, if you will), and he is undoubtedly aware that he wants his vocal to sound a
certain way. Ratlif suggests that when we hear the emotion in music, what we are hearing is an
artist making a series of choices and what they are intimating and feeling are diferent things.95
During these occasions where Waters was ‘attempting to perfect a particular set of vocals,’96
then, he may very well have been trying to intimate the feeling of sadness, where he was feeling
tension and frustration at the slowness of the recording process.

Structure and formula

The fnal potential manipulations of truth that we will discuss are song structure and rhyme.
Throughout his career, Waters has specialised in creating lyrics that sound both satisfying and
philosophical, and a lot of the former has come from the way he constructs his lines and the
fact that he has never been the type of songwriter who appears to ‘mess around with syntax
and syllables in order to make it ft with the melody.’97 What we cannot ignore is that Waters
has refned his lyric writing skills over many years to create the illusion of his phrasing being
natural, and this, of course, is in itself a manipulation of the messages and narratives he wants to
put across. Yes, he wants the content of his lyrics to have an impact, but he also needs to make
them sound good to appeal to the listener in the frst place.
Of all the post-Barrett non-soundtrack Pink Floyd albums, The Final Cut stands out for
its ‘standard’ album approach: 12 songs, no lengthy instrumental breaks, one lead singer – it is
about as far removed as we could get from the sprawling ambition of The Wall or the epic tracks
on Animals or Wish You Were Here. Although the subject matter is complex and challenging,
the actual structure of The Final Cut makes it arguably the most accessible of all the Pink Floyd
albums. Blume (2004) states that ‘crafting songs that incorporate one of the most popular struc-
tures is analogous to using proper grammar and punctuation to communicate our ideas better
when we speak or write.’98
This approach is, of course, a method of manipulation. Finding lyrics to suit a verse, chorus,
refrain or bridge can lead the writer to edit their content further, allowing their original mes-
sage to be diluted. Although The Final Cut may follow a ‘standardised’99 album format with

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regard to song length and number, however, Waters largely rejects traditional song structures
and uses a chorus on just two occasions (‘Your Possible Pasts,’ and ‘Paranoid Eyes’) and refrain
only once (‘The Gunner’s Dream’). Although in song the lyricist is usually confned by meter
and syllabic count, Waters, for the most part, gives the impression that he is saying what he
wants to say and is not sacrifcing his content to ft in a catchy refrain or pithy hook. Signifcant
manipulations do come via rhyme, however.
While many lyric writing self-help books suggest that a writer ‘always have a rhyming dic-
tionary to hand,’ actively seeking rhyme in this way risks a sacrifce of truth as the lyricist is led
to say things they did not mean to say or are not precisely relevant to their theme.100
Rhymes are so familiar in pop music that it is a surprise to us when we come across a song
that has none at all. Used well, a rhyme can make a lyric feel as natural and comfortable as put-
ting on a pair of old gloves, but if used poorly, it can severely impact our enjoyment of a song.
In BBC 6’s ‘shortlist of the worst song lyrics . . . ever!’101 nine of the ten tracks are selected due
to rhyme (only Razorlight’s ‘Somewhere Else’ gets in for content alone for the lines ‘And I met
a girl/she asked me my name/I told her what it was.’)102 The rhymes on this list occur due to
the writers’ desire to create a rhyme – possibly so the song is ‘catchier’ – at the expense of mean-
ing due to the narrative being distorted to shoehorn in the rhyming word. One of the most
signifcant manipulations of truth that can occur in pop music is the use of rhyme, and forced
rhymes (usually perfect rhymes, the kind that are sought out via a rhyming dictionary) are prob-
ably the worst ofenders for this. As ‘there are only a limited number of words that rhyme with
each other,’103 we have to consider to what extent rhymes have dictated the narrative. There
are rhymes in every song on The Final Cut, so this question is a pressing one when considering
truth and manipulation in the album. Of most importance is the consideration of which rhymes
appear to dictate the narrative.
One to consider is the rhyming couplet in ‘Your Possible Pasts’: ‘Her cold eyes imploring the
men in their macs/For the gold in their bags or the knives in their backs.’104 Waters has already
shown an image of a soldier with a knife in his back on the back cover of the album, so this line
is most certainly reinforcing that and underlining the theme of betrayal which is present else-
where on the album. However, we could argue that the description of ‘men in macs’ only exists
because Waters was seeking a rhyme for ‘backs,’ and this, although not making any real sense to
the listener (who are these men? What is their role in the narrative of the song?), is a decent ft
that seems to occur naturally. Other rhymes worth noting come within ‘The Gunner’s Dream’
where the dream itself may have to be manipulated purely to create rhyming couplets with the
imagining that ‘no-one ever disappears’105 perhaps arising to rhyme with ‘fears’ at the end of the
previous line and the aforementioned ‘no-one kills the children any more’106 possibly existing
only because it rhymes with ‘law.’
The song most manipulated by rhyme, though, is most defnitely ‘Not Now John,’ where
Waters reels of a series of disconnected words whose only link seems to be that they rhyme:
‘Getaway; Payday; Make hay/Need fx; Big six; Clickity click,’107 and although this section’s
lyrics seem to have been created purely for the rhythm that these words create, it is not the case
that meaning is sacrifced as a result. The terms and the sounds they make represent the factory
foor, the division of labour and alienation felt by workers on a production line.

Conclusion
Despite there being manipulations of truth due to editing, rhyming, self-awareness, structure
and rhetoric, and despite Waters’ intentions to the contrary, the album’s language is ambigu-
ous enough (without the aid of external texts, at least) to allow listeners the room to interpret

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the lyrics in their own way, to create their own version of the truth. If considering Waters’
intentions in putting across a particular narrative with particular meaning within structured
pop songs, then The Final Cut is a truthful as he and its medium allow it to be. But if we do
not restrict ourselves to following what Waters intended, its truth is elastic and will change
with each new listener and each passing year. A problematic, unusual addition to the Pink
Floyd catalogue it may be, but The Final Cut’s ability to start discussion and question the way
we think about war, politics, hero-worship, capitalism and leadership may make it their most
important.

Notes
1 Pink Floyd. (1983). The Final Cut. Harvest Records. OC 064–65 042. 2004 CD re-release includes
‘When the Tiger’s Broke Free.’
2 Thompson, D. (2013). Roger Waters: The Man Behind the Wall. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, page 54.
3 Mason, N. (2017). Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, page
264.
4 Ibid.
5 Weinstein, D. (2007). ‘Roger Waters: Artist of the Absurd’, in Reisch, G. A. (ed.), Pink Floyd and
Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, page 86–87.
6 Op. cit. Thompson (2013):57.
7 Fricke, D. (1987). ‘Pink Floyd: The Inside Story’. Retrieved from rollingstone.com/music/news/
pink-foyd-the-inside-story-19871119.
8 Ibid.
9 Op. cit. Thompson (2013):57.
10 ultimateclassicrock.com/pink-foyd-the-fnal-cut/.
11 Gracyk, T. (2007). ‘Pulling Together as a Team’, in Reisch, G. A. (ed.), Pink Floyd and Philosophy
Chicago: Open Court, page 144.
12 Loder, K. (1983). Pink Floyd: The Final Cut. Retrieved from rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/
the-fnal-cut-19830414.
13 Hopps, G. (2009). The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart. London: Continuum, page 84.
14 Op. cit. Thompson (2013):59.
15 Blake, M. (2013). Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. London: Aurum Press, page 295.
16 Op. cit. Hopps (2009):84.
17 Shepherd, J. E. (2015). ‘Tyler, the Creator on Being Banned from the UK: “I’m Being Treated
Like a Terrorist”’. Retrieved from theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/sep/01/tyler-the-
creator-comments-banned-uk-freedom-of-speech.
18 Op. cit. Blake (2013):260.
19 Ibid:261.
20 Interview of Pink Floyd for KMET. (1983). Written and hosted by Jim Ladd. Produced by Chris
Applegate. youtube.com/watch?v=WxTxlGHKYpY.
21 ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
22 ‘Nip’ and ‘nips’ were frequently used slang for the Japanese military during the Second World War.
The word originates from the word Nippon, the Japanese name for Japan.
23 Mabbett, A. (1995). The Complete Guide to the Music of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus Press, page 91.
24 ‘The Post War Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
25 Nemcof, M. Y. (2012). Tearing Down the Wall. Los Angeles: Wordsushi Books, page 32.
26 ‘The Post War Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
27 Ibid.
28 Op. cit. Mason (2017):264.
29 ‘Common People’, from Pulp’s Diferent Class album, by Jarvis Cocker, Russell Senior, Steve Mackey,
Nick Barnes and Candida Thomas. Islands Records, 1995.
30 Dimery, R. (ed.). (2013). 1001 Songs You Must Hear before You Die. London: Quintessence, page 731.
31 Milam, G. (2018). ‘Fake Films? Oscar Contenders Criticised over the Retelling of Historical Events’.
Retrieved from news.sky.com/story/fake-flms-oscar-contenders-criticised-over-retelling-of-historical-
events-11273865.

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 Glenn Fosbraey

32 Bakhtin, M. (1990). ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Holquist, M. and Liapunov, V. (eds.),
Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, page 10.
33 Ibid:172.
34 Op. cit. (1983). KMET Interview.
35 Webb, J. (1998). Tunesmith. New York: Hyperion, page 38.
36 Self, W. (2011). ‘The King of Bedsit Angst Grows Up’, in Woods, P. A. (ed.), Morrissey in Conversation.
London: Plexus Publishing, page 165.
37 ‘The Post War Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
38 Pavitt, K. (ed.). (1982). Technical Innovation and British Economic Performance. London: Macmillan,
page 169.
39 bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-24820573.
40 Op. cit. Mason (2017):264.
41 Op. cit. Blake (2013):299.
42 The Final Cut. Harvest Records. 1983.
43 ‘The Post War Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
44 ‘Southampton Dock’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
45 Op. cit. Mason (2017):264.
46 ‘Not Now John’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
47 Op. cit. (1983). KMET Interview.
48 Hamilton, P. (1996). Historicism. London: Routledge, page 105.
49 Waters, R. (2017). ‘Broken Bones’, on Is This the Life We Really Want? Columbia Records. The
fourth solo album by Waters.
50 Waters, R. (2017). ‘Picture That’, on Is This the Life We Really Want? Columbia Records.
51 Op. cit. Thompson (2013):58.
52 ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
53 ‘1982: IRA Bombs Cause Carnage in London’. Retrieved from news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/
stories/july/20/newsid_2515000/2515343.stm.
54 Whitehead, T. (2014). ‘Hyde Park IRA Bombing: 1982 Bombing Was One of the Worst Main-
land Atrocities’. Retrieved from telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/10652155/
Hyde-Park-IRA-bombing-1982-bombing-was-one-of-the-worst-mainland-atrocities.html.
55 ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
56 discogs.com/label/84415-Innerview.
57 Op. cit. Hopps (2009):9.
58 Gracyk, T. (2001). I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple Univer-
sity Press, page 56.
59 Allen, G. (2000). Intertextuality. London: Routledge, page 1.
60 ultimateclassicrock.com/roger-waters-the-wall-movie-2.
61 Op. cit. Blake (2013):291.
62 Vernallis, C. (2004). Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia
University Press, page xiii.
63 news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4446012.stm.
64 Brooke, R. (2005). ‘The Soldier’, in The Nation’s Favourite Poems. London: BBC Worldwide Limited,
page 44.
65 ‘The Soldier: Rupert Brooke – Summary and Critical Analysis’. Retrieved 2 March  2018, from
bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-soldier.html#.WqzilWrFLIU
66 ‘Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)’. Retrieved 20 February 2018, from www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_
fgures/brooke_rupert.shtml.
67 Op. cit. Mason (2017):264.
68 ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 1’, The Wall. Harvest Records, 1979.
69 Op. cit. (1983). KMET Interview.
70 Ibid.
71 ‘The Final Cut’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
72 Ibid.
73 ‘The Trial’, The Wall. Harvest Records, 1979.
74 McCaw, N. (2008). How to Read Texts. London: Continuum, page 71.
75 Op. cit. (1983). KMET Interview.
76 Op. cit. McCaw (2008):72.

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77 Levitin, D. (2009). The World in Six Songs. London: Aurum Press, pages 31–32.
78 ‘The Post War Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
79 Chippindale, P. and Horrie, C. (2005). Stick It Up Your Punter. London: William Heinemann Limited,
page 198.
80 queensregimentalassociation.org/media/Bufs%20(Royal%20East%20Kent%20Regiment.pdf.
81 ‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
82 Ibid.
83 Booth, W. C. (1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction. London: The University of Chicago Press, page 89.
84 Shabo, M. E. (2010). Rhetoric, Logic, and Argumentation: A Guide for Student Writers. Clayton: Prestwick
House, Inc., page 8.
85 Eco, U. (1992). Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, page 41.
86 Ibid.
87 Richards, I. A. (1964). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press, page 51.
88 sound-ideas.com/Page/what-is-holophonic-sound.aspx.
89 Roberts, W. R. (1995). ‘Rhetoric’, in Barnes, J. (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised
Oxford Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, page 2159.
90 Booth, W. C. (2004). The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Oxford: Blackwell, page 17.
91 ‘Two Suns in the Sunset’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
92 Op. cit. Blake (2013):294.
93 Op. cit. Mason (2017):268.
94 Op. cit. Blake (2013):299.
95 Ratlif, B. (2016). Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to in an Age of Musical Plenty. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 203.
96 Op. cit. Mason (2017):268.
97 Op. cit. Racher (2013):481.
98 Blume, J. (2004). Steps to Songwriting Success. New York: Billboard Books, page 3.
99 Negus, K. (1996). Popular Music in Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, page 9.
100 Rooksby, R. (2006). Lyrics. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, page 53.
101 ‘Taxing Lyrical’. Retrieved from bbc.co.uk/6music/events/lyrical/top10.shtml.
102 Razorlight, ‘Somewhere Else’, Mercury. CD single, 2005.
103 Racher, D. (2013). Isle of Noises. London: Picador, page 212.
104 ‘Your Possible Pasts’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
105 ‘The Gunner’s Dream’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.
106 Ibid.
107 ‘Not Now John’, The Final Cut. Harvest Records, 1983.

399
 PART V

Aesthetics and Subjectivity

 22
MEADOWS, RELICS, AND
VICTORIAN DOLLS’ HOUSES
Places, ephemera, and the unreal realities
of Pink Floyd

Peter Hughes Jachimiak

Introduction
In his 2003 contribution to Continuum’s series of album-focused ‘33 1/3’ booklets, The Piper
at the Gates of Dawn, John Cavanagh vividly recalls the time when, as a 10-year-old child who
was fxated on star-gazing, he heard, for the very frst time, Pink Floyd’s ‘Astronomy Domine’
on the radio in his terraced house in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1975:

It was an event, a discovery. One moment I was looking at distant constellations, the
next I was hearing a voice, like the sound of Apollo astronauts hailing the president
from the moon, but more remote; a chugging incessant guitar; massive drums; a jag-
ged bass rif and a song which name-checked planets and satellites, seemed to sweep
the higher reaches of the infnite, then cascaded downwards towards ‘the icy waters
underground.’1

Moreover, in his consideration of Pink Floyd’s debut album, Julian Palacios (1998) notes
that ‘[o]ne of the things that makes The Piper at the Gates of Dawn an enduring work is its evo-
cation of a very specifc and thoroughly imaginary world.’2 In particular, for Palacios (1998)
Piper ‘evokes a slightly claustrophobic Victorian house of strange deserted rooms flled chock
a block with mysterious ephemera.’3 With this notion of Pink Floyd’s early work as an ‘imagi-
nary world’ that captures the rather unsettling nature of home – its clutter and beyond – this
chapter will place emphasis upon the weird, the eerie, and the uncanny elements of Pink
Floyd’s recorded music, live performance, and engagement with ephemera. Thus, in keep-
ing with the theme of Glenn Povey’s work, Pink Floyd in Objects (2018),4 this chapter will
explore the weirdness, eeriness, and uncanniness of the gadgets, contraptions, curios and so on
that are indelibly associated with Pink Floyd. For, as the designer Storm Thorgerson (2015)
insisted – when transforming Nick Mason’s line drawing for the cover of Relics (1971) into
a three-dimensional sculpture (for the record’s 1995 remaster) – here was a ‘relic’ that defed
categorisation: ‘The drawing was after all of a thing – a weird and wonderful thing – but a
thing nonetheless.’5

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-29 403

 Peter Hughes Jachimiak

Utilising the work of – amongst others – Mark Fisher (2016),6 Nicholas Royle (2003),7
Dylan Trigg (2012),8 and Marina Warner (2006),9 this chapter will, therefore, examine a multi-
tude of ‘things’ associated with Pink Floyd. For Trigg (2012) what is fundamental to any appre-
ciation of the phenomenology of the uncanny is the creation of an ‘unreal reality,’ whereby any
return to a site that one has memory of, the rather comforting memories one holds merge with
the unrecognisable elements of somewhere that is now an unknown place. Thus, such a coming
together of remembering and the unknown, within Pink Floyd’s early output, is exemplifed
in ‘Grantchester Meadows’ – that is, as both song (Ummagumma, 1969) and place (the meadows
run alongside the River Cam, Cambridge). As Storm Thorgerson (in Worden and Marziano,
2007) recalls: ‘There are many resonant things about Grantchester Meadows. It was a favourite
haunt for swimming and picnics,’ and ‘I certainly love it and have extremely intense memories
of it.’10

Grantchester Meadows
‘Grantchester Meadows’ – as a location where resonance, memory, and strangeness all inter-
mingle – is the very epitome of place, as an unreal reality of Pink Floyd, that is explored in this
chapter. But, of course, Pink Floyd set out to be unreal from the very inception of the band.
As Watkinson and Anderson (1993) note, in Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett and the Dawn of Pink
Floyd, having already played the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, the UFO on Tottenham Court
Road, and so on, the band’s frst undertaking outside of London was a performance at Canter-
bury Technical College, on November 19, 1967. The following quote, from a local Canterbury
newspaper’s review of the gig, captures the strangeness of Pink Floyd even at this early stage in
their musical career:

The opening curtains revealed the group on stage wearing neutral shirts to refect the
coloured lights and standing in semi-darkness. Behind them was a 15-foot Buddha.
On either side, sets of fltered spots sprayed various colours over the stage while mod-
ern art slides were projected behind.11

Moreover, then:

[t]his weird conglomeration of sight and sound added up to a strange result. Those
watching were a little mystifed at frst, but after the frst rather frightening discordant
notes (they) soon began dancing and gradually relaxed. It was an enjoyable if some-
what odd evening.12

With this notion of early Pink Floyd’s live shows as a site of ‘oddness,’ let us turn to the weird,
the eerie, and the uncanny.

Te weird, the eerie, and the uncanny as the unconcept

According to Fisher (2016), the weird and the eerie share a fxation with the strange: that is,
certainly what is strange but not what is, in any way, horrifc. And, as we will come to appreci-
ate, this is what both the weird and the eerie have in common with the uncanny. Moreover,
the weird, the eerie, and the uncanny are all troubled engagements with the familiar. However,
whilst the weird conveys to the familiar something which normally situates itself at a distance
from it, notions of the eerie go further, as the viewpoint of the eerie allows us to engage

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with the powers that control everyday reality but are, of course, powers that are normally
shrouded. Freud, in The Uncanny (1919), made use of the terms heimlich (‘homely’) and unhe-
imlich (‘unhomely’), and it is their literal translation that is most interesting here, for this chap-
ter will consider the objects, gadgets, and curios associated with Pink Floyd as, at once, both
homely (the familiar) yet unhomely (somehow, something quite unfamiliar, quite unsettling).
More typically, as Royle (2003) suggests, we will appreciate that Pink Floyd’s music and aesthet-
ics – both recorded and on stage – are a version of the uncanny that is not only an odd inter-
twining of the familiar with the unfamiliar but a version that is heightened by the inclusion of
entities that might, at frst glance, simply present themselves as mechanical, automated, or life-
like in form. As an extension, perhaps, of this as the ‘new uncanny,’ for Page (2008), the familiar
(which, at frst glance, is somewhat banal), on closer inspection, ‘somehow disturbs us, makes
us uncomfortable, and in some cases gives us the full on willies.’13 However, the uncanny – just
like the weird and the eerie – should not be confused with horror, gore, or similar that serve to
create feelings of fear, revulsion, and so on within us. As, after all, those are rational reactions
to such terrors. Instead, the uncanny is far more subtle than that, as it tends to bring a barely
perceptible level to a piece of moving imagery or a novel, a song, and so on that is there solely
‘to instil an inexplicable air of unease, a cognitive dissonance that mounts and mounts until we
are almost literally “unnerved”.’14 Of course, it is Page’s mention of a ‘dissonance that mounts
and mounts’ here that certainly supports the notion that, as well as flm and/or literature, the
uncanny can be applied to much of Pink Floyd’s music and the way in which it has been both
visually and sonically packaged and presented, both on stage and on record.
This brings us to the so-called ‘canonisation of the uncanny’ – in which, I insist here, Pink
Floyd has been central. The conceptualisation of the uncanny, according to Masschelein (2011),
occurs in a recognisably signifcant manner, amid both French and English philosophical tradi-
tions in the mid-1970s (yet, notably, slightly later in German and other languages). Come the
1990s, the concept of the uncanny both steadies and extends – and, in doing so, enters the
canon, becomes part and parcel of more everyday critical discussion, and is commonly under-
stood in a conceptual manner. At this time the emphasis of the uncanny – and its application
as a concept – moves from being something literary to something cultural, although, all the
while, this process of canonisation is confned to the realm of theory that is positioned at the
juncture of a number of creative and academic realms: architecture, fne art, literature, philoso-
phy, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences. But, more than this, the uncanny then belonged to
a range of concepts, texts, and so on that could be grouped together under the poststructuralist
banner, which, in turn, facilitated its interchangeability between and across multiple disciplines.
Crucially, Masschelein adds that ‘[u]nder the infuence of deconstruction and poststructuralism,
conceptual ambiguity and vagueness have been situated at the very core of the defnition of the
concept.’15
Come the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-frst century, the uncanny moves, once again,
from the realms of pure criticism and returns to the arts, where – now the preserve of not
only visual forms but fction writing as well – the uncanny tends to increasingly manifest itself
as a disturbing form of unhomeliness that is not only buried deep within one’s psyche but as
something that distinguishes humanity itself and that, all the while, is mitigated by slight sur-
realist undercurrents and the façade of familiarity. In so doing, the uncanny has shifted from
a concept to something best described as an ‘unconcept,’ as successive conceptualisations of
the uncanny, from the 1970s onwards, have been both characterised and driven by a number
of adequate and inadequate attempts at conceptualisation. This is where multiple conceptual
strands have arisen as dominant, while others have withdrawn into the theoretical shadows to
only occasionally present themselves once more in a revised manner. And it is this very ebb

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and fow of the uncanny as a concept that places even greater emphasis upon its position – that
is, precarious positioning as a concept – at the ‘in between’ or as something ‘on the verge’: a
concept ‘on the verge of sliding from the plane of immanence onto the plane of composition
and vice versa, on the verge between concept and afect, and on the verge of no longer being
a concept.’16
With the establishment of the uncanny as unconcept, as something always in between or on
the verge, we should acknowledge how apt this all is to both Pink Floyd and their music. In
particular, it certainly informed their early, Syd Barrett-era recordings such as The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn (1967) and A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), where their art school-trained, enigmatic
front man of the time – Barrett – wrote lyrics that were almost in between classical children’s lit-
erature and chaotic psychedelic rock and always on the verge of, conceptually, being something
far more. Likewise, Barrett’s own drawings and paintings of the mid-to-late 1960s refected this,
as they very much tapped into the whimsical Edwardian Englishness of Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl
and the Pussycat,’ E. H. Shepard’s pictorial works for Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Wil-
lows, and John Tenniel’s visual accompaniments to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. More than
this, though, it was the group’s – especially Barrett’s – ingestion of mind-expanding drugs that
ensured that any on-the-verge aspects of their work quite often tipped over the edge – that is,
as both concepts and unconcepts. As Joe Boyd makes clear in his contributory chapter to Pink
Floyd – Their Mortal Remains (2017, a companion book to the Victoria and Albert Museum
exhibition of the same name and theme), Barrett’s embrace of LSD ‘seemed to connect him
even more closely to this very English, very nostalgic, slightly fey world.’17

Gadgets and doppelgängers

Nick Hodges and Ian Priston (1999) assert that, in order to comprehend fully early Pink Floyd
(pre-The Dark Side of the Moon), one needs to appreciate ‘The Man and the Journey.’ This work
‘was arguably the most signifcant opus in the history and development of The Pink Floyd.’18
‘The Man and the Journey’ – which was eventually released, in its own right, as part of Volume
3: 1969: Dramatis/ation, from their ‘The Early Years 1965–1972’ boxsets (2016) – was a two-
part conceptual suite of songs toured across 1969. With the suite being premiered on Monday
April 14, 1969, at The Royal Festival Hall, on London’s South Bank, as The Massed Gadgets of
the Auximines – More Furious Madness from Pink Floyd, it was then expanded two months later for
‘The Final Lunacy’ live event at the Royal Albert Hall. As Hodges and Piston make clear, three
of the suite’s compositions were already well established amid their repertoire – that is, ‘Beset By
Creatures of the Deep’ (as ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’), ‘The Pink Jungle’ (‘Pow R. Toc
H.’), and ‘The End of the Beginning’ (‘Celestial Voices,’ from the four-part title track of their
1968 album, A Saucerful of Secrets). However, perhaps more signifcantly, the suite also comprised
other songs – in rudimentary form – that would later be found upon the long-players More and
Ummagumma (released, respectively, in June and October 1969). Whilst Pink Floyd’s attempts
at theme-based music can be traced back to 1967’s ‘Games for May – Space Age Relaxation
for the Climax of Spring,’ held at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, where the audience were
encouraged to get involved to the extent that they were undergoing all as participants rather
than observers, ‘The Man and the Journey’ went well beyond this initial efort. Utilising taped
material that was panned around the venue by a custom-built sound-distorting device, the
Azimuth Co-ordinator (more on this later), Pink Floyd presented their audience with far more
than a music performance. For, as a major example of performance art, a table was built on
stage during the performance, at which the crew assembled and sipped tea at the same time as

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they listened to a transistor radio that had been arbitrarily tuned in and then amplifed through
the speaker system.
The frst part of the suite, ‘The Man,’ opened with tranquil ‘Daybreak’ (that is, what was
eventually to become ‘Grantchester Meadows’) before being harshly interrupted by the highly
percussive, very industrial-sounding ‘Work.’ For Hodges and Priston (1999), this element of
the opening part of the suite possesses two meanings: The frst is the more literal, which is that
(accompanied by the sound of a steam train’s whistle) of a commute and the factory; the second
is a Freudian interpretation – that is, whereby any typical male (especially when engaged with
a repetitive and tedious task) is understood as thinking about sex, on average, once every six
minutes. Then, after ‘Work,’ comes the ‘Afternoon’ (later ‘Biding My Time’), focusing not just
on any random afternoon but the more existential ‘afternoon’ of one’s life. In turn, this leads
on to ‘Sleeping,’ which – as a key element of ‘The Massed Gadgets’ – is a defning moment in
Pink Floyd’s development, as it premieres the ‘schoolteacher rant’ that was to be, much later,
an integral theme of the band’s The Wall. Indeed, this particular recurring theme preyed upon
Roger Waters’ mindset especially, to the extent that he insisted upon its heightened obvious-
ness amid the band’s output. It is then only natural that ‘Sleeping’ degenerates into ‘Nightmare’
(later, ‘Cymbaline’), a composition which is of particular note to Roger Waters, as it is ‘an early
expression of his disillusionment with the music business, and his fear of failure.’19 Here, it also
represents a more primeval fear, as the listener interprets, perhaps, such a sleep as the never-
ending sleep of death. Then, with this half of the suite’s suggestion of the cyclical nature of life,
‘Nightmare’ – quite naturally – morphs into a reprise of ‘Daybreak.’
Thus, the second part of the suite, ‘The Journey,’ is nigh-on a fantasy, as there are a number
of aspects of it which suggest that this excursion is an internal one rather than being something
to do with anything outward facing. As one would expect, ‘The Journey’ is initiated by ‘The
Beginning’ (‘Green Is the Colour’), although, quite quickly, it then becomes something rather
perilous, as ‘The Man’ is ‘Beset by Creatures of the Deep’ (‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’),
whereby the subject is commonplace amid any number of examples of concept-driven, progres-
sive music. Although, very much akin to all things uncanny, any danger is not obvious at frst
and, in reality, is barely perceptible for the majority of the song. It is only after the realisation
that this is some form of near-death experience that ‘The Man’ reaches safety and enters ‘The
Pink Jungle.’ And, as Hodges and Priston (1999) point out, this segment of the suite is one of
the earliest tracks amid Pink Floyd’s repertoire, as it is a more substantial reworking of ‘Pow R.
Toc H.,’ whereby ‘it ends with a scream and a descent into a place which would appear to be
within oneself: “The Labyrinth of Auximenes”.’20 Of course, this furthers the notion of ‘The
Journey’ as being an ‘internal’ one and that ‘The Man’ descends into a place ‘within’ himself.
‘The Labyrinth’ thereby allows us to draw connections with notions of the weird and the eerie,
as – unlike the uncanny (which facilitates an understanding of the outside through inner per-
ceptions) – both ‘[t]he weird and the eerie make the opposite move,’ as ‘they allow us to see the
inside from the perspective of the outside.’21
According to Hodges and Priston (1999), it is at this point that the hero of the work, follow-
ing the experiencing of all thus far, now comes face to face with himself, which is extremely
frightful in itself. In fact, such an experience is very much an uncanny one, as coming ‘face
to face’ with oneself – in efect, ‘doubling’ – is a central characteristic of Freud’s uncanny. For
Nicholas Royle (2003), the uncanny is very much associated with understanding one’s self as
something double, as a split entity, and as being at odds with oneself, whereby the uncanny is
seen as the experiencing of being ‘after oneself ’ (in a multifarious sense). Or, rather, ‘[i]t is the
experience of something duplicitous, diplopic, being double.’22 However, it is David Gilmour’s

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gentle guitar which brings about the eventual redemption of ‘The Man,’ with ‘Behold the Tem-
ple of Light’ as some form of utopian vision. Then, fnally, and quite naturally, there is ‘The End
of the Beginning.’ But, of course, such an oxymoron would imply that, despite the end of the
journey, the journey will never end.

Abdabs and lodgers

According to Palacios (1998), from September  1962 Roger Waters had been enrolled in
an architectural course at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic, where – across 1963 – he
encountered fellow students Nick Mason and Rick Wright, who were also studying the same
subject. Peter Jenner (who was initially a lecturer at the London School of Economics but who
went on – eventually – to manage Pink Floyd), recalled that, whilst Mason, Waters, and Wright
were all rather fastidious architects-in-the-making, the eventual fourth member of the band,
Syd Barrett, was – at this time – engaged in his fne art studies at Camberwell Art School. For
Jenner, this bi-discipline polarity was key to Pink Floyd’s development across the next few years,
as Barrett’s artistic bent, and the architectural skills of the others, ‘really showed in the band.’23
It was whilst at Regent Street Polytechnic that Mason, Waters, and Wright formed a band –
Sigma 3. Such is the embryonic nature of a rock group – where the various members are bal-
ancing the playing of music with their studies – that across the next three years or so, the band’s
name would shift from the T-Set (a tongue-in-cheek reference to a piece of equipment used in
architectural drawing) to the Architectural Abdabs – a title that refected, perhaps, their collec-
tive anxiety-inducing approach to both their studies and their music.
It was also in 1963 that Mike Leonard, a lecturer in architecture at both Regent Street Poly-
technic and Hornsey College of Art, bought a house (39 Stanhope Gardens, Highgate, north
London), and met Mason, Waters, and Wright. In fact, insisting that there was ample space
at his new property, Leonard not only suggested that they move in as ground-foor tenants
but that they, in turn, practice their music in his basement. Thus, as Watkinson and Anderson
(1993) make clear, ‘Leonard was by all accounts no ordinary landlord.’24 Despite being in his late
thirties (which, in the early 1960s, was – to any student-age youth – an excruciatingly embar-
rassing ‘square’ age to be), Leonard was genuinely interested in the antics of the band. In fact,
according to Watkinson and Anderson (1993), the landlord could hardly miss the noise being
generated by his tenants, for when they, at basement level, busied themselves with practicing,
the high volume of the music was such that Leonard’s ofce, which was situated directly above
their rehearsal space, actually shook. Yet, despite the distracting sounds emanating from below,
Leonard displayed nothing but tolerance and understanding toward the band and their music. In
reciprocal gratitude, ‘the band briefy billed themselves as Leonard’s Lodgers.’25 In fact, on sev-
eral occasions, Leonard was to play organ for the group, and – more generally – act as an on-of
roadie. Whilst keen on joining the group full time, as he was approximately 15 years older than
the rest of the group (and, thus, in no way considered by them fashionably ‘hip’), Leonard was
never really a serious contender for permanent membership. According to Povey (2018), the
only pictorial record of the group in this particular – and very brief – incarnation comes from a
gig at a private house party in Oxshott, Surrey, in October 1964. These photos show that amid
the very short time that Leonard was part of the band’s line-up, his rather conservative-looking
presence clashed quite obviously with the already emerging non-conformist image of the rest
of the band.
Leonard – in his spare time – constructed primitive ‘sound-light machines.’ Loosely
derived from the lighting to be found suspended above theatrical stages, Leonard’s mechani-
cal contraptions were, according to Palacios (1998), a very early inspiration for Pink Floyd’s

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eventual on-stage presence of the mid-1960s onwards. Attached to Leonard’s cumbersome

machines were spinning discs which had wavy lines, star-shaped patterns, and so on hammered
onto them. Then, covered with multi-coloured cellophane, light would be projected ‘through
crystals of varying shapes and sizes to create ever-shifting patterns.’26 Thus we can trace how –
following Syd Barrett joining in December 1964 – the band not only settled on the name Pink
Floyd, but developed the proto-live show that would defne them. By late 1966 Leonard – aided
by a number of like-minded individuals – had established a radical sound-light workshop at the
Hornsey College of Art, with their trials with light machines carried out to a sonic backdrop
of Japanese koto-based music and Yusaf Lateef ’s fute-centred jazz. No surprise that Leonard
convinced Pink Floyd to take part in these evening workshops. In fact, conducting a total of
four workshops, Leonard recalls that – with both his flm and back projections taking place – he
was desperate in his encouragement that they now change their sound accordingly. Still playing
blues-structured music, and months away from their more extended take on music, Leonard
makes explicit that, at Hornsey College, ‘I was trying to get them out of 4/4 rhythms into free
rhythms so they relate to the coloured imagery.’27 Eventually leaving Hornsey College, Leonard
was to relocate his workshop to the attic of his own house. In fact, it was in that exact domestic
space – in late 1967 – that Pink Floyd’s seminal performance for BBC TV’s Tomorrow’s World was
flmed, where, as the band played their music, Leonard operated the light machine. Needless to
say, it was these early experiments in combining light and sound that proved to be – certainly
from the perspective of a slew of Barrett-themed biographies that began to appear by the late
1990s – an integral element of their on-stage presence for 30 or more years thereafter.
Perhaps just as signifcantly, Leonard’s workshop was adjoined by an extraordinary living
room. Filled with a treasure trove of amassed clutter, an in-depth description of it all – from
the late-1990s perspective of Syd Barrett biographer Julian Palacios – deserves inclusion here:

Carpets from Central Asia ran wall to wall, a grand piano under wide front windows.
Frozen in time, it’s still the focal point of a hip lecturer’s fat from the sixties. The clut-
ter, dust and genteel poverty do nothing to detract from its charm. Hundreds of paper-
backs line the handmade wooden shelves, alongside hundreds of odd-shaped books
on every conceivable subject. A Brassai photo book, an engineering manual, a study
of the Suf mystics, books on science, volumes of poetry, psychological textbooks and
a great many other tomes on esoteric subjects. Asian gongs, futes, African percussion
instruments, silver gamelan xylophones from Bali with wooden mallets, lutes, futes
are arrayed everywhere. Crystals and metal discs for the light machines, tools, scattered
slides and mountains of accrued papers, newspaper cuttings, ancient jazz 78s. Yusef
Lateef ’s LPs mixing jazz with world music, Berlioz, Beethoven, Coltrane, the Radio-
phonic Workshop, the Goon Show.28

As Mark Blake (2017) also concludes, with Leonard’s home being ‘an Aladdin’s cave of exotic
musical instruments, suits of armour, beatnik books and jazz records, [all] shared with his cats
Tunji and McGhee,’ such a sprawling mass of ephemera would have most certainly ‘appealed to
Syd’s sense of the bizarre.’29 No wonder, then, that Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn, contained – per Palacios (1998), quoted at the very start of this chapter – a sense
of a ‘slightly claustrophobic Victorian house’ that consisted ‘of strange deserted rooms flled
chock a block with mysterious ephemera.’ All of this was, of course, more than just Pink Floyd –
and, in particular, Syd Barrett – being surrounded by an assortment of interesting things. For
the room was also a portal into, for Palacios (1998), quite a specifc English mindset – that of
the collector, as ‘here was a fantastic room, an archive of ephemera.’30 Not only had Leonard

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amassed an Aladdin’s Cave of wonders amid which Barrett’s artistic mind could wallow but a
place where Pink Floyd’s original primary songwriter – whilst tinkering with the antique musi-
cal instruments that were strewn across the room – could transform early versions of songs into
more expansive musical experiments. For it was here, lost amid the ever-so-slightly shambolic
surroundings of Leonard’s living room, where Barrett ‘sat at the slightly out of tune grand
piano,’ with ‘the sun streaming in through the curtains in that far-of spring of 1965.’31 Sup-
ported fnancially by college grants, and basking within such an unpressurised environment, it is
argued that Barrett was in his element amid this cluttered, yet inspirational, setting. It was, quite
simply, a domestic idyll, where Barrett, totally unconstrained, possessed time to mull through,
and advance, his song-writing.

Echoes and Azimuths

By late 1965, Pink Floyd’s music was undergoing a radical transformation. According to Blake,
it was one device in particular that helped the band achieve the revolutionary sounds that they
were now striving for: the Binson Echorec. Essentially a tape loop with a magnetic head that
produced fve echoes of the source sound in a sequence, this was ‘the box of tricks that helped
create those space-age sound efects.’32 Coming across this ‘box of tricks,’ initially within Leon-
ard’s attic, Palacios (1998) notes that the Binson Echorec was one of only two commercially
available devices of the time – with the Watkins Copycat being the alternative. Borrowing this
contraption from Leonard, Pink Floyd trialled the Binson Echorec at a number of their early
gigs, although, according to Leonard, it produced far more than just multiple echoes, as it also
produced a squeaking of sorts, that, in the end, also became part of the overall sound of the
band on stage. Of course, such sonic anomalies merely added to the intentional/unintentional
musical experimentation for which Pink Floyd strove. In their attempts to extend their music,
the Binson Echorec – certainly as far as Peter Jenner was concerned – was absolutely a central
element of their aesthetic mystique, with its ‘overloaded valve electronics and winking green
“magic eye” level indicator, swirls and pulses through the elemental images as Syd and Rick sing
of subterranean icy waters and remote space.’33 It is, however, drummer Nick Mason’s words
that manage to capture the contraptual uncanniness of the Binson Echorec. Whilst acknowl-
edging that it was prone to mechanical failure and its tendency to overload with ‘white noise’
(arguably a key element of its sonic attractiveness), it was, he admits, ‘a fantastic piece of kit.’34
Even though ‘[t]hey look as though they’d be most comfortable in the science museum,’ a
Binson Echorec ‘can make almost any instrument sound as if it’s been recorded by Thomas
Edison himself.’35
Impressed by the Echorec, the band commissioned Bernard Speight, a technical engineer
at Abbey Road, to come up with a tailor-made means by which both Rick Wright’s keyboard
and the band’s overall sound could be drastically altered. Debuting as a piece of on-stage efects
hardware at the ‘Games for May’ live event (Queen Elizabeth Hall, 12 May 1967), the Azimuth
Co-ordinator was a sound-distortion device worked primarily by Wright. The twin-channelled
Azimuth Co-ordinator possessed two joysticks: one for Wright’s Farfsa organ and the other
for more overarching sound efects. Regarding the manipulation of both or either channel(s),
if a joystick remained upright, all sound was ‘centered.’ However, by moving the joystick in a
diagonal direction, sound could be sent to the speaker to be found in that area of the live event.
So, striving to create so-called ‘sound in the round,’ the Azimuth Co-ordinator was a crude,
early version of what was eventually to become ‘surround sound’ – and, certainly from the
very early 1970s onwards, surround sound had become a sonic staple of Pink Floyd on stage.
Thus, as Nick Mason recalls in his biography of the band, with this device, ‘Rick could send

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his keyboard sounds swirling round the auditorium, or make footsteps – supplied from a Revox
tape recorder – apparently march across from one side to the other.’36 At a loss to remember
the individual who christened the machine, Mason refers to the Oxford English Dictionary’s
defnition of an ‘azimuth’ – ‘the arc of the heavens extending from the zenith to the horizon,
which cuts it at right angles,’ adding, when comparing that defnition with how the Azimuth
Co-ordinator performed on stage, that ‘[i]t seemed rather well put, I thought.’37

Projectors and mirrors

During the very earliest Pink Floyd gigs, according to Blake (2017), an unusual light show
(certainly for the time) was provided by an American husband-and-wife team, Joel and Toni
Brown. Originally from the hippy Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, they developed
lights that, whilst quite basic when compared to today’s stage lighting, still involved the radi-
cal use of both coloured slides and a projector that was quite far removed from the regular
overhead lights of many theatre-style music settings of the mid-to-late-1960s. However, when
the Browns returned to the United States, Pink Floyd’s frst proper touring light show was put
together by Peter Jenner, his wife Sumi, and Andrew King, where their version of on-stage
lights for the band was a result of the coming together of half-inch-thick timber shelving,
Woolworths-branded spotlights that were intended for home use, drawing pins, and plastic gel.
And, yes, whilst such an elementary lighting rig would seem very uncomplicated nowadays, at
the time – again, the mid-to-late-1960s – it provided the band with a signifcant visual advan-
tage over their musical peers. In addition to this, it also, of course, allowed them to tap into the
‘mixed media’ avant garde world of the British Underground.
The majority of Pink Floyd’s on-stage electrical equipment of this time was both basic and
drastically underpowered, and yet despite this, with this early touring light show, here was
something akin to a modern-day ‘mixed media’ event. As Nick Mason makes explicit, ‘[o]ur
entire combination of instruments, amps and light show was being run of one single 13-amp
lead, which would barely have supported the power supply for the average kitchen.’38 Jenner
was far more pragmatic – and, indeed, honest – about this embryonic period of Pink Floyd’s
use of projectors as stage lighting: ‘The result was these hugely dramatic shadows behind [the
band], which I’m sure everyone thought was brilliant,’ mused Jenner, continuing: ‘Of course,
it was a complete fuck-up, and mistake, as all the best things are.’39 Moreover, even come their
famed performance at the opening night of the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London
(October 15, 1966, which also saw the launch of the radical publication, The International Times,
or IT), the band and their entourage looked to a range of household electrical objects as an aid
to their uncanny visual experimentations. As Nick Mason recalls, alongside this hand-built rig
were to be found a number of Rank Aldis 35-mm projectors – ‘the kind of machines families
used to display their summer holiday snaps.’40 Loaded with slides that had been flled with a
concoction of water, oil, inks, and chemicals, all was then blasted with the heat of several butane
blow lamps. According to Mason, this was where ‘[g]reat skill was required not to overheat the
contraption,’ as ‘otherwise the glass cracked, spilling the ink, creating the possibility of a small
fre, and the certainty of an atrocious mess.’41
According to Povey (2018), Pink Floyd employed – across the rest of 1966 and into 1967 –
a number of technicians who were adept in innovative lighting techniques. Joe Gannon was
their frst full-time, on-the-road technician who, in turn, was replaced in mid-1967 by Peter
Wynne Wilson and his girlfriend Susie Gawler-Wright who – whilst still utilising Rank Aldis
projectors – started to manipulate light further by beaming it through both polarisers and latex
membranes. Indeed, perhaps epitomising the rather playful – and certainly experimental –

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nature of the time, it was discovered, according to Mason, ‘that the best polarized stress patterns
were produced by using condoms.’42 Nick Mason recalls the uncanny ways in which both Peter
Wynne Wilson and Susie Gawler-Wright further manipulated light by utilising mirrors. One
technique involved placing a mirror at a 45-degree angle towards the end of a lens. Upon being
vibrated, it would then produce Lissajou curve-like patterns, which – with the addition of vari-
ous wheels, operated at varying speeds – would create, according to Mason (2017), so-called
‘worms of colour.’ Quite often, standard flm-set lighting was used, although this would often be
powered well beyond any form of safe limit to attain extreme levels of illumination. Meanwhile,
placed just in front of this ramped-up lighting was a coloured glass wheel that, powered by a
motor, was spinning at an incredibly fast rate. Mounted in a box of around two feet by three
feet in dimension, with a rubberised base, this contraption was placed at an angle towards the
band, producing an array of incredible colour and light. However, ‘the uneven temperatures,
the shaking and banging, and the wildly spinning colour wheels, meant the glass had an alarm-
ing tendency to run out of control and shatter noisily, sending vicious shards of glass fying into
the band at very close quarters.’43 The very fact that these mirror-centred machines were seem-
ingly – and viciously – out of control, meant that the band were quick to provide them with a
nickname: ‘Roger and I dubbed these machines “the Daleks” in tribute to their robotic nature
and their obvious hostility to humanoids.’44
As well as this rather disconcerting inclusion of such an unstable light-mirror hybrid ‘Dalek,’
refective surfaces of all shapes and sizes were already (and would continue to be) a central ele-
ment of Pink Floyd’s on-stage presence. For example, insists Povey (2018), Syd Barrett’s famous
‘Mirror Disc Telecaster’ guitar (which actually was not a Telecaster at all but a Fender Esquire
’62), came to be the musical instrument that was to be forever associated with him. Purchased
in early 1965, it was – come the end of 1966 – customised by Barrett gluing 15 polished metal
discs onto the front of the guitar’s body. In turn, these discs refected the glare of the band’s ele-
mentary (yet efective) light shows to even greater efect. Moreover, the ‘Mirror Ball,’ that made
its debut during the band’s North American tour of March 1973 was a hemispherical globe
that, hanging over the stage by the aid of a truss, revolved as red lasers hit its refective surface,
conveying beams of light in multiple directions. Bearing in mind such mirrored ‘Daleks,’ guitars,
and over-sized balls – all sending out shards of glass and light in all directions – it is worth not-
ing Marina Warner’s mention of the primeval unease brought about by refections: ‘For before
the mirror became a commonplace item of every household, refections were a cause of deep,
widespread alarm,’ whereby – amid such refected imagery – ‘doubles,’ or ‘fetches,’ are ‘uncanny
spectres who call the living into the land of the dead.’45 Of course, whilst we are not suggest-
ing that the use of on-stage mirrors by Pink Floyd attempted the latter, it is almost certain that
such light-sound manipulation, coupled with an audience/band predilection for dabbling in
mid-altering substances, would have, in some, facilitated an uncanny unease, all heightened by
mirrored refections.

Prisms and curios

With this notion of ‘shards of light in all directions,’ let us now contemplate the weird, the eerie,
and the uncanny amid Vic Singh’s cover design for the band’s debut long-player, The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn, and its revolutionary utilisation (at the time) of the prism lens. Faceted, and a
means by which an image is not only broken up into a number of separate parts, but the over-
lapping edges of each of those parts are softened, the prism lens was, at the time of the photo
shoot for the album, new to Singh. In possession of such a lens and having just been asked to
photograph the band, Singh had an epiphany: ‘I thought BANG! that lens is perfect for them,

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it signifed them, the kind of psychedelic music and the trip they were on.’46 In an attempt to
convince the band that this approach was highly suited to them, Singh appealed directly, stating
‘I’ve got this lens I want to use. There’ll be lots of you. It’ll be like looking through the eye of a
fy.’47 Getting the band to dress in the most colourful clothes they had, and photographing them
in front of a white backdrop as to exaggerate their psychedelic garb, Singh was convinced he
had captured – and yet not captured – Pink Floyd at a particular pivotal moment in their musi-
cal/sartorial life: ‘It was perfect for that session and for them at that time. They were so abstract
and undefned, transparent. They’re very like that lens . . . there, but not there.’48 However, all
was not to everyone’s taste. Indeed, with the album cover now being perceived by some as very
much a clichéd, and rather garish, example of 1967-era underground style, this kaleidoscopic
example of psychedelic conservatism, arguably (going by their expressions on the album’s front
cover), seemed not to suit the band members themselves. As Watkinson and Anderson (1993)
rather humorously make explicit: ‘Syd, sitting there in his Kings Road fnery, manages to mus-
ter sufcient poise, but Waters, Wright and Mason have the look of men who, having boarded
a number 10 bus to Clapham, discover they’ve mistakenly hitched a ride on an intergalactic
juggernaut.’49
However, things were seen to improve with Pink Floyd’s follow-up of 1968, A Saucerful of
Secrets, with its sleeve designed by the band’s Royal College of Art friends, Storm Thorgeson
and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell. Thorgeson and Powell, operating under their design partnership name
of Hipgnosis (a trendy, playful amalgamation of the terms ‘hip’ and ‘gnostic’), came up with
a cover that revolved around a miniscule photograph of the band in Richmond Park that was
encased by sea-green swirls – all of which, of course, ‘was intended to “give the album a surreal,
acidy feel”.’50 Certainly, while the cover art still refected the ‘trippy’ dominant aesthetics of the
time, it also possessed – in a rather uncanny manner – a ‘timeless’ quality as a result of the design
bringing together both contemporaneous popular culture imagery and elements of manuscripts
from both the medieval and early modern periods. According to Povey (2018), with the design
seemingly based around a montage of around 14 identifable images, not only can the face of
the ‘Living Tribunal’ (upper left corner of the album cover) be seen, but that of ‘Dr Strange’
(mid-right side), with both accompanied (towards the middle) by an arc of planetary bodies – all
taken, incidentally, from Marvel Comics’ Strange Tales #158 (published in July 1967). However,
much older detailing can also be seen, as in the centre, where the fgure of man has his arms
extended out from his sides, the circular chart above is, according to Blake (2017), an illustra-
tion of the Rosicrucian Alchemical Cosmology of Inspiration (taken from ‘Janitor Pansophus,’
or ‘Figura Anenea Quadriparita,’ bound into the 1677 edition of Musaeum Hermeticum). Mean-
while, the number of alchemical bottles are quite possibly derived from Salomon Trismosin’s
Splendor Solis, an illuminated alchemical manuscript of the medieval period. Equally signifcant
was the fact that – following a payment of £110 – this particular design, by Hipgnosis, ushered
in the working collaboration between the designer Storm Thorgerson and Pink Floyd.
May 1971 saw EMI release – via their low-budget Starline/Music For Pleasure subsidiary
label – Relics, an 11-track compilation of largely back-catalogue material. Whilst the original
vinyl release was enveloped in a textured card sleeve, a later reissue was released as a laminated
version, where the majority of the artwork remained the same, but the band’s name now
came in bright pink lettering. However, in both instances the album came with the subtitle –
A Bizarre Collection of Antiques and Curios – and a ‘Heath Robinson-style’ line drawing of a
machine of sorts: part airship, part church organ. Being a particularly vivid visualisation of the
album’s full title, this was not only Nick Mason’s singular contribution to his band’s album art-
work but ‘evidence that those three years hunched over a drawing board at Regent Street Poly
had not been entirely wasted.’51 Moreover, 1990s-era further re-releases of the album witnessed

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the inclusion of multi-angle, close-up photographs of not the original drawing but a three-
dimensional model of the outlandish contrivance originally drawn by Mason.

Cosmos and cows

Childhood is a recurring theme throughout Pink Floyd’s entire musical career and a particu-
larly marked characteristic of their early recordings under Syd Barrett’s auspices. For example,
‘Matilda Mother’ – the third track of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – is as if sung by a child to
its mother. For Cavanagh (2003), ‘Matilda Mother’ could quite easily be a literal evocation of
Barrett’s own childhood, with its conjuring of a rather ethereal world of ‘fairy stories,’ where
Barrett, as a boy at bedtime, is seemingly suspended on ‘clouds of sunlight’ whilst longing for
far more. Indeed, one of Barrett’s childhood friends, Matthew Scurfeld, recalls his visits to the
Barrett family home, making connections between the imaginary world of the everyday to be
found in a child’s house and the wider academic character of a university town:

It was quite a dark house, very womb-y, in a funny kind of way. In Cambridge, the
word was everything: if you had a light, it didn’t matter whether there was a window,
so long as you could read your book! If you’re brought up in an academic world, you
tend to create your own space as a child. The imaginary world is your saving grace.52

Meanwhile, according to Palacios, with ‘Matilda Mother’ – and Barrett’s haunting men-
tion of a ‘doll’s house darkness’ and ‘old perfume’ in particular – there is a strong suggestion of
the ‘slightly sinister evocation of childhood.’53 This notion of childhood as something which
possesses, on occasion, a sense of the sinister connects with Barrett’s own childhood, tainted
with tragedy when, at the age of 15, his father – Max Barrett, a pathologist at the University
of Cambridge – died. As Barrett grew up to be an LSD-addled adult, who was to sufer from
extended periods of depression whilst living the life of a recluse, there is, of course, a particular
level of tragedy to ‘Matilda,’ especially when we bear in mind Barrett’s troubled return to his
mother, Winifred, and the family home, later in his life.
Jenny Fabian, author of Groupie (1969), who had intimate liaisons with Syd Barrett, not only
refers to Barrett’s innocent-cum-sinister otherworldliness as an extension of the drug culture of
the time but as some form of true transcendental experience. Their music, insists Fabian, ‘took
you to the places that you’d been on your trips’ and, even without the aid of hallucinogenic
drugs, ‘took you to somewhere that, perhaps, you thought was a better place than the world
you were in.’54 And this ‘better place’ was, quite often, as far away from the crib as you could go,
for Fabian ‘out there in the cosmos, foating, looking around,’ where ‘everything was wonderful
and lovely, sort of 2001-ish,’ and where ‘you were removed from time.’55
The notion of being ‘removed’ – from time, from childhood, or whatever – is certainly an
apt way of describing the opener of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn: ‘Astronomy Domine.’ Very
much setting an incredibly high standard for the rest of the album to match, with ‘Astronomy
Domine,’ according to Calef (2007), Pink Floyd ‘sonically evoked the everlasting void’ – that
is, ‘the cold emptiness and invisible darkness which, though nothing, separates everything from
everything.’56 Ushered in by a cacophony of sounds, it is Peter Jenner’s spliced voiceover – both
reading and speaking through a megaphone – that creates a rather disconnected, distanced feel
to ‘Astronomy Domine.’ Signifcantly, with this sense of detachment in mind, Jenner recalled
that Barrett not only kept a copy of The Observer’s Book of Astronomy close at hand but that the
musician consulted it endlessly at the time of writing ‘Astronomy Domine.’

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Blake (2017) notes that Cambridge’s history as an academic environment can be traced
back as far as the thirteenth century, the rather magnifcent array of colleges, spires, and other
architectural splendour all gently nestled together either side of the banks of the River Cam.
Thus, as traditionally English as could possibly be, there exists a stark contrast to this tweeness
just outside of the city limits – and that is the far more windswept expanse of the Cambridge
Fens. This rural setting, then, soaked into Pink Floyd’s music right from their early years start,
whilst the collective histories of the band’s three main members – namely Barrett, Gilmour, and
Waters – is forever intertwined with Cambridge, the city where they spent their youth. In fact,
for David Gilmour, Cambridge – as both a seat of learning and as a place where the urban and
the rural meet – was an idyllic place to spend your formative years: ‘You’re in a town dominated
by education, you’re surrounded by bright people. But then it’s also got this rural heart that
spreads practically to the centre.’57 Of course, this notion of being ‘surrounded by bright people’
was, in efect, an open invitation for unusual behaviour, outlandish modes of dress, and so on
to blossom, Cambridge a place where any form of overt peculiarity was certainly not seen as
anything out of the ordinary. Thus, according to David Gale, a childhood friend of Barrett, the
city’s ancient character itself propagates oddness:

I think Cambridge is a city that supports whimsy more readily than London, because
it’s one of those museum cities like Bath or Amsterdam that is largely pretty and full of
old buildings and the signs of the modern city aren’t particularly oppressive. It’s quite
easy to support a whimsy habit in such a place.58

Of course, all this mention of the tranquil banks of the River Cam and the back roads of
the Cambridgeshire Fens brings us, quite poignantly, to ‘Grantchester Meadows.’ Ultimately
becoming track two, side three, of the double live/studio LP Ummagumma (1969), the song
premiered during ‘The Man and the Journey’ rehearsals, Monday April 14, 1969, at the Royal
Festival Hall. At that point entitled ‘Daybreak,’ the song opened the show with lengthy bird-
song which resonated around the auditorium. Hodges and Priston (1999), in documenting the
development of Pink Floyd at the time of this suite-oriented live tour of 1969, noted that –
for Roger Waters and David Gilmour in particular – ‘Daybreak’ is a song that is to do with
their Cambridgeshire childhood, as it is quite well documented that they frequently cycled to
Grantchester when they were in their teens. No surprise, really, as Grantchester is the epitome
of mythical arcadia, as it is situated on the banks of the River Cam, around four miles out
from Cambridge itself. Moreover, according to Young (April 2015), ‘Grantchester Meadows’
is, perhaps, one of Pink Floyd’s most revered songs: an acoustic, contemplative ode to nature, it
is ‘sung in a reverberant chamber to the accompaniment of a double-tracked guitar and a tape
loop of a chittering skylark.’59 With its sonic backdrop of buzzing bees, the fowing of water,
and geese in fight, it is – seemingly – an in-studio representation of the sun-dappled banks of
the Cam. However, for Young (2015), there is far more to ‘Grantchester Meadows’ than just it
being a gentle replication of the rural idyll, as the song’s pastoral air is transformed in a rather
subtle way into something quite strange through the use of somewhat stagnant feld recordings,
where the inclusion of looped birdsong is done in a rapid manner. Moreover, as the lyrics fnally
make obvious, this version of a summery ‘Grantchester’ is merely a ‘meadow of the mind,’ as all
is being recalled, in a dream-like state, from the icy perspective of a bleak mid-winter and, come
the song’s closing few seconds, any sense of bucolic tranquillity is wrecked by the sharp sound
of a fy-swatter in action. Yet, despite the band’s attempt – with this fnal ending of ‘Grantches-
ter Meadows’ – to shatter the illusion of the rural idyll, they were to become, insists Cavanagh

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(2003), the stereotyped purveyors of ‘an English churchyard meditativeness,’ as ‘stoned tranquil-
lity and slow-shifting late-evening shadows were the bedrock of the Floyd’s sound in the late
’60s and early ’70s.’60 And it was not just their music, for when Hipgnosis designed the sleeve
of 1970’s Atom Heart Mother, the least psychedelic, most of-tangent image chosen was that of a
cow. Indeed, with Lulubelle III (to give this bovine creature its full name) photographed within
a green feld in Hertfordshire, it was all, according to Storm Thorgerson, ‘perfect, because it
was just so cow.’61 Despite the managing director of EMI hating the whole design, come the
morning of the Atom Heart Mother’s release, Blake (2017) notes, company employees somehow
managed to cajole a herd of cows down the Mall so that the press photographers had something
ofbeat and memorable to capture on camera. Of course, something ‘so cow’ is in line with the
phenomenology of the uncanny, as laid out by Trigg (2012), whereby what phenomenology
manages is to make us more than aware of the strangeness of everyday things that surround us, in
that phenomenology achieves this through its focusing upon the natural world in an unnatural
way. Thus, to us – applying the phenomenology of the uncanny to Lulubelle III – it is both ‘so
cow’ (familiar, and natural) and not ‘so cow’ (unfamiliar, and unnatural), all at once.

Screams and madness

Around the time of the recording, and eventual release, of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a typi-
cal Pink Floyd live performance would involve the band members merging, visually speaking,
amid a myriad of mystique-inducing shadows. Meanwhile, sonically, ‘Syd’s abstract guitar rifs
battled with Richard Wright’s unearthly-sounding keyboards,’ as ‘Roger Waters, gangling and
aloof, delivered a thudding bass to underpin the din, and some ungodly screaming when the
mood demanded it.’62 In fact, right through this Piper-era period, Richard Wright’s classical and
jazz infuences came to the fore, with the keyboards occupying the gaps that a lead guitar would
normally fll. This, in efect, gave their recordings of the time, for Blake (2017), a very disturb-
ing inherent mood, where a sense of imperceptible threat meant that all was akin to Grimm’s
Fairy Tales put to music. For example, ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ was experimental to the extreme, the
song’s mouth-derived, percussive ‘funny noises’ were ‘very avant garde-y,’ meaning ‘it sounded
loopy, but without using tape loops.’63 Whilst it is credited to the group at large, for David Gale,
‘Pow R. Toc H.’ is Roger Waters through and through: ‘All the vocal things he was doing, the
screams and the clicks, all of that strikes me as Waters trying out various efects that he would
later take much further.’64 Thus, with ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ there is, insists Cavanagh (2003), an
‘unhinged’ quality to the music that is even more than evident when listening to the non-stereo
version of the album, as with the mono version, the chemistry between Barrett’s ferociously
overdriven lead guitar, Wright’s horror flm-esque organ – along with the screams and other
muttered noises high up in the mix – all, come the end of the song, morph into Mason’s brutal
attack upon his drum kit. Indeed, ‘[m]ore goblin than Hobbit, it could be the soundtrack for
a sacrifcial rite.’65
In November 1968, Pink Floyd recorded the B-side for their forthcoming single, ‘Point Me
at the Sky.’ Based on the foundations of a rather limited one-chord instrumental and initially
entitled ‘Murderistic Woman,’ they renamed this more extended, and complex, version ‘Careful
with That Axe, Eugene.’ Perhaps an even more signifcant redevelopment of the song came in
April 1969, explains Macan (2007), when the group recorded the live version that would, even-
tually, come to be appreciated as one of the highlights of the ‘in concert’ disc of their upcom-
ing long-player, Ummagumma. In this form, the band have fashioned an expressionist work of
genius as far as rock music instrumentals are concerned. Indeed, in analysing this live version
of ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ (especially when compared to the rather restrained studio

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version), it is signifcant to note that the song can be divided into four distinct elements. First,
there is the ‘introduction’ that only just rises above pianissimo and is played in a dark and pitiful
vein. Then, second, where the dominant melody is played by Wright on a Farfsa organ that
is akin to a Middle Eastern musical motif, Gilmour’s voice initiates a loose, falsetto-like – yet
wordless – melody, where the vocalese-like sounds that emanate from him give the impression
that they are foating towards another dimension outside of any temporal restrictions. However,
with Waters returning to the notes that ushered in the track, whispering ‘Careful with that axe,
Eugene,’ the band launch into a threatening crescendo, so that – come the third section – all
is subject to Waters’ harrowing screams. Indeed, Waters’ screams are tremendously efective in
conjuring up impressions of sheer terror – to the extent that, now over 50 years since its record-
ing, they endure in their ability to unnerve any frst-time listener. Then, in inaugurating the
fourth and fnal element of the song, Wright makes a clear (albeit not exact) reference to his
main melody once again, and Gilmour resumes his vocalese, and it is the latter’s guitar arpeg-
gios that, now, provide this remarkably murky instrumental a feetingly incandescent essence.
Almost straightaway, though, the music ebbs away, ‘seemingly into the shadows out of which it
appeared.’66 However, that is not the last of ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene.’ During the same
year that Ummagumma was released, 1969, the band had incorporated yet another live version
of the song into the ‘The Man and the Journey’ tour (that is, as part of ‘The Journey’ half of
the suite) and, with the Zabriskie Point soundtrack that was to surface in 1970, the track ‘Come
in Number 51, Your Time Is Up’ was, in efect, a shrouded rehash of ‘Careful with That Axe,
Eugene,’ where ‘[i]ts roaring guitars, crashing drums, and death throe screaming are the perfect
complement to the flm’s cataclysmic fnish.’67
With ‘screams’ already a central motif of their art, Pink Floyd were, perhaps, a little too
over-wrought with regard to their pursuit of musical unhinged-ness. For instance, with ‘Several
Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ (track
3 of the studio-based disc from Ummagumma), Roger Waters attempts to replicate an array of
noises similar to those made by woodland wildlife, and – as far as a number of listeners are con-
cerned – rages in a faux-Scottish drawl for far longer than he really needs to. Indeed, perhaps
only worthy of mention for the backwards-playing phrase at the end (‘That was pretty avant-
garde, wasn’t it?’), ‘Several Species . . .’ sounds, in reality, ‘as if The Goons had been allowed
to run riot through Abbey Road.’68 However, such screaming and ranting take on a far darker
ambience when we bear in mind, of course, the rapid – and infamous – decline of Syd Bar-
rett’s mental state. For, in November 1967, Pink Floyd (on a package tour that included Welsh
‘local boys’ Amen Corner, as well as UK-wide acts such as The Move, The Nice, and so on)
appeared at Cardif’s Sophia Gardens, where the band played a rather restrained set – that is,
despite being billed as one of only a handful of truly psychedelic events that were to take place
outside of London. Backstage, those who encountered Barrett did so as he sat in the far corner
of the dressing room, where he – seemingly in the midst of an LSD-induced lethargy – nerv-
ously played ‘with a toy steam engine he had acquired, and looking terrifed whenever anyone
struck up conversation.’69
No surprise, then, that in the process of fnalising the recordings for A Saucerful of Secrets in
the following year, 1968, ‘Jugband Blues’ was to be, for Wild (2017), Barrett’s desperately heart-
rending last involvement in Pink Floyd’s music-making. However, ‘Vegetable Man’ (recorded
during the same sessions), was a nigh-on tuneless mess of a song, where it is only the ongoing
mythologising of Syd Barrett that has maintained any curiosity about this rather disorderly
and senseless outtake. Meanwhile, another outtake from a few weeks before, ‘Scream Thy Last
Scream’ is, at best, something that is an uncomfortable sonic experience. So, whilst it was agreed
to include ‘Jugband Blues’ on A Saucerful of Secrets, a similar inclusion of both Barrett’s ‘Vegetable

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Man’ or ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ were vetoed by Roger Waters ‘on the grounds that they were
“just too dark”.’70 Whilst these rejected songs were deemed ‘too dark,’ many – including Peter
Jenner – made a direct correlation between Syd Barrett’s LSD-addled state of mind, his dor-
mant predilection to mental instability, and his song-writing. For, as Jenner claims, ‘[t]he acid
brought out the creativity, but more important it brought out the madness.’71 Thus, having left
the band following those sessions for A Saucerful of Secrets, those few people who encountered
Barrett were now to be confronted by a shell of a man. As Jenny Fabian recalls, of one occasion
at this time, ‘I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had
a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke.’72 Seeing him a few years later, when Barrett was
living alone in a fat near Earls Court, Fabian not only noted his total inability to communicate,
but – more worryingly – his more general detached strangeness: ‘He was sitting in the corner on
a mattress and he’d painted every other foorboard alternate colours, red and green. He boiled
an egg in a kettle and ate it. And he listened over and over again to Beach Boys tapes, which
I found a bit distressing.’73
Of course, despite Barrett’s increasing alienation from his former bandmates, wider group
entourage, and so on, some of Pink Floyd’s later material was to make constant reference to him
– thus simultaneously acting as both honest homage and mystique-making. For the track ‘Fear-
less’ (from 1971’s Meddle LP), with the lines: ‘Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd/The lunatic
is on the grass,’ this was – in lyrical terms at least – a forerunner of ‘Brain Damage.’ The latter
– to be found on the band’s celebrated long-player, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) – is an
extravagantly produced piece of music, whereby the lyrics summon up images of a traumatised
Syd Barrett by engaging, in a straightforward way, with madness. Rather scathingly, for Fabian,
it was only the Barrett-era version of the band – due, especially, to this tangible ‘madness’ – that
held any meaning:

I knew the others, but they were absolutely nothing at all compared to him. His words
and his music were the Pink Floyd and I’ve never been interested in them since. Noth-
ing ever reached the heights of that frst album which was mad and mysterious – like
him.74

In considering Pink Floyd’s constant need to acknowledge an absent Barrett – a band mem-
ber who is, indeed, now dead – we enter the realm of the uncanny as understood by Marina
Warner (2006). As an extension of Freud’s notion of the unheimlich, whereby a sense of unease
is brought about as a result of perceiving something to be present-yet-absent, Warner states
that ‘the feeling arises when a fgure or an image stirs a memory of something familiar that
has been mislaid, or lost’ and is ‘the prickly sensation excited by feeling that someone is in the
room when there turns out to be nobody there.’75 Thus, as far as this chapter is concerned, the
uncanniness of Syd Barrett is evoked as a result of Pink Floyd’s recorded legacy forever being a
repository of both his songs and his ‘image’: The uncanny Barrett is, in essence, the ‘fgure’ that
is always ‘there’ but forever the ‘something familiar’ that is eternally ‘mislaid, or lost.’

Ephemera and re-fnding of Pink Floyd

So, with Barrett understood as an unheimlich, lost fgure, and in the absence of a full lineup of
the other members of Pink Floyd playing music and touring together in any shape or form,
we now need to consider – in the words of the Pink Floyd-themed exhibition (and associated
book) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 2017 – ‘their mortal remains’: or, rather, consider
what remains of their recorded output. Moreover, it is essential, I feel, to do this in relation to

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our more focused understanding of ephemera in relation to Pink Floyd. For, with earlier men-
tions of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as something akin to ‘a slightly claustrophobic Victorian
house of strange deserted rooms flled chock a block with mysterious ephemera,’76 and, with the
band ensconced amid Mike Leonard’s rambling, archival-like, home-cum-workshop of 1963, it
is essential for us to acknowledge that ‘things’ – in efect, ephemera – are an essential component
in our full understanding of, and appreciation of, Pink Floyd.
Fundamentally, then, the relatively recent unearthing of all manner of things associated with
the band serves to place great emphasis upon the unreal realities of Pink Floyd. Amid a present
day where we have lost both Syd Barrett and Rick Wright, essentially, the band (as a non-
recording entity, who no longer play live together, and so on) is also lost to us. Yet it is amid the
whole gamut of Pink Floyd-related ephemera that we can actually re-fnd Pink Floyd in their
totality. Aubrey Powell, creative director and curator of the V&A 2017 exhibition, had this to
say about having gained access to the band’s personal archive of hand-written notes and lyrics,
letters and diaries, photos, flms, equipment, and so on:

It’s a treasure trove hidden for decades in lock-ups, storage facilities, old studios, at the
back of dusty shelves and in long-unopened tour cases. In a warehouse, old, perished
plastic pigs fown years ago at Pink Floyd concerts were found abandoned, never to
be re-infated. Yet among the detritus was an infatable TV set and fridge, relics from
the 1977 Animals tour. . . . All this dredging and sifting has unearthed many unseen,
worthwhile objects.77

Thus, as I  type these words, I  am surrounded by – immersed amid, even – Pink Floyd
ephemera that has, over the past few years, been made public: the 2007 hardback, clothbound
book-like reissue of Piper, which – in a booklet foregrounded on the cover with the words
‘FART ENJOY’ – ofers afectionately reproduced copies of Syd Barrett’s hand-typed prose
and select items from his artistic portfolio; the 2011 orange and green slip-cased edition of
the utterly beautiful cofee-table tome Barrett,78 choc-a-bloc with an even greater selection of
reproductions of hand-written notes, artwork, and fading photographs; a number of the indi-
vidually released volumes of the 2016 box set, The Early Years, 1965–1972, with their miniature
facsimiles of concert posters and the like. Taken together, they provide me with countless unreal
realities that facilitate my re-fnding of a Pink Floyd now lost.

Conclusion
According to Calef (2007), ‘[w]ith Pink Floyd, there’s always something more than meets the
eye – or ear,’ whereby ‘[t]heirs is a world combining and separating the seen and the unseen.’79
Bearing in mind Masschelein’s insistence that the uncanny – as a slippery unconcept – is always
on ‘the verge’ and Calef ’s (2007) mention that Pink Floyd’s world is one where both the seen
and the unseen are constantly combining and separating, we can appreciate that, as a manifesta-
tion of the weird, the eerie and the uncanny, Pink Floyd are ‘unconceptual.’ That is, even their
work-in-progress magnum opus of 1969 ‘The Man and the Journey’ was – due to the fact that
it was a suite that comprised old material, newly written songs, and compositions that were (in
their fully realised form) yet to be – an unconceptual concept work in that age of great concept
albums.
Furthermore, with Page (2008) asserting that we now exist in a distinctively uncanny era, we
need to remind ourselves of the uncannily ‘visionary’ dimension of Pink Floyd. Highlighting
the band’s long-established tradition of both psychedelic and post-psychedelic light projections,

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remarkable stage sets, and iconographic album covers, in the end, despite their embrace of the
multimedia pop/rock performance, Calef (2007) argues that Pink Floyd unceasingly ofer us
what is unseen – that is, what is hiding, absent, enigmatic, or, indeed, undetectable.
Thus, as detailed in the opening of this chapter, when listening to 1967’s The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn for the very frst time – especially from the perspective of a valve radiogramme
listener or someone playing it on a primitive Dansette – ‘sound efects emerge like radio emis-
sions from the ether’ or ‘like an errant reception of Radio Caroline.’80 So, from Glaswegian
terraced houses, to distant constellations out in the cosmos, and from the absolute clarity of
creativity, to the dire depths of madness, Pink Floyd’s evocations of the weird, the eerie, and the
uncanny allow us – for example, when listening to a song such as ‘Flaming’ – to take a ‘hide-
and-seek magic carpet ride to what Aldous Huxley described as ”the mind’s far continents”.’81
Thus, I would insist that Pink Floyd’s music specifcally, and aesthetics generally, are not only the
epitome of the weird, eerie, and uncanny of the late twentieth century but an obvious example
of where it all connects with us at far more profound level than that of current philosophical
trends and present-day hang-ups and is, instead, something that is above and beyond time itself.

Notes
1 Cavanagh, J. (2003). 33 1/3 – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. London: The Continuum International
Publishing Group Ltd, page 2.
2 Palacios, J. (1998). Lost in the Woods – Syd Barrett and the Pink Floyd. London: Boxtree, page 129.
3 Ibid.
4 See, Povey, G. (2018). Pink Floyd in Objects. London: Carlton Books Ltd.
5 Thorgerson, S. and Curzon, P. (2015). Mind Over Matter – The Images of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus
Press, page 278.
6 See, Fisher, M. (2016). The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
7 See, Royle, N. (2003). The Uncanny. Manchester University Press, Manchester.
8 See, Trigg, D. (2012). The Memory of Place – A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Ohio: Ohio University
Press.
9 See, Warner, M. (2006). Phantasmagoria – Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Cen-
tury. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
10 Storm Thorgerson quoted in Worden, M. and Marziano, A. (2007). A Pink Floyd Fan’s Illustrated Guide
to Cambridge. Cambridge: B. Damned Publishing, page 56.
11 Watkinson, M. and Anderson, P. (1993, frst published 1991). Crazy Diamond – Syd Barret and the Dawn
of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus Press, pages 45–46.
12 Ibid:46.
13 Page, R. (2008). ‘Introduction’, in Eyre, S. and Page, R. (eds.), The New Uncanny – Tales of Unease.
London: Comma Press, page vii.
14 Ibid:viiii.
15 Masschelein, A. (2011). The Unconcept – The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory.
Albany: State University of New York Press, page 127.
16 Ibid:11.
17 Boyd, J. (2017). ‘ “Lift Of” – Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, and the London Underground’, in anon., Pink
Floyd – Their Mortal Remains. London: V&A Publishing, page 27.
18 Hodges, R. and Priston, J. (1999). Embryo: A Pink Floyd Chronology, 1966–1971. London: Cherry Red
Books, page 1.
19 Ibid:5.
20 Ibid:6.
21 Op. cit. Fisher (2016):10.
22 Royle, N. (2003). The Uncanny. Manchester University Press, Manchester, page 16.
23 Jenner, quoted in, Green, J. (1998, frst published 1988). Days in the Life – Voices from the English Under-
ground, 1961–1971. London: Pimlico Green, pages 166–167.
24 Watkinson, M. and Anderson, P. (1993, frst published 1991). Crazy Diamond – Syd Barret and the Dawn
of Pink Floyd. London: Omnibus Press, page 28.

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 Meadows, relics, and dolls’ houses

25 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):42.

26 Ibid:38.
27 Leonard, quoted in, Ibid:41
28 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):43.
29 Blake, M. (2017, frst published 2007). Pigs Might Fly – The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, London: Aurum
Press, page 41.
30 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):43.
31 Ibid:43.
32 Op. cit. Blake (2017):78.
33 Jenner, quoted in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):30–31.
34 Mason quoted in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):31.
35 Ibid:31.
36 Ibid:83.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Jenner, quoted in Op. cit. Povey (2018):34.
40 Mason, N. (2017, frst published 2004). Inside Out- – A Personal History of Pink Floyd. San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, LLC, page 50.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid:79.
43 Ibid:79–80.
44 Ibid:80.
45 Op. cit. Warner (2006):173.
46 Singh, cited in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):66.
47 Ibid:66.
48 Ibid:67.
49 Op. cit. Watkinson and Anderson (1993):68–69.
50 Powell, quoted in Op. cit. Blake (2017):128.
51 Op. cit. Blake (2017):166.
52 Scurfeld, quoted Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):49.
53 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):129.
54 Fabian, cited in Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):52.
55 Ibid.
56 Calef, S. (2007). ‘Distorted View: A Saucerful of Skepticism’, in Reisch, G. A. (ed.), Pink Floyd and
Philosophy – Careful with That Axiom, Eugene. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, page 180.
57 Gilmour, quoted in Op. cit. Blake (2017):14.
58 Gale, quoted in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):104.
59 Young, R. (2015, April). ‘Ummagumma’, in The Ultimate Music Guide – Pink Floyd. London: Time
Inc. (UK) Ltd., page 26.
60 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):48.
61 Thorgerson, quoted in, Op. cit. Blake (2017):154.
62 Op. cit. Blake (2017):70.
63 Jenner, quoted in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):57.
64 Gale, quoted in, Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):58.
65 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):59.
66 Macan, E. (2007). ‘Theodor Adorno, Pink Floyd, and the Psychedelics of Alienation’, in Reisch, G.
A. (ed.), Pink Floyd and Philosophy – Careful with That Axiom, Eugene. Chicago Open Court Publishing
Company, page 110.
67 Wild, A. (2017). Pink Floyd Song by Song. London: Fonthill Media Ltd, page 49.
68 Op. cit. Blake (2017):136.
69 Ibid:99.
70 Waters, quoted in Op. cit. Blake (2017):116.
71 Jenner, quoted in Green, J. (1998, frst published 1988). Days in the Life – Voices from the English Under-
ground, 1961–1971. London: Pimlico Green, page 168.
72 Fabian, quoted in Ibid:168.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid:168–169.

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 Peter Hughes Jachimiak

75 Op. cit. Warner (2006):54.

76 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):129.
77 Powell, A. (2017). ‘Foreword – Becoming Pink Floyd’, in anon., Pink Floyd – Their Mortal Remains.
London: V&A Publishing, page 9.
78 Beecher, R. and Shutes, W. (2011). Barrett. London: Essential Works Limited.
79 Op. cit. Calef (2007):179–180.
80 Op. cit. Palacios (1998):131.
81 Op. cit. Cavanagh (2003):52.

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 23
THE PINK FLOYD INTENSITY
Humanity, aesthetics and the breathless fan

Robert Wilsmore

Introduction
On the cover of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn are the words ‘Original UK release date:
August 1967,’ and that can be said of me, too: I also came into this world in August 1967, the
so-called ‘summer of love.’ But like those birthday cards that have one’s year of birth on them,
with the news headlines and music of the time, they do not connect to the year you became
aware of yourself in the world. Yet as lovely as it is to know that I was born in the same year
as the release of Sgt Pepper’s and the same month as the release of Pink Floyd’s frst album, it is
meaningless with regard to the identity of me, the fan, who has no recollection of that year.
Autoethnographically speaking, 1967 has relevance only in as much as the timing of the
mature works of Pink Floyd came into view to me, in the early 1980s: the teenage years, the
years of refection on the past, but more so on the widening perspective of the self in the world.
This was for me, as no doubt for other teenagers throughout the decades, the period of identity
formation and all that goes with it – the turmoil of emotion. It was in these formative years
that the young Robert Wilsmore became totally bound up in a relationship with the music of
Pink Floyd.
There were no contenders for this relationship: no one else, just The Pink Floyd. Yes, there
were other bands within the preference group, including Yes, and there was one other artist
in my later teens for whom I had a passion – obscurely this was the work of British composer
Sir Michael Tippett, to whom breath was the essence of a symphony. But it was Pink Floyd
that was my frst and longest-lasting love. Perhaps another time, another band, the efect would
have been the same, and that would speak for the universality of frst loves, of musical efect in
general, of intensity in-itself and for-itself, but this chapter is about a particular intensity, namely
The Pink Floyd Intensity.

FrameWorks
The intensity sought here is not one thing; it is not that the efect of a singularity is afect. Afect
is variously accounted for by social scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers and other disciplines,
and the current understanding has no particular consensus (we might even say, anticipating
Ranciere’s (2011) infuence here, that there is dissensus). Blair (2013) notes that afect theory is

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-30 423

 Robert Wilsmore

‘best understood as afect theories, a myriad of approaches to studying and understanding fows
of afect.’1 Neither does the concept of intensity have unity, being located at the skin for Mas-
sumi (2002), in diference and the other for Kant, in breath for Klossowski (1999) and exter-
nally as the extract of afection for Deleuze and Guattari (2011).2
No one appears to be speaking of the same thing exactly when it comes to afect, or indeed
for intensity. Its current fuidity, however, opens up the opportunity to move towards an under-
standing of an intensity that is not bound by fxity of terminology. This allows for the term,
in this autoethnographic context, to have its meaning driven from the ‘efect’ of the music, a
particular and exclusively Pink Floyd intensity might be described rather than as an ontology
of intensity itself.
The study of key albums around pre- and post-Waters Floyd is central to this narrative, but
frst, there is a need to set up some useful theoretical frameworks and a vocabulary that will
help piece together the intensity that hopefully will become suitably unclear as the assemblage
is constructed.
As the title of this chapter suggests, elements of the ‘subject and the subjected’ are part of this,
as are contemplations of the ‘object and the objectifed.’ These opposites are, however, artifcial;
they divide the aesthetic and humanity from experience. Herein lies a potential difculty and
advantage. The dichotomies fail from the start of this investigation. If they cannot allow con-
sideration of one element in isolation (in this case the start is an aesthetic unable to free itself
of the ‘other’), it follows that as part of a non-dialectical nature of the intensity assemblage, a
contestation is able to be resolved.
Conversely, we may also see a dialectical progression in the coming together and the sub-
sequent separation and the new understanding from this carried within the new (articulating a
progress that preserves the former state). There is an attachment of opposites built in, an attrac-
tion perhaps pulls them together and holds them, suspended (sublated), in their cohered form
when they merge. The various frameworks are set out with this spillage in mind, and these are
big categories: aesthetics, afect, intensity, humanity, signifcation, the self, the other, all far too
large to unpack in any great detail. However, there is a move here to cram a lot into a small space
because the intensity itself is the result of such cramming where one cannot see the wood for
the trees, but one can sense the enormity of it all. Think of the Pink Floyd Intensity as being a
small dark cupboard at a party where the players of a game of sardines (the players are aesthetics,
afect, humanity, otherness, sublation, excess) are squished excitedly together in a moment of
suspense waiting to be uncovered. It is something of that type of intensity, being aware but not
fully knowing, being scared but also excited, not knowing who, how many or what is in there
with you but having a sense of it all. ‘Being’ caught up in the thrill of confusion. That will be
where this intensity lies; meshed, certain but unsure, a whole but one that does not know all of
its own parts or even how many it might have, never fully revealed, in control but only just, an
excess teetering on a parapet.
We now have an initial framework and vocabulary with which to orient this analysis.

Afect
The social theory of Massumi (2002) presents afect as being in the realm of the pre-personal
and non-conscious, of the body frst before emotion, whereas Wetherell (2012) presents afect
as something much less linear with regard to how it functions between brain and body, as she
writes, ‘The picture that psychology and neuroscience typically now paints of afect is a highly
dynamic, interacting composite or assemblage.’3 To paraphrase, this assemblage can capture ‘in
the same general moment’ automatic bodily responses, subjective feelings, cognitive processes,

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verbal exclamations, facial expressions, a whole host of receptions, processes and expressions
that intertwine.
This particular multiplicity of assemblage makes sense with regard to approaching the
Pink Floyd Intensity; this intensity was never likely to be the product of a single element,
not a single identifable ingredient (that ‘x’ factor) that we could point to and say ‘there,
that’s the thing in Pink Floyd’s music that makes us feel this way’; we will not be able to ‘put
our fnger on it,’ indeed, it is the fact that we cannot do this wherein lies intensity. Its unar-
ticulateableness (an awkward word to express an awkward quality) is its being; it disappears
at the very point of capture. Hence the multiple frameworks here are crucial to assembling
some chemical mix between them that creates the compound that can be called the inten-
sity or, to go back to the frst analogy, the particles that make up the atom gelled by the
subatomic forces between them. What cannot be achieved is the exact detail, the precision
of position, of velocity; if that could be done, it would be captured, and that, as I have said,
is its vanishing point.
Wetherell (2012) and Reason (2016) are not convinced by Massumi’s (2002)4 idea that afect
is ‘pre-personal,’ and that emotions are then subsequently ‘personal’ (afect being before emotion
and the personal). Reason (2016) articulates Massumi’s position as,

Emotions are therefore conscious, personal, subjective; afect in contrast not only
precedes both emotion and language (although it might be what gives emotion its
intensity) but is also non-conscious. . . . As a pre-personal intensity, afect is not under
the individual’s control.5

Reason’s (2016) research goes on to show how a complex assemblage takes place in the itera-
tive and multiple processes that occur in the moment of afect. He states (2016) this positioning
between afect and linguistics, ‘the value of afect theories to contemporary performance is
exactly its ability to acknowledge that which we cannot put our fnger on but is utterly essential
nonetheless.’6 We want to share with faultless accuracy between sender and receiver, our sense
to our sense-community, to be able to communicate what it is that is felt but that ‘I cannot put
my fnger on.’
An eternal return in art, not to express emotion but to share sense or, more necessarily, to
share afect. Failure to achieve this and for the reception to be dampened returns the damp-
ening efect to the one; where afect continually fails to share itself, the dampening thick-
ens until numbness set in (the more one shouts, the more the one is dampened, numbed).
Where the desire to connect afect meets the disinterest of the world, where togetherness
has gone and then where we are no longer even ‘together and apart’ (see Ranciere, 2011)
but merely apart, then numbness and perfect isolation result. How is the resultant intensity
of the totality of that situation to be presented, and then beyond presentation and represen-
tation, to be felt?
The Pink Floyd Intensity that we felt is, for many of us, the closest we have come to putting
our fnger on it; any closer and it would disappear; we are as near as is possible. The explosion
of art is precisely because afect wishes to be known but it does not know how to do so.

Intensity
So far, the developments in the understanding of afect have not refected well on Massumi
(2002), but his ideas are not to be dismissed so easily. Drawing on an empirical and scientifc
study (involving Galvanic skin response), Massumi (2002) notes that ‘Intensity is embodied in

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purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin – at the surface of the body,
at its interface with things.’7 The reactions measured at the skin in these subjects (children’s
responses to three versions of the same short flm) showed the highest intensity in the original
version of the flm, the only version that was nonverbal (the other two versions including
voice-overs). We have to accept a particular version of what is meant by ‘intensity’ here, as
we do with all discussions on the term, but what is interesting in Massumi’s discussion is the
description between the efect that language has on afect. He uses the terms ‘dampening’
and ‘heightening’ to qualify the nature of experienced intensity. In this case (and he is clear
to point out that language is not in opposition to intensity), the voice-overs seem to have a
dampening efect.
As noted in the previous section, Wetherell (2012) ofers a more nuanced and complex asso-
ciation between sense and the conscious with regard to a preconscious state of afect, but there
is something in his reading of the case where intensity involves the ‘crossing of semantic wires’
where experiencing sadness is pleasant. While keeping Wetherell’s (2012) uncertainly about
the afect as singularly preconscious in mind, there is something in the pleasantness of Floydian
anxiety that can be explored, the warm glow of anxiety, and there is doubted, if only by anal-
ogy, a way in which we can observe intensity in Floyd through a discussion on what ‘dampens’
intensity post-split that might help enlighten what heightened it pre-split.
Deleuze’s (2015) ‘It seems that breaths, in themselves and in ourselves, must be conceived of as
pure intensities’ contemplates Klossowski’s (1999) work where the spirit, the ‘breath,’ is a reduction
from existence to subsistence and almost to an essence where what remains, is ‘the unequal or the
diferent – each one is already diference in itself – so that all of them are comprehended in the
manifestation of everyone’ (Deleuze, 2015).8 This ‘non-communicable’ and ‘obstinate’ singularity
for Klossowski (1999) is soul, and as Daniel Smith (2012) writes of Klossowski’s notion,

What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its ‘impulses’ – their fuctuations of
intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are
in constant variation.9

Again, we return to the impossibility of communication as intensity. Klossowki’s (1999)

impulses fuctuate, rise and fall; they are dampened or heightened. The communication of the
uncommunicable, the not being able to say it, the not being able to put one’s fnger on it, are
frustrations. The frustration of ‘not being able to’ heightens intensity to the point of exhaustion
through the act of trying and failing – that leaves one, fnally, breathless. In that end moment,
if we connect this to Klossowki’s (1999) spirits, then to be absolutely breathless is to say that
intensity is no longer present (for intensity is breath). Perhaps that is the relief at the end of the
experience? Or rather the relief is when we are then asked to breathe, and the breath comes into
focus. We do this in moments of panic, at times of excess of afect: we ask others to ‘breathe
slowly’ to ‘take a deep breath of air.’
I have already pointed to Kant’s need of the other in the production of intensity in aesthetic
judgement and that it is the diference in the other, the contestation of the universal, that drives
this. Let us bring Stephen Hawking (1988) into the equation here and throw in Gilles Deleuze
and Pink Floyd (post-spilt) and God as well, just for good measure. That sounds like a pretty
intense combination. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking wrote that ‘Using the no boundary
condition, we fnd that the universe must, in fact, have started with just the minimum pos-
sible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle.’10 Hawking played his part in noting
the importance of diference at the very start of the universe; without it, without the minute

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inequalities present at the beginning, there would be no universe. Diference is universal. The
universe is diference. Deleuze, in Diference and Repetition (2010), says,

It is, therefore, true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never
work out exactly [juste], and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreduc-
ible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world ‘happens’ while God
calculates; if the calculations were exact, there would be no world. The world can be
regarded as a ‘remainder’, and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional
or even incommensurable numbers.11

He goes on to note that ‘every intensity is diferential, by itself a diference’ – diference

is intensity and hence the phrase ‘diference of intensity’ is a tautology. But that is not, from
Deleuze’s (2010) point of view, to dismiss measurements of intensity (which Massumi can see
as being dampened or heightened) but to point out that intensity is diference rather than being
of diference. To draw this away from the birth of a universe and forward 13 billion years to the
arrival of humans, then Kingsman (2017), writing on the impact of British philosopher Nick
Land,12 notes Land’s notion of intensity-in-itself as:

a thirsting for annihilation via a nihilistic acceleration without ethics. Apart from
these frameworks of intuition – frameworks of subjectivity, afect, and phenomenol-
ogy that Deleuze and Guattari (as well as most other transcendental materialists) are
uncomfortable jettisoning entirely – the ‘subject’ cannot experience intensity, because
intensity de-stabilizes and eliminates subjectivity.13

If this elimination of the subject seems farfetched, then we can bring it home quite simply:
if the subject is one’s self and the external object that eliminates it is the music, then we are left
with the simple idea that one literally ‘loses one’s self in the music.’ Where intensity-in-itself is the
very beginning of the universe, it also harbours a ‘thirsting for annihilation.’ It wants to explode
and expand and retract and annihilate all at the same time. No wonder intensity is so intense.

Aesthetic
A simple approach to aesthetics with regard to Floyd might involve the sound of Gilmour’s
Stratocaster, the singular efect of three female backing singers, the inevitable ‘reverse diegetic’
of the sound efects (the phones, the radios, the clocks), for these all play their part. And as the
intensity has no plan of fnding itself in singularities, then the aesthetic too will be multiple,
something along the lines of neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus (1991), whose approach to
beauty concludes,

Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole;
the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to
give a comely total.14

However, I  wish to use those opposites that are already tied together, that display their
attraction upfront, and for this purpose, it is not merely aesthetics as described in the previous
elements (guitar, backing vocals, sound efects) but the aesthetic judgement that carries this attrac-
tion of opposites. Rather than the object in relation to a subject, it is a subject in relation to

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object-and-subject that draws the importance of otherness into the aesthetic. For Kant, this is
the sensus communis – the necessity of thinking the other into our aesthetic judgement in order
that intensity be produced in artwork. As Gary Peters (2005) puts it:

That is to say, the ‘sensus communis’, as the fctional articulation of the ‘possible’ rather
than the ‘actual’ judgement of others, is in reality characterised by irresolvable difer-
ence, albeit measured against the ideal of consensus. It is the desire, and yet the ‘failure’
to transcend such diference that introduces intensity into aesthetic production.15

It is the irresolution between ‘sameness and diference’ that the other brings to the self that
intensifes the aesthetic judgement. In Pink Floyd, we encounter not only the thinking of the
other but have the exposing of another, as an embodied other (the obvious example being ‘Pink’
in The Wall), then, by proxy, the exposing of the self through an empathic attunement to that
other (the ‘Pink’ in us).
For Kant16 aesthetic judgment is not a dialectic because it does not resolve, but instead, it
remains a contestation of universalities. Heidegger (1962), on the other hand (a somewhat
unfortunately apt fgure in a discussion-based around the neo-Nazi Pink), notes of our inau-
thentic self the inclusion of the other as our ‘they-self.’ This, for him, is not meant necessarily
derogatorily but rather that ‘the Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish
from authentic Self – that is, from the Self which has taken hold of in its own way.’17 ‘Dasein’ is
understood not straightforwardly as ‘being’ but rather a phenomenological ‘being there’ in the
world.
A self that encompasses the other, as described previously, is to include the fctional and pos-
sible rather than an (unknowable) actual. Here aesthetic judgement seems to have strayed some-
what from a rather cold and objective attempt to describe beauty, to describe the Pink Floyd
aesthetic, its sound. That quick shift, that momentary and feeting glimpse of pure aesthetic
that vanishes into plurality, is identifed as one of the factors that produce the afect, the allure
of the sonic glint that allows in the razor-sharp humanity which was attached to it all along. As
Muhammad Ali said, ‘Float like a butterfy, sting like a bee.’ Perhaps we could relate it to the
mythical Sirens who lure sailors to their deaths through the beauty of their sound; there is a
fatal attraction to this intensity. For some fans, the dialectical move of the personal story in one
direction (perhaps better exemplifed in the narrative in Waters’ Radio Kaos than Pros and Cons)
and the slick sound of post-split Pink Floyd in A Momentary Lapse of Reason presents something
of a downward move, a negative dialectic (a downward-aufheben). A Momentary Lapse briefy
draws me to an aesthetic, but I am not stung; Radio Kaos has me observing someone else being
stung, but again I am not stung. I can see the connection of beauty and the sting in operation,
but I cannot feel it. It is without afect, without intensity.
Ranciere (2011) writes that the sensus communis is a ‘community of sense’ and from this that
there is a diference of sense in the sensory reality of the artwork to the sensory reality of the
things that are ‘represented’ by the artist.18 This diference is part of Ranciere’s term ‘dissensus.’
If Kant sees intensity in the diferences between a universal sense-perception systems, then
Ranciere (2011) sees dissensus between sensory realities of the artwork and the reality it is
rendered from.
Diference in the same is more than a semantic argument over the term ‘sense’; it goes to
the heart of expression, that is, the desire of the afected self to share this efect with the other
(that is, ‘I want you to feel what I feel’). But this is never entirely achievable as an aim; Ran-
ciere (2011) writes ‘to the extent that it is a dissensual community, an aesthetic community is

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a community structured by disconnection.’19 Within Pink Floyd, the struggle and the failure
to fnd consensus comes to its peak in The Wall. Community and separation are at the core of
this album; dissensus in the form of separated realities momentarily heightens intensity before
it is dampened by fracturing, by the tearing down of the wall. Once the tension breaks apart
the whole (the wall), the remaining parts are without tension. The tension has gone and the
intensity with it. After that, where ‘you’ are alone, separated and singular, those who love you
are in pairs, together and in community.

Dialectic
The assemblage of the Pink Floyd Intensity makes use of the split. The dialectical nature of this
division moves, on the one hand, towards the knowledge (or perhaps a knowing-experience) of
the intensity, each part of the split leaving negative spaces, spaces in which we might be able to
observe and identify what is missing. This absence ought to be a positive way forward towards
identifying what the intensity ‘is’ by naming the absences. Perhaps the most enlightening way
forward in taking a Hegelian approach to dialectics is the consideration of what is ‘pulled
through’ from an original starting point, what is maintained from that position that is preserved
within the current and new position. With regard to this notion of ‘picking up,’ Hegel (1991)
in The Science of Logic, explains the concept of sublation (aufheben):

On the one hand, we understand it to mean ‘clear away’ or ‘cancel.’ . . . But the word
also means ‘to preserve’, . . . This ambiguity in linguistic usage, through which the
same word has a negative and a positive meaning, cannot be regarded as an accident
nor yet as a reason to reproach language as if it were a source of confusion. We ought
rather to recognise here the speculative spirit of our language which transcends the
‘either-or’ of mere understanding.20

The trajectory here is to work on how an established afect is ‘picked up’ and carried through
(preserved) in a new moment. Hegel’s translators of Logic suggest that Sublate would be bet-
ter replaced with the word ‘suspend’ in that it ‘has the dual sense of something’s being put out
of action whilst continuing to exist.’21 In that preservation what is contained of the original is
essential in the new moment, the new accumulating afect that builds towards the critical mass
that can be called the intensity. Hence the ‘big bang’ of the split, which formed Momentary
Lapse and Pros and Cons, might be considered to undergo a process whereby an element has
been dropped, a reverse or ‘downward-aufheben’ in that they lose rather than preserve. How-
ever, within this dialectic, and with knowledge of the original, it more clearly exposes the
moments that can pinpoint where intensity works. Whereas the Hegelian dialectic is positive
(the negation of negation is positive, afrmative) and sublation preserves whilst moving forward,
in Žižek’s (2015) engagement with a new dialectical materialism, he notes an alternative

The standard Hegelian ‘upward-Aufhebung’ spiritualizes the immediacy of reality, rec-

onciling its struggles or contradictions in an ideal/notional form. In contrast, in the
case of the ‘downward-Aufhebung,’ the contradiction remains unresolved and is merely
patched up in an obscene spectral appearance.22

There is a link here to Kant’s irresolution of universal aesthetic judgement that introduces inten-
sity onto aesthetic production.

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Adorno and me
Theodore Adorno (2008), in his 1965–66 Lectures on Negative Dialectics, noted the traditional
logic that a minus and a minus equals a plus, and this chimes with Hegel’s dialectics that the
negation of negation is a positive; this is how the Hegelian dialectic moves forward. But for
Adorno this is not a sustainable position, living as he did through times of regress rather than
progress, to the point where positivity was seen as a desperate avoidance of negation, a negative
positivity where emigrants to a new country, who were met with aggression, had to ft in by
means of positive response,

In order to succeed in this process of adaptation, in order to do justice to what they

were forced to do, you would hear them say, by way of encouragement – and you
could see the efort it cost them to identify with the aggressor – ‘Yes, so-and-so really
is very positive’.23

And so, I have segued from one category straight into the next, deliberately of course because
they are not separate. Adorno (2008) continues his accusation of negative ideology directly
against the aggressor, ‘in the case of the Nazis; it was race, something that even the most stupid
people have ceased to believe in.’24
Adorno was, as is well known, no great supporter of popular music (for it keeps, he assumed,
the proletariat in its place), but it would be interesting to imagine how he would have responded
to The Wall’s neo-Nazi ‘Pink.’ Is social protest in rock music a positive dialectic? Has it improved
the world at all, or can it only preach to the converted? Or, as Ranciere would have it, the
political lies within the emancipation of the aesthetic rather than from the overtly political
instrumentalisation of art. How is the political act of art best served, to voice a statement or to
free it from instrumentalisation?
As our children are told when writing stories at school to ‘show, don’t tell,’ that is one of
the drivers for where Waters seems to excel in comparison to the telling of post-Waters Floyd.
Roger Waters, seemingly so tied up in autobiography, placed humanity in the situation of the
individual, the screwed-up self ’s intent of screwing up others, whereas Floyd became general,
where abstracted regimes divorced of identity displayed generic qualities (the dogs of war that
do not negotiate). The split is a divide in how the story is told, but it is not a split in politics.
When one splits an aesthetic, there is a tendency to locate parts on party political sides. To para-
phrase from Walter Benjamin’s (1955) Illuminations,25 the left politicises aesthetics, and the right
aestheticise politics. And just to emphasise this, David Gilmour tweeted at the time of the last
general election, ‘I’m voting Labour because I believe in social equality. David Gilmour,’ along
with a link to register to vote and help forge the ‘youthquake forward.’
There is a strong social message in Pink Floyd, and the split gives an opportunity to see what
happens when the individual story is wrapped in the slick aesthetic pre-split and then what
happens when the individual story lacks that aesthetic and conversely when the aesthetic tries
to speak without the cry of the individual soul. Which is the greater, to tell us to keep talking
or to show us people talking?
Both myself and Robert (the young me) have to confess to being ignorant of Pink Floyd
outside of their music. For sure, we come across news and hear things from other Floyd fans,
but we do not seek out information (who needs information?), so we are not geeks in that
sense, more like ‘purists’ who receive all from a singular source and try to avoid infltration from
outside, thus remaining within the totality that is given to us by the artists, the music that they
want us to hear and not the gossip that might surround it. The drawback of course for a ‘serious’

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academic is that ignorance comes at a price; it might be a valued quality in Rancierian pedagogy
but less so in a knowledge economy.
That said, the advantage is that our reception is largely untainted, and we are emancipated
from any worry that what we have to say is afected by the other. As much as this is an excuse
for missing so much, it is also true. But Robert and I have heard some things, we know Pros
and Cons could have been a Floyd album and that Waters had regrets about making Radio Kaos,
which for us is a shame because we do not like Pros and Cons much (too shouty, as we will
describe later), but we do like Radio Kaos. Neither do we know much about the split itself
with regard to the band members and their relationships, Richard Wright does not appear on
The Final Cut but returns on post-split albums. Something happened during The Wall that you
might know, but we do not.

Te pros and cons of post-split albums

Before we look into the diferences, perhaps we should take a look at the sameness of some of
these post-split studio albums, in particular the frst two by Floyd and the frst two by Waters.
They cover a ten-year period in terms of their release dates (1984 to 1994), though noticeably
Radio Kaos and Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason were released within four months of each
other in June and September 1987. Just for context, the release dates of albums pre- and post-
split are The Wall (November 1979), The Final Cut (March 1983), Waters’ The Pros and Cons of
Hitch Hiking (April 1984), Waters’ Radio Kaos (June 1987), Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of
Reason (1987), Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (March 1994).
Just to get a feel for the general notions of sameness, we can construct a short ‘checklist,’ a
comforting list of all the types of things we had come to expect from Floyd and that can still
be observed in the remnants that follow the split and can be found in both Pink Floyd’s and
Roger Waters’ albums. Such a list might go something like this: Sound efects (check), guitar
solos (check), sax solos (check), female backing singers (check), song about human communica-
tion (check), song about those in power (check), song about ‘turning’ (well, yes, check), warped
circus-waltz-like intervention (obscure, but sort of, check), wheelchair user with voice synthesiser
(what . . . ?), Billy and Stephen (oh, I see).
Let us start with Billy and Stephen. If one of the ways into afect is the cry of humanity, then
we can observe both the cry, the means of signifcation and the humanity that is signifed. Billy
is, for the purpose of the album Radio Kaos, a fctional character, whereas Stephen Hawking on
the song ‘Keep Talking’ (The Division Bell) is an actual person who ‘speaks’ for himself.
To explore the ‘cry’ frst, we are confronted with the human who, muted by accident or
disease, has a sonic identity wrapped up in the sound of their voice synthesiser. The voice of
Stephen Hawking26 is instantly recognisable; Billy’s is recognisably diferent from Hawking’s.
They share the ‘uncanny valley’ hybridity between human and robot, and because we know
they are human, we are drawn to the robotic voice perhaps because of the greater efort required
to speak, and hence that efort underlies that someone wants to say something of importance,
something worth listening to. Words are easy, except when they are not, and where it is difcult
to speak, we have to listen more closely if we want to hear. Hawking brings status, an iconic
genius to whom we should listen, and he is already embedded here (in this chapter) in the theo-
retical framework in the intensity of contingency and irregularity at the begging of everything.
What Hawking says, as valid as it is, is at a general level, is a simple message that if we keep
talking, then things will work out all right in the end. It might be true; it is a worthy message,
but it is not ‘intense’ (the voice-over has a dampening efect). The very meaning of life itself,
as exposed by Monty Python (1983) at the end of the eponymous flm, is ‘Well, it’s nothing

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very special. Try to be nice to people . . . and try and live together in peace and harmony with
people of all creeds and nations.’27 Python might also be right, but again, the joke here lies in
this most signifcant of questions being answered with a dispelling of intensity, with a frivolous
platitude, a dampening (perhaps it is no surprise to fnd Douglas Adams,28 who disarmed a
similarly grand question with the apparently trivial answer of ‘42,’ involved in post-split Floyd).
Ironically, Hawking is a ‘genuine’ genius with a mind capable of thinking deeply about the
workings of the universe, but his words here fail to afect. Yet Billy is only fctionally given such
insight: with his power to hear radio waves in his head, he knows when the ‘red button’ at the
hands of the world leaders is pressed before anyone else. Land’s intensity of the ‘thirsting for
annihilation’ is played out here in story, and yet it is more efective with regard to intensity than
Pink Floyd’s ‘Keep Talking.’
The order of signifcation of being told to keep talking if we want to save the world is less
than the order of signifcation in the empathic afect of feeling the end of the world, the secrecy
of power-crazy red button pressers, the moment of a second sun evaporating our tears. One
can say, ‘I feel sad,’ and it is understood by others, but music can make the other sad. Opposed
to the semiotic, Deleuze and Guattari (2011) wrote in What Is Philosophy? that ‘the work of
art – is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and afects,’29 where the art-
work is the afect from afection and the percept from perception. A very diferent view to the
representational system of semiotics but instead the turn to afect and being. For Deleuze and
Guattari (2011), there is a further step, a signifying rupture that rejects the sign; the artwork is
not the subject-oriented perception and afection, but it sits external to the subject (as noted in
Massumi’s notes to A Thousand Plateaus and in Land where the subject disappears). It is the art
that creates percept and afect; it is a philosophy that creates a concept. It begs the question with
regard to Pink Floyd, then, as to what the ‘concept album’ is. In this respect, with art for percept
and afect, and philosophy for the concept, then the concept album must be ‘philosophical art.’
For a Pink Floyd fan, that sounds cool; it means that Dark Side of the Moon is philosophical art
and that Animals is also philosophical art. I will go with that – not least, it means that the music
Robert listened to was validated by this impressive categorisation (and how we could lord it
over the ignoramuses who liked pop).
Billy’s fnal countdown to annihilation is but a simulation, but as Baudrillard (1994) empha-
sises throughout Simulation and Simulacra, the signs are indistinguishable from those of ‘reality’
and as such are more dangerous than pretentious. Whereas pretending admits that there is a
‘real,’ simulation threatens the fxity, the assuredness, of the real.30 The message might be as
platitudinous as saying ‘just be nice to each other,’ but the danger of simulation introduces an
intensity that is not there in the telling of the platitude. Ultimately, then, we are left with an
odd couple of attempts to share afect; genius scientist Hawking’s message is dampened by words
in telling us to ‘keep talking’; the fctional Billy heightens intensity by threatening the world’s
existence, but we observe this rather than feeling it and hence it does not achieve the heights
that it wishes (we are not ‘really’ threatened). Maybe neither works that well, in the end: neither
of these post-split approaches seems to match that which was achieved pre-split.
So, we can ask, is Waters’ cry of humanity where intensity lies in pre-split Floyd? It is part of
the assemblage, but it is only a part. I can best express this, perhaps, through the vocal registers
and timbres of Waters in Pros and Cons, where the mode of expression is familiar but without
intensity. We were used to the shifts in tone and register of Waters’ vocals ranging from low and
almost dis-voiced whispering, to mid-range melody, to high register nearly-in-tune-but-not-
quite shouting. However, when these are not in balance, the intensity dampens. It might be
thought that the loud, shouting, high-register, barely in tune, half-sung half-screamed vocal is
the most intense, but that is not the reason for intensity. An odd and sinister emphasis at the start

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of Pros and Cons on being hungry seems misplaced. The ‘shouty’ voice of Waters here hits us
very early on and very suddenly at the start of ‘4:33 AM (Running Shoes),’ and we might well
say ‘that’s too intense.’ The issue, then, is that the intensity here is kept outside the body; that is,
in terms of afect we are not prepared to ‘let this in,’ in other words, to let it afect us, and hence
it is left outside of us. This is of a diferent order to Deleuze’s (2011) notion of externality of
afect, as Massumi (2002) notes in A Thousand Plateaus,

Neither word denotes personal feeling. . . . L’afect (Spinoza’s afectus) is an ability to

afect and be afected. . . . L’afection (Spinoza’s afectio) is each such state considered as
an encounter between the afected body and a second, afecting, body.31

Intensity lies in the connectedness of outside actors, but here in ‘Running Shoes,’ Waters’
shouting does not make those connections to the inside; an excess of shouting but not an excess
of connections, not an excess that confuses and thrills. When one shouts too much and too
often, the villagers no longer respond to the cry of ‘wolf!’ So, there is something in the personal
storytelling of Waters and the cry of the voice that is part of the Pink Floyd Intensity, but left
uncontrolled (post-split), it fails to contain excess (to keep excess inside us); it does not do the
work of intensity, and hence it does not ‘work’ for us. Without the Pink Floyd Aesthetic, the
cry is not allowed inside to afect us.
So, is it that the role of the aesthetic in the Pink Floyd Intensity, the gold leafng that delivers
the message that cuts inside, that does the containing, to efect intensity? In echoes of earlier
times, Momentary Lapse and Division Bell start with the long sustained, drumless, harmonically
static synth and guitar amblings of Wish You Were Here and before. Unlike Waters’ preference for
heading straight into the narrative, Pink Floyd let the music ‘speak for itself,’ and it is distinctly
Floydian in texture and timbre in string-laden sustained synths. The luxuriousness of tone of
Gilmour’s guitar notes I can only describe as being like the moment one puts that frst chocolate
in one’s mouth and it takes just a short moment to seep satisfaction through the body before one
closes one’s eyes and gives a closed-lipped sigh of enjoyment and pure satisfaction. Something
has got inside, something that could bring with it more or less whatever it liked at this point,
so seduced are we with the Siren’s song. ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ sublates; the aesthetic
carries through, and when the lyrics kick in, they carry in them what has come before. We are
immersed within this totality, the positive dialectic, the upward aufheben that ‘suspends’ the past
and moves us forward, blown on the breeze, and within that enclosed totality the players, the
actors, assemble the intensity.
The opening numbers of Momentary Lapse and Division Bell have the aesthetic quality, but
they do not carry through a past; like empty rhetoric they start well and do not bring gravity. In
pre-split Floyd sublation can work both ways; ‘Comfortably Numb’ (granted the fan is already
almost breathless with intensity by this point anyway) succeeds in carrying the afect of the
music-words into the guitar solo, which then intensifes the afect, taking over the baton from
work done by the lyrics and music. However in, for example, ‘The Dogs of War’ (Momentary
Lapse), the generic nature of the lyrics, their lack of the personal, does not set up the intensity
for the guitar solo that follows. A totality is immersive because there is no room for anything
else to get in, when there is room, it fails to intensify. There is nothing particularly wrong with,
say, ‘One Slip’ as a song, a catchy chorus, somewhat general lyrics perhaps, but they still relate,
and the bass playing (let us be frank) is much better than it used to be; nonetheless, the sounds
allow in external (intertextual) associations, images of Jackson-esque ‘Thriller’ zombie arms
stretched out towards me break the totality, the immersion. Another occasion on my own with
no music playing, I am singing ‘On the Turning Away,’ but after the second line, I fnd that I am

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singing ‘all around the blooming heather’ from a nineteenth-century Scottish folk song instead.
Again, something else from outside has come in and dispersed the assembling hoards before
they reach critical mass.
The excited fan is, then, a believer. There are things outside, but they are not proper things.
Robert walked into Kaye’s record shop in Yate, a short walk from his home in Chipping Sod-
bury – an adventure for a 12-year-old. The shop was small, one central stand running down
the middle with records on either side and then record stands on each of the opposite walls of
the rectangular shop. Glass fronted, one normally took the right-hand side of the central record
stand to get to the counter, which stretched right across the far end if one was not there just to
browse. Robert pre-ordered a copy of the forthcoming single ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part
2,’ but he had a question for the man in a plain white tee-shirt on the other side of the counter,
‘Are people really buying Lena Martell’s “One Day at a Time”?’ The man gave a small chuckle,
smiled and said ‘Yes. Yes, they are.’
Of course, ‘One Day at a Time’ is a classic, a beautifully constructed song, and Lena Mar-
tell’s version32 stayed at number one in the UK charts for three weeks in October 1979. To a
12-year-old obsessed Pink Floyd fan, it was hard to believe. Robert was convinced that it was
a marketing ploy; we had all heard rumours of record companies buying their own records
to get into the charts and hence gain airplay and sales. Surely this must be what is happening
here? But clearly not: the man at the shop said so. The only other explanation, then, was that
people were ‘lacking’ something: they clearly could not see that this was not proper music, for
if they could, then it would be obvious that Pink Floyd was the best. They would, those that
were emotionally and intellectually intelligent enough, come to realise that Pink Floyd was the
best. Either they had yet to realise this (and had the capability to do so), or they simply were
not musical enough, not intellectually or emotionally intelligent enough ever to come to know
the truth. There were those that could be saved and those that had no soul to save. The latter
would simply have to have to go through life lacking any access to the truth. Robert felt a bit
annoyed by them.
The other is in confict not just that they are ‘wrong,’ that is, that my aesthetic judgement
holds as universal, but that this lack of consensus is problematic. The consensus is not required,
aesthetic judgment is universal and fnal, yet there are clearly others, and my every day being
here in the world creates an inauthentic they-self that conficts with an authentic my-self. This
irresolvable diference then that the other injects into aesthetic production creates tensions. This
intensity, the result of the other in aesthetic production, is a signifcant part of the Pink Floyd
Intensity: us and them, you and me, me or him, him and me alone, binaries but ones that do
not easily divide between the one and the other (Ranciere, 2011, uses an example artwork titled
‘I and Us’).33
The other is already external and internal to the one. Hence we see the pulling of the char-
acter Pink across identities, a desire to include the other, but then a break, a cut that turns to a
desire to exclude the other. And in the confusion of identity within Floyd, we are unsure what
is fction, what is fact, what stories are their stories? Is ‘Shine On’ about an absent Syd, Division
Bell an absent Roger, is Pros and Cons a recovering Pink, and what part of Pink was Waters
himself and what part Syd? It is hard to tell what is what, but this is part of the excess and the
confusion, the readerly-ness of the text (echoing Barthes). ‘4:50 AM (Go Fishing),’ as in many
parts of Pros and Cons, links intertextually to The Wall and The Final Cut. As if the bricks, the
building blocks, now lying in pieces, are still there but no longer a whole with a function.
We, the listeners, are now tourists visiting its ruins, walking up and down by it perhaps,
and we recognise the themes though they have lost their place, their position of pressure and
strength, and they beg the question, is this Pink picking upon the pieces and fnding his way

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forward after the fall of the wall? External context tells us that the album concept was ofered
at the same time as The Wall and not as a sequel – it has fragments of The Wall in it and so why
would it not be read this way? In some respect the failings of Pros and Cons would be ftting
for ‘Pink,’ with his heyday behind him; there are some moments of greatness, but they are not
coherent; it reminisces; it is recognisable as the ruins of the thing and not the thing itself. Such
is the album Pros and Cons in relation to The Wall.
The voice of Waters was beginning to dominate in The Wall, becoming shouty and angry,
yet it was contained within the Floyd aesthetic. The Final Cut is less an album in itself but rather
a contextualisation of The Wall, a postscript as well as a requiem, beautifully melodic as it is (and
arguably the most melodic of all Floyd albums), it is as if flmmakers were releasing a ‘making
of the flm’ documentary in its relationship to The Wall. If Hegel’s world-spirit (weltgeist) makes
itself manifest in worldly things with which to come to know itself, then perhaps The Final Cut
is this dialectic in action. The dedication to Eric Fletcher Waters (1913–1944) and the most
beautiful and powerful single accumulative structure in Floyds output ‘When the Tigers Broke
Free’ (perhaps ‘Eclipse’ from Dark Side being its nearest competitor in terms of its direct teleol-
ogy), which tells his (Waters’) story, says ‘this is what I wanted to say all along.’ By this, I mean
that the telling of the ‘facts’ in Final Cut does not communicate the intensity of the afect in the
way that the dramatisation of The Wall does, wrapped up as it is in the desire to communicate
‘being.’ No doubt it is embroiled in signifcation and representation, and the workings of afect
are those of being, of an signifying rupture far away from ‘this means that,’ yet rather ‘it is.’ Even-
tually following its absence from the vinyl release of the album, ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’
found its place in the album’s re-release on CD, and it segues in and out in accordance with its
aesthetic and its afect.
It is an accumulation picking up pressure instrumentally, lyrically and vocally on a single
destination to its climax at the very end. It almost feels as if everything, every part of Pink
Floyd that Waters was involved in, was about, and was leading to, this moment. The whisper-
ing Waters of ‘One of the Few’ places the calm for the opening horn of ‘When the Tigers,’ the
song then acts like the slow drawing back of a bow and arrow string until it is as taut as it can
be, and then the arrow is let loose at the start of ‘The Hero’s Return’ where Waters’ shouting
voice projects.
The Final Cut is not by Pink Floyd yet is ‘performed by Pink Floyd.’ Here the unwanted excess
that would leave intensity outside is still kept at bay with only just and for the last time with
Waters in the line-up at this point. That mainstay of Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright, The
Pink Floyd, have already broken up by this point, with Richard Wright not featuring. And while
Eric Clapton’s guitar playing on Pros and Cons is gutsy, controlled and brilliant, it does not con-
strain the excess of Waters in the manner in which Gilmour’s seductive and chocolate tones did.
The album cover for Pros and Cons is similarly awkward, not in a deliberate way but rather
more than a decade on from the seventies carry-on and calendar-girl culture of everyday sexism
in which ‘A Nice Pair’ was released in 1973, the high-heeled naked and beautiful backpacker is
already out of step with society (and one cannot critique something by merely doing the thing
one is critiquing, if indeed critique is what it is).
The rock rawness of the Pros and Cons album artwork is in opposition to the enigmatic and
much prog-rockier Momentary Lapse cover with its multiples and its juxtaposition of familiar
objects and situations that are incongruous when put together (familiar signs usually uncon-
nected bought together to make a new sign that is under-coded and in need of new meaning).
Waters is in these respects making a break from the ‘Floyd’ aesthetic; after all, he is not Pink
Floyd. Post-spilt Pink Floyd is (in name at least) still Pink Floyd, and hence its brand identity is
continued in the artwork.

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 Robert Wilsmore

Radio Kaos and Division Bell fare somewhat better in this respect. At least the covers avoid
gender issues and focus on communication, the two heads face to face that also make one face
are both ‘talking’ to each other (courtesy of the signifying lights in the background), while Radio
Kaos uses the binary dot-dash system of Morse code. Similarly, the use of sound efects pervades
Pink Floyd’s output, and that continues in post-split albums. We perhaps have to rethink these
less as sound efects and more as a reversal of the diegetic sound that we are used to in flm. We
are familiar with the non-diegetic of music in flm, whereas with an album where the primary
reality is music, it is the ‘real’ sounds that are outside of the primacy and hence are non-diegetic
(the ‘scene’ being the music in this case). If music in flm carries the ‘being’ of the narrative
(making us ‘be’ scared or ‘be’ happy rather than merely representing fear or happiness), then the
sound efects in accompanying the music attempt to ground the abstract afect in the real world;
this results in the afect being pulled from the body, though not completely, not Deleuze’s
(2010) externalisation but a dual position of being inside and outside.34 Dark Side of the Moon
threaded this technique throughout; The Wall used it more dramatically, emphasising its rock-
opera quality. Post-split, though, it generally fails to hold the intensity that being both inside
and outside carries with it; the rowing of ‘Signs of Life’ that fails to build into ‘Learning to Fly,’
the ticking and cars of Pros and Cons that sets a scene breaks the success of the reverse diegetic
by making the music secondary (when its primacy is a necessity). The diference between the
actual dark side of the Moon and the dark side of the Earth is the diference between reality
(of the side we never see, the tidal lock) and simulation (the fake end of it all), between the
abstracted laughter where afect is literally extracted and isolated and the laughter of a DJ that
mocks, between the rowing that rows to nowhere and the ticking that puts actual time before
the reality of the music.

Conclusion
Robert walked from the pitch area out into the tunnels of Wembley Stadium away from the
crowds while a Waters-less Pink Floyd were playing on stage. It was not Floyd’s fault; he had
grown up, and the intensity of frst love had faded some years ago now. There was a hint of
sadness, yes, and more overwhelmingly a sense of thanks. How odd it is, to be immersed in the
intensity of a band’s music but to know that one cannot send back that afect to them. Such is
fandom. And to be able to see, later, from the outside the bubble that one was in, and also to
recognise that it was no illusion: it was crammed full of reality to the point of excess and confu-
sion that was the thrill of the Pink Floyd Intensity.

Notes
1 Blair, R. (2013). ‘Introduction: The Multimodal Practitioner’, in N. Shaugnessy (ed.), Afective Perfor-
mance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. London and New York: Bloomsbury, page 141.
2 See Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Afect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University
Press; Klossowski, P. (1999). Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Smith, D. W. (trans.). London: Athlone
Press; Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2011). What is Philosophy? Tomlinson, H. and Burchill, G. (trans.).
London and New York: Verso.
3 Op. cit. Massumi (2002). Also Wetherell, M. (2012). Afect and Emotion. A New Social Science Understand-
ing. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, page 62.
4 Op. cit. Wetherell (2012); Op. cit. Massumi’s (2002).
5 Reason, M. (2016). ‘Afect and Experience’, in Reason, M. and Lindelof, A. M. (eds.), Experiencing
Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, page 85.
6 Ibid:86.
7 Op. cit. Massumi (2002):25.

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 Te Pink Floyd Intensity

8 Deleuze, G. (2015). The Logic of Sense. NY: Columbia University Press, page 337. Also, Op. cit. Klos-
sowski (1999).
9 Smith, D. (2012). Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, page 326.
10 Hawking, S. (1988). A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes. London and New York:
Bantam Press, page 140.
11 Deleuze, G. (2010). Diference and Repetition. London and New York: Continuum, pages 280–281.
12 Nick Land is a controversial philosopher accused of expressing intolerance to other cultures and
faiths. His philosophy has been labelled Dark Enlightenment or Neo-Reactionary, as it seems to
critique democracy and post-liberalism. Student of Land Mark Fisher described him as, ‘our
Nietzsche – with the same baiting of the so-called progressive tendencies, the same bizarre mix-
ture of the reactionary and the futuristic.’ See markfsherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/
terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism.
13 Kingsmith, A. T. (2017). Locating the Alt-Right: Nick Land’s Romantic Irrationalism as Critical Delir-
ium. Retrieved from https://Non.Copyriot.Com/Locating-The-Alt-Right-Nick-Lands-Romantic-
Irrationalism-As-Critical-Delirium/: n.p.
14 Plotinus (1991). The Enneads. MacKenna, S. (trans.). London and NY: Penguin Books, page 46.
15 Peters, G. (2005). Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas. Burlington USA:
Ashgate, page 13.
16 For discussions of Kant’s critique of judgement and aesthetics, see, for example, Rueger, A. (2009).
‘Enjoying the Unbeautiful: From Mendelssohn’s Theory of “Mixed Sentiments” to Kant’s Aesthetic
Judgments of Refection’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67(2):181–189; Zuckert, R. (2007).
‘Kant’s Rationalist Aesthetics’, Kant-Studien, 98 443–463; Zammito, J. H. (1992). The Genesis of Kant’s
Critique of Judgment. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
17 Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. London: Blackwell Publishing, page 167.
18 Ranciere, J. (2011). The Emancipated Spectator. Elliot, G. (trans.). London and New York: Verso, page
56.
19 Ibid:59.
20 Op. cit. Plotinus (1991):154.
21 Ibid:xxxv.
22 Žižek, S. (2015). Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London and New
York: Verso, page 332.
23 Adorno, T. (2008). Lectures on Negative Dialectics. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, page 17.
24 Ibid.
25 Benjamin, W. (1955). Illuminations. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
26 Lacasian Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge – regarded as one of the most brilliant
theoretical physicists since Einstein.
27 Monty Python (1983). The Meaning of Life. Terry Jones (director) and John Goldstone (producer). The
Monty Python Membership and Celandine flms.
28 , British science fction writer best known for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978).
29 Op. cit. Deleuze and Guattari (2011):164.
30 Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Glaser, S. (trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
31 Op. cit. Massumi (2002):xvi. Also, Op. cit. Deleuze and Guattari (2011).
32 Martell, L. (1979). ‘One Day at a Time’, On Lena Martell One Day at a Time (1980).
33 Op. cit. Ranciere (2011).
34 Op. cit. Deleuze (2010).

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 24
THE CULTURAL LEGACY
OF SYD BARRETT’S
ENGLISH PASTORAL
Simon Gwyn Roberts

Introduction
Notions of cultural imperialism in relation to popular music have tended to revolve around the
market penetration and subsequent dominance of so-called ‘Anglo-American’ popular culture.
But Syd Barrett was an early riposte to this reductive confation: contributing to a line of artists
who, inversely, found an English voice in a Americanised art form.
It is hard to discuss Barrett’s legacy without reverting to cliché – his short period of creativity
and subsequent drift into isolation has been trawled over and micro-analysed for decades. But
that legacy, when assessed in wider political terms, remains relevant. Barrett’s mobilisation of
a distinctive southern English pastoral vision – subtly emphasising an identity that withers the
moment it is directly articulated or politicised – retains its signifcance as a totem of non-toxic
Englishness. This chapter argues that it connects to post-Brexit debate around English identity,
as well as the older observation that two competing visions of Englishness and the English land-
scape exist – one based on imperialism, law, royalty and confict; the other on the ancient, the
pagan, the whimsical, the land itself.
This chapter will therefore explore the legacy of Barrett’s work in relation to contemporary
political debate about place, belonging and the politics of identity.

Versions of Englishness
The retreat into idealised Englishness, or a personal vision of Englishness, was not an entirely
original inspiration for musicians when the Barrett-led Pink Floyd began plundering childhood
literature and half-remembered landscapes, then fusing them with a psychedelic imprint. Some
of Barrett’s near contemporaries had also experimented with musical forays into versions of
Englishness and themes of lost childhood. The Ray Davies-composed Village Green Preserva-
tion Society of 1968 is an obvious example,1 albeit a record that saw less commercial and critical
success than his earlier output with The Kinks. It is notable that even in the context of the era,
Davies saw this work as being ‘about the decline of a certain innocence in England.’2 The idea
that popular music might be used as a vehicle for the exploration of Englishness and its contra-
dictions was therefore also present in the music of other artists and even at that relatively early
stage was often accompanied by a semi-politicised take on the implications of change.

438 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-31

 Syd Barrett’s English pastoral

In a diferent context, and a diferent era, Vaughan Williams and others linked folk music
traditions to specifc landscapes, presenting English folk songs as ‘the natural development of
excited speech.’3 Vaughan Williams in particular felt that these were ‘founded on the rhythm and
timbre of native language’ and were therefore expressive of ‘a national essence.’4 Some English
regions conformed to this ‘national essence’ better than others; notably those that were rural and
(broadly) southern. Robert Stradling (1998) suggests that ‘Severnside’ – a somewhat notional
English ‘region’ of his own defnition – is unlike any other in terms of the ‘intensity of published
reference to . . . culture, history, destiny.’5 In that sense, A. E. Housman’s novel A Shropshire Lad
(1896) combines with Joseph Gibbs’ 1898 novel A Cotswold Village as difering musical-literary
takes on this stereotypically English region, bounded, in Stradling’s view, by Shropshire to the
north-west and the Cotswolds to the south-east. Stradling credits Gloucester-born composer-
poet Ivor Gurney,6 in particular, as having ‘the insight of the true artistic seer . . . he apostro-
phized the city’s unique historical-geographical position in relation to the surrounding region.’7
He cites Gurney’s ‘intensely pastoral patriotism, which as early as 1905 wished to write out the
names in a verse of the places worth dying for.’8
Gurney sufered from bipolar disorder for much of his life, his mental illness worsened by the
wartime experiences that form a signifcant proportion of his work. Gurney experienced a major
breakdown aged 28, after which he was hospitalised: he spent the last 15 years of his life in psy-
chiatric institutions. Barrett, famously, sufered from mental illness worsened – or accelerated –
by drug use and the realities of life in the Pink Floyd of the mid-to-late 1960s. Since his death
in 2006, much speculation has surrounded the nature of Barrett’s mental collapse, with some
suggesting bipolar disorder, others Asperger’s syndrome and others schizophrenia (while oth-
ers still, including his sister Rosemary, have argued he was merely ‘eccentric’). Whatever the
reality, there are clear parallels between some of Barrett’s lyrics and the poetry of Gurney. Both
embody a distinctive indirect lyrical take on landscape and the pastoral: these, for example, are
the opening lines of Gurney’s ‘I saw England – July night’ (1920–21):

She was a village

Of lovely knowledge
The high roads left her aside, she was forlorn, a maid –
Water ran there, dusk hid her, she climbed four-wayed.
Brown-gold windows showed last folk not yet asleep;

Water ran, was a centre of silence deep,

Fathomless deeps of pricked sky, almost fathomless
Hallowed an upward gaze in pale satin of blue.

That sense in which a particularised, highly individual vision of the English landscape is explored
through compressed, allusive language, is mirrored by, for example, Barrett’s ‘It Is Obvious,’
from his 1970 (fnal) solo album Barrett. The lyrics describe ‘a valley, a hill’ where there a ‘Wood
on quarry stood, each of us crying.’ Barrett then talks of a ‘velvet curtain’ that is ‘grey,’ a ‘blanket
where the sparrows play,’ and ‘trees’ next to ‘waving corn’; that his ‘legs move . . . to you,’ and
‘in suspense’ ‘our minds shot together.’
For Barrett, Englishness and the pastoral was a little more elusive and less often directly
articulated. It was darker, perhaps, and it was apolitical. His solo material, notoriously haphazard
and chaotic in its recording, touches on these themes lyrically more often than his work with
Pink Floyd, although the legacy of the Floyd material remains considerably more infuential.
Indeed, by far the most celebrated example of Barrett tapping into those themes is the Floyd

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album that bears his distinctive mark more than any other: Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967).
With a title culled from chapter seven of Kenneth Graham’s 1908 novel Wind in the Willows, the
album pursues the blend of the sinister and the whimsical that characterised all his best work.
The blueprint thus established is detectable across huge swathes of British (more often spe-
cifcally English) popular culture, from flms like the Wicker Man and A Field in England to
musicians like XTC, Robyn Hitchcock and the Young Knives.9 For Graham Coxon of Blur, its
infuence was profound. Chapman (2010) quotes Coxon, ‘The accent was my own, the childish
rhymes came from my own childhood . . . the music was expressive rather than technical.’10 The
lazy confation of ‘Anglo-American’ begins to seem as simplistic as any other trite generalisation
in this context.

Topophilia
Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) coined the word ‘topophilia’ to defne the attachment that people have to
a particular place.11 He suggests that place is not just a ‘thing’ in the world but a way of under-
standing the world. It suggests value and belonging, whereas space implies economic reality
and rationalism. Place is invested with signifcance – because places imply attachments and
connections between people and place. For Carter, Donald and Squires (1993) spaces do not
ground identifcations, but places do.12 Space becomes place by being named, by embodying
the symbolic and imaginary investments of a population – it is space to which meaning has been
ascribed. By challenging that meaning and perhaps subverting it, as artists and musicians often
do, new forms of identity are forged, the results of a diferent, more nuanced, vision – and one
that is much harder for populist politicians and one-dimensional patriots to mobilise.
Barrett never specifcally ‘named’ place, never harnessed the latent power that the naming of
place can achieve emotionally, but as Sarah Cohen (1995) argues, an Ivor Gurney-style articula-
tion of place is not always necessary in the context of rock and pop:

Music plays a very particular and sensual role in the production of place, in part
through its embodiment of movement and collectivity, and through the peculiar ambi-
guity of its symbolic forms, music can appear to act upon and convey emotion in a
unique way. It represents an alternative discourse to everyday speech and language,
although both are of course ideologically informed and culturally constructed.13

For Barrett, the place was Cambridge, a city to which he returned after his mental decline,
presumably associating it with security, continuing to live there until his death, aged 60, in 2006.
His connection with the town, as with so much else about his life, is hard to pin down, partly
because of his reclusivity and the narrowing of horizons that must have involved. Yet Barrett
and Cambridge remain inextricably linked. As Chapman says, ‘Syd’s unfulflled early promise
and dreams abandoned seemed to hover over the place [Cambridge] like a spectral presence.’14
Raymond Williams’ (1958) much-cited but rarely defned ‘structure of feeling,’ which was
intended to describe the felt quality and pattern of life as experienced by individual ‘cultures’
(he also said, famously, that culture was one of the hardest words in the English language to
defne) is perhaps apposite here.15 Barrett in many ways invented the rock music version of the
English pastoral, although he was drawing on the longer and broader tradition of Housman,
Williams, Gurney and others when it came to the use of musical form to explore that ‘felt pat-
tern of life.’ His take proved highly infuential, with dozens of artists subsequently using varied
forms of rock music to explore and interrogate their own culture.

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 Syd Barrett’s English pastoral

Music’s efectiveness in stimulating a sense of identity, in preserving and transmitting cultural

memory and in establishing the production of place has frequently been commented on by
academics and critics. Individuals can use music as a cultural ‘map of meaning,’ drawing upon
it to locate ‘themselves in diferent imaginary geographies at one and the same time’ and to
articulate both individual and collective identities, as Stuart Hall (1995) has suggested.16 Barrett’s
work is sufused with imaginary geography and half-remembered landscapes: his lyrics get close
to expressing the essence of place while seeming to revel in the indefnable nature of southern
England, the perfect backdrop to songs about a love unfulflled or a psychedelic fashback to
childhood. The notion of loss, something just out of reach that cannot quite be recaptured or
articulated, is central to this.
For Leyshon, Matless and Revill (1998), ‘the images and experiences engendered by music
are .  .  . dependent upon the particular circumstances in which the music is performed and
heard, and upon the musical style and activity involved.’17 Barrett’s music and lyrics are con-
textual; they emerged from a particular era: two decades after the end of the war, a version
of a subconscious patriotism that dared not speak its name (or, more accurately, would have
deemed direct articulation inappropriate) far removed from the crass mobilisation of later years
as English identity politics became weaponised by populist politicians.
The gradual shift in academic, cultural and political emphasis from space to place has fre-
quently been commented on.18 Space, once, meant endless opportunity – place, by contrast,
geographical constraint. But space suggests the abstract, the impersonal, even the imperial. Place
is personal, communal, human, and as such it seems more appealing and contemporary. A major
caveat to that appeal has become necessary since the middle years of the 2010s, however, in the
sense that these notions can, of course, be powerfully manipulated because place is also – by
defnition – populist. We all have homes. The potential for place to be mobilised by populist
politicians was, arguably, not given sufcient consideration by an earlier generation of academ-
ics and cultural commentators who saw only the positives in place’s humanity and constrained
dimensions.
As a partial consequence, some have observed that there is now a liberal tendency to celebrate
‘good’ localism (thriving communities, locally sourced food, vernacular architecture, indigenous
languages) while simultaneously deriding ‘bad’ localism (hostility to immigration, nativism,
bombastic nationalism). The suggestion is that there is a fundamental hypocrisy in so doing, that
the two are inherently connected.19 David Goodhart (2017) articulated a diferent but related
observation in his much-reported take on Brexit, where he suggested that the United Kingdom
and much of the developed world has split into two opposing tribes: ‘somewheres’ (those rooted
in place and community) versus ‘anywheres’ (mobile, open to change, tolerant).20 This, he says,
is the contemporary faultline that made Brexit inevitable, and Theresa May then transplanted
the observation into populist politics with her ‘citizens of nowhere’ speech.
Although a superfcially attractive way of explaining contemporary culture wars, this obser-
vation seems dubious in the context of popular culture, a false dichotomy. It is perfectly possible,
in fact it is arguably standard, for interesting musicians to be rooted in place and simultaneously
open to wider infuences: indeed, the two are frequently mutually reinforcing, not mutually
exclusive – in the sense that travelling reveals the distinctiveness of one’s own culture by forcing
you to see it afresh and discern an infnitely nuanced blend of diferences and similarities which
provoke empathy, not antipathy. Consider, in this context, obvious examples like Lennon and
McCartney’s work on Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967), or Blur’s Parklife (1994):
that attractive blend of personal heritage and global infuences that, when combined interest-
ingly and meaningfully, produces unique and groundbreaking works of art.

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 Simon Gwyn Roberts

Whatever the contemporary political role of place might be, Feld and Basso’s (1996) Senses
of Place suggests that ‘storytelling,’ in whatever cultural form that takes, seems to be the universal
means of place-making.21 Stories – whether songs, artwork, or works of literature – have the
power to transform object and area into place and landscape. For Burden and Kohl (2006), ‘sym-
bolic landscapes and places have specifc cultural meanings that construct, maintain and circulate
myths of a unifed national identity, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths.’22 The Piper
at the Gates of Dawn repeatedly plays with stereotypical ideals of the English landscape, inviting the
listener into a vision of nature which combines the aesthetic and the psychological. Burden and
Kohl (2006) suggest that landscape is already an encoded way of seeing the countryside, and when
mobilised by English artists of whatever stripe, ‘this splendour has then stood for everything that
is quintessentially English.’23 There is, of course, nothing exclusively English about this: Schama
(1995) argues that the cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of
nature.24 All our landscapes, he suggests, are imprinted with our tenacious, inescapable obsessions.
Hudson (2006) argues that the links between music and senses of place and identity are
strong both historically and contemporarily. There is, he says, ample evidence to support the
proposition that music has the ability to conjure up powerful images of place, feelings of deep
attachment to place.25 He describes it as an oddly neglected topic in human geography – sug-
gesting such work as there is tends to be conceptually limited. Yet music infuences virtually all
aspects of culture and is obviously ‘spatial’ in terms of its impact and construction.

Englishness and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn

In this context, Barrett’s take on place and Englishness imbues Piper with a highly distinctive
imprint, a fourishing of ideas that had a lasting impact. For Nick Kent (1974), this creativity set
the stage in Barrett’s song-writing:

for what can only be described as the quintessential marriage of the two ideal forms of
English psychedelia – musical rococo freak-outs joining together with Barrett’s sudden
ascent into the lyrical realms of ye olde English whimsical loone, wherein dwelt the
likes of Edward Lear and Kenneth Grahame.26

There’s a suggestion that it veers close to parody in places, although there were of course
wider factors at play that go some way to explain the lyrical content. Characteristic of the
album is ‘The Scarecrow,’ which combines takes on the English landscape, the English pastoral,
with Barrett’s own deteriorating mental state. As the song directly suggests, with references to a
‘scarecrow as everyone knows,’ with its ‘straw everywhere’ and that he ‘didn’t care,’ reveals Bar-
rett was already resigning himself to the reality of decline.
‘Matilda Mother,’ meanwhile, explicitly references themes of middle-class English childhood
whilst also seeming to predict a reclusive future, back with his mother in the Cambridge family
home. Barrett recalls ‘The doll’s house, darkness, old perfumes’ and ‘fairy stories’ told by his mother.
Elsewhere, the drug-addled nursery rhymes of ‘Flaming,’ references out of body experiences
fused to the English countryside, and pursues the pastoral theme whilst infusing it with a dis-
tinctive psychedelic take with reference to ‘buttercups’ in the light and ‘Sleeping on a dandelion.’
The essential Englishness of ‘See Emily Play’ is another obvious example. Lyrically, all
four of these tracks are deliberately childlike and naïve: there is no equivalent of the Ivor
Gurney-style sophistication of Barrett’s compositions ‘It Is Obvious’ or ‘Wined and Dined,’
with lines like ‘chalk underfoot, light ash of blue’ from the later solo work.27 Yet for Kent
(1974), the ultimate harsh critic, Piper ‘manages to capture Barrett’s blinding spurt of acid

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 Syd Barrett’s English pastoral

creativity in its perfect ascendant,’ with its songs about hallucinating cats, eastern religions
and ‘the spirit of Albion suddenly transformed into space-age day-glo.’28 It is certainly pos-
sible to identify Barrett-era Pink Floyd as something of a focal point in the history of the
darker take on the English pastoral, a hinge around which the past and future of this par-
ticular vision revolve.
Piper established an infuential blueprint to be pursued and developed by the likes of the
aforementioned British bands XTC and Blur, but the vision of a specifcally depoliticised Eng-
lish identity had a considerable precedent before being plundered by Barrett in an autoethno-
graphic way. As with the mobilisation of what Vaughan Williams called ‘musical citizenship,’29
the artistic technique of ‘defamiliarization’ was hardly new in the English context. Looking
afresh at the commonplace, the everyday – warping it and considering it from a diferent per-
spective – obviously resonated with the psychedelic explorers of the 1960s but had a much older
precedent in the United Kingdom. Knights (1996) for example, cites the work of H. V. Morton
in the 1920s. Superfcially, a series of celebrated travelogues and motoring guides to the English
regions, Morton’s work was actually underpinned by a ‘synoptic and almost spiritualised vision.’
For Knights, ‘the England for which Morton and implicitly his readers were searching was rural,
or small town, an England of thatched cottages, market towns and cathedral closes, its centre of
gravity is the Georgian South Country.’30 It was, he suggests, a vision of England manifested and
fed by sources as various as Cecil Sharp’s folk songs, country dancing, horticulturalist Gertrude
Jekyll and composers Edward Elgar and Vaughan Williams.
For Knights, however, Morton’s work is not always what it frst appears to be in his most
famous 1920s work, ‘In Search of England,’ which is still in print. He argues that ‘the pastoral
quest does not always lead to utopia. It was always possible for the travelogue format to articu-
late a darker, more contradictory, even dystopian vision.’31 The Russian concept of ‘Ostranenie,’
or defamiliarisation, enhances perceptions of the familiar by presenting them in unfamiliar or
destabilising ways. Sigmund Freud (1919) later articulated a similar technique in Das Unheim-
liche (‘The Uncanny’), suggesting that ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads
back to what is known of old and long familiar.’32 Whilst on one level, the work of Morton
holds an obvious attraction to patriots and the nostalgic, on another, its opinionated idiosyn-
crasy strikes a diferent tone.
The notion of the simultaneously strange and familiar also underpins much of Barrett’s most
creative work, and indeed it is fundamental to it – the disturbing subversion of standard English
tropes, seeing the familiar landscape in unfamiliar ways, partially drug-induced but partially also
playing homage to this older tradition. It plays with the ‘two traditions’ of Englishness previ-
ously mentioned: feeding into the contemporary (in late 1960s terms) take on those alternative
visions of whimsy, mysticism, paganism; the England into which the new counterculture could
comfortably plug itself, the England of the Glastonbury festival, stone circles, Fairport Conven-
tion and Silbury Hill. H. V. Morton’s deliberate romanticism spills over into near-parody in its
attempt to interpret the familiar:

These Warwickshire lanes, deep and banked; these mighty trees; these small, arched
bridges over small streams, how well I knew them when I was a boy. There were little
villages in which men still spoke Elizabethan English, such as Welford-upon-Avon,
where there was a maypole, where they grew the most delicious raspberries and took
the sweetest honey from straw skeps. Here it was years ago that I saw a man in a smock.
There was Bidford – ‘drunken Bidford’ – where an old woman, with a face like a
withered apple under a mauve sun-bonnet, used to point out the crab-tree beneath
whose shade Shakespeare, so the legend went, slept of a carouse at the Falcon Inn.33

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 Simon Gwyn Roberts

Jan Morris (2002) suggests that Morton’s work became ‘a myth in its own lifetime . . . the
Englishness he represented, like the England he described, lives on only in myth, longing, and
literature, and in his own engaging cadences.’34 It was made possible, in other words, by an
essential confdence born of insular independence. That, perhaps, is what has changed most in
the intervening years: a sense that this confdence has been replaced by what Fintan O’Toole
(2018) describes as an aggressive sense of victimhood, the ‘lure of self-pity, the weird need to
dream England into a state of awful oppression.’35 This rhetoric presents English identity as
something very diferent, simultaneously bombastic and defensive, framed around something it
is not, rather than the quiet reafrmation of cultural practice that characterises more tangible
forms of national identity.
Writing about Morton, Morris (2002) suggests that:

we know better than the author ever could how fragile was the matter of his descriptions.
How could he have guessed that the proud society he celebrates would so soon be piti-
fully unsure of itself, or that the great imperial sovereignty it underlay would be left high
and dry among the nations, searching decade after decade for its role in a new world?36

In the contemporary political context, this view from 2002 seems unusually prescient.
Apart from establishing a specifc blueprint for an entire strain of English popular culture, The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn also marked the highpoint of Barrett’s infuence within Pink Floyd,
as his behaviour and performing became more erratic. For Clinton Heylin (2012), ‘(Syd’s) own
inner world was closing in. In a single weekend at the end of July (1967), so the story goes, he
went from being the pied piper of English pop to Mr Madcap.’37 Heylin continues:

By the end of 1967 Barrett was hardly alone, inside or outside ‘his band’, in his strug-
gle to retain both his creativity and his sanity. A whole generation of English singer
songwriters were wrestling with their inner demons, usually – though not necessarily –
let out of the bottle by the LSD genie.38

Much has been written about that era, with Nick Kent (1974) suggesting that the fnal track
on Piper, ‘Bike,’ is a portent of things to come, ‘reeking as it does of warped crazy basements
and Barrett’s eccentricities beginning to go the way of the warped . . . concurrent with all this
mind-blowing music, strange things were starting to happen to the Floyd but more particularly
to Barrett himself.’39
Barrett was, famously, replaced by Dave Gilmour – but not before recording ‘Jugband
Blues’ for the band’s second album, Saucerful of Secrets. ‘Jugband Blues’ uses specifcally English
phraseology such as ‘It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here’ to pursue the theme
of mental decline, although it is equally easy to interpret the next line ‘I’m most obliged to
you for making it clear that I’m not here’ as a comment on his persona non grata status within
the band.

Context is everything
Context is indeed everything. At the time, Englishness would rarely have been directly articu-
lated, still less used in popular music or crass politicking. Instead, the fantasies of a magical Brit-
ain fused with hippy ideals in the late 1960s and found a natural habitat in southern England.
Glastonbury opened near the legendary site of Avalon and was soaked in psychedelic mysticism
from the start – the apotheosis of that ‘second’ vision of England that opened up this chapter,

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the one that celebrates the ancient, the pagan, the landscape, and rejects the pomp and circum-
stance of the other.
It is not an original observation to argue that nostalgia is a prism through which Britons
understand their present and their past, and John Harris (2010) explores that argument in the
context of pop culture in his book about British music in the 1990s.40 A tendency to wallow
in nostalgia is hardly unique to Britain, of course. But in the context of pop culture, the 1990s
emergence of what came to be called ‘Britpop’ sometimes misrepresented that earlier era of
global rock and pop dominance in its attempts to celebrate it. In reality, the creative outburst
of the late 1960s was more subtle in its referencing of nostalgic or national tropes. Consider the
diference between Barrett, or The Beatles, in their mid- to late-1960s pomp, and some of the
subsequent attempts to reference the mores of that era.
The child’s eye view of The Beatles’ 1967 track ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ for example,
referenced a very specifc place, sufused with memories of a very specifc childhood. For
McDonald (2007), it revolves around ‘an eerie longing for a wild childhood of hide-and-seek
and tree-climbing: this visionary strawberry felds of his [Lennon’s] imagination.’41 McDonald
goes on to suggest that the true subject of English psychedelia was neither love nor drugs but
nostalgia for the innocent vision of the child, and the impossibility of that being recaptured as
an adult: ‘The Northern childhood motifs in Sgt Pepper are too pervasive to ignore, whether
or not actively coordinated.’
Compare this to the crass narrative that was sometimes woven by the media around Britpop.
Zuberi (2001) argues that the cultural nationalism of 1990s Britpop has been generally regarded
as ‘‘a circling of the wagons,’ a defensive reaction against the perceived threat of multiculturalism
and American cultural hegemony.’42 The April 1993 edition of Select magazine,43 for example,
pictured Suede’s Brett Anderson on the cover, backed by a Union Jack and the phrase ‘Yanks
Go Home.’ In fairness, even at the time Anderson seemed an odd choice for such crude alpha
male triumphalism, with his obvious Bowie infuences and inherent sexual ambiguity. And
Zuberi’s argument is rather reductive: the bands loosely placed under the ‘Britpop’ banner were
actually a disparate bunch with a wide range of ideological takes on identity and their relation-
ship with it.
That said, in a broader political context this kind of framing did form part of a wider shift,
whereby distinctively British (almost exclusively English) forms of 1990s pop music were mobi-
lised for political reasons. As Bennett and Stratton suggest (2016),

critical to a contemporary understanding of the Britpop phenomenon is the way in

which it was efectively hijacked . . . by mainstream politics in the mid-1990s . . . a
crucial and seemingly willing partner in the promotion of a new cultural political
discourse – Cool Britannia.44

Blair’s New Labour project was central to this, viewing it as a prime example of the UK’s
‘soft power,’ exactly the kind of vibrant modernity it wished to project globally. Dig a little
deeper, however, and it can be read as symptomatic of a still broader set of political trends, even
if – in origin – it was more innocent in its simple nostalgia. As Bennett and Stratton (2016)
argue:

1960s groups were nostalgic for a lost empire and a time before American-driven
consumerism . . . groups in the 2000s nostalgic for what they think was the simpler
nationalism of Britain in the 1970s, a time, perhaps, before devolution and the vote to
join what was then the Common Market.45

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 Simon Gwyn Roberts

But unlike the nostalgia that cuts through Piper or ‘Strawberry Fields,’ it is not the poignancy
of attempting to recapture childhood innocence that began to characterise the post-Britpop
political mobilisation of its emotional appeal. Instead, the appeal of nostalgia began to be infused
with that sense of exceptionalism that, while always present, came to dominate certain aspects
of English public life in the 2010s. In a much-quoted 2019 interview, author John Le Carré
attempted to characterise this: ‘What really scares me about nostalgia is that it’s become a politi-
cal weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it,
really, as something we could return to.’46
It is unfair, and an exaggeration, to suggest that the roots of this lie in that lightweight ver-
sion of independent music that dominated 1990s charts (not least because Britpop itself was
an absurdly reductive term, bracketing wildly diferent bands together under one meaningless
umbrella description). But Britpop as broader cultural phenomenon was certainly implicated in
the production of a nostalgic, hybridity-erasing form of Britishness (even if it was Englishness
‘writ large’).
The fundamental split in the referencing of English national identity between ancient mysti-
cism and bombastic imperialism is rarely cited post-Brexit, but it is analogous to the broader
schism characterising contemporary politics. Competing visions about the nature of English
identity have characterised post-Brexit debate but alternative, more nuanced ideas of what
Englishness might look like have been notable by their absence: there has been little attempt to
mobilise that alternative form, perhaps because it warps and withers the moment it is directly
articulated. Instead, the renewed force of English nationalism expresses itself in a robust but
unusual way. It is rarely based around community engagement with shared traditions and cul-
tural practice (although these do, of course, exist) but more often on symbolism, sport and
politically inspired ‘values.’ At its best, this is arguably more inclusive than the more typical
‘shared tradition’ model familiar in Continental Europe, but at its worst, its lack of tangibility
combined with laments for a lost period of former dominance leads to a destructive focus on
‘the other’ that can be easily exploited.
In contrast, celebrating distinctiveness on a micro scale places a renewed emphasis on the
regional; the plural and the distinctive that does not have to be damaging or introspective.
Barrett’s mobilisation of a very personal nostalgia and take on the southern English landscape
represented the opposing pole of bombast and exceptionalism, capturing – in its innocence – a
particular time and a particular place. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons Syd Barrett was the
one creative element of Pink Floyd that it was acceptable for punks and those that followed to
say they liked, or were infuenced by. Alan McGee, founder of infuential indie label Creation
Records professed to being ‘obsessed by Barrett and Pink Floyd.’47 In 1987, Beyond the Wild-
wood was released by Imaginary Records, a collection of Barrett cover versions by numerous
British and American indie bands. There have been multiple other cover versions over many
years (from Bowie’s version of ‘See Emily Play,’ through The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Vegetable
Man,’ to Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘Terrapin’). In 2012, Paul Weller released When Your Garden’s
Overgrown, about Barrett, and multiple other tributes and references continue to be made (there
are, for example, two diferent bands called Baby Lemonade).
The essential appeal of Barrett’s work remains, perhaps because there is something fun-
damental about that blend of the particular and the universal and the way in which it con-
nects to the innocent discoveries of childhood. Schama explores the ways in which cultures
promote myths that relate to landscape: the notion of an idyll, a pastoral Arcadia, seems to
transcend global societies, he suggests.48 The most ‘intensely felt landscapes’ are those we
knew as a child, and therefore there is a kind of innocence about them. The fusion of such
memories with other, much broader infuences characterises a particular strand of English

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popular culture: it is typifed by Barrett’s work, and it is in danger of being lost in the
contemporary political environment, which prefers instead to mobilise the alternative ver-
sion. Barrett’s period of creativity lasted no more than four years, after which his status was
cemented by his reclusion, yet its legacy still connects. The celebration of an identity that
cannot easily be defned seems a singularly appropriate legacy for an artist who redefned
what it meant to be elusive.

Notes
1 ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ is a single and album by the English band The Kinks (1968).
It is a nostalgic refection on the ‘village green’ often associated with English villages before the war –
some kind of imagined rural ideal.
2 Heylin, C. (2012). All the Madmen: Barrett, Bowie, Drake, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, the Who and the Journey
to the Dark Side of English Rock. London: Constable, page 66.
3 Williams, R. V. (1987 [1934]). National Music and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4 Ibid.
5 Stradling, R. (1998). ‘England’s Glory: Sensibilities of Place in English Music, 1900–1950’, in Leyshon,
A., Matless, D. and Revill, G. (eds.), The Place of Music. New York: Guilford Press, page 189.
6 Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was an English poet.
7 Op. cit. Stradling (1998).
8 Ibid.
9 The Wicker Man references the earliest, still extant, English folk song in its startling and infamous con-
cluding scene: ‘Summer is icumen in’, a thirteenth century ‘rota’ revolving around rural signs of the
changing seasons, ‘lhude sing cuccu’ and so on.
10 Chapman, R. (2010). Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head. London: Faber and Faber, page ix.
11 Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A  Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. New York:
Colombia University Press, page 4.
12 Carter, E., Donald, J. and Squires, J. (eds.). (1993). Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, page vii.
13 Cohen, S. (1995). ‘Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers, 20(4):434–446. The quote is on page 343.
14 Op. cit. Chapman (2010):xvii.
15 Williams, R. (1958). ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Williams, R. (ed.). (1989), Resources of Hope: Culture,
Democracy, Socialism. London: Verso, pages 3–14.
16 Hall, S. (1995). ‘New Cultures for Old’, in Massey, D. and Jess, P. (eds.), A Place in the World? Places,
Cultures, and Globalization (The Shape of the World: Explorations in Human Geography). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
17 Leyshon, A., Matless, D. and Revill, G. (eds.). (1998). The Place of Music. New York: Guilford Press,
page 286.
18 See for example, Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (1996). Senses of Place. New Mexico: University of New
Mexico.
19 See Meek, J. (2019). Dreams of Leaving and Remaining. London: Verso.
20 Goodhart, D. (2017). The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London:
Hurst.
21 Op. cit. Feld and Basso (1996).
22 Burden, R. and Kohl, S. (1996). Landscapes and Englishness. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pages 207–224. The
quote is on page 23.
23 Ibid.
24 Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Perennial, page 18.
25 Hudson, R. (2006). ‘Music, Identity and Place. Progress in Human Geography’, Progress in Human
Geography, 30(5):626–634.
26 Kent, N. (1974). ‘The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett’, New Musical Express, 13 April.
27 This lyric is actually from ‘Wined and Dined.’
28 Op. cit. Kent (1974).
29 Williams, R. V. (1934). ‘Should Music Be National?’, in National Music and Other Essays. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pages 3–22.

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 Simon Gwyn Roberts

30 Knights, B. (1996). ‘In Search of England: Travelogue and National between the Wars’, in Burden, R.
and Kohl, S. (eds.), Landscapes and Englishness (Spacial Practices 1). New York: Rodopi, pages 165–185.
Quote is on page 171.
31 Ibid:172.
32 Freud, S. (1919). ‘Das Unheimliche’, Imago. Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswis-
senschaften V. Retrieved from gutenberg.org/fles/34222/34222-h/34222-h.htm.
33 Morton, H. V. (1934/2002). In Search of England. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, page 247.
34 Morris, J. (2002). ‘Foreword’, in In Search of England. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, page xi.
35 Economist editor Walter Bagehot came from an entirely diferent political tradition and era, yet was
similarly scathing as he outlined the inescapable class dimensions of English identity in 1867 (The
English Constitution): ‘The mass of people yield obedience to the select few’, as well as its lack of real
substance, with its dependence on superfcial pomp; ‘people defer to what we may call the theatrical
show of society . . . we must not let in daylight upon magic [in reference to the monarchy].’ Also see,
O’Toole, F. (2018). ‘The Paranoid Fantasy Behind Brexit’, The Guardian. 16 November. Retrieved
from theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/16/brexit-paranoid-fantasy-fntan-otoole.
36 Op. cit. Morris (2002):xi.
37 Op. cit. Heylin (2012):2.
38 Ibid:7.
39 Kent, N. (1974). ‘The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett’, New Musical Express, 13 April.
40 Harris, J. (2010). The Last Party – Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. London: Harper
Perennial.
41 McDonald, I. (2007). Revolution in the Head – The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. Chicago: Chicago
Review Press, page 191.
42 Zuberi, N. (2001). Sounds English; Transnational Popular Music. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, page
23.
43 Maconie, S. (1993). ‘Pop Babylon’, Select, April 1993, pages 70–71.
44 Bennett, A. and Stratton, J. (2016). Britpop and the English Musical Tradition. London: Routledge, page
2.
45 Ibid:5.
46 Le Carré, J. (2019). ‘John le Carré: Politicians Love Chaos – It Gives Them Authority’, James Naugh-
tie, BBC Radio 4, Today Programme, 14 October 2019.
47 McGee, A. (n.d.). ‘My Life in Vinyl: Alan McGee’, Loing Live VINYL. Retrieved from longlivevinyl.
net/alan-mcgee-interview/.
48 Schama, S. (2004). Landscape and Memory. London: Harper.

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 25
TEMPORAL STRUCTURATION
IN PINK FLOYD’S THE WALL
Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

Introduction
‘What the fuck was that?’ Stephen Spielberg asked at the premiere of the flm The Wall in 1982.1
It is not certain if this was a criticism or exclamation of having seen something diferent. What
can be said is Alan Parker and Roger Waters had made something diferent – a flm that cri-
tiqued society on many levels.
This chapter analyses the interconnecting temporal structural narratives of Pink Floyd’s The
Wall (1979) and the 1982 flm of the same name. The main research question is: if The Wall is
a story of oppression, how did it become a message for hope? In other words, all but two songs
from The Wall tell of violence, oppression, fear, abuse, obedience and death. The story can best
be seen from the movie – and in short, this is the story. In his hotel room, Pink, the main char-
acter, has withdrawn from social relationships, but on refection, and as a meta-metaphor for all
listeners and viewers, Pink decides to take back control, to re-engage with the world around
him, refusing to be a passive victim.
The main frame of reference for this analysis are the iconographic aspects of The Wall that
produce a temporal structure. This choice is made because The Wall has had many incarnations,
and they difer from each other mainly on the performance aspects, while the lyrics and images
used maintain the temporal structure. The iconography of The Wall, it can be claimed, is rich,
having some deep and disturbing historical, social, political and psychological messages from its
initial release. Take for example, the album’s front cover. It is a wall; it looks at frst to be plain
and uninteresting. But it is a metaphor to the meaning of the music and lyrics of the tracks and
overall concept of the album – some people live behind the psychological wall they have built
between themselves and society. When opening the album cover (it is a double fold), there
is a huge stadium with marching claw-hammers, an exaggerated legal judge, Pink’s wife and
mother, his schoolteacher and a lawyer. The subject, Pink, is watched from all the diferent sides
which can be seen as pressure and control from society. The images created by Gerald Scarfe tell
the story of psychological oppression and are as telling as The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch.
By iconographic is meant, the referent materials are the music, songs, staging, graphics, ani-
mations, costumes and video/flm, symbols which are used to conjure, in the popular imagina-
tion, the meanings of the artwork. By artwork we are referring to the recorded album on vinyl,
CD-ROM, the flm and the live performances. These materials consist of the following, by no

DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-32 449

 Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

means exhaustive, chronology of The Wall from its initial release in 1979 available products and
works:

• 1979. Pink Floyd – The Wall. Harvest (UK) SHDW 411. Columbia (USA) PC2 36183
• 1983. Pink Floyd – The Wall. VHS MV400268, (1989) M400268, (1994) M204694.
MGM/UA Home Entertainment, and 1999 (CV50198) by Columbia Music Video.
• 1999. Pink Floyd – The Wall. DVD (UPC: 074645019895) by Columbia Music Video.
• 2005. Pink Floyd – The Wall. (UPC: 074645816395) by Columbia Music Video.
• 1990. The Wall – Live in Berlin. Waters and producer Tony Hollingsworth created, staged
for charity at a site once occupied by part of the Berlin Wall.
• 2010–2013. The Wall Live. Waters performed the album worldwide on his tour.
• 2012. Pink Floyd – The Wall. Re-released on vinyl. EMI (B00536OCYG).
• 2012. Pink Floyd – The Wall. Immersion Edition. EMI (B004ZNAXX2).2
• 2015. Roger Waters: The Wall. A flm of the live concert.
• 2016. Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera. Waters adapted The Wall into an opera, with
contemporary classical composer Julien Bilodeau. It premiered at Opéra de Montréal in
March 2017 and was produced by Cincinnati Opera in July 2018.
• 2017–2018. Us+Them Tour. Waters world tour included tracks from The Wall, including
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Parts II and III’, ‘Vera’, and ‘Comfortably Numb.’ The content
of Us+Them was regarded as politically controversial.
• 2019. Us+Them Film. Directors, Roger Waters and Sean Evans.

Our proposition is this. Regardless of the re-working of The Wall, the temporal structure and
use of iconic referents remains intact: that between 1979 through to the Us+Them tour, while
Waters highlighted diferent examples of political oppression, the fundamental use of temporal
structure remained the same. And it was through this that Waters has been able to maintain the
social, economic and political relevance of The Wall for successive generations and audiences.

Teoretical frame of reference: structuration (Giddens)

and temporality (Mead)
While structuration theory, as originally formulated by Giddens (1984),3 is not an empirical
approach to research, we have, nonetheless, looked to apply notions from the theory (rather
than the theory as a whole) to the empirically available materials.
The reason for employing a frame of reference derived from structuration theory is that it
allows for an exploration of relationships between several key concepts evident within the nar-
rative of The Wall. A core tenet of structuration theory is that social structures cannot be sepa-
rated from human agency; both are intimately intertwined. That is, social structures are shaped
by history, politics, economics, traditions and other forms of institutions, including social class,
status, religion and ethnicity. Thus, human agents inhabit social structures that are not of their
making and are subject to the normative expectations (social and legal rules) of such structures
in a given context. In many ways, the main character ‘Pink’ in the Alan Parker and Roger
Waters flm The Wall (1982) lives within the structures of music capitalism, celebrity, marriage
and, among others, British history, specifcally the Second World War.
Giddens (1984), in his explication of structuration theory (which is not without some seri-
ous criticisms), employs the notion of ‘duality’ between the two realms of social reality – struc-
ture and agency. Within this he employs a number of concepts to describe (possibly explain)
how members of a particular society (with its social structures) can go about their daily business.

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 Temporal structuration in Te Wall

He claims (1984) individuals (social actors or agents) are normally aware of the expectations of
social situations in most given contexts; they have ‘knowledge’ (or ‘knowledgeability’) of the
social rules of social interaction and can for most situations apply these rules so as to reproduce
the expectations of the particular social structure in which they fnd themselves.4 Hence, in
knowing and acting in accordance with the social expectations, agents simultaneously conform
to and reproduce the social structure of those expectations. This is the duality, according to
Giddens (1984), of human existence. Pink, as we see as the flm progresses, releases his hold
of the expectations of the structures of infuence around him; he begins to act in ways that are
counter to expectations despite being forced, through drugs administered to him, to ‘perform’
and go on with the show.
The movie especially shows that for Pink the organised sets of structures – the music business,
marriage, family, education and history – can be seen as the resources which have enabled him
to become famous (to become part of the institution of celebrity). At the same time, the same
structures make demands on him that are not good for his mental well-being. As a member of
society Pink will, we assume, have been aware (knowledgeable) of the social rules of his social
world and must have been able to routinely apply them as a resource; otherwise how did he
become a successful rock artist/performer? Giddens (1984) calls this duality ‘practical con-
sciousness’ and ‘discursive consciousness.’5 The former refers to actors’ awareness and knowledge
of the rules and expectations placed on them. The latter refers to what actions can be done
within the expectations without violating expectations (the rules).
Within this dynamic are two types of resources: the resources over which we can have some
degree of control (objects, information, etc.) and resources that can generate authority over
an individual(s). For this conceptual framework to ‘work,’ both types of resource must be co-
present in every social situation. As such, diferent social situations can be managed by most
actors in a routine way. The routine nature of these structuring properties Giddens (1984)
argues for ‘make it possible for . . . similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time
and space.’ A core resource for most people is the routine nature of social interactions; we have
‘trace memories’ embedded into our knowledge of how to adapt our behaviours to most situa-
tions within most social structures. According to Giddens (1984),

Structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and
as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents.6

This brings us to an important point in Giddens’ (1984) theory and which is generally shared
among social theorists. This is that the social contexts of action (behaviour) are temporal and
relational. This means we order time into diferent temporal spheres that co-exist; the past,
present and future are always with us. Pink is shown living in the present time, refecting hap-
hazardly on his life – his recent relationship break-up, his childhood, school and domineering
mother, cruel schoolteachers and the death of his father in war. He fantasises a future in which
he is a dictator oppressing others often seen as being diferent; then he imagines he is on trial,
his accusers being all the people in his life who have had authority over him. The structure and
dynamics of temporality, as a perceived reality, we argue, are at the centre of The Wall.
The social psychology of George Herbert Mead (1932) is particularly insightful on this point.7
Mead (1932) proposed that time is a concept and is constituted through ‘emergent’ events.
Actors constitute time by continuously re-focusing events of the past and future. Time, for Mead
(1932), is not a clear succession of distinct events but something that is multi-dimensional, with
diferent levels, that is grounded in the agents’ presence and, importantly, their current percep-
tions of their past. Time and memories of past events are, for Mead (1932) subjective and social;

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 Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

they are related to others. It is important to note here that they are also related to others who
are deemed signifcant in the persons’ life; memories are ‘relational.’ According to Emirbayer
and Mische (1998), who made a close reading of his work on temporality,

Mead insists that the human experience of temporality is based in the social character
of emergence, that is, in the passage from the old to the new, and in the interrelated
changes occurring throughout the various situational contexts within which human
beings are embedded. As actors respond to changing environments, they must con-
tinually reconstruct their view of the past in an attempt to understand the causal con-
ditioning of the emergent present, while using this understanding to control and shape
their responses in the arising future.8

In the movie, Pink, in one scene, sits in a hotel room he has trashed, refecting on his life
in terms of his current situation and feelings. There begins a series of ‘memories’ – they begin
with a song by Vera Lynn and images of a young boy (Pink) fnding the telegram his mother
received informing her that her husband had been killed – that lead into visions of traumatic
relationships experienced by Pink. The traumas of his past are clearly related to and evidence
of an ‘awakening of delayed and conficting responses’ in Pink.9 Pink, alone in a hotel room, is
experiencing a continuous tsunami of multiple erupting emotions about relationships he has
had with other controlling people in his past and present.

Present, past and future

Mead (1932) suggests agency be thought of as a chordal triad, made up of the past, present and
future. While there is tonal variation between the three, it is the ‘past,’ he argues, that has the
most resonance. Mead (1932) says the past qualifes the present, that ‘its presence is exhibited in
memory, and in the historical apparatus that extends memory . . . when they have taken on the
organized structure of tendencies.’10
In the opening scene of the flm, therefore, Pink appears to be alone. But he is not alone; he
is with his past, in an embedded relationship with it, with how he remembers it. Pink is placing
himself within a structure of relationships and historical events in ways that are selective. He may
be doing this so as to make recognisable his own self (the ‘me’) as victim within these vignettes
of interactions with others. Pink is interpreting his own biography not as fact but as meaningful
events so as to understand, and ft with, his current situation. Both Berger (1963) and Strauss
(1969) also talk about individuals and groups being able to ‘reinterpret’ or ‘re-see’ their past to
explain their current and possible future existence.11 Hence, as for Mead (1932) the past has
multiple possible interpretations, as do the present and the future. For Mead (1932), the past is
as ‘hypothetical as the future.’12
This takes us back to Mead’s (1932 and 1936) analogy. Mead (1936) says there is no one
present but ‘[d]urations [that] are . . . continual sliding of presents into each other’ and that in
the ways in which one can listen to a melody, ‘there would not be a melody if there was a sound
at this moment, another at the next, and so on, each taken by itself.’ Once integrated into a
structure, separate notes, or events, are given meaning as a whole. Or in Mead’s (1936) words,

There must be an interpenetration of the diferent notes in order that there may be a
melody, and that is what is characteristic of all our thought. Duration, as such, always
involves this interpenetration, not only in the sense that what is taking place extends

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over into what is coming into existence and anticipates what is coming on, but also
that it gives the meaning and value to things.13

How the notes are arranged to create the melody is a matter of musical convention, and
how these conventions are used is up to the composer. Hence, the past does not determine the
present or the future. The past is not a prison in the same way the future cannot be determined
from the present. Unless, that is, an individual chooses to ‘see’ their current self, in their present
situation as determined by their past, and how they chose to remember and frame it.

Narrative and messages

Within the general frame of reference outlined previously, the central device to the telling of
Pink’s life is narrative. And it is within this narrative structure that Waters makes his political
messages visible.
Through Pink’s selective reminiscences and projections into a possible future, the audience
comes to know his perspective on his life and the world around him. Pink’s perspective is
anchored in events that have traumatised him; they are, therefore, all negative experiences. And
it is the telling of these experiences that enables Waters to critique, in diferent ways, what he
sees as the authoritarian institutions and unhealthy relationships common to his and successive
generations. This is also seen as a visual representation in the album cover art. For the catego-
risation of present, past and future, see Table 25.1, which lists the tracks from the 1979 album
and 1983 flm.

Table 25.1 Present, past and future in the album and motion picture of The Wall

Album Track Present, Past, Film Track Present, Past,

Sequence Future Sequence Future

1 In the Flesh? Present In the Flesh? Present

2 The Thin Ice Past The Thin Ice
3 Another Brick in the Past Another Brick in the Past
Wall, Part 1 Wall, Part 1
4 When the Tigers Broke Past
Free
5 The Happiest Days of Past Goodbye Blue Sky Past
Our Lives
6 Another Brick in the Past The Happiest Days of Past
Wall, Part 2 Our Lives
7 Mother Past Another Brick in the Past
Wall, Part 2
8 Mother Past
9 Goodbye Blue Sky Past What Shall We Do Present
Now?
10 Empty Spaces Present Young Lust Past
11 Young Lust Past One of My Turns Present
12 One of My Turns Present Don’t Leave Me Now Present

(Continued)

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 Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

Table 25.1 (Continued)

Album Track Present, Past, Film Track Present, Past,

Sequence Future Sequence Future
13 Don’t Leave Me Now Present Another Brick in the Present
Wall, Part 3
14 Another Brick in the Present Goodbye Cruel World Present
Wall, Part 3
15 Goodbye Cruel World Present Hey You Present
16 Hey You Present Is There Anybody Out Present
There?
17 Is There Anybody Out Present Nobody Home Present
There?
18 Nobody Home Present Vera Past
19 Vera Past Bring the Boys Back Past
Home
20 Bring the Boys Back Past Comfortably Numb Present
Home
21 Comfortably Numb Present The Show Must Go On Present
22 The Show Must Go On Present In the Flesh Future
23 In the Flesh Future Run Like Hell Future
24 Run Like Hell Future Waiting for the Worms Future
25 Waiting for the Worms Future Stop Present
26 Stop Present The Trial Future
27 The Trial Future Outside the Wall Future
28 Outside the Wall Future

Source: 2011 Pink Floyd – The Wall Digital remaster, Pink Floyd Music Ltd/Parlophone Records Ltd 50999
028944 2 3, and Pink Floyd – The Wall (The Sound Track of the Motion Picture, from Discogs discogs.
com/Pink-Floyd-The-Wall-The-Soundtrack-Of-The-Motion-Picture/release/2948837

Present
Pink is having a dialogue with his self: both his present self and his self of his past (his ‘me’ at that
time). He is not perceiving his self in a metaphysical way but in terms of the ways he remembers
‘being’ in a series of events. His sense of agency is directed, then, towards the persons who sur-
rounded him in particular places at particular times. He is having, in Bakhtin’s (1986) terms, a
dialogue with his past self that is flled with overtones, or themes, that are linked to his present
situation and condition.14
Where Pink is currently is not a good place for him. He is alone, traumatised and losing
control. Part of his attempt to cope is to have internal conversations based on his selection of
memories. These memories are of his ‘self ’ having interactions with others who, in some way,
have, from his standpoint, led him to his current problems.
This dialogue has a familiar structure; it is a narrative about relationships. In terms of a
chordal structure Pink is projecting his memories in order to construct a coherent narrative.
There is nothing irrational or odd in this. The melodic structure Pink gives to his memories
furnishes him with a vague set of temporal sequences (or events) along with, and maybe more
importantly than, a coherent set of causes for his wretched state of being. In Bruner’s (1986)

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terms, Pink provides the essential elements for his narrative – a ‘character’ (himself), his ‘plight’
and ‘consciousness.’15
It is from Pink’s ‘present’ as he sits in his hotel room that his ‘plight’ is revealed. The audience
is furnished with narrative vignettes and the main themes. Pink’s plight is that from birth he has
been building a wall between his self and the world. It all began with the death of his father in
war; now it is crazed fans, violence, authoritarianism and obedience, themes that have all led to
intolerance, violence and death.
War is, therefore, a major recurring theme in The Wall. In the lyrics and album art and in the
flm in live action, animation and graphics, images of war are shown. The album art contains a
picture of a war plane which seems to have a mouth and eyes.
The second theme is relationships. We see Pink becoming conscious of his personal relation-
ships with schoolteachers, his mother, wife, manager and fans, those who have had structural
authority and emotional power over him. The tracks ‘Empty Spaces’ and ‘Don’t Leave Me
Now’ are set in the ‘present’ but informed by Pink’s past. In these two songs Pink addresses his
estranged wife, wondering what he will do now without her while lashing out at her adultery,
while in ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ Pink remembers the physical and mental cruelty of
his teachers in an education system that had become a factory in which children were the raw
materials to be minced.
Most of the present ‘tenses’ in The Wall are used to take the audience to a past memory or
imaginary future from Pink’s mind. In the next section, we look at the past, before the future.

Past
Pink’s experiences of events and relationships, as he remembers them, are set in a general-
ised past that many of his generation will have knowledge about and some will have personal
experiences of. The Second World War, bombing, death and injury, world leaders, symbols
of oppression and hate, patriotic songs, uniforms and more will, for Waters’ post-war genera-
tion, be common points of reference. Although experienced and remembered diferently, a
sufcient set of iconic images exist to provide a set of common reference points. Some will be
‘good’ memories and others ‘bad’: memories of sufering and enjoyment are, according to Mead
(1934), what being a conscious refecting human is about. We cannot escape our personal and
societal temporal memories.16
Aspects of the past, as found in Pink’s constructions of his self, are told across nine songs.
None of these songs are about happy memories; they are all negative, resources for Pink to
compose his melody of causes for his current, present plight.
For Pink who he is, his ‘me,’ is the result of oppression from teachers, his mother and wife
and the social institutions they are part of – education, matriarchy and marriage. This structure
is represented on the inside sleeves of the album cover. In ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Parts 1
and 2,’ Pink recounts the cruelty of some teachers who enjoy humiliating their pupils. The lyrics
of the ironically titled song ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’ tell of how the creative individual-
ity of pupils is crushed by some sarcastic teachers, who have their own problems in their homes.
Fear and the fear of violence run through these songs.
The theme of violence is dominant in three songs, ‘Goodbye Blue Sky,’ ‘Vera’ and ‘Bring the
Boys Back Home.’ In the flm, it is ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ that uses the most embedded and elabo-
rate iconography, created by Scarfe’s animations, to communicate the fear and consequences of
war, dictators and obedience. Scarfe’s animation is frightening, but it is also how Pink remem-
bers the war. The opening scene of ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ mirrors the end of the frst track on

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the album and flm, ‘In the Flesh,’ which shows Pink’s mother with a pram, enjoying a peaceful
summer’s day in a garden. This sense of tranquillity is destroyed for her as a wife and mother and
for her country by war17 – an all-encompassing industrialised war of mass destruction and death,
pursued by fanatics following orders from a despot. For Pink, the war killed his father and made
his mother overprotective, resulting in him beginning to build his wall.

Future
For Mead (1938), the present is less than the future. The future is not what will be but what can
be and, therefore, has numerous possibilities. The future is always uncertain and unpredictable
and is not determined by the past. If, says Mead (1938), the future were determined by the past,
then ‘there would be no means of distinguishing the future from the present.’18 But there are
two aspects to the future, the immediate and the hypothesised future.
There are fve songs in which Pink deals with his possible future. In ‘In the Flesh,’ ‘Run Like
Hell’ and ‘Waiting for the Worms’ Pink imagines he has the authority of a dictator, who can
install fear of him in his followers (audience) and get them to hate others. While in ‘The Trial’
and ‘Outside the Wall’ the message is diferent, there is a narrative change. These two songs are
about taking responsibility, reconnecting with the world and becoming socially conscious of the
walls that divide and separate people.
In his visions of his possible futures, Pink is organising his responses and understanding of his
past and present. Like in Mead’s (1938) distinction between the ‘I’ and ‘me,’ Pink refects that
his ‘I’ has responded to the expectations and behaviours of others, whom he had no control
over.19 His ‘me,’ however, envisions a future in which expectations merge. Pink has evaluated
the expectations imposed on him from his past and present and decided that his social self, the
‘me’ aspect of his self, is to take control over his reactive ‘I,’ to take responsibility and re-engage
with the world around him, to take a social role. By this it is meant, we, the audience, should
also engage with what is happing in our world.

From despair to hope

At the beginning of this chapter we said that Pink, the main character, has withdrawn from
social relationships, but on refection, and as a meta-metaphor for all listeners and viewers, he
decides to take back control, to re-engage with the world around him, refusing to be a passive
victim. In this section we will look at the iconographic elements that furnish the listener and
viewer with the necessary information to understand what they are listening to and seeing.
Within this we initially return to the work of Giddens (1984), and we take the notion that ‘oth-
ers’ can muster resources, including their authority as given in an institutional structure such
as a school, to control an individual. At the same time, we acknowledge this is not binary, that
the individual experiencing the authority of others can do likewise to others and that they too
are subject to the authority of others: that there is a constellation of authority. In The Wall the
sarcastic schoolteacher exercised a cruel authority over his pupils. At the same time his wife
exercised a domineering authority over him. At the end of the narrative Pink refects on these
structures; he sees (hypothesises) he can have authority over his fans, that he can be a totalitarian
dictator. He also shows a discursive awareness that his future is not determined, that he need not
be like others, that he has a choice. He has examined the ways in which external authority in
the form of individuals, institutions and events has caused him grief and trauma and that regard-
less of how he has re-framed his past, it is not a determinant of his future. Pink has discovered
his sense of agency, his self in a social world.

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Te iconography of war for the British

Waters’ use of generalised images, lyrics, events and people to signify the experience of the
Second World War is typically British. This is not meant in any derogatory way. It acknowl-
edges Waters’ portrayal of Pink’s biography in the context of mid-twentieth-century British and
European history – the war and post-war years.
In the flm version of The Wall, Waters, Scarfe and Parker use hard-hitting live scenes, anima-
tion and graphics to send the message war is horrifc. In his later shows Waters supplemented
images of the Second World War with contemporary images of war, deprivation and sufering.
In the opening scenes of The Wall, Pink imagines a soldier, his father, preparing for battle.
The soldier lights an oil lamp, signifying this is a time from the past. Using the light from the
lamp, he lights a cigarette, and shell fre is heard, as the lyrics to ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’
play. The soldier sighs and begins cleaning a revolver. The lyrics tell us this is wartime – that the
forward command orders the ranks to hold the Tigers and the Anzio bridgehead, that no one
from the Royal Fusiliers survived. The point being made is the Generals sacrifced ‘ordinary
lives,’ including Waters’ father, his mother’s husband. The scene turns to a playing feld, showing
in the distance a solitary fgure and a rugby (football) goal.
‘Tigers,’ ‘Anzio’ and ‘Royal Fusiliers’20 are, for the war generation and those born in the
1950s, common reference points in British history.21 They are terms that belong to the war.
The image of the soldier consolidates these as an initial defnition of a situation. This initial
defnition is followed up by the crowd scene. Fans are seen rushing into a stadium, followed by
soldiers running; the soldiers are being shelled and blown up. Fans are seen being pushed and
beaten by the police (American police). The semiological index here is the violence would not
exist without the agents of control, the police or generals.
In the flm segment when Pink comes home from school and his mother is not home, he
fnds a telegram from the War Ofce informing his mother of her husband’s death. He also fnds
some bullets and his father’s uniform. He recalls the telegram as being a scroll, with gold leaf,
having been signed by the king with his own rubber stamp. Clearly it was not a scroll and there
was no gold leaf. We would like to think, as did Pink, that his fathers’ life meant something. But
the bureaucracy of war, the rubber stamp, says otherwise.
For the war generation ‘the telegram’ was the means by which most people were informed
of the plight of loved ones, whether they had been injured, taken prisoner, were missing or had
been killed. No one wanted the telegram boy knocking on their door. The telegram was short
and to the point, often beginning with the line, ‘We regret to inform you . . .’
The uniform and bullets Pink fnds symbolise two aspects of war: those who wear the uni-
forms and follow orders and the death of soldiers. Trying on the uniform, Pink sees himself in a
mirror. The uniform connects Pink to his father and also to war. This is how the next genera-
tion could look in the next war.
The next set of scenes play on and amplify the images of the war. Animation shows a mas-
sive bird of prey transform into a bomber as ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ plays. London and searchlights
appear as people wearing gas masks run for shelter into tunnels. Hundreds of bombers fll the
sky, as down in the city there are scenes of destruction in the form of twisted steel girders. Then
a soldier is seen falling, dead on the battlefeld. Other soldiers appear as ghosts, and fnally we
see blood running down a grate into the drain.
The blitz on British towns and cities is another stock piece of knowledge in British Second
World War history. The blitz of London is probably most remembered after Coventry. But
regardless, the images of searchlights, bombers in the sky and destruction, along with gas masks
and shelters, are sufcient to index the fear of the blitz.

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The theme of war is, therefore, a thread running through The Wall. In later scenes and lyr-
ics, the death of Waters’ father is re-visited. In the flm there are scenes of trenches reminiscent
of  the First World War, full of dead soldiers, of sand dunes such as those at Dunkirk being
bombed as British soldiers run with nowhere to get cover. Plus, when Pink is slipping further
into mental and physical decline, we see he is watching on television the flm The Dam Busters22
(1955). And fnally, in ‘Vera’ and ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ and the railway station scene
showing soldiers, sailors and airmen returning to their loved ones, Pink waits on the station
platform, looking for his father, watching all the families showing love and emotional relief.
Pink’s father is, as we know, dead. For Waters, ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ was the central song
on the album.23 It is also, for Pink, a turning point in his mental health.
Dunkirk, the Dam Busters, and Vera Lynn are similarly common reference points in the
collective conscience of the British war and post-war generations. The events of Dunkirk and
the Dam Busters support popular narratives of bravery, efort and ingenuity. At Dunkirk an
armada of small ships crewed by British citizens rescued 338,226 soldiers from the beaches as the
Germans took control of Western and Northern Europe. And Vera Lynn, known as the ‘forces’
sweetheart,’ recorded some of the most iconic songs of the war such as ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and
‘The White Clifs of Dover.’
But the Second World War was over 75+ years ago. And while remaining relevant to Waters’
generation, it has, we may propose, less relevance to contemporary generations. For the tem-
poral aspects of the narrative of The Wall, this is not a major issue. This is because the anti-war
message running through The Wall is clear. The same images still have the core meaning about
the nature of war and its consequences. In Waters’ recent tour, US + THEM (2017–18), a range
of political themes were projected onto huge screens above the stage, including support for
Julian Assange, opposition to anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies and support for Palestine.24

Obedience
In The Wall there are a series of haunting reminders of what the consequences of obedience and
acquiescence to authoritarian ideologies can be. In Giddens’ (1984) terms, these are the struc-
tures that make resources, such as authority, available to its members to enforce expectations. At
the same time there is the process of obedience – of giving active support to the agent exercising
authority. In extreme structures this relationship engenders extreme behaviours not merely from
people with extreme views but, as Waters shows, all kinds of people. However, Waters begins
with an everyday, recognisable authoritarian structure – the school.
The social, physical and psychological power of schoolteachers, as part of the institution of
education, is introduced in the ironically titled ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives.’ The teachers
in the staf room hear the school bell and march like an army down a corridor – they are going
into battle. This is a place of education, a school. Colour has signifcance in this corridor scene.
The walls are red and white. The same red appears later in the fascist scenes.
In the flm, the children are shown wearing faceless, expressionless masks. Other children,
on a railway train of cattle trucks, are also shown wearing the same masks. The cattle trucks
are a powerful index of the ‘faceless’ Jews and others transported to concentration camps. The
school is not a concentration camp; schools are like the camps by being part of a wider structure
based on industrial technologies and methods to subjugate individuality. The Wall claims that
whatever makes us human, such institutions have the power and authority to crush individual-
ity, to render people into objects.25
In the schoolroom, with desks in rows, children with heads down, the teacher walking
between the desks – all of these defne the place and the power structure. The lyrics of the song

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tell of teachers who hurt pupils in ‘any way they could.’ In the flm, Pink is picked on by the
teacher, who pours derision on Pink’s poems. In doing so he tries to elicit consent from Pink’s
classmates by holding up Pink’s book of poems, reading aloud the lyrics from ‘Money’ – from
one of the most successful albums of all time. The other children laugh at Pink. The social
stigma gives Pink another reason for his wall.
The behaviour of the male schoolteacher is situational. Who he is depends on where he is
and with whom. In the school he can act as a despot. In his home he is the one who is obedi-
ent. The lyrics of ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ and the movie portray the teacher as a
being subjugated by his wife; she dominates and controls him. When he goes home the lyrics
tell us his ‘Psychopathic [wife] would thrash [him].’ The teacher’s home is familiar; it is a British
middle-class home. On the wall is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, on the dining table is sil-
verware, and there are net curtains at the windows – all iconic symbols of respectability. Hence,
school and marriage, as societal structures, have within them dialectical relationships in which
any person’s sense of self can be defned by another. The song portrays a teacher who, in his
own home, doesn’t have a voice. The video shows how his wife makes him eat a piece of food;
he does not like doing it, but he obeys.
The teacher, according to the movie, is an unhappy man who does not have a voice in his
own home. The frustration of being controlled is put in contrast with the aggression he shows
towards the school pupils in the movie.26 In the flm, following the scene where his wife domi-
nates him, he is seen ‘thrashing’ a young boy with a cane. His position as a teacher provides
him with the power to be cruel, to transfer his frustration onto an innocent party. If we see this
as a dialectal relationship, the subjugated equally express their frustration. And this is what the
school pupils do when they rebel against the school and institution of education.
In the flm, school desks are smashed up, uniforms torn of, windows broken and fres started
by the pupils. They are expressing their frustration as anger. They are angry over being pro-
cessed as objects for the needs of the ‘system.’
In previous scenes we see lines of children walking in a regimented line on a gantry in a
factory. The lyrics claim, ‘We don’t need no thought control.’ Children sitting at desks appear
on the same gantry. They are on a conveyor belt. From having human faces, the children are, as
they move along the conveyor belt, given masks to wear. A large clock, a maze of rooms, as a
machine’s wheels turn, and children march (with featureless faces) in formation, overlooked by
the male teacher in an academic gown; he holds a cane.
Rows and rows of children are shown in the next scene. They are arranged to look like
legions from the Roman army or like Nazis at a Nuremberg rally. The children all sing the same
lyrics, ‘We don’t need no education’ as the teacher rants at them, shouting, ‘you can’t have any
pudding if you don’t eat your meat.’
The images of a conveyor belt appear, and one by one the children fall of the end of the belt.
They fall into a meat mincer. On the wall is a shadow of a hammer turning a machine. Out of
the machine comes minced meat. In Althusser’s (1971) terms,27 educational systems exist to
produce the kinds of citizens the system, such as capitalism, needs. This is the reproduction of an
obedient workforce that can read, write and do maths. They systematically socialise pupils into a
system that mirrors the workplace – governed by time, authority, industrialised procedures and
competition. The ideology forces, through threats and coercion, children to accept their role as
objects and to hide or reject their essential individuality, creativity and independence.
Obedience, as a relationship within societal structures, is a consequence of perceived author-
ity and what the subjugated endorse.
Pink, still alone in his hotel room somewhere in America, uses a telephone to call his wife,
who is presumably in England. A  man answers her telephone. Pink now knows she is with

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another man. Scenes of violence follow. First an animation of two fowers appears on screen –
one represents a penis, the other a vagina – they dance around each other, simulating passion
before consummating their relation. The vagina fower dominates the penis fower. Back in
the possible present, outside the stadium, police (American police ofcers) grab, push and use
batons to beat Pink’s fans. Meanwhile several female fans have sex with security guards to get
backstage, where they have sex with the roadies. In this scene, the female fans are shown using
their sexuality as a resource to get what they want and have circumvented the power relation-
ships of the space between audience and backstage.
One fan goes with Pink to his room, now a large trailer. At frst, he is not interested in her.
He sits watching the British war movie on the television, The Dam Busters (1952). He, none-
theless, has sex with her, and afterwards, sitting in a chair in front of the television, blood drips
from his hand. On the wall behind him a shadow appears; it is a woman. The shadow grows
larger, threatening Pink.
The soundtrack plays ‘[you] were all just bricks in the wall,’ as Pink trashes everything in
his room. Any sense of his present and past has gone for Pink; his grip on who he thought he
was was tenuous; this has now gone. Pink has no hold on who he is anymore. The Wall he now
sees in front of him is solid; it is too high and too long for Pink to break through it. This is a
moment of consciousness and realisation for Pink. He takes back control of his immediate sur-
roundings. All of the parts from the broken and smashed items in the room are neatly laid out
by Pink. He washes and shaves all the hair of his body, including his eyebrows, cutting himself
as he does so. On the television the war flm continues.
Pink now imagines what it would be like if he took control. In a world where people acqui-
esce, given his status as a rock star, he can use this resource to control others. But before this
happens, in the flm, Pink’s body is consumed by worms; it transforms into a hideous decaying
hulk before metamorphosising into Pink the fascist dictator. Pink has been reborn; he no longer
wears the masks others have provided for him. His mother, wife, schoolteacher and father are
bracketed, placed into a psychological box. This is, of course, all in Pink’s imagination.
Back in the present, revived by drugs administered by a doctor, under instructions from his
manager, Pink is taken to the show. In the lyrics Pink asks, ‘Why don’t I turn and run?’ followed
by, ‘I didn’t mean to let them – Take away my soul.’ Pink decides that the show must go on, but
not the way his manager would expect it to.
The frail, tortured and oppressed Pink takes on the role, or persona, of a fascist dictator. His
uniform is black and has a round collar with studs; an armband of black and red contains crossed
claw hammers as the emblem, with a black leather belt. The metal buckle also has the hammers
crossed, and he wears a baldric across his chest. This is the common look and iconography of
1930s fascist movements like the British Union of Fascists28 and the National Socialist Workers
Party (a.k.a. Nazis).
The iconography of fascism is common knowledge, as is the behaviour of its followers and so
too the consequences for minority groups. From 1944 onwards, the world became fully aware
of the horrors of the concentration camps, forced labour and mass murder of European citizens
by the German state and by the followers of Nazism.
In his imagination, Pink is in control; he is a fascist leader. On the platform in a crowded
stadium is Pink, the audience are dressed in a similar uniforms to him, some with Ku Klux
Klan29 style hats, many with shaven heads. Pink is in command; he orders his followers to get
‘Jews, queers, people with spots, dope users and coons’ ‘up against the wall.’ Waters knows this
language is utterly unacceptable but uses it to show the power of labels to ‘other’ any group,
even people with spots.30 People are seen being attacked by black-shirted followers.

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To one side of Pink there is a choir. Wearing t-shirts with the crossed claw hammers, they
sing in unison, ‘Against the wall.’ Others in the crowd wear shirts with ‘HATE’ written across
them.
The images related to totalitarianism are interspersed with the stadium scenes – Nazi salutes,
black shirts beating people up in the street, doors being kicked in, people dragged into the
street, shop and cafe windows smashed,31 women raped and peopled hanging from a gibbet.
The lyrics of ‘Run Like Hell’ tell people to run or close your eyes, because if you are caught
expressing your feelings, you will be ‘sent back to your mother, in a cardboard box.’
The flm then shows the crowd with expressionless masks, like those of the school children
and those on the cattle trucks. The crowd have become a homogeneous mass – saluting their
leader. They will do as he says, either out of fear or adoration. Ironically the very forces that
killed his father are now those Pink imagines are his to do as he wishes, including killing people.
This also shows the complex nature of power relations throughout a person’s life. During Pink’s
life he found himself both being oppressed and having wishes to control and use violence.
The iconography does not stop here, even though sufcient and necessary imagery in sound,
lyrics and flm have been provided. ‘Waiting for the Worms’ drives home the message. The lyr-
ics call for ethnic cleansing – ‘turning on the showers,’ ‘fre the ovens,’ and ‘fnal solution’ – three
phrases that stand for the murder of over 6 million Jewish people. We emphasise Waters does
not mean this literally but as a warning from history. If Pink (a.k.a. Waters) says you want hate
to dominate, then follow the ‘worms’ – those that will get ‘you’ to do the hating, beatings and
murders.32
‘Stop’ begins with the word ‘stop.’ Pink says he wants to take of the uniform, to leave the
show, and he is waiting for his prison cell. From his sense of despair, angst and alienation from
the world, Pink looks to his own understanding of his self (his past ‘me’) to consider if he was
to blame for being obedient, for not resisting and for not taking responsibility. Pink asks, ‘Have
I been guilty all this time?’ The duality of social structures means Pink had a choice; socially and
personally he had the choice to be an active interactant in social relationships or retreat behind
‘closed eyes’ and ‘wear a mask’ and let the political rot set in.

Conclusion: redemption
‘The Trial’ is Pink putting himself on trial for not taking responsibility for his own ‘I’ – his own
response to the attitudes and behaviours of others around him. The judge’s condemnation, ver-
dict and sentence are the catalyst for Pink’s realisation that things can be diferent. For this to be
so, Pink needs to reconcile his past with his present to take control of his immediate future. Pink
does not want to be a victim any more, a ‘rag doll’ or puppet in the hands of signifcant others,
but for this to happen, he needs to destroy the ‘wall.’ The wall is not torn down but explodes
into thousands of fragments, as if it has been hit by a bomb.
Pink’s realisation and actions are not contingent upon his imaginative trial; they are constitu-
tive of the trial as a situation – even if it is in his mind. Through the trial Pink has organised
his memories into a structure that he now understands, allowing him to understand how his
identity is a part of the social interactions and social structures that he is in, including institutions
such as capitalism and the music business.
Pink’s imaginary trial is his agency projecting a diferent trajectory for his self. That trajec-
tory is, at frst, the realisation of the role others and institutions have had his life, what he has
allowed to be signifcant in shaping and controlling his ‘wall.’ The structures he has, to date,
reacted against in the building of his ‘wall’ are now perceived by Pink as one possible structural

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 Vesa-Matti Sarenius, Marian Tumanyan and Chris Hart

confguration. He has the power to reconfgure these structures, but this can only be done at
a high personal cost. Whatever his hopes for his future, his fears act as a symmetrical force. As
each witness testifes against Pink, his perception of his situation is an evolving, emergent one.
Nothing is certain for Pink. It matters not that this situation is in Pink’s imagination; it is real in
its consequences. His experience of the trial is real in the sense those experiences are directed
towards his relationships with diferent people in his life. It is to these relationships that he is
now, to some degree, externalising and building the imaginary extension of the reality. This
allows Pink, as it were, to enter into a dialogue with his memories and the meanings he has
given to those memories.33 In narrative terms he has become conscious of his plight and the
characters around him, and of himself as a character in a set of relational structures.34 Pink now
has all three parts of his narrative, a beginning, middle and possible end.
This process is Mead’s (1932) chordal triad – past, present and future. The most signifcant
for Pink here is his imaginative reconstruction that his future is not determined; he has the
power to hypothesise an alternative future for himself. But to make this real, he needs to break
free of his habitual behaviour – of building his ‘wall’ and thinking others in his life determine
his existence. This, in itself, would not be enough. This is because the ‘wall’ is too high; it
completely surrounds Pink. The judge’s declaration is stark; it leaves no room for piece-meal
reconfgurations by Pink to change his plight. The judge, along with the others in Pink’s life,
shout ‘tear down the wall.’ And the wall explodes into fragments. Pink, using the memories of
experiences that had imprisoned him behind his wall, has liberated himself – his past, present
and future now have a harmonious balance – and is now a free agent.

Notes
1 See, Scarfe, G. (2010). The Making of Pink Floyd: The Wall. Lebanon, IN: Da Capo Press, page 216.
2 The ‘Immersion Edition’ includes the original album, digitally remastered plus rare and unreleased
tracks, demos and video material, all within a limited edition box set that includes exclusive merchan-
dise and packaging. The demos are arranged chronologically, tracing the development of the album
from Waters’ solo demos. The bonus DVD features a ‘Behind the Wall’ documentary, an interview with
Gerald Scarfe and extracts from the Earl’s Court concert.
3 Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
4 Ibid:17.
5 Ibid:7.
6 Ibid:17.
7 Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
8 Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998). ‘What is Agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103:962–1023.
Quote is from pages 968–969.
9 Op. cit. Mead (1934):71.
10 Ibid:17–18.
11 See Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Garden City, NY: Anchor Dou-
bleday; Strauss, A. L. (1969). Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. San Francisco: Sociology Press.
12 Op. cit. Mead (1932):2.
13 Mead, G. H. (1936). Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, page 297.
14 Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Emerson, C. and Holquist, M. (eds.),
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. McGee, V. W. (trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press, pages
60–102. See pages 91–92 in particular.
15 Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
16 Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 350.
17 Mrs Miniver (1942). Dir. William Wyler.
18 Mead, G. H. (1938). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pages 413–414.
19 Ibid:175.

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 Temporal structuration in Te Wall

20 A Tiger refers to a fearsome German tank, the Tiger. Anzio and Royal Fusiliers refer to a battle during
the Second World War involving the City of London Regiment of the British Army.
21 This may not be the case for those born in the 1990s onwards.
22 The Dam Busters (1955). Directed by Michael Anderson. Starring Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave
and Ursela Jeans. It tells of how the inventor Barnes Wallace (played by Redgrave) developed a ‘bounc-
ing bomb’ to destroy dams essential to the German war efort. On May 17, 2018, a commemoration of
the 75th anniversary was held in which a restored version of the flm was broadcast live from the Royal
Albert Hall, London. The flm was simulcast into over 300 cinemas across the UK.
23 Roger Waters described ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ as ‘the central song on the whole album.’ Inter-
view by Tommy Vance, 30 November 1979, BBC Radio One.
24 Us + Them was released as a flm in 2019. Many of the political themes are not as evident as they were
at the live shows. Waters did, however, say ‘I’m glad the flm turned out to have a humane and political
message. . . . I believe music is a very powerful art form and that it can be used as a political tool, as
well as a source of entertainment to keep the masses quiet.’ See the World Socialist Web Site for more
information, wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/11/wate-o11.html.
25 This position originates with Irving Gofman and his book (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation
of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books.
26 See the following for more on the theory of frustration and its criticisms, Dollard, J., Miller, N. E.,
Doob, L. W., Mowrer, O. H. and Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press and, Pastore, N. (1952). ‘The Role of Arbitrariness in the Frustration-Aggression
Hypothesis’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47(3):728–731.
27 See, for example, Althusser, L. (1971). ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Phi-
losophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Also see Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976).
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic
Books.
28 The British Union of Fascists was a fascist political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by
Oswald Mosley. It changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936.
The party’s embrace of Nazi-style anti-Semitism in 1936 led to increasingly violent clashes with oppo-
nents, notably the 1936 Battle of Cable Street in London’s East End. They were recognised by black
uniforms; armbands of red, white and blue; black belts and silver buckles.
29 The Ku Klux Klan, also known as the KKK, is an American white supremist group that hate black
people, Catholics, Jews, communists, Muslims and many other groups. They are best known for wear-
ing white robes and pointed hats that incorporate a facemask with eye holes cut into them.
30 For the sale of clarity, Waters is being ironic, not literal.
31 Kristallnacht, often referred to as the ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish
pogroms which took place on November 9–10, 1938. Mobs were encouraged, by speeches from Hit-
ler’s Chief of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, to attack Jews in the street, in their homes and schools and
at their places of work and worship. At least 96 Jews were killed, over 1,000 synagogues were burned
and cemeteries were vandalised.
32 Waters is not claiming only some kinds of people obey others, but, as Milgram (1962) demonstrated,
most people will obey and be obedient in given situations – see, for example, Fiske (1993), Keltner,
Gruenfeld and Anderson (2003). But it is worth noting here that Bègue et al. (2014) and Blass (1991)
identifed that persons who develop a clear perception of their situation are more likely to resist the
demands and pressures of authority fgures and structures.
33 Here we are borrowing from heavily from Op. cit. Mead (1932):12, who says, ‘the past (or the mean-
ingful structure of the past) is as hypothetical as the future.’
34 For more on this idea, see Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

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 26
A TEMPORAL JOURNEY
THROUGH PINK FLOYD’S
MUSIC
Gilad Cohen

Mmmmmmmuuuusssiic takes you for a journey

through
time. time. time. time.
This sentence does what a sentence needs to do: it is coherent, it says something meaningful,
and it leads from one place to another in a linear way. But its sense of time is distorted. It takes
its time before taking of, it stops for a while in the middle, and its ending lingers on. This
description fts much of Pink Floyd’s music, too. Let’s start again. Music takes you for a journey
through time. Many researchers, including Langer (1953), Clifton (1983), and Kramer (1988),1
have noted the special time realm that music evokes, time that exists in the relationship between
listeners and a musical piece. As Peter Silberman writes (2018),

[m]ost compositions encourage us to participate in their narrative ebbs and fows,

departures and returns, detours and surprises, all of which draw our attention away
from absolute [or real, or clock] time.2

Just as diferent vehicles ofer diferent journeys through space – varying in speed, wobbli-
ness, meandering, scenery – diferent types of music ofer diferent journeys through – and
experiences of – time. Some music follows a linear journey: it progresses from one event to
another with a clear sense of direction. Conversely, some music suggests a nonlinear journey: it
departs from natural fow through means that challenge standard progression and directionality.3
Central to the nonlinear experience is stasis, which according to Rowell (1987) defes the tra-
ditional dynamic properties of music. Rowell and others, such as Kramer (1988) and Cutileiro
(2014),4 suggest that stasis could evoke a sense of timelessness, even if it includes some limited
motion and involves only part of the music parameters. Rowell’s (1987) description is especially
ftting for the current study:

[Static or timeless music] is consistent, continuous, and relatively unarticulated; it fails

to imply a sense of progression, goal direction, increasing or decreasing tension, cumu-
lation, phrases or other internal units that might suggest a temporal scale of periodici-
ties. It is, in a word, a ‘pool’ of sound, a sustained esthetic surface in which the beauty

464 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-33

 A journey through Pink Floyd’s music

lies in one’s response to the surface itself, not in the syntactical relationships among its
components. . . . The general illusion is one of a state rather than a process, a music
more of being than becoming, a continuous Now.5

Pink Floyd’s propensity toward fuctuations in temporality – and the use of stasis in particular –
is rooted in their psychedelic jams in London’s underground scene, where audiences danced
in repetitive motions and seemed to be able to go on forever.6 Several scholars have noted
how such music, by featuring repetitive rhythms, harmonic stasis (a consistent single chord),
harmonic oscillation (a regularly repeated alternation between two chords), and manipula-
tions of timbre, provides music equivalent to a hallucinogenic experience that afects the
listener’s perception and creates an impression that time has stopped, slowed down, changed
direction, or disappeared.7 These tactics were then adopted into the studio, where they were
joined by other features that contribute to slow or nonlinear temporality such as slow tempos
and harmonic pace, frequent drums-less sections, few lyrics and the prominent presence of
instrumental music, prolonged forms that often avoid choruses, and studio manipulations
(such as slowed down or reversed tapes). Many of these depart from typical characteristics of
rock music that generate momentum, such as directional harmony, lyrical syntax and nar-
rative, and short forms that develop quickly and are geared toward a climatic chorus. At the
same time, much of Pink Floyd’s music is expressive, dramatic, and progress driven, produc-
ing a strong sense of direction. Pink Floyd’s language thus presents a fusion of linear and
nonlinear elements.
This study ofers a comprehensive investigation of what I view as a core ingredient in Pink
Floyd’s style: the interplay between nonlinear and linear temporalities, specifcally between
stasis and motion. Several scholars have touched on the issue of temporal manipulations in Pink
Floyd’s music, mostly focusing on the way these refect psychedelic experience. Stemming from
these studies, especially Yodfat (2014), Long (2014), and Reising (2009), this chapter examines
recurring nonlinear devices in Pink Floyd’s music; the ways these elements intersect with lin-
ear elements; their structural, thematic, and dramatic impacts; and their evolution through the
band’s career. In order to assess both the scope and the evolution of nonlinear qualities in Pink
Floyd’s music, I will look at numerous examples from all eras, including solo works by individual
band members. My examination will start with identifying structural, harmonic, and melodic
tools that challenge linear fow within individual songs.8 The epic piece ‘Echoes’ (1971) will be
used as a case study for exploring how stillness and motion can intersect within a single piece.
Then I will investigate similar intersections at the album level, including the opening and end-
ings on an album, the use of transition collages, and placement of tracks. Last, I will summarise
how the use of nonlinear elements has evolved through Pink Floyd’s long career, suggesting a
view of the entire catalogue as a journey though musical time.

Song level
The journey through a Pink Floyd song resembles a bike ride. One biker might start her trip
without wasting a single moment, excitedly screaming ‘I’ve got a bike!’ and rushing downhill
at full speed. Another might take his time to prepare and survey the scenery before starting to
pedal. The rest of the journey can likewise vary in both speed and direction. Some paths might
be fast and straightforward, clearly leading from one place to another. But a sudden turn could
lead into a wide-open space, one that invites putting time on hold and wandering around with
no clear goal in mind. After a while, however, the original trail reappears, movement resumes,
and the journey starts heading toward its fnal destination – which, in some cases, is an indefnite

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 Gilad Cohen

misty horizon. With this metaphor in mind, we will now look at devices that challenge linear
fow through Pink Floyd songs.

Non-intro, still intro

Fittingly to his erratic style, some of Syd Barrett’s songs in the short period when he was Pink
Floyd’s main singer and writer begin with full force and no preparation. Such a ‘non-intro’
catches the listener of guard; in the absence of an intro section, the opening lines make an
impression that time moves faster in order to catch up. This is how the entire Floydian corpus
begins: their frst single, ‘Arnold Layne’ (1967), opens with a rapid ascend of a half-step in lieu
of a true intro, granting the frst verse a surprising momentum.9 Similar non-intros open the
excited, child-like ‘Bike’ (1967) and the self-refecting ‘Jugband Blues’ (1968), both written by
Barrett, as well as several of his solo songs. After his departure, however, the band abandoned
this technique, instead embracing Barrett’s opposite model for opening a song: a static intro that
allows the listener to absorb the scenery before embarking on a journey.
In theatre, some shows choose to have the curtain pulled up when the audience enters the
hall and takes their seats, allowing the viewers a few minutes to observe the stage; absorb the
set and lights; and get an impression of the time, place, and mood of the show. It is a frozen
moment that resides outside the show’s fctional time; it is static but also infused with expecta-
tion. ‘Let There Be More Light,’ the Roger Waters-written track that opens Pink Floyd’s second
album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), does exactly this. A 70-second intro presents a still image of
harmonic stasis, short repeated bass fguration (basso ostinato), steady dynamics, and a keyboard
improvisation that avoids development or progression. This music does not return later in the
track or anywhere else in the album. All the same, the intro shows a revealing still image for
what we are about to experience: we get a sense of a key, a sonic world (the intro’s instru-
mentation is the core for the entire album), and a mood (groovy and psychedelic). At 1:08, a
cymbal roll fades in (‘swoosh!’), washing the entire texture from right to left and leaving behind
something completely diferent: a slower tempo, sustained organ chord, new drum pattern, and
new bass and organ motif: Pum, Pum, Pa-a-am, pum-pum-pum . . . These are the sounds of the
actors, entering the stage for the frst time and ready to speak. When Richard Wright’s voice
joins the motif (‘Far, far, fa-a-a-ar away, way, people . . .’), coloured by Waters’ whispering, time
starts moving, although with a dragging, meditative feel. It is only in the chorus, when dynam-
ics rise and so do the vocal range (half-screamed by David Gilmour) and the harmony (from the
verse’s sustained tonic to the subdominant), that we truly reach linear temporality.
Prefacing a song with a still intro – a static and self-contained section that evokes timeless-
ness – is a recurring Floydian tool.10 Its motionlessness only emphasises the activeness of the
sections that follow. Yet it stimulates the main body of the song. In ‘Flaming’ (1967), the intro
carries almost no resemblance to the rest of the song and projects timelessness through a low-
range organ-cluster drone and non-rhythmic, spooky vocal shrieking and whispers (0:00–0:16).
The contrast with the verse here is more comic than dramatic, ftting the child-like spirit of
this Barrett-written song (‘Yippee! You can’t see me but I  can you’). In Waters’ solo song
‘What God Wants, Pt. III’ (1992), the sudden shift from stillness to action is enhanced by sound
efects and a surprising modulation (0:33–0:38). In Barrett’s songs, similar modulations seem
to mischievously announce ‘Now I’m here, now I’m there!’11 as they promptly jump from a
short one-chord intro to an active verse (‘See Emily Play,’ ‘The Gnome,’ ‘Candy and a Currant
Bun,’ ‘Vegetable Man’ [all 1967] and his solo song ‘Late Night’ [1970]). Other intros make a
more gradual transition from stillness to motion as static harmony begins strolling, textures get
busier, and instruments join in (‘The Narrow Way, Pt. 3’ [1969], ‘Echoes’ [1970], ‘Shine On You

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 A journey through Pink Floyd’s music

Crazy Diamond, Pt. I’ [1975], ‘Sorrow’ [1987]). ‘Time’ (1973) makes an inventive example as it
starts from multiple ticking clocks (which, paradoxically, evokes timelessness due to unchanging
rhythm, timbre, and dynamics), which are followed by a tonally ambiguous harmonic oscil-
lation (0:43–1:46), a sluggish four-chord progression that establishes the key (1:46–2:16), and
only then a powerful drum fll that leads into the song proper (2:16+).

Free interlude, steady jam

Pink Floyd is known for David Gilmour’s celebrated guitar solos, which are characterised by
expressiveness, direction, and the ability to lead songs – and even complete albums – to their
dramatic peaks (Cohen 2015a). But many instrumental segments in the Floydian corpus have
the opposite efect. Like the biker who chooses to leave the main trail in order to wander
around, deliberately suspending his progress in order to cease the moment and breath the scen-
ery in, it is not uncommon for a Pink Floyd song to abandon the path paved by the opening
theme in favour of a timeless instrumental wandering, sometimes for a considerable portion
of the track, before themes return and bring the song back to a linear path.12 Such dormant
interludes are built on non-developing harmony, repetitive textures, and little to no thematic
material, all of which result in what Kramer (1988) calls ‘extended present,’ as it minimises
‘the signifcance of the sequential order of things’ and avoids ‘gestures that invoke memory or
activate expectations.’13 Some interludes, and even complete tracks, do so by freeing themselves
from any sense of beat or tonal gravity (‘Interstellar Overdrive’ [1967] ~3:00–8:00, ‘A Saucerful
of Secrets’ [1968] 3:58~7:00, ‘Jugband Blues’ [1968] 1:41–2:21, ‘Atom Heart Mother’ [1971]
15:26~18:00).
But the most common species of this timeless interlude is the steady jam: a prolonged sec-
tion that is based on a steady groove (usually in 4/4 time), harmonic stasis or oscillation, fxed
instrumentation, and steady or slow-changing dynamics. Textures may vary little from bar to
bar, but unlike in some minimalist music, such changes do not accumulate in any overarching
goal-oriented process.14 The steady jam is instilled with potential energy that is motionless,
stored within the groove, and awaits the moment to break free and become kinetic.15 Examples
include ‘Matilda Mother’ (1967) 1:23–1:54, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ (1967) 1:30~2:45 (with
accelerating tempo), ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ (1968) 2:14–3:18, and Barrett’s
solo song ‘No Good Trying’ (1970) 0:41–1:03 and 1:43–2:07. Sometimes such jams take up the
majority of a track, such as in ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ and ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ (both
1967). In his solo albums, Syd Barrett went further and recorded a few songs – with vocals –
that from beginning to end jam on the same texture, instrumentation, dynamics, and harmonic
stasis or oscillation, albeit usually with changing lyrics (‘Maisie,’ ‘It Is Obvious,’ ‘Golden Hair’
[featuring a repeated single rif], and, with a little more development, ‘Rats’ [all 1970]). Most
steady jams feature no clear melody, but even those that do include an improvised solo seldom
feel linear, since these solos tend to submerge in the mix and their phrases do not develop,
rather they ‘refuse to form a hierarchy . . . Every cadence is of approximately equal weight.
No distinction is made as to the degree of closure.’16 Examples include ‘Candy and a Currant
Bun’ (1967) 1:08–1:49, ‘See Emily Play’ (1967) 1:31–2:01, ‘Dramatic Theme,’ ‘Party Sequence,’
‘Up the Khyber’ (all 1969), ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ (1970) 1:25–3:30,17 ‘Echoes’ (1971)
7:02~11:20, and ‘Obscured by Clouds’ (1972).
Another Floydian device that, like the steady jam, creates a static-but-energetic feel is their
signature perpetuum mobile bassline: an aggressive, persistent one-note bass fguration that runs
through a delay unit and accompanies an entire song or section. It is a vital feature – the hook,
really – of ‘One of These Days’ (1971), and it makes imperative appearances in ‘Echoes’ (1971),

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 Gilad Cohen

‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond – Part VI’ (1975), ‘Sheep’ (1977), ‘Another Brick in the Wall,
Part 1’ (1979), ‘The Happiest Days of Our Lives’ (1979), ‘Run Like Hell’ (1979), and, less
predominantly, ‘The Hero’s Return’ (1983) and Waters’ solo song ‘What God Wants, Pt. III’
(1992). In a way, it is a technological descendant of the aggressive, repetitive basslines that cre-
ate a similar impression in the openings of ‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967), ‘Interstellar Overdrive’
(1967), and ‘Let There Be More Light’ (1968).
Like the still intros, steady jams are not only static but also self-contained; their ingredients
stem from the piece’s general concept more than of the sections that surround them.18 Never-
theless, they hold a structural role by ofering contrast to and break from the rest of the song
in the form of a motionless meditative pondering before the music rises back to a linear (and
usually louder) thematic section. Starting with The Dark Side of the Moon (note that all the pre-
vious examples for static interludes predate this album), instrumental tracks and interludes that
are based on harmonic stasis or oscillation became sparser and much more active as a result of
textural and melodic development and dramatic use of extra-musical elements (‘On the Run’
[1973], ‘Any Colour You Like’ [1973], ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ [1973] 1:06–2:15, ‘Shine
On You Crazy Diamond (Pts. VI–IX)’ [1975] 6:28~9:00, ‘Pigs (Three Diferent Ones)’ [1977]
4:12–7:08, and ‘Dogs’ [1977] 7:57–11:38), until they completely vanished by the time of the
albums The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983).19 The powerful model of breakdown, build-
up, and a climatic loud groove – better known as beat drop – has become a vital component
of electronic dance music since the 1980s. Correspondingly, static instrumental interludes and
tracks made their way back to Pink Floyd’s vocabulary in their 1987 LP A Momentary Lapse
of Reason (‘Learning To Fly’ 2:06–2:52, ‘Terminal Frost,’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Marooned’
from the following album The Division Bell from 1994), with some songs even featuring a
clear buildup and beat drop (‘Sorrow’ 4:36–5:15, ‘One Slip’ 2:47–3:41, and Gilmour’s solo
song ‘Take a Breath’ [2006] 3:30~4:24). In retrospect, it is fascinating to hear the roots of such
an iconic contemporary phenomenon as the beat drop in music as early as the 1977’s ‘Sheep’
(drop at 7:10), 1971’s ‘Echoes’ (drop at 19:11), 1970’s ‘Atom Heart Mother’ (drop at 19:10),
and even 1967’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ (drop at 8:38). In 2014, static music reached its peak in
Pink Floyd’s evolving style, with steady jams over harmonic oscillation playing a key role in the
band’s latest release The Endless River (most notably in ‘It’s What We Do,’ ‘Sum,’ ‘Unsung,’ ‘On
Noodle Street,’ and ‘Eyes to Pearl’).20

Time-stretching outro
Some Pink Floyd songs end with a straight path that leads to a clear destination. Others, how-
ever, keep going on and on with no defnite closure. I call such ending time-stretching outro: an
extended closing section that makes an impression that time is suspended or slowing down due
to sudden prolongation of a single chord, repetition of a small vocal or instrumental cell, and
fade out (‘Matilda Mother’ 2:25–3:08, ‘Chapter  24’ 2:49–3:42, ‘See Emily Play’ 2:36–2:53,
‘Paint Box’ 2:43–3:33, all 1967). Notably, all of these examples end with harmony that evokes
tension, producing what Blandino (2006) calls (when discussing Mahler’s music) ‘a paradoxical
efect of simultaneous extension and dissolution of expectation.’21 A diferent, shorter version
of such an outro that is used for dramatic purposes occurs in ‘One of My Turns’ and ‘Hey You,’
both from the narrative-led The Wall (1979). The last two syllables in these songs repeat using
delay efect and fade out (‘away, away, away . . .’ and ‘we fall, we fall, we fall . . .’, respectively),
prolonging, again, an unresolved harmonic tension.22
Other elements often join in to strengthen the impression of time-stretching outros, includ-
ing reversed tracks (guitar and drums in Barrett’s solo song ‘Dominoes’ [1970]), concurrent

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 A journey through Pink Floyd’s music

rhythmic layers (‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pts. 1–V.’ 12:40–13:31), or gradual disintegra-
tion of the texture (Syd Barrett’s solo song ‘No Man’s Land’ [1970] 2:01–3:03).
Descending glissandos can add a sensation of infnite sinking down (‘Vegetable Man’ 2:09–
2:29, ‘The Gnome’ 1:57–2:10 [both 1967]), while ascending glissandos contribute to an oppo-
site efect of time speeding up (‘Corporal Clegg’ [1968] 4:02–4:07, ‘Up the Khyber’ [1969]
2:04–2:09). In ‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967), the coda (3:36–4:11) evokes shimmering stasis
by repeating single notes in the vocals over an unusual oscillation of D-major and D-minor
chords, efectively bringing the song to a new and ambiguous place (before closing on a deci-
sive D major), whereas in ‘Matilda Mother’ (1967), the outro literally switches to slow motion
as slower tempo and new meter are introduced (2:26–3:08). Similarly, sometimes the time-
stretching efect is enhanced by stretching a melodic or harmonic gesture for twice as long as
a transition into the outro (‘The Scarecrow’ 1:23–2:11, ‘The Gnome’ 1:57–2:10 [both 1967]).
‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ (1970) goes even further by stretching a chord progression for
twice as long (10:20–11:17) – and then for four times as long (11:17–11:42). The chord that
opens this fnal cycle lasts for so long that we are caught up by surprise when it actually changes.
Incorporating multiple nonlinear sections in a song can have a crucial impact on the type
of journey it ofers listeners. ‘Let There Be More Light’ (1968), despite having a directional
strophic sung section that even features a climatic chorus, presents an unusual temporal structure
as its still intro (0:00–1:16) and the time-stretching outro (3:25–5:38) make the majority of the
track instrumental, relatively static, and short on thematic material. The result creates a reversed
version of the classic ABA form that shapes songs such as ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ (1967), ‘Take
Up . . .’ (1967), and ‘Set the Controls . . .’ (1968). Instead of having a theme, a static interlude
that ofers a break from the action, and a recapitulation of the theme, ‘Let There . . .’ buries its
active theme in the middle of a timeless environment. ‘Cirrus Minor’ (1969) similarly ofers a
journey with more stops than progress: its sung section (1:07–2:22 out of a 5+ minute track)
is so short, it feels like an interlude between two unrelated instrumental units (the second of
which is harmonically active). But probably the most unusual journey is the one portrayed by
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ (1975), Pink Floyd’s 26-minute tribute to Syd Barrett. The
dramatic verses and refrains play only a small part in this otherwise instrumental piece. Although
it features multiple static sections and develops very slowly, ‘Shine On’ underlines an innova-
tive directional journey that seems to follow the famous fve stages of grief, thus refecting the
band’s coping with the trauma of losing Syd Barrett.23 The impact of lengthy static instrumental
sections on the way a piece is perceived will be further discussed in the following in the context
of the epic song ‘Echoes’ (1971).

Non-directional harmony, soporifc melody

The temporal ebb and fow in Pink Floyd’s music stems, in large, from their harmonic lan-
guage. On the one hand, much of their music relies on directional harmony: chords fow into
one another, creating a scheme of tension and resolution that gravitates toward a goal – each
return to the home chord of the key (i.e., tonic) feels like an assuring landing – and ofers a
strong sense of syntax and direction.24 On the other hand, the Floydian corpus is saturated with
moments that defy harmonic directionality and thus challenge the sensation of natural time
fow. In addition to extensive harmonic stasis and oscillation that were discussed previously,
non-directional tools include successions with constantly changing tonal centres and prolonged
chromatic motion in the bass. ‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967) exemplifes both phenomena.
Already in the intro, ‘Astronomy Domine’ hints at Syd Barrett’s idiosyncratic harmonic
language by alternating the tonic E-major with an altered version in which some of the notes

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are shifted.25 The impression is of a picture that goes out of focus, and it is strengthened by a
syncopated rif and drum fll (0:24+) that disorient our sense of the downbeat. These discords
lead the way to an ambiguous harmonic scheme that occupies almost the entire song, most
of which is instrumental. Both the verse (0:40–1:14) and the lengthy instrumental interlude
(1:32–3:10) are based on multiple repetitions of the same 4-chord succession (E-E♭-G-A), and
it is in the interlude that its uniquely timeless nature is really evident (especially since no instru-
ment ofers a goal-oriented melody). This chord succession makes a never-ending circle: start
with any of its chords, and it could sound like home (i.e., a plausible tonic). See Figure 26.1

Figure 26.1 Linear fow in ‘Astronomy Domine’ (1967) is challenged by constant bouncing among
potential tonic chords, prolonged chromatic motion in the bass, and harmonic oscillation
in the coda

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– this is especially clear in the extended live version of the song from the 1969 LP Ummagumma;
for instance, start listening around 4:53.26 A comparison to repeated four-chord progressions in
other Floyd songs such as ‘Time’ (1973), ‘Us and Them’ (1973), and ‘Dogs’ (1977) is revealing.
While these progressions have a clear underlying key, thus advancing toward a goal, the suc-
cession in ‘Astronomy Domine’ seems infnite, or timeless.27 With a nod to the song’s subject
matter, I call this phenomenon ‘interstellar harmony’: an eternity in which one moment we are
stable on one planet (Jupiter?), only to be captured a moment later by the gravity of another
(Saturn?). Similar successions that challenge linear fow due to constant bouncing between keys
are the bases for ‘Vegetable Man’ (1967), ‘Lucifer Sam’ (1967), ‘See-Saw’ (1968), and Barrett’s
solo song ‘Baby Lemonade’ (1970).28 In the much later Waters-written song ‘Don’t Leave Me
Now’ from The Wall (1979), a repeated four-chord succession illustrates the ground that shakes
under the feet of the tortured speaker, as none of the chords feels stable or secure; there is no
sense of a home key, only an infnite searching. Surprisingly, the impact of Waters’ succession is
similar to that of Barrett’s in ‘Astronomy Domine’: both evoke timelessness – the latter due to
too many stable chords, the former due to none. Similarly, the wordless hook of ‘Astronomy,’ in
which all parts ricochet downwards in a chromatic freefall (1:14–1:25 and 3:24–3:36), creates
a tonal limbo that efectively puts time on hold – there is no telling when and where it would
end – until it suddenly hits a new tonal ground and the motion stops.29
Barrett’s melodies are usually linear in nature: they progress, develop, and gain momentum
from phrase to phrase. In ‘Astronomy Domine,’ however, the seemingly eternal harmonic suc-
cession is matched by static vocal melodies: each part repeats a single note over each chord,
moving the smallest distance possible only when forced by a chord change. Waters made such
melodies a signature of Pink Floyd’s style for years. Reinforced by repetitive accompaniment,
the soporifc melodies of Waters’ early songs create a meditative impression of walking-in-place
by repeating small-ranged cells of two or three notes over and over again (not unlike some
melodies of his idol, John Lennon,30 e.g., ‘Come Together’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’) and often
moving in parallel motion to the bassline that he plays (‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’
[1967], ‘Let There Be More Light’ [1968], ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ [1968],
‘The Nile Song’ [1969], and ‘Embryo’ [1970]; vocals also double the bassline in the less repeti-
tive ‘Julia Dream’ [1968] and Barrett’s solo song ‘Long Gone’ [1970]). Even in later years, after
the band’s style had greatly changed, many Waters songs preserved this melodic economy and
stasis, adding a motionless sheen to songs that are otherwise active and directional (‘Free Four’
[1972], ‘If ’ [1970], ‘Time’ [1973], ‘Brian Damage’ [1973], ‘Eclipse’ [1973], ‘Welcome to the
Machine’ [1975], ‘Have a Cigar’ [1975], ‘Sheep’ [1977], ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ [1979]).
In his last albums with the band, The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), as well as in his
solo albums, Waters’ melodic style changed considerably and became much more varied, wide-
ranged, and dramatic.

Stillness and motion in ‘Echoes’

The inventive ways stillness and motion could intertwine within a single song are maybe best
demonstrated in ‘Echoes’ from the 1971 LP Meddle, an ambitious 23-minute composition that
is considered a milestone in the evolution of the Floydian style.31 While its form resembles a
standard-scale song with two directional themes (one sung and one instrumental), extensive
nonlinear instrumental sections – an intro that gradually transitions from stillness to motion,
steady jam, free non-tonal interlude, and time-stretching outro – make the majority of the
piece relatively static. At the same time, ‘Echoes’ maintains surprising momentum thanks to
careful motivic development and large-scale progression. The song features a complex duality

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Figure 26.2 ‘Echoes’ (1971) as an infated standard-scale song, alongside songs of a similar structure: The
Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ (1968), The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumping’ Jack Flash’ (1968), and Pink
Floyd’s ‘Matilda Mother’ (1967)

Figure 26.3 Stillness and motion in ‘Echoes’’ verse, using motivic half-step ascend and a major tonic
chord

of stillness and motion that resonates with the lyrics, from the albatross that ‘hangs motionless
upon the air’ to something that ‘stirs’ and ‘tries’ and ‘starts to climb toward the light.’
The verse of ‘Echoes’ displays stillness and motion concurrently. While the repetitious, small-
ranged vocal melody and circular chord progression make a static surface, a motivic half-step
ascend keeps evoking upward motion, refecting the lyrics that suggest a motion from under-
water toward the sky. This motif frst appears in the keyboard, then in the vocals (marking a
surprising arrival of a major tonic chord), and last in all instruments simultaneously, pushing the
vocals up to fy ‘around the sun’ as they spin between two adjacent pitches. The build up toward
the instrumental chorus is enhanced by a group crescendo and drums fll (3:39–3:43, 4:52–4:56,
19:48–19:56).
In the third guitar solo of ‘Echoes,’ various temporalities reside concurrently at diferent hier-
archic levels (7:01~11:00). At the foreground level, when examining bar by bar, this solo feels

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active due to expressive phrases, high-octane groove, and subtle textural variations. At the mid-
dle ground level, when looking at this section as a whole, it is motionless, as it ofers no devel-
opment from beginning to end due to unchanging accompaniment, static dynamics, harmonic
oscillation, and guitar phrases that, although expressive, are so sparse that they hardly link into
a continuous, coherent melody (this is especially evident starting at 9:00). On the background
level, looking at the entire song from a bird’s-eye view, this solo plays a structural role in the
piece as it transitions from the few linear themes to the lengthy free interlude.
‘Echoes’’ autonomous free interlude suspends both the lyrical and musical narratives of the
song for close to ten minutes. All components of the material thus far (lyrics, melody, harmony,
rhythm, texture, and timbre) evaporate in favour of spacious, non-tonal and non-developing
seagull-like and wind-like sounds that difer from the rest of the song in every parameter
(~11:20-~14:40). How do listeners conceive such a section, especially in the context of a rock
album? Kramer (1988) and Pearsall (2006) both speculate that static music calls for diferent
ways of listening than the one used for linear sections: concentrating on the present moment
and ignoring the music’s past and future, letting go of expectation for development and change,
contemplating and self-refecting, and immersing in the sound itself while relishing subtle vari-
eties within the repeated patterns.32 But in Pink Floyd’s music, we are asked to switch among
listening states in the middle of a piece, often several times. As a teenager, I remember enjoying
the beginning and ending of ‘Echoes’ but being bored by its ten-minute free interlude, often
skipping it (on a cassette!) when listening to the album. Many years later, as I became a more
patient listener and open to diferent musical experiences, I discovered that by changing my
way of listening I can not only enjoy this section’s stillness but also appreciate its structural role
in the piece and the way it creates a sonic world that paints the song’s imagery by suggesting
underwater sounds. Today, I relish being carried away by the narrative, emotion, and groove
of Pink Floyd’s dramatic moments while also being intrigued by free interludes in songs like
‘Echoes,’ ‘Dogs’ (1977), and ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ (1967) as they ask me to experience music –
and, with it, time – diferently.33
Perhaps the most impressive interplay of stillness and motion in ‘Echoes’ happens at the macro
level, as a three-note motif builds large-scale momentum through the entire piece, despite the
fact that most of it consists of relatively static sections. ‘Echoes’ opens with a ping sound of high
B that repeats 14 times over a harmonic pendulum in the key of C♯-minor before it fades out.
Although the ping returns only much later in the song, its presence lingers throughout the
exposition as it structurally evolves to B♯ (the leading-tone), which in turn generates tension
by its desire to resolve into the tonic C♯. These three notes and the pulls among them set the
foundation for the vocals of the entire verse – the only sung section in the piece – as well as for
similar chromatic fragments in the bassline throughout the exposition.34
Following the long free interlude, tonality is gradually rising from the dead in the instrumen-
tal bridge (~14:40–19:11) with a sustained B-minor chord in the organ. After some 20 seconds,
the soft ping marks its resurrection, announcing the approaching reprise no less efectively than
a strike of a gong (15:03). But the most striking element in its revival is its pitch: for the frst
time in the piece, the ping, still in B, is in unison with the accompanying B-minor tonic. After
the universe of pitch, texture, meter, and timbre collapsed during the free interlude, we are now
in a new world (tonally, rhythmically, etc.); however, the loyal ping remained intact and thus
glues the structure together.
The instrumental bridge builds anticipation through a repeated four-chord progression
that is reminiscent of the verse’s harmony,36 perpetuum mobile bass fguration, slow crescendo,
and gradual accumulation of the texture. An orgasmic explosion of a ‘guitar orchestra’ using
delay efect brings the song to its climax (18:14+), when the progression modulates and pushes

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Figure 26.4 Structural ascending motion (B-B♯-C♯) in the exposition of ‘Echoes’

Figure 26.5 Development of the ascending motif in the instrumental bridge and build up toward the
return of the verse35

the music back to its original C♯-minor key (18:44+). Just like the structural and melodic B-C♯
ascend in the intro and the verse, the harmonic rise from B-minor to C♯-minor in the bridge
creates momentum that catalyses the reprise of the song’s themes (see ovals in Figure 26.5).
This fnal move is completed by a drum fll, an ascending guitar’s slide, and an overall
crescendo (19:08–19:12), all leading toward a strong sense of arrival – a beat drop of a sort –
as the third and last verse begins. ‘Cloudless every day you fall,’ it opens quietly, embracing
the familiar music from the beginning of the piece using a thinner, ‘cloudless’ texture, wide
panning, and fanger efect on the vocals, suggesting an underwater environment as appropriate
after such thunderous climax.
‘Echoes’ ends with a time-stretching coda that presents yet another type of intersection between
stillness and motion. Numerous voice-like parts keep sliding up but never reach anywhere (~22:30-
end), a Shepard-tone-like efect that evokes endlessness. This section captures in a nutshell the two
principal and contrasting forces that coexist within ‘Echoes’ – and in much of Pink Floyd’s music:
motion (ascending glissandos) and stillness (never reaching anywhere).
‘Echoes’ marks a transition point in the band’s exploration of nonlinear temporalities. While
long segments in the piece are meditative and clearly stem from earlier nonlinear explora-
tions and live jams, overall the piece exhibits large-scale linear structure that would be further
explored in later works. After ‘Echoes,’ Pink Floyd clearly leaned toward tighter structures
with clearer directionality as part of their concept albums (1973–1983), while meditative and

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free-form sections became shorter and sparser before making their revival in the Gilmour-led
era (1987–2014). This development is part of a broader change in the aesthetics of the band’s
music that started with Meddle, as psychedelic elements gradually vanished in favour of clear and
precise lyrical and musical statements.

Album level
If the journey through a Pink Floyd song resembles a bike ride, the temporal structure of some
of their albums brings to mind driving a car on a snowy night. Like a driver that leaves the
engine idling for a few minutes to warm up before cautiously navigating her way in the snow,
Wish You Were Here (1975) begins with a bed of shimmering keyboards that stretch a sustained
chord for more than two minutes before introducing frst signs of activity – sparse melodic lines
followed by strolling harmonic progression, all in free time. Only when reaching the main road
does the driver switch gears for a slow drive; in Wish You Were Here, this moment occurs after
no less than four minutes, when a rhythm section joins in and ofers a beat for the frst time in
the album, albeit a Floydily-slow one. Notably, it takes four more minutes for the vocals to join
in for what some might consider the song per se.
The gradual journey from stasis to motion that opens Wish You Were Here functions as a
prototype for the band’s last three albums, all of which begin with some kind of an ‘idling
track’ that features non-metered shimmering layers of harmonic stasis (A Momentary Lapse of
Reason [1987], The Division Bell [1994], and The Endless River [2014]). Only in the second
track of these albums do harmony and rhythm begin to truly roll. The temporal journey in
Roger Waters’ solo album Amused to Death (1992) similarly begins with static outdoors sounds
(‘The Ballad of Bill Hubbard,’ 0:00+) and progresses into sustained keyboard chords and soft
isolated guitar notes (0:35+) that slowly develop into melodic fragments (1:05+). These frag-
ments gradually stir the energy toward the album’s frst thematic material: a repeated keyboard
rif over a soft percussion groove (2:23–4:21). The gradual unfolding of motion does not end
here: after the music pauses for a few seconds at the beginning of track two (‘What God Wants,
Pt. I’), the keyboard rif and chords reappear but this time using faster tempo and richer texture
(0:10+), clearly taking the temporal feel a step up. Only the loud entrance of the full band at
1:22 (announced by preceding guitar rif and snare hit) marks the end of this long temporal
buildup and the album’s structural downbeat. Waters chose to open his following solo album,
Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017), with a similar temporal build-up from a relatively
static track.
The opening track of The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) evokes nonlinearity in a diferent
way: ‘Speak to Me’ features a non-tonal collage of sounds that will later appear in the album,
efectively strengthening its large-scale structure as a concept album. With each element hav-
ing its own rhythm, placement in the stereo gamut, sound, and sometimes key, sound collages
evoke a sense of multiple diferent times at once, including foreshadowing the future in the case
of ‘Speak to Me.’ Pink Floyd, O’Donnell (2018)37 suggests, frequently use such sound collages
in transitional moments within albums or at their edges, where they bridge between the real
world and the album (or between real time and musical time). O’Donnell (2018) discusses the
framing collages in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967) and The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
as well as internal collages, such as the ones in ‘Jugband Blues’ (1968), ‘Atom Heart Mother’
(1970), and ‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ (1979). The opening tracks of solo albums by both
David Gilmour (On an Island, 2006) and Richard Wright (Broken China, 1996) present a hybrid
of both methods – sustained keyboard chords in free time and sound collage – before standard
temporality is reached in the second track.

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When snow is heavy, and sight limited, there might be long stretches of time when cars
driving on the highway make little to no progress. But then, minutes later, everything could
get clear and driving is smooth again. Likewise, throughout Pink Floyd’s corpus, long tracks
that fuctuate with temporality are efectively placed next to short, simple, and clearly linear
songs. These juxtapositions make the colours of each side more vivid: experimental, partially
static tracks seem even more static and experimental; humble, directional tracks seem even
more directional and humble. Thus, the 23-minute semi-orchestral ‘Atom Heart Mother,’ with
its lengthy harmonic oscillations and non-tonal collage, is followed (notwithstanding fipping
the LP) by the short and intimate ‘If ’ (Atom Heart Mother, 1970). On the same album, the
peculiar, mostly static instrumental ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ succeeds the naïve ‘Fat Old
Sun’; the aggressive, theme-less instrumental ‘One of These Days’ precedes the gentle, acoustic
‘Pillow of Winds’ (Meddle, 1971); and the 17-minute ‘Dogs,’ with its heavy harmonic repetition
and lengthy spacious interlude, follows the 84-second voice-and-guitar miniature ‘Pigs on the
Wing, Pt. 1’ (Animals, 1977). These opposing pairs are often enhanced by dichotomies in the
track titles, as abstract or bizarre concepts are coupled with grounded, defnite objects: ‘A Sau-
cerful of Secrets’ with ‘See-Saw’ (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968), ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’
with ‘Paintbox’ (single, 1968), ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ with ‘The Gnome’ (The Piper at the Gates
of Dawn, 1967), ‘Echoes’ with ‘Seamus’ [the dog] (Meddle, 1971), and ‘Several Species of Small
Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ with ‘Grantchester
Meadows’ (Ummagumma, 1969). Notably, as Pink Floyd’s music became more structured and
less experimental over the years, lengthy tracks have vanished, and with them this technique of
juxtaposing tracks.
Finally, most Pink Floyd albums disintegrate into timelessness (and then into the ‘real world,’
using O’Donnell’s language) by ending with a static element that gradually fades out. This ele-
ment can be an unchanging pulsing sound (manipulated laughter in The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn [1967], water drop in Atom Heart Mother [1970], heartbeat in The Dark Side of the Moon
[1973], or bell in The Division Bell [1994; excluding separate speaking sounds]), a constant
sound manipulation (More [1968], Meddle [1971]); a sustained keyboard chord (Wish You Were
Here [1975]), or a sound collage over such a chord (The Endless River [2014]). Like the time-
stretching outro, which makes an impression that time is slowing down or suspended, these
album endings seem to both blur and prolong the exact moment in which an album actually
ends. The ending of Obscured by Clouds (1972) arouses this sensation as a shimmering keyboard
chord in the closing track, ‘Absolutely Certain,’ cross-fades with a recording of tribal chanting
that, through free and non-developing monophonic phrases, creates a meditative, out-of-time
feel. After one such phrase – not diferent than any of its antecedents – the album simply ceases,
leaving the listeners in midair without any closure. The ending of The Wall (1979) features yet
another type of nonlinear time, namely circular time: the half sentence that ends the album
(‘Isn’t this where . . .’) is completed at the opening of the album (‘. . . we came in?’), hinting
that the journey the album’s protagonist has gone through is cyclic in nature.

Corpus level
If the journey through a Pink Floyd song suggests a bike ride, and the voyage through a Pink
Floyd album is reminiscent of a car ride, the way time moves through the entire Floydian corpus
brings to mind a ship cruise. After a slow but considerable journey through the decades, which
featured low tides and high tides of temporal feel (1967–1977) and even a short but dramatic
storm (1979–1983), in 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the Floydian ship reaches the middle
of the ocean. As the peaceful sailing sounds that open this album suggest (possibly recorded

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from the deck of Astoria, David Gilmour’s houseboat-studio), the Floydian ship seems to make
little movement as it foats in the middle of the sea, surrounded by 360 degrees of serene water,
heading forward no more than it is refecting backwards.
A useful way to examine the evolution of Pink Floyd’s style over the years is to look at it
through the lenses of musical time. The following summary and map thus summarise the ways
temporality is fuctuated within each era of the band’s recorded corpus.38 In the Barrett-led era
(1965–1967: early singles, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn), Syd Barrett wrote most of the mate-
rial, in which short directional segments reside comfortably next to extensive jams over static
or non-tonal harmony, often within the same song. Similarly, while many songs are upbeat and
create a sense of urgency, others are slow and contemplative. This era features most of the band’s
fastest songs; rarely later did the band use such fast tempos as they did in ‘Flaming,’ ‘Lucifer
Sam,’ ‘Arnold Layne,’ ‘See Emily Play,’ ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk,’ and ‘Interstellar
Overdrive.’ Nevertheless, tools that challenge linear time such as the still intro, steady jam, time-
stretching outro, and interstellar harmony are all in full bloom here, as well as the occasional
use of accelerated tape. Like Alice in Wonderland, who keeps shrinking and expanding in the
fantastical novel by Lewis Carroll, one of Barrett’s favourites,39 the music in this era constantly
bounces among diferent levels of temporality.
In the searching era (1968–1972: A Saucerful of Secrets, More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart
Mother, Meddle, Obscured by Clouds), Pink Floyd were searching for and experimenting with
new directions as they were overcoming the loss of Syd Barrett as their main songwriter, singer,
and guitarist. Alongside some of their most conventional songs (mostly in their singles and in
Obscured by Clouds, and a few in More), this era is abundant with instrumental music (notably,
two of the albums were flm soundtracks) and characterised by slow and static temporalities due
to numerous sections in free time and steady jams over harmonic stasis or oscillation. Especially
notable is the double album Ummagumma (1969), which is abundant with static sections and
tracks, many of which firt with non-tonal avant-garde and relish repetition, sound experi-
ments, and extended techniques. Released toward the end of this era, Meddle (1971) marks a
transition both in the band’s overall style and in its use of musical time. While it retains static
and psychedelic elements from earlier years, it also features a few simple and directional acoustic
songs, and its central piece, ‘Echoes,’ celebrates an interplay between nonlinear elements and
large-scale development, thus looking backwards at earlier aesthetics while also hinting at the
more linear and structured direction the band will be following starting with the classic era.
When comparing the classic era (1973–1977: The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here,
Animals) to earlier eras, the lyrics are more direct and the music generally more directional,
ofering simpler song forms, mostly teleological harmony, and few instrumental tracks (only in
Dark Side), all within concept albums that maintain linear momentum from beginning to end.
Tellingly, as musical time became more linear in this era, themes have drifted from the distances
of space (‘Astronomy Domine,’ ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the
Sun,’ ‘Let There Be More Light’) and underwater (‘Echoes’) in some songs to earthy issues of
human relationships and society (hinted in ‘Echoes’ and accomplished in full in the classic era,
e.g., ‘Money,’ ‘Time,’ and ‘Have a Cigar’). Still, while the temporality is generally linear, slow
tempos, some harmonic stasis and oscillation, and extensive instrumental sections all result in a
slow sense of time.
In the dramatic era (1978–1983: The Wall, The Final Cut), Roger Waters led the band and
wrote almost all of its material, which centres on the concepts and lyrics. Both albums employ
short and extremely wordy songs (in the case of The Wall serving a linear dramatic narrative),
some faster songs in comparison with the classic era, simple and directional chord progres-
sions,40 extensive use of extra-musical elements that enhance the lyrics and concept, and only

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brief instrumental sections with no instrumental tracks. All of these result in a strong sense of
linear temporality. Also signifcant are constant changes and highlighted contrasts in dynamics,
registers, panning, and timbre, granting the music a dramatic and cinematic sheen and a clear
sense of tension, direction, and progression (compare the sense of urgency in the stream of
short hectic tracks that open The Wall with the spacious fow of any of the classic era’s albums).
Overall, this era features the band’s most directional outcome as all forces (lyrics, visuals, melody,
harmony, rhythm, form, etc.) join hands in delivering a clear story, images, and message.
In the refective era (1987–2014: A Momentary Lapse of Reason, The Division Bell, The End-
less River), Gilmour led the band (following Waters’ departure) in albums that centre on the
music and are characterised by slow tempos, lyrics that contemplate the past, expansive reverb-
heavy mix, and a revival of nonlinear features and meditative segments (including idling tracks,
free interludes, steady jams, and occasional collages). The result is music that sometimes pro-
gresses linearly, sometimes stays put, and sometimes refects back in time to the band’s classic era
(‘Yet Another Movie’ and ‘Marooned’ resemble ‘Comfortably Numb,’ ‘Dogs of Wars’ resembles
‘Welcome to the Machine,’ ‘What Do You Want from Me’ resembles ‘Have a Cigar,’ and the
fttingly titled ‘It’s What We Do’ unmistakably blends together ‘Shine On’ and ‘Welcome to
the Machine’).41 Incidentally, there is a dramatic declaration in the pace of album releases from
a release every two years in the mid-1970s to gaps of 4, 7, and then 20 years between albums
in the refective era. This large-scale ritardando echoes a gradual decrease in linear temporality
throughout this era, which ends with vibrant stasis in the band’s latest release. Although abun-
dant with loud grooves and soaring guitars, The Endless River (2014) is very much an ambient
album. In Cohen (2014) I  described the many elements that make this instrumental album

Figure 26.6 Temporal map of Pink Floyd’s recorded corpus, 1967–2014

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(save for the closing track) static, timeless, and a great ft for its title. To summarise my points
there, The Endless River gleans material from the 1960s, the 1990s, and the twenty-frst century;
bridges between dead and living musicians; and brings back sounds, chords, and grooves from
the past. With no lyrics and little thematic organisation to punctuate the music, its syntax heav-
ily relies on harmonic oscillation (as mentioned earlier); motionless pondering that resembles
early pieces such as ‘A Saucerful of Secrets’ (‘Skins’); repeated textural tapestries; short melodic
guitar fragments (in place of the band’s iconic directional solos); and little melodic, harmonic,
and rhythmic tension, all resulting in isolated pools of sound and groove that ofer little sense
of direction.
In order to apprehend the way Pink Floyd’s use of musical time has evolved through the
years, it can be useful to think of the entire Floydian recorded corpus as one continuous piece
lasting from 1967 to 2014 (see Figure 26.6). Hence, the 58-year-long Floydian output begins
with an erratic intro that fuctuates between various and extreme temporalities (the Barrett-
led era); continues with a static, mostly instrumental interlude featuring few linear fares (the
searching era); picks up the pace in a linear, albeit slow section (the classic era); reaches its peak
in an overtly linear climax (the dramatic era); and ends with a time-stretching coda that deceler-
ates, ceases motion, and even seems to go back in time (the refective era).
Like the man sailing in an endless sea of clouds on the cover of The Endless River, Pink Floyd’s
corpus does not come to a clear end. Instead, its last piece suggests an eternal cruise in the sea
of time. The place the man is coming from and the place to which he is going look the same,
as past, present, and future all merge into a continuous pool. Pink Floyd’s swan song ofers no
closure, nor is it heading anywhere. It is not becoming; it is simply being at the end of a six-decade
journey of music.

Conclusion
Temporal fuctuations are so ingrained in Pink Floyd’s music that it is impossible to imagine it
without them. Kramer (1988) argues that the interplay of linearity and nonlinearity in music
determines both the style and the form of a composition.42 In the case of Pink Floyd, such
interplay does not only inform many of their works but also shapes the band’s overall style. The
experience that many of their songs and albums evoke – the journey they ofer through time –
is defned by a mosaic of diferent temporalities. Often static and motional sections alternate
sequentially. Other times, linear and nonlinear elements appear concurrently in diferent musi-
cal ingredients (e.g., melody and harmony) or hierarchical levels (e.g., foreground and back-
ground). All of these ofer a rich and complex experience that, arguably, alters our perception
and calls for various modes of listening. In addition to its impact on the structure of pieces, the
use of varied temporalities often supports and enriches the lyrics, concept, or dramatic narrative.
The way various temporalities, and especially stasis, are used in diferent eras in the band’s
career sheds light on the way their style has developed through their many years of music mak-
ing. On the one hand, it underlines the great distances among diferent eras – for instance, how
far their music in 1979’s The Wall is from that of 1969’s Ummagumma. On the other hand, it
depicts a few common threads that, despite changes in personnel, artistic goals, lyrical style,
and almost every musical aspect, have sustained through the years. By illuminating this integral
part of Pink Floyd’s vocabulary and using it to help defne their evolving style, this study adds
another piece to the decoding of the Floydian genome.
I began this chapter by demonstrating how the sense of time can be fuctuated in language.
It is thus only appropriate to end it the way Pink Floyd’s corpus ends – ofering no punctuation
or closure, rather a never-ending journey toward . . .43

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 Gilad Cohen

Notes
1 See Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, page 109; Clifton, T.
(1983). Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology. New Haven: Yale University Press, page 114;
Kramer, J. (1988). The Time of Music. New York and London: Schirmer, pages 5–7.
2 Silberman, P. (2018). ‘Form and Time in Trout Mask Replica’, in Scotto, C., Smith, K. and Brackett,
J. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. Abingdon, UK:
Routledge, pages 315–331.
3 Scholars refer to these types as linear/nonlinear temporality or linear/nonlinear musical times (see Op. cit.
Kramer; also, Meyer, L. B. (1967). Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 72 – or discursive/non-discursive music – see Pearsall,
E. (2006). ‘Anti-Teleological Art: Articulating Meaning Through Silence’, in Almén, B. and Pearsall,
E. (eds.), Approaches to Meaning in Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, page 44.
4 Rowell, L. (1987). ‘Stasis in Music’, Semiotica, 66(1–3):181–195; Op. cit. Kramer (1988):210–211;
Cutileiro, T. (2014). ‘Opera and Non-Narrative Music, Vol. I’, Doctoral diss., Universidade de Évora,
pages 131–132. Also, Rowell, L. (1983). Thinking about Music: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music.
Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
5 Op. cit. Rowell (1987):184.
6 See Whitehead (1967), who documents a Pink Floyd concert at the UFO club in 1966. A segment is
available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUHMltEOLds
7 See Yodfat, A. (2014). ‘The Pink Time’, in Katorza, A. (ed.), Pink Floyd – Tearing Down the Wall.
Tel-Aviv: Resling, pages 221–226; Long, P. G. (2014). ‘The Sound of In-Between Exploring Liminal-
ity in Popular Music Composition’, Undergraduate thesis, University of Western Sydney; Whiteley,
S. (1990). ‘Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix’, Popular Music,
9(1):37–60; Reising, R. (2009). ‘Melting Clocks and the Hallways of Always: Time in Psychedelic
Music’, Popular Music and Society, 32(4):523–547. I borrow the terms ‘harmonic stasis’ and ‘harmonic
oscillation’ from Malawey, V. (2010). ‘Harmonic Stasis and Oscillation in Björk’s Medúlla’, Music The-
ory Online, 16(1).
8 While this chapter focuses on form, harmony, and rhythm, themes of time, stasis, and motion are also
frequent in the band’s lyrics (e.g., ‘Time’, ‘On the Run’, ‘Wish You Were Here’, ‘Dogs’, ‘Run Like
Hell’, and ‘Comfortably Numb’). Stasis and motion are also central themes in Barrett’s two ofcial solo
albums, with stasis taking over in the second one, Barrett, from 1970 – Chapman, R. (2010). A Very
Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett. London: Faber and Faber, pages 245, 258. For more about time
in psychedelic music’s lyrics, see Op. cit. Reising (2009). Likewise, this study refers to timbre and sound
only when it relates to my main discussion on the aforementioned elements.
9 Interestingly, the verse of Pink Floyd’s second single, ‘See Emily Play’, presents a mirrored version of
the two-note beginning of ‘Arnold Layne’ through a descending whole-step on the downbeat, grant-
ing the verse a similar (albeit more grounded) momentum. The sped-up interlude between frst two
verses in ‘See Emily Play’ creates a similar sensation of time speeding up, a much less common tool
in a toolbox that favours slow and static temporalities. In O’Donnell, S. (2002). ‘Sailing to the Sun:
Revolver’s Infuence on Pink Floyd’, in Reising, R. (ed.), Every Sound There Is: The Beatles’ Revolver and
the Transformation of Rock and Roll. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, pages 69–86, O’Donnell
attributes this technique to the infuence of The Beatles on Pink Floyd.
10 The still intro I discuss here is fundamentally diferent from a much more common prototype, an intro
that introduces a repeated fguration (also known as a vamp) of the tonic chord that later continues
to accompany the verse (e.g., ‘Brain Damage’ [1973] and ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ [1979]). While the
latter prepares the verse, thus leading to it linearly, the former makes an autonomous entity that simply
takes place before the verse.
11 As rock band Queen sings to a melody that nods to the opening line of Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’,
written by Syd Barrett.
12 Op. cit. Reising (2009):527–528 links the emergence of previously heard musical themes after a time-
disorienting interlude to the sensation of time shifts during psychedelic experience.
13 Op. cit. Kramer (1988):375–376.
14 Some early Pink Floyd tracks, although entirely based on harmonic stasis or oscillation without any
melodic themes, maintain a strong sense of linear momentum thanks to structural development in
texture and dynamics (e.g., ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ [1968]; see Cotner, J. S. (2002). ‘Pink

480
 A journey through Pink Floyd’s music

Floyd’s “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”: Toward a Theory of Textural Rhythm in Rock Recording’,
in Holm- Hudson, K. (ed.), Progressive Rock Reconsidered. London: Routledge, for textural analysis; and
‘One of These Days’ [1971]). Likewise, despite static harmony, texture, rhythm, and dynamics, I fnd
that the soaring guitar solo in Atom Heart Mother (1970, 10:17~12:40) imbues that section with both
development and direction.
15 Thanks to Brady Bock for this useful metaphor.
16 Op. cit. Kramer (1988):55 characterises some minimalist music.
17 Notably, the prefacing intro in ‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ (1:00–1:24) is much more directional
than the theme that follows: this intro features a continuous, goal-oriented chord progression and a
gradual acceleration aided by a rhythmic use of match lighting sounds, whereas the following theme
is a one-chord, quasi-minimalistic tapestry that is made of keyboards and guitar lines using bar-length
delay efect.
18 In linear music, events stem from earlier events, while in nonlinear music, events stem from principles
that govern an entire piece (Op. cit. Kramer [1988]:453). I wonder if Pink Floyd’s steady jams stem not
only from entire pieces but rather of their entire style. In other words, the decision to include steady
jams in so many songs, both live and recorded, is governed less by a structural need in any particular
song and more by the overall aesthetic of their early years – aesthetic that includes ofering audiences
a danceable psychedelic experience in the band’s early performances.
19 In my analysis of the emotional arc in ‘Shine On you Crazy Diamond’ (1975), I suggest that the steady
jam in the closing track (6:28~9:00) pays a tribute to the band’s early jams with Syd Barrett – see
Cohen, G. (2018). ‘ “The Shadow of Yesterday’s Triumph”: Pink Floyd’s “Shine On” and the Stage
Theory of Grief ’, Music Theory Spectrum, 40(1), Spring:106–120. The free interlude in ‘Dogs’ (1977),
although repeating a four-chord progression, has clear ties to other free interludes that are mentioned
here (Cohen, 2015a), and it was probably infuential on the semi-free interlude in Waters’ solo song
‘Bird in a Gale’ (2017) 3:06–4:37.
20 See Cohen, G. (2014). ‘In Pink Floyd’s River, Time is Endless’, theconversation.com. Retrieved from
theconversation.com/in-pink-foyds-river-time-is-endless-33707.
21 The harmony I am referring to is a sustained dominant seventh chord that serves as a platform for
improvisations in mixolydian mode (the same harmony is used for a similar efect in ‘Flaming’ 1:30–
2:16 and throughout ‘Chapter 24’ [both 1967]). In traditional harmony this chord is considered dis-
sonant and calls for a resolution. Blandino (2006):11 refers to the prolonged added-6th chord that ends
Mahler’s ‘Der Abschied’ from Das Lied von der Erde. See Blandino, M. V. (2006). ‘Musical Time and
Revealed Timelessness’, Louisiana State University Master’s Theses.
22 The chord that ends these two songs is a minor ninth chord, a common chord in Pink Floyd’s arsenal
that also opens or ends songs such as ‘Paintbox’ (1967), ‘Breathe (in the Air)’ (1973), ‘Dogs’ (1977), and
‘The Fletcher Memorial Home’ (1983).
23 See Op. cit. Cohen (2018) for a complete analysis of this reading of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond.’
24 Overall, Pink Floyd’s harmonic language is relatively simple: most songs post the Syd Barrett era feature
only triads and 7th chords, small harmonic palette, short progressions, and very few modulations.
25 By moving the left hand one fret left on the guitar’s neck, three notes of the chord move a half-step
down, while the other three stay intact. As a result, the chord changes from E-B-E-G♯-B-E (bottom
to top) to E-B♭-E♭-G-B-E, producing evident clashes.
26 As the example shows, each of the chords in this succession can sound like a tonic, especially consider-
ing the static melody and slow harmonic pace (in the sung sections the E♭ is shorter than the other
chords, making it less plausible as a tonic). Both ♭VII-I and IV-I are common cadences in rock. ♭VI-I
is often used by Barrett (‘Flaming’ [1967], ‘Chapter 24’ [1967], ‘Jugband Blues’ [1968], and Barrett’s
solo songs ‘Wined and Dined’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’ [both 1970]). Reminiscent of the triton substitution
cadence in jazz, ♭II-I is more common in a minor key as ♭II-i (end of verse in ‘Sea-Saw’ [1968], chorus
to verse in ‘Let There Be More Light’ [1968], chorus to verse in ‘Cymbaline’ [1969], and bridge in ‘Us
and Them’ [1973]). Interestingly, the three frst chords in ‘Astronomy Domine’’s succession (E-E♭-G)
have the same relationships as those that open the sung section of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’
(Gm-G♭-B♭), which was written as a tribute to Barrett in 1975.
27 The verses of ‘Time’ are solely based on the progression F♯m-A-E-F♯m, and the verses of ‘Us and Them’
on Dm-Bm/D-Dmmaj9-G/D. More than half of the 17-minute song ‘Dogs’ is based on the uncharacter-
istically dissonant progression Dm9-B♭add4- Asus2sus4-A♭sus2sus4, which possesses a claustrophobic quality (see
Cohen, G. (2015a). ‘Expansive Form in Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”.’ Music Theory Online, 21(2).).

481
 Gilad Cohen

28 These successions are: ‘Vegetable Man’ – ||G-A♭-A-B♭-B||B-F♯-B-F♯-B-E♭-D♭-A-A♭-E-A♭ –

A-B-E . . .; ‘Lucifer Sam’ (verse) – ||F♯m-G-B-E-C-D-||F♯m . . .; ‘See-Saw’ – ||:Cmaj7-Am7-
F-B-E(7)-A(7)-G-F-Em-B♭-A-D(m):||E♭-Cmaj7-Fmaj7-A-E-D||; ‘Baby Lemonade’ (starting at
0:40) – B♭-D♭-A-G-D-B♭-E♭-A||B♭-A-D-A. . . . These examples of ‘interstellar harmony’ ft Bar-
rett’s harmonic language (save for ‘See Saw,’ which was written by Richard Wright), which tends to
wander with wonder and scarify with ease the stability of any previously established key in favour
of a surprising turn. Other songs that feature tonal ambiguity throughout include ‘Flaming’ (1967),
‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ (1967), and Barrett’s solo songs ‘Love Song’, ‘It Is Obvious’, and ‘Dominoes’
(all 1970). In ‘Dominoes’, nonlinearity is enhanced by uneven phrase lengths, fxed drums pattern
and dynamics, and a reversed guitar track throughout the song, which Op. cit. O’Donnell (2002) also
attributes to The Beatles’ infuence.
29 Similar continuous chromatic motions in the bass (either descending or ascending) that suspend tonal
progression and seem to be able to go on forever occur in the 1967 songs ‘Pow R. Toc H.’ (1:43–1:58
and 2:48–3:04, framing the middle quasi a-tonal section of the track), ‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and
Walk’ (2:39–2:49), ‘Paintbox’ (1:07–1:10, where the ambiguous tonality is enhanced by a surprising
7/8 bar), and ‘Vegetable Man’ (0:07–0:36, where the verse modulates half-step up every phrase, efec-
tively disguising any sense of a long-term key). In Barrett’s solo song ‘Baby Lemonade’ (1970), the
chromatic freefall (0:19–0:30) does not even lead to a new tonal place – it is simply there, and in Roger
Waters’ song ‘Smell the Roses’ (2017) a continuous whole-step descend (2:31–2:59) bridges between
the free interlude and the reprise.
30 See MacDonald, B. (ed.). (1997). Pink Floyd: Through the Eyes of . . . The Band, Its Fans, Friends and
Foes. New York: Da Capo, page 151.
31 See Wright, R. (2008). ‘Interviewed by Mark Paytress’, MOJO, November; Blake, M. (2008). Com-
fortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Cambridge, MA: Thunder’s Mouth Press, page 158;
Schafner, N. (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, pages
134–135, 155–156; Costa, J.-C. (1972). ‘Meddle’, Rolling Stone, 6 January 1972.
32 Op. cit. Kramer (1988):379 and Op. cit. Pearsall (2006):43–45. Pearsall argues that ‘when syntax is
obscured, sound itself becomes the center of attention.’ Op. cit. Cutileiro (2014):131–132 adds: ‘when
sound events become static, one tends to concentrate on the very qualities of that sound as opposed to
the moving design it could have been doing.’
33 Pink Floyd have been aware of the signifcant place of stasis in their work and in retrospect have some-
times dismissed it. Waters said: ‘I got the feeling that there was a serious lack of panic about losing
the listener’s interest,’ and Gilmour stated in regard to the origins of such sections: ‘We used to do
very long, extended jamming on stage – interminable, many people would say, and probably rightly’
(quoted in Op. cit. MacDonald (1997):188, 275. Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine, on the other hand,
remembers hearing Pink Floyd at one of their early concerts and being amazed exactly by their ‘nerve
in taking their time to get from one note to another. I couldn’t do it, but Floyd were always in control’
(quoted in Op. cit. Blake [2008]:70).
34 I call this gesture ‘fanfare’ following Meron-Dvoyris, M. (2014). ‘Us and Them’, in Katorza, A. (ed.),
Pink Floyd: Tearing Down the Wall. Tel-Aviv: Resling, page 95.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid. Meron-Dvoyris (2014):98 for an analysis of this chord progression.
37 See O’Donnell, S. (2018). ‘ “Silence in the Studio!”: Collage as Retransition in Pink Floyd’s “Atom
Heart Mother”’, in Scotto, C., Smith, K. and Brackett, J. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Popular
Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. New York: Routledge.
38 Of course, any artifcial division into eras should not be taken too strictly, and eras bleed into one
another, with some albums serving as transition albums. Thus, A Saucerful of Secrets features character-
istics (both temporal and other) of both the Barrett-led and the searching eras (and even features one
Barrett song), Meddle likewise transitions from the searching to the classic era, and so does Animals
from the classic to the dramatic era. The only defnite cut occurs, not surprisingly, after The Final Cut
(1983), as Waters, the leading force behind this album and its predecessor The Wall, departed from the
band and David Gilmour took over as its leader.
39 Op. cit. Chapman (2010):8, 143.
40 Waters’ harmonic language has become more conventional and limited in its palette starting in the late
1970s, both within Pink Floyd and in his solo albums ever since. Rarely has he explored with static
harmony again.

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41 Solo albums by individual band members also nod to Pink Floyd’s classics, like David Gilmour’s ‘Red
Sky at Night’ (2006), which is reminiscent of ‘Shine On’, and Waters’ ‘Smell the Roses’ (2017), which
brings to mind ‘Have a Cigar’ (1975) and, towards its end, ‘Echoes’ (1971).
42 Op. cit. Kramer (1988):20.
43 This chapter is based on my course ‘Shine On: The Music of Pink Floyd’ at Ramapo College of New
Jersey and on parts of my doctoral dissertation. See Cohen, G. (2015b). ‘Expansive Rock: Large-Scale
Structure in the Music of Pink Floyd’, Doctoral diss., Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
I would like to thank my students for our enlightening discussions, and especially Brady Bock for his
valuable input and ideas.

Audio and visual recordings cited in this chapter

Barrett, Syd. (1990). Barrett. Capitol Records, CDP 7 46607 2. Originally released in 1970.
———. (2010). Barrett. Harvest, 5099991755728. Originally released in 1970.
Gilmour, David. (2006). On an Island. 2006. EMI, 0946 3 55695 2 0.
Pink Floyd. (2011a). The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Capitol Records, 50999 028935 2 5. Originally
released in 1967.
———. (2011b). A Saucerful of Secrets. EMI, 50999 028936 2 4. Originally released in 1968.
———. (2011c). Music from the Film More. EMI, 50999 028938 2 2. Originally released in 1969.
———. (2011d). Ummagumma. EMI, 50999 028937 2. Originally released in 1969.
———. (2011e). Atom Heart Mother. Capitol Records, 50999 028940 2 7. Originally released in 1970.
———. (2011f). Meddle. Capitol Records, 50999 028942 2 5. Originally released in 1971.
———. (2011g). Obscured by Clouds. Capitol Records, 50999 028943 2 4. Originally released in 1972.
———. (2011h). The Dark Side of the Moon. EMI, 50999 028955 2 9. Originally released in 1973.
———. (2011i). Wish You Were Here. EMI, 50999 028945 2 2 5. Originally released in 1975.
———. (2011j). Animals. Capitol Records, 50999 028951 2 3. Originally released in 1977.
———. (2011k). The Wall. EMI, 50999 028944 2 3. Originally released in 1979.
———. (2011l). The Final Cut. EMI, 50999 028956 2 8. Originally released in 1983.
———. (2011m). A Momentary Lapse of Reason. EMI, 50999 028959 2 5. Originally released in 1987.
———. (2011n). The Division Bell. EMI, 50999 028961 2 0. Originally released in 1994.
———. (2014). The Endless River. Columbia, 88875020102.
———. (2016). The Early Years 1965–1972. Pink Floyd Records, 0190295950255.

483
 PINK FLOYD
SELECTIVE CHRONOLOGY
OF RELEVANT EVENTS1
Compiled by Chris Hart

Throughout the work of Pink Floyd there are many references to political, social and military
events, people and places. Most of these references are related to Britain. For this reason, the
following list of events is provided to help the reader unfamiliar with British and world history
better understand some of the references in the chapters of this book.2

1932–1933:
Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) voted into government.
Totalitarian Third Reich established in Germany by the Nazi Party.
In Britain the British Union of Fascists is formed under the leadership of Oswald Mosley, a
British aristocrat. Mosley married Diana Mitford in 1936 in the home of leading Nazi
Joseph Goebbels. He was detained by the British government for the duration of the
war but was never charged with anything. The British Union of Fascists were recognis-
able by their black shirts, arm bands, red insignia, black leather boots and belt buckles.
This symbolism is seen in The Wall.

1939–1945:
Second World War. 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945; six years, one day. Over 30 coun-
tries and 100 million people involved around the world.
Entertainers play a major role in maintaining morale among British citizens and military, includ-
ing Vera Lynn, especially her songs ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘The White Clifs of Dover’.
The war features in the Final Cut and The Wall.

1943:
28 July – Richard William Wright born in Hatch End, Middlesex.
6 September – George Roger Waters born in Great Bookham, Surrey.

1944:
The Education Act 1944 – An expression of one-nation conservatism in the tradition of Dis-
raeli, which called for paternalism by the upper class towards the working class – this
increased openness of secondary schools to girls and the working class, educating and

484 DOI: 10.4324/9780367338282-34

 Selective chronology

mobilising them. Another result was that the percentage of children attending higher
education tripled from 1% to 3%.
18 February 1944 – Lt Eric Fletcher Waters of Z Company, of the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusi-
liers, was killed at Aprilia (south of Rome) during the Battle of Anzio. Roger Waters
was fve months old. The death of Lt Waters is told in the Final Cut.

1944–1945:
July–January – Discovery of concentration camps across previously German-occupied Europe.
Words such as Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen become synonymous with mass
murder of Jews, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, Romany people and political
opponents of the Nazis. Railway ‘cattle-trucks’ became synonymous with the transport
of prisoners to the camps.

1945:
8 May – V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day).
6–8 August – The USA drops two atomic bombs on Japan – one on Hiroshima and one on
Nagasaki. The human race now had the technological capacity to destroy the entire
planet. In 1986 Waters arranged the music for the anti-nuclear weapons flm When the
Wind Blows.
15 August – V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day) – due to the war 85 million people worldwide
were now dead. Nuclear holocaust features in the Final Cut.

1946:
6 January – Roger Keith ‘Syd’ Barrett born in Cambridge.
6 March – David Jon Gilmour born in Trumpington, Cambridgeshire. In 1956 the Gilmour
family moved to Grantchester Meadows.
5 July – the Labour Party won the UK General election; Clement Attlee becomes prime min-
ister, replacing Winston Churchill. Attlee implemented a radical programme of social
reform, introducing the welfare state and nationalisation of core industries.
Reforms established social care provision for all UK citizens, including the NHS, building of
over 1  million public sector houses, employment rights and expansion of education
provision.

1946–1950:
Nationalisation of many heavy industries and utilities, including the Bank of England, coal, iron
and steel, water, gas, electricity, railways, waterways and telecommunications. Beginning in
the early 1980s under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, these industries were privatised.

1948:
July – NHS established in the UK – with the aim to meet the medical needs of everyone at the
point of delivery for free.
In the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Summer Olympics the NHS was celebrated
by director Danny Boyle, who said it was “the institution which more than any other
unites our nation.”
1950s:
Music and youth cultures emerge in the USA. Collectively labelled rock ‘n’ roll, the music
arrived at the same time as advances in music recording technology such as the electric

485
 Compiled by Chris Hart

guitar, amplifers and the 45-rpm record. A band needed very little equipment, usually
lead and rhythm guitars, amplifer, microphones and speakers and a drum kit to provide
the backbeat. Early bands had piano and saxophone as the lead instruments.

1951:
3 May – Festival of Britain is opened by George VI.

1952:
6 February – Elizabeth II succeeds her father, George VI.

1954:
July brought an end to the rationing that was introduced during the war in the UK.

1955:
22 September – Commercial television starts with the frst ITV broadcast.
R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self is published, which argued that mental illness was often a reaction
to an individual’s inability to cope with family and social pressures.
1 December – Rosa McCauley Parks, in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat for
a white passenger on a public bus. Rosa explained that her refusal was not because she
was physically tired but that she was tired of giving in.

1956:
May – John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger is staged. Osborne announced, “I want to make
people feel, to give them lessons in feeling.”3 The play marked a moment of social
change in the UK class system; the post-war generation of state-educated young people
were fnding their voice and expressing a challenge to the social deference often shown
by their parents and would go on to spread satire and popular culture to the masses by
the early 1960s.

1957:
15 May – Britain tests its frst hydrogen bomb over Christmas Island in the Pacifc Ocean. The
tests led to a debate in Britain about the dangers of nuclear weapons and to the founda-
tion in 1958 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). It continues to date
to oppose nuclear weapons and promote peace and political freedom. Its symbol has
become the universal sign for peace worldwide. Aged 16 years, Roger Waters was one
of CND’s Cambridge members, as was his mother. In London the Masons gave their
support to CND.
In 1980 the nuclear rearmament and second Cold War saw CND respond by organising mass
protests throughout Europe. The CND has been supported and associated with the
Glastonbury Music Festival since the early 1980s.
By 2017, there had been 2,476 nuclear devices fred, out of which 520 were in the Earth’s
atmosphere. The use of atomic weapons by the USA in 1945 on two Japanese cities
ironically led to many books and flms about the world-transforming possibilities of
nuclear energy, but these hopes soon turned to fear and warnings about the efects of
radiation on life on Earth.4

486
 Selective chronology

4 October – Sputnik 1 becomes the frst artifcial Earth satellite. Launched by the USSR, it
created a mixture of fear and amazement in the West. The space age and space race had
begun.
1960s:
Art and design colleges attract some of the most talented creative individuals, leading the British
to dominate 1960s popular culture. Many art and design colleges gave opportunities for
future success to such, including James Dyson, Ridley Scott, Ian Dury, Alan Rickman,
David Nash and many many more.5 The creative industries are a major British success
story for over 60 years.

1963:
New universities open and students get state support in order to be able to attend university.
Doctor Stephen Vincent Strange, the Marvel comic character, appears for the frst time. He is
a supreme sorcerer with mystic powers charged with protecting Earth against magical
threats.

1966:
30 July – England wins the football World Cup, beating Germany 3–2 in extra time.

1967:
Abortion and homosexuality are partially legalised in England and Wales. Criminalisation of
homosexuality in the UK did not actually end until 2013 – the 1967 act was just a
start. In 1966, the year before partial decriminalisation, some 420 men were convicted
of gross indecency – by 1974 the annual number of convictions had soared to 1,711.6
The song, ‘In the Flesh’ (1979) by Waters has the line, ‘Are there any queers in the theatre
tonight? Get them up against . . .’.
19 February – The supertanker SS Torrey Canyon runs aground of the southwest coast of the
United Kingdom, spilling an estimated 164 million litres of crude oil into the sea. The
oil devastated French and British coasts, with authorities not knowing how to deal with
the disaster. Environmental abuse of the planet is referenced in The Division Bell.
4 AUGUST – THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN

1968:
4 April – Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights activist, is assassinated, sparking violent protests in
more than 115 American cities.
May – Protests in many countries, mostly led by students and trade unionists, break out – the
protests are against war, racial inequalities, economic inequality and dictatorships. Sec-
tarian confict in Northern Ireland begins. People protest for civil rights, in opposition
to the Vietnam war and for protection of the environment and women’s rights.
May and July – student occupations of art schools spread across the UK in protest at the make-
shift buildings and oppressive management regimes in UK higher education. The occu-
pation at Hornsey College of Art (now Middlesex University) – once the place of
employment for Mason and Waters’ landlord Mike Leonard and venue of an early Pink
Floyd gig – remains an emblematic event in the modern history of British universities.
29 JUNE – A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS

487
 Compiled by Chris Hart

1969:
7 NOVEMBER – UMMAGUMMA

1970:
13 February – The so-call Garden House ‘riot’ was a protest by Cambridge University students
at the Garden House Hotel, beside the River Cam, in Cambridge against the Greek
Military junta. Eight students were convicted and sent to long terms in prison or youth
detention centres.
In 2010, Charlie Gilmour (son of Polly Samson and David Gilmour), a Cambridge University
student, was sentenced to 16 months detention for taking part in a protest against stu-
dent loans in central London.
2 OCTOBER – ATOM HEART MOTHER

1971:
6 February – First British soldier is killed in Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. On 20 July 1982, at
12.55 pm, an IRA bomb explodes under the bandstand in Regent’s Park, London, on
which the band of the Royal Green Jackets was playing. Two hours earlier, another IRA
nail bomb explodes in Hyde Park. The song ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ (1983) by Waters,
has the line, ‘And maniacs don’t blow holes in bandsmen by remote control’ referencing
these events.
5 NOVEMBER – MEDDLE

1972:
30 January – British army kills 14 in Londonderry – Derry, Northern Ireland, on Bloody
Sunday.
2 JUNE – OBSCURED BY CLOUDS

1973:
1 MARCH – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

1974:
January–March – Three-day week in UK: businesses were limited to three specifed consecutive
days of electricity consumption each week. The measure was to conserve stocks of coal
for electricity generating due to the miners’ strike limiting supply.

1975:
30 April – Vietnam War ends in chaos as US troops evacuate Saigon. The war cost America
over 1 trillion dollars (adjusted to 2015), with over 3 million Americans serving in Viet-
nam, with 52,220 killed, more than 150,000 wounded. Words such as ‘agent orange’,
‘defoliation’, and ‘napalm’ entered the vocabulary.
12 SEPTEMBER – WISH YOU WERE HERE

1976:
September – Britain is forced to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund to avoid
national bankruptcy.

1977:
21 JANUARY – ANIMALS

488
 Selective chronology

1978/79:
Winter Strikes paralyse Britain during the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’.

1979:
3 May – Conservative Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain’s frst female prime minister.
30 NOVEMBER – THE WALL

1980–1992:
Second Cold War begins.
In the UK citizens would be given a four-minute warning of nuclear attack from the USSR.

1981:
Ronald Reagan becomes president of the USA until 1989.
April – Racial tensions spark riots in Brixton and other areas across the UK.
Nuclear cruise missiles brought to RAF/USAF base at Greenham Common brought protests
from the Women’s Peace Movement and establishment of long-lasting Greenham Com-
mon Women’s Peace Camp. In 1987 in the United States President Ronald Reagan
and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty, which led to the removal of cruise missiles from Greenham between 1989
and 1991.

1982:
January – Economic recession leads to high unemployment. Staple industries such as iron and
steel, ship building and coal mining are drastically reduced, leading to the devastation of
many traditional working-class communities.
2 April – Argentina, under the rule of a junta led by Leopoldo Galtieri, invades the British ter-
ritory of the Falkland Islands. This leads to a ten-week undeclared war between the UK
and Argentina. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher orders that a task force be sent
to the South Atlantic to take back the Falklands.
2 May – The Argentinean battle-cruiser General Belgrano is sunk by the British with loss of 323
sailors. British casualties are 255 killed and 775 wounded. Argentinean causalities are
649 killed and 1,657 wounded. SS Atlantic Conveyor, a merchant navy ship in support of
the British forces, is sunk by the Argentine air force using French made Exocet Missiles.
The Falklands war features on the Final Cut.

1983:
7 SEPTEMBER – THE FINAL CUT

1984:
March – Twelve-month ‘Miners’ Strike’ over pit closures begins. Government begins closure of
UK pits; by 2004, 170 had closed, with loss of approximately 44,000 direct jobs. In 2015
only two coal mines remained active in the UK.
Apple Computers, Inc., launches the Macintosh personal computer – it could ‘talk’ – it is adver-
tised in a television commercial based on Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

1986:
When the Wind Blows (flm) released in UK; based on the Raymond Briggs Book, it tells the
story of an elderly couple following the ridiculous instructions from the government

489
 Compiled by Chris Hart

pamphlet Protect and Survive on how to survive a nuclear attack. James and Hilda do
what the government has told them to and die slowly from radiation sickness. Music
is by Roger Waters with David Bowie, Genesis, Squeeze, Hugh Cornwell and Paul
Hardcastle.
8 December – Major national industries in the UK are privatised. The post-war dream begins
to unravel.

1989:
22 December – Gates in the Berlin Wall, built in 1961 to divide East from West Berlin, were
opened, allowing citizens of the once-communist East to visit the West and vice versa.
The following year demolition of the wall is begun. On 21 July 1990, Roger Waters
performs The Wall – Live in Berlin.

1989:
Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web. The frst web page went live on 6 August 1991.
In 2019 there were approximately 1.7 billion web sites on 8.2 billion servers.

1991:
17 January – Liberation of Kuwait begins as Allies launch Operation Desert Storm.

1994:
28 MARCH – THE DIVISION BELL

2001:
Apple introduces the iPod and in 2003 introduces iTunes – though not the frst player to mar-
ket, it revolutionises the way we purchase and listen to music.
2003:
20 March – Iraq War begins and continues to some extent to the time of the publication of this
book. Based on inaccurate information about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruc-
tion (WMD), the USA is joined by the UK and other countries in the near destruction
of Iraq’s armed forces. In the UK the Iraq Inquiry (2016)7 found that Prime Minister
Tony Blair had exaggerated the threat from Iraq and subverted intelligence agencies in
order to make a case for the war.
Since 2003 Iraq and other neighbouring countries have experienced social, religious and eco-
nomic chaos and confict, notably the rise of Islamic State (Daesh) fanatics.

2006:
7 July – Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett dies.

2008:
15 September – Richard Wright dies.

2013:
18 April – Storm Thorgerson dies.

490
 Selective chronology

2014:
10 NOVEMBER – THE ENDLESS RIVER

2022:
8 April – ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ single released in support of the people of Ukraine following the
invasion by the Russian Federation.

Notes
1 Prepared and selected by Chris Hart.
2 Op. cit. Mason (2004) also gives a list of events in his book, pages 346–5.
3 John Osborne, ‘They Call It Cricket’, in Declaration, ed. by Tom Maschler. London: MacGibbon and
Kee, 1957, page 65.
4 See Brians, P. (1984). Nuclear War in Science Fiction, 1945–59 (La guerre nucléaire en science-fction,
1945–59). Science Fiction Studies. Vol. 11, No. 3 (Nov): 253–263.
5 Horowitz, H. L. (1986). ‘The 1960s and the Transformation of Campus Cultures’. History of Education
Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring):1–38.
6 Tatchell, P. (2017). ‘Don’t fall for the myth that it’s 50 years since we decriminalised homosexuality’. The
Guardian Online, 23 May.
7 The very long report can be download here, gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry.

491
 INDEX
Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a fgure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the
corresponding page.
Abbey Road (Beatles) 174
absence and presence 243, 246–247, 254
‘Absolutely Curtains’ 32, 152, 302
acceptance 318, 327, 331–333, 332
Adorno, Theodor 339, 347, 350n23, 366,
430–431
aesthetics 101–102, 105–106, 246–248, 251–252,
262, 423–424, 427–429; and Adorno 430;
of album covers 174, 177–178; le cinéma-vérité
151; and dialectic 429; of Gonzo Journalism
165; and intensity 426, 433; looping 229–230;
oppositional 243; and the other 434;
of psychedelia 125–136, 222; punk 85, 248,
252; space rock 221–223; ‘unhuman’ 236
afect 406, 423–429, 431–433, 435–436
‘Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast’ 31, 298, 304, 467,
469, 476
album charts 19–20, 164, 243, 260, 261
album covers 119–120, 172–174, 173, 186–187;
Animals 182–184; Atom Heart Mother 176–177;
The Dark Side of the Moon 179–181, 180; as
data 174–175; The Division Bell 185–186; The
Endless River 185; Meddle 177–178; Momentary
Lapse of Reason 175; More 176; Obscured by
Clouds 178–179; The Wall 184–185, 185; Wish
You Were Here 181–182
albums 25–27; Animals 34–35; Atom Heart
Mother 31; The Dark Side of the Moon 33–34;
The Division Bell 39–40; The Endless River
40–42; The Final Cut 37–38; fve phases 54;
group compositions on 84; Meddle 31–32;
A Momentary Lapse of Reason 38–39; More 29–30;
Obscured by Clouds 32; The Piper at the Gates
492
of Dawn 27–28; pros and cons of post-split
albums 431–436; A Saucerful of Secrets 28–29;
Ummagumma 30–31; The Wall 35–37; Wish You
Were Here 34; see also specifc albums
alienation 35–36, 120–121, 132–133, 212–217,
220–223, 340–343
‘All You Need Is Love’ (Beatles) 58
anger 165–166, 327–333, 328–329
Animals (1977) 2–5, 20–21, 34–35; aesthetics
and subjectivity 419, 432, 476–477; album
cover 182–184; and the British music media
162–165; confict and control in 344–347; and
genre 242–243, 252–254, 257, 261, 264, 268;
and legacy 303; making of 339–344; maturity
and decline in 347–348; and memorabilia
193–194; performance and sound 83, 93, 119,
122; and the stage theory of grief 332; and
totalitarianism 351, 357, 360, 364; track listing
34; transitional aspects 338–339, 348–349;
truth and manipulation 394–395; see also
specifc tracks
Animals in the Flesh tour 121–122, 193, 350n14
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’ 36, 264, 327,
355, 362, 455, 459
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2’ 36, 132, 191;
aesthetics and subjectivity 434, 455, 459; and
genre 261, 264; and Gilmour’s guitar 97–98,
98; and the stage theory of grief 327; and
totalitarianism 356–357, 360
‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3’ 36, 264, 356,
363
Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera 450
‘Any Colour You Like’ 26, 33, 104, 134, 468
 Index
Architectural Abdabs 408
‘Arnold Layne’ 17–18, 117, 206; and the British
music media 161, 166; and genre 249; and
temporality 466, 477, 480n9; and whimsy 275,
279, 281
ascending motif 322, 327, 344–345, 469, 474,
474
‘Astronomy Domine’ 27; aesthetics and
subjectivity 403, 414, 468–471, 470; and
genre 211, 214–220; and legacy 298–300;
performance and sound 56, 79–80, 127, 132
Atom Heart Mother (1970) 19, 31, 86; aesthetics
and subjectivity 416, 476–477; album cover
176–177, 187; and the British music media
165; and genre 263; and legacy 296–298,
301–305; and live performances 119; and
original soundtracks 150; track listing 31; truth
and manipulation 385; see also specifc tracks
‘Atom Heart Mother’ 193, 304, 321; aesthetics
and subjectivity 467–468, 475–476;
performance and sound 75, 83, 85, 113
‘Autobahn’ (Kraftwerk) 233–234
autobiographical elements 66, 127, 430; and
totalitarianism 351–358, 361–362, 366; truth
and manipulation 385–386, 390–392
avant-garde, the 75, 86, 181, 248–249, 298, 477
Azimuth Co-ordinator 17, 117–120, 132, 308;
aesthetics and subjectivity 406, 410–411; and
whimsy 281, 284
band name 11–12, 20, 30, 309, 313, 408–409, 435
Barrett, Roger ‘Syd’ 5, 7–12, 15–17, 20–21,
26–31, 34, 39; aesthetics and subjectivity 406,
408–410, 412, 414–419, 466–471, 477–479;
and album covers 181–182; and the British
music media 159, 161–162; and collaborative
composition 82–85; The Committee 143–144;
departure of 157, 166–168; and English
pastoral 438–447; and genre 212, 216,
229–230, 248–251; and improvisation 73,
75–82; and legacy 293–294, 297–301, 304;
memorabilia 192, 207; performance and sound
53–54, 56–65, 68–69, 113–115, 128, 131,
134; and the stage theory of grief 318–324,
327–330, 333–334; success and downfall
307–309, 313; and whimsy 279–281, 284,
287–290
Battersea Power Station 122, 182–183, 183, 347
Beatles, The 10–11, 13, 76, 294, 299–300; Abbey
Road 174; album covers 173–174; ‘All You
Need Is Love’ 58; The Beatles 174; ‘A Day
in Life’ 132; Let It Be 308; ‘Revolution’ 472;
‘Revolution 9’ 232; Revolver 174; Rubber Soul
15; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 15,
18, 79, 174, 187, 214, 245, 308; ‘Strawberry
Fields Forever’ 445; White Album 173; Yellow
Submarine 173
493
Beatles, The (Beatles) 174
bereavement: as a process 319–321; ‘Shine On
You Crazy Diamond’ 333; stages 320; see also
grief, stage theory of
‘Bike’ 27–28, 79, 300, 302, 332, 444, 466
binaries 243–246
bootlegs 132, 144, 150, 294–295, 297; Feed Your
Head 192, 203; A Tree Full of Secrets 146
boredom 117, 152, 252–253
box sets 26–27, 294–296; Cambridge St/ation
1965–1967 26; The Dark Side of the Moon
Immersion Box Set 26; Dramatis/ation 1969 26;
1970 Devi/Ation 26; Obfusc/ation 1972 26; Pink
Floyd: The Early Years 114, 142, 144, 146, 150,
293–305, 419; Reverber/ation 1971 26; Shine
On 310, 313–315
‘Brain Damage’ 33–34, 150, 265, 309, 418;
performance and sound 61, 69, 121, 134
‘Bring the Boys Back Home’ 36, 65; and the stage
theory of grief 322, 327; and temporality 455,
458, 475; and totalitarianism 356, 364
‘Burning Bridges’ 32, 60, 152
‘call and response’ 96–97, 96, 105
‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’ 114, 144,
148–149, 302; aesthetics and subjectivity
406–407, 416–417, 476; free improvisation and
collective composition 75, 82–84
cartographical map 49–55, 68–70; lament 59–64;
nostalgia 55–59; trauma 64–68
categorisation 53–54, 212–213, 217–223, 264
‘Chapter 24’ 18, 28, 60, 79–80, 275, 286, 468
character 183, 385–387, 390–391; Billy 431;
Matilda 287; ‘Pink’ 64, 69, 166, 184, 279, 354,
370, 450, 455–456, 462
charts see album charts
‘Childhood’s End’ 32, 56, 151, 153, 302
chronology 484–491; see also historical context
‘Cirrus Minor’ 29, 145, 147, 301, 469
‘Cluster One’ 39
Cole, Nat King 173
collaborative composition 73–75, 82–86; and
improvisation 75–82
collecting 191–192, 194–195, 196–207;
exhibiting 193–194; and fandom 195; how
memories become memorabilia 193; reasons
for 192
collective composition 73–75, 82–86; and
improvisation 75–82
‘Comfortably Numb’ 37, 122, 134, 327, 356;
aesthetics and subjectivity 433, 450, 478;
and Gilmour’s guitar 99–104; truth and
manipulation 391, 394
‘Coming Back to Life’ 40, 62, 102, 132
Committee, The (1968) 19, 141–145, 302
communication 39–40, 262–263, 426
composition see collective composition
 Index
confict 61–62, 343–347
context 444–447; see also historical context
control 343–347, 359–361, 456–461
controversies 166–169, 364
‘Corporal Clegg’ 28, 60, 279, 384, 469
corpus 466–469, 476–479, 478
cosmos 211, 414–416, 420
covers see album covers
cows 119, 176–177, 187, 301, 303, 414–416
critical framework 1–2
critical reception: progressive rock 257–262
‘Crying Song’ 29, 145, 147
cultural legacy see legacy
curios 403, 405, 412–414
‘Cymbaline’ 30, 145–146, 148, 152, 301–302, 407
dance music 17, 226–228, 231–232, 276, 468;
‘Autobahn’ 233–234; ‘Doctor Who’ 232; ‘I Feel
Love’ 234; ‘Phaedra’ 233; in Pink Floyd music
228–231, 234–238; ‘Popcorn’ 233; ‘Revolution
9’ 232; ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ 233
Dark Side of the Moon, The (1973) 1–4, 19–21,
26, 33–34, 41; and the aesthetics of psychedelia
125, 127, 132–134; aesthetics and subjectivity
406, 418, 432, 436, 468, 475–477; album
cover 174, 178–180, 187; and the British
music media 164–165; free improvisation
and collective composition 73, 82–86; and
genre 212, 226, 234, 236, 242–243, 247, 257,
263–268; and Gilmour’s guitar 89, 92–93;
and legacy 295, 301–305; listening to and
understanding 51, 69; and live performances
112, 119–121; memorabilia 191, 193, 200; and
original soundtracks 141, 149–150, 153; and
the stage theory of grief 318, 331–332; success
and downfall 306–315; and totalitarianism 352,
357, 359; track listing 33; transitional aspects
338, 343, 345, 349; truth and manipulation
385, 394; see also specifc tracks
Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Box Set, The 26
data, album covers as 174–175
‘Day in the Life, A’ (Beatles) 132, 300
decline 347–348
Delicate Sound of Thunder, The (1988) 21, 192
David Gilmour Meltdown 198
depression 65–66, 330–333, 331, 356
Derbyshire, Delia 228, 231, 232
despair 358, 456, 461
dialectic 424, 428, 429, 433–435; Adorno’s
negative dialectic 339, 347, 350n23, 430–431
dissonance 100–101, 323, 369, 405
Division Bell, The (1994) 21, 39–42, 185, 313,
385; aesthetics and subjectivity 431–436, 468,
475–478; performance and sound 69, 94, 95,
126–127; track listing 39; see also specifc tracks
Division Bell tour 119, 125–128, 126, 129–136,
130, 193, 313; production costs 128–129
494
‘Doctor Who’ (Delia Derbyshire/Ron Grainer)
231, 232
‘Dogs’ 114, 153, 162; and genre 252, 264, 268,
395; and Gilmour’s guitar 97, 100, 100; and
the stage theory of grief 321, 327, 330; and
temporality 468, 471, 473, 476; transitional
aspects 340–346, 348
‘Dogs of War, The’ 39, 433
‘Don’t Leave Me Now’ 36, 322, 330, 356, 391,
455, 471
‘Dramatic Theme’ 30, 302, 467
Earls Court 111, 120, 126, 130, 130, 200, 418
Early Years (box set) 114, 142, 144, 146, 150,
293–294, 419; and the avant-garde 298; and
Latham, John 298–299; and legacy 294–296;
musical and stylistic evolution 296–298; and
rurality 301; and soundtracks 302–305; and
Wright, Rick 299–301
echoes 177–178, 410–411
‘Echoes’ 32, 304, 321, 342; free improvisation
and collective composition 75, 82–85,
93; and genre 219–220, 242, 263; and
live performances 113–114; memorabilia
192–193; stillness and motion in 471–475; and
temporality 465–469, 472, 474, 476–477
‘Eclipse’ 34, 134, 150, 310; aesthetics and
subjectivity 435, 471; and genre 212, 265
eerie, the 403–407, 412, 419–420
electronic dance music 226–228, 231–232,
468; ‘Autobahn’ 233–234; ‘Doctor Who’
232; ‘I Feel Love’ 234; ‘Phaedra’ 233; in Pink
Floyd music 228–231, 234–238; ‘Popcorn’
233; ‘Revolution 9’ 232; ‘Won’t Get Fooled
Again’ 233
‘Empty Spaces’ 36, 356, 455
Endless River, The (2014) 3, 21, 40–42, 73, 205;
album cover 185–187; and temporality 468,
475–479; track listing 40–41; see also specifc
tracks
Englishness 131, 406, 438–440, 446; and the
Piper at the Gates of Dawn 442–444
English pastoral 438–447
ephemera 403, 409, 418–419
ethos 393–395
exhibitions 193–194, 418–419
Ezrin, Bob 349, 353–354, 385
fandom and fans 4, 195, 370, 423, 428–436
‘Fat Old Sun’ 31, 60, 296, 301, 303, 476
‘Fearless’ 32
Feed Your Head (bootleg) 192, 203
flms 141–142, 153–154; The Committee
142–144; More 144–148; La Vallée 151–153;
Zabriskie Point 148–150
Final Cut, The (1983) 5, 8, 20–22, 37–38, 313;
aesthetics and subjectivity 431, 434–435, 468,
 Index
471, 477; and the British music media 167;
contemporary meanings 392; editing truth
387–388; ethos, pathos and logos 393–395;
fact, fction, character, voice 385–387;
interpretation 388–392; memorabilia 191,
195, 199; performance and sound 51, 64,
68–70, 73; and the stage theory of grief 322,
332; structure and formula 395–396; and
totalitarianism 352; track listing 37; transitional
aspects 339, 348; truth and manipulation
384–385, 396–397; see also specifc tracks
‘Final Cut, The’ 38, 66, 388, 390–391
Fisher, Mark 121–122, 128–129, 134, 193–197,
357, 404
fve phases of Pink Floyd 54–55
‘Flaming’ 27, 78, 80, 114, 314; aesthetics and
subjectivity 420, 442, 466, 477; listening to and
understanding 56, 68
‘Fletcher Memorial Home, The’ 38, 61, 390, 392,
394
frameworks 1–2, 245, 423–425, 427
‘Free Four’ 32, 60, 151–153, 384, 389, 395, 471
free improvisation 73–75, 80–82; and other types
75–78; in The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 78–80
future 58–59, 442–443, 451–456, 461–462
gadgets 298, 403, 405–408
‘Games for May’ 17–18, 132, 277, 284–289, 308,
406, 410
Geesin, Ron 142, 143, 176
genre formation 211–212, 222–223;
categorisation and genre recognition 217–222;
generic mixing 214–217; generic parameters
212–214
‘Get Your Filthy Hands Of My Desert’ 38, 388,
394
Giddens, A. 450–452, 456, 458
Gilmour, David 5–12, 16–21, 28–35, 37–42,
89–90, 104–106; and the aesthetics of
psychedelia 126–127, 130–131, 134–136;
aesthetics and subjectivity 407, 415–417,
427, 430, 433–435, 444, 466–468, 475–478;
and album covers 185; approaches to
composition 102–104; and the British music
media 165–168; dissonance 100–101; free
improvisation and collective composition
73, 75, 80–85; and genre 235, 237, 247,
252, 267–269; infuences and learning to
play 90–91; and legacy 299–304; listening
to and understanding 51, 55–58, 63, 68–69;
and live performances 111, 113, 119, 122;
memorabilia 191, 193; note choice 98–100;
and original soundtracks 141, 146–147,
149, 153; phrasing 96–98; playing technique
101–102; sound 92–96; success and downfall
307–309, 311–315; and totalitarianism
353–355; transitional aspects 338–339,
495
341–346; truth and manipulation 394–395;
and whimsy 288, 290
‘Gnome, The’ 28, 56, 79; and temporality 466,
469, 476; and whimsy 275, 285–286, 288
‘Gold It’s in the . . ., The’ 32, 151
‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ 36, 65–66, 356, 362,
455, 457
‘Goodbye Cruel Sky’ 36, 121, 330, 356, 363
Gothard, Michael 151, 206
Graham, Bill 15, 280
Graham, Davey 76
Grahame, Kenneth 27, 276, 440, 442
Grainer, Ron 231, 232
‘Grand Vizier’s Garden Party, The’ 31
‘Grantchester Meadows’ 9–10, 31, 68; aesthetics
and subjectivity 404, 407, 415, 476; and legacy
301, 303; and whimsy 287–288
‘Great Day for Freedom, A’ 40, 57, 69
‘Great Gig in the Sky, The’ 33, 85, 133, 136,
264–265, 309, 468
‘Green Is the Colour’ 29, 145–146, 148, 152,
301, 407
grief, stage theory of 318–319, 333–334;
acceptance 331–333; anger 327–330;
bereavement as a process 319–321; depression
330–331; mourning and grief 321; nostalgia
330; shock and numbness 321–322; yearning
322–326
group compositions 75, 79, 82–85, 84, 114; see
also collective composition
guitar see Gilmour, David
‘Gunner’s Dream, The’ 38, 61; and the
stage theory of grief 322, 327; truth and
manipulation 386, 389, 390, 396
‘Happiest Days of Our Lives, The’ 36, 65, 327,
355, 455, 458, 468
harmonic language 469–471
‘Have a Cigar’ 34, 93, 251, 313, 343, 359;
and the stage theory of grief 319, 327; and
temporality 471, 477–478
‘Hero’s Return, The’ 38, 66, 327, 395, 435, 368
‘Hey You’ 36, 122, 344, 356, 363, 370, 468
‘High Hopes’ 40, 57, 97, 102, 126, 131
historical context 6–19; Animals 20; Atom Heart
Mother 19; chronology 484–491; The Committee
19; The Dark Side of the Moon 19–20; The
Delicate Sound of Thunder 21; The Division Bell
21; The Endless River 21; The Final Cut 20–21;
Meddle 19; Momentary Lapse of Reason 21;
More 19; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 18; A
Saucerful of Secrets 19; Ummagumma 19; The Wall
20, 352–355; Wish You Were Here 20
hope 456
Hornsey College of Art 11, 276, 298, 408–409
Hot Butter 233
humanity 35–36, 424, 428, 430–432, 441–442
 Index
‘Ibiza Bar’ 30, 146–147, 288, 303
iconography of war 457–458
ideological repressive state apparatuses 369–381
‘If ’ 31, 60
‘I Feel Love’ (Donna Summer) 234
‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt 243, 254
improvisation: free versus other types 75–78; in
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn 78–80; see also
free improvisation
infuences 50–51, 213–216, 226–234, 248–252;
Gilmour, David 90–91, 96–98, 100, 104;
Wright, Rick 299–301
intensity: and aesthetic 427–429; and afect
424–425; and dialectic 429–429; frameworks
423–424, 425–427; and post-split albums
431–436
International Times (IT) 14, 158, 162–163,
279, 411; launch party at the Roundhouse
159–160
interpretation 388–392
‘Interstellar Overdrive’ 16, 27–28, 142, 148,
298, 321; free improvisation and collective
composition 75, 78–80, 83–84, 86; and genre
211, 214, 216, 218, 222, 263; and temporality
467–469, 473, 476–477
‘In the Flesh’ 37, 357, 369, 378, 386, 456, 487
‘In the Flesh?’ 36, 65, 355, 362
In the Flesh tour see Animals In the Flesh tour
‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ 36, 322, 356
Jacobs, Selby 320
‘Jugband Blues’ 28–29, 332, 417, 444, 466–467,
475
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (The Rolling Stones) 472
‘Keep Talking’ 40, 42, 82, 94, 132, 431–432
King Cole Trio, The 173
Kraftwerk 214, 233–234, 236
lament 34, 59–64, 60–62, 68–69, 219, 331
Latham, John 81, 142, 293–294, 297–299
La Vallee (1972) 32, 141–142, 151–153, 164, 178,
206, 302; see also Obscured by Clouds (1972)
lead-lines 89, 96–101, 104, 113, 342
‘Learning to Fly’ 39, 131, 436, 468
legacy 293–294; and the avant-garde 298; and
box sets 294–296; and context 444–447; and
Englishness 438–440, 442–444; and Latham,
John 298–299; musical and stylistic evolution
296–298; and rurality 301; and soundtracks
302–305; and topophilia 440–442; and Wright,
Rick 299–301
Leonard’s Lodgers 11, 408
Let It Be (Beatles) 308
‘Let There Be More Light’ 28, 30, 56, 229, 288,
302; and temporality 466–471, 477
‘levels of impact’ 105, 106
496
listening 49–53, 68–70; lament 59–64; maps
53–55; nostalgia 55–59; trauma 64–68
Live at Pompeii 112–113, 141, 192, 307–308, 311
live performances 111–112; early 112–117; late
122–123; middle 117–122; see also Animals in
the Flesh tour; Division Bell tour; Wall Live, The
logos 393–395
‘Lost for Words’ 40, 62
LSD 14–18, 114–115, 275–279, 282–289,
417–418
‘Lucifer Sam’ 56, 80, 471, 477
Lynn, Vera 362, 452, 458; see also ‘Vera’
lyrics 31–34, 39–42, 153, 165; aesthetics and
subjectivity 369–371, 433, 439–441, 449,
455–461, 472–473, 477–479; and genre
215–223, 257–258, 263–269; listening to and
understanding 58, 63, 67–70; and the stage
theory of grief 318–324; success and downfall
309–310; and totalitarianism 362–363;
and transitional aspects 342–349; truth and
manipulation 385–392, 394–397; and whimsy
278–289
Maclean, B. 280
madness 33–34, 133–134, 212, 355–356, 361,
416–418
‘Main Theme’ 30, 144, 146–147, 152
manipulation 384–385, 396–397; contemporary
meanings 392; editing truth 397–388; ethos,
pathos and logos 393–395; fact, fction,
character, voice 385–387; interpretation
388–392; structure and formula 395–396
maps 53–55, 54–55; lament 59–64, 60–62;
nostalgia 55–59, 56–57; trauma 64–68, 65–66
‘Marooned’ 40, 93, 103, 468, 478
Mason, Nick 6–9, 11–14, 16–20, 27–34, 39–42;
and the aesthetics of psychedelia 126, 128,
130, 134–135; aesthetics and subjectivity 408,
410–414, 435; and the British music media
157–158, 160; free improvisation and collective
composition 73, 75, 81–85; and genre 230,
248–251; and Gilmour’s guitar 102; and legacy
294, 298–301; listening to and understanding
51–52, 68; and live performances 118–119,
121; memorabilia 192–193; and original
soundtracks 141, 144–145, 148–149, 153;
and the stage theory of grief 318; success
and downfall 307–308, 312–315; and
totalitarianism 353; and transitional aspects 338,
341–342, 344–345; and whimsy 277–279, 290
‘Matilda Mother’ 18, 27, 56, 79–80, 300;
aesthetics and subjectivity 414, 442, 467–469,
472; and whimsy 287–288
maturity 347–348
Mead, George Herbert 450–453, 455–456
Meddle (1971) 19, 31–32, 119, 132; aesthetics and
subjectivity 418, 471, 475–477; album cover
 Index
177–178; and genre 219, 230, 263; and legacy
303–305; success and downfall 308–309; track
listing 31; truth and manipulation 384–385,
394; see also specifc tracks
media see music media
melodic functions 104–106, 105
memorabilia 2, 6, 193; see also collecting
memory 218, 452; and the self 286–288; and time
281–283
messages 351–352, 453
mirrors 411–412
Momentary Lapse of Reason, A (1987) 21,
38–39, 55, 69, 131, 313, 385; aesthetics and
subjectivity 428, 431, 468, 475–476, 478;
media, reception and fandom 168, 175, 193;
track listing 38; see also specifc tracks
‘Money’ 26, 33, 304, 327, 343; and genre 247,
257, 261, 265, 267–268; performance and
sound 96, 96, 121, 133; success and downfall
309–313; and temporality 459, 477
More (1969) 6, 19, 29–30, 141–148, 151–152,
288; aesthetics and subjectivity 406, 476; and
collective composition 81, 83–85; and genre
229–230, 263; and legacy 301–303; track
listing 29; see also specifc tracks
‘More Blues’ 30, 85, 146
‘Mother’ 36, 104, 356, 394
motion 464–466, 469–475
mourning 68, 321, 330
‘Mudmen’ 32, 142, 151–152, 302
musical elements: and critical reception 257–262;
lyrics 266–269; the Pink Floyd sound
263–266; and successful communication
262–263
musical evolution 296–298
music media 157–158, 164–166, 168–169;
controversies 166–168; IT launch party
at the Roundhouse 159–160; London
underground 158–159; representations and
misrepresentations 163–164; UFO 160–163
name see band name
narrative 63–66, 385–386, 395–397, 453–462
‘Narrow Way, The’ 31, 150, 288, 301–302, 466
‘New Machine, A’ 39, 62, 229
‘Nile Song, The’ 29, 85, 145–147, 303, 471
‘Nobody Home’ 36, 65, 356
nostalgia 28–29, 55–59, 56–57, 68–69, 128–136,
330, 443–446
note choice 90, 98–102
‘Not Now John’ 38, 388, 390–391, 396
numbness 321–323, 425
obedience 455, 458–461
Obscured by Clouds (1972) 6, 32, 151–153, 164,
206, 230, 394; album cover 178–179; and
legacy 302–303; success and downfall 308–309;
497
and temporality 467, 476–477; track listing 32;
see also specifc tracks
‘Obscured by Clouds’ 32, 153, 230, 467
‘One of My Turns’ 36, 327, 356, 391, 468
‘One of the Few’ 38, 66, 390, 435
‘One of These Days’ 32, 132, 303, 327, 345;
collective composition 82, 85; and genre
230–231, 252; and temporality 467, 476
‘One Slip’ 39, 433, 468
‘On the Run’ 33, 41, 121, 133; and genre
226–231, 234–238, 265; success and downfall
308–309; and temporality 468
‘On the Turning Away’ 39, 61, 433
oppositional culture 242–247, 251–254
‘Outside the Wall’ 37, 65, 332, 357, 379, 456
pain 64–68, 131, 252–253
‘Paranoid Eyes’ 38, 66, 396
‘Party Sequence’ 30, 146, 229, 467
past 57–59, 451–457; present versus 247–249
pastoral 301, 344–346; and context 444–447;
in Piper at the Gates of Dawn 442–444;
and topophilia 440–442; and versions of
Englishness 438–440
pathos 393–395
‘Phaedra’ (Tangerine Dream) 233–234
phases of Pink Floyd 54–57, 60–61, 65, 68–69
phrasing 96–98, 97, 100–102, 104, 395
‘Pigs’ 35, 93, 98, 183–184, 264, 340, 343–348
‘Pigs on the Wing’ 35, 183, 332, 340, 346, 348,
395
‘Pillow of Winds, A’ 32, 476
Piper at the Gates of Dawn, The (1967) 18, 27–28,
332, 385; aesthetics and subjectivity 403, 406,
409, 412–416, 419–420, 423, 475–477; and
Englishness 442–444; and genre 221, 261; and
legacy 300, 303; performance and sound 58–59,
114, 132; success and downfall 307, 312; track
listing 27; types of improvisation in 78–80; and
whimsy 279, 286; see also specifc tracks
play 281–285, 287
playing technique 90, 94, 101–102
‘Poles Apart’ 39, 42, 62
politics 4–7, 10–14, 69–70; and the aesthetics
of psychedelia 133–134; and English pastoral
438–447; and subjectivity 370–371; and
totalitarianism 351–353, 357–361, 364–366;
and transitional aspects 338–340, 346–349;
truth and manipulation 390–393; and whimsy
275–276
‘Popcorn’ (Hot Butter) 233
posters 29, 119, 126, 206, 276, 311
‘Post War Dream, The’ 37, 65, 327, 386–388,
391, 394
‘Pow R. Toc H.’ 18, 27
presence see absence and presence
present 58–59, 451–456; versus past 247–249
 Index
prisms 1, 33, 179, 311, 412–414
Prog magazine 194
progressive (prog) rock 85, 347, 366; and album
covers 176, 178, 182; critical reception
257–262; genre formation 212–214; and live
performances 112–113; musical elements
262–263, 265–269; and punk 243–249,
253–254
projectors 116, 358, 411–412
psychedelia, aesthetics of 125; and The Division
Bell 126–127, 129–136; and the late 1960s
127–128; and technological retro-nostalgia
128–129
psychedelic self 275–281, 288–290; and memory
281–283, 286–288; and time 281–283; and
whimsy 283–286
punk 85–86, 165–166, 242–243, 253–254;
absence and presence as oppositional marker
246–247; and binaries 243–246; boredom and
pain 252–253; Pink Floyd’s punk moment
249–252; the present versus the past 247–249
‘Quicksilver’ 30, 81, 142, 145–147, 152, 230, 302
realities 289, 428–429; unreal 404, 419
Record World 260
redemption 376, 379, 381, 408, 461–462
Relics compilation (1971) 83–85, 311, 403, 413
‘Remember a Day’ 28, 56–58, 68, 78, 281, 283,
300
repression see ideological repressive state
apparatuses
resources 42–43
‘Revolution’ (Beatles) 472
‘Revolution 9’ (Beatles) 232
Revolver (Beatles) 174
Rolling Stones, The 149; ‘I’m a King Bee’ 297;
‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ 472;’2000 Light Years
From Home’ 214
Roundhouse 159–161, 277, 282, 404, 411
Rubber Soul (Beatles) 15
‘Run Like Hell’ 37, 327, 357, 364, 372;
performance and sound 65, 93, 111, 135; and
temporality 456, 461, 468
rurality 301
Samson, Polly 131
San Francisco 14, 280, 411
San Francisco (flm) 142
San Francisco Examiner 160
‘San Tropez’ 32
Saucerful of Secrets, A (1968) 19, 28–29, 144,
312, 332; aesthetics and subjectivity 406,
413, 417–418, 444, 466, 476–477; and free
improvisation 73–78, 81, 84; and genre 216,
221, 229; and legacy 300–303; listening
to and understanding 57–59, 68; and live
498
performances 119, 122; track listing 28; see also
specifc tracks
‘Saucerful of Secrets, A’ 83, 229–230, 300, 302,
467, 479
Saucerful of Secrets tour 7, 122, 153
‘Scarecrow, The’ 28, 79, 442, 469
Screaming Abdabs 11
screams 77, 184, 265, 327, 393, 416–418
‘Scream Thy Last Scream’ 294, 303–304,
417–418, 467
‘Seabirds’ 81, 88n37, 146, 301
‘Seamus’ 32, 476
‘See Emily Play’ 18, 34, 307; aesthetics and
subjectivity 442, 446, 466–468, 477, 480n9;
and legacy 299–300; and the stage theory of
grief 332–333; and whimsy 275, 284
‘See-Saw’ 28–29, 56, 471, 476
self, the 286–289, 376–381, 423–424, 428;
see also psychedelic self
self-destruction 29, 340–343
‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ 28–30,
42, 81; and genre 211, 214, 216–218, 220,
222–223, 229; and temporality 467, 471, 477;
and whimsy 281–283
‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered
in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’ 31, 82,
417, 476
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles) 15,
18, 79, 174, 187, 214, 245, 308
‘Sheep’ 35, 231, 252, 264, 327; and temporality
468, 471; and transitional aspects 340,
343–346, 348
Shine On (box set) 310, 313–315
‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ 20, 34, 39, 114,
131, 176, 263; acceptance 331–333; aesthetics
and subjectivity 433–434, 466–469, 478;
anger 327–330; and bereavement as a process
319–321; and the British music media 162,
165; depression 330–331; free improvisation
and collective composition 73, 80, 83; and
Gilmour’s guitar 101–102; listening to and
understanding 51, 61, 63–64, 69; mourning
and grief 321; nostalgia 330; shock and
numbness 321–322; and the stage theory of
grief 318–319, 333–334; yearning 322–326
shock 333, 321–322
‘Show Must Go On, The’ 37, 356–357
Sigma 6 11
‘Signs of Life’ 39, 57, 69, 436
Smith, Norman 18, 79, 142, 279, 203
solos 78–80, 89, 91–92, 96–106
‘Sorrow’ 39, 62, 132, 467–468
soundtracks 18–19, 141–142, 229–230, 293–294,
302–309, 416–417; The Committee 142–144;
La Vallée 151–154; More 144–148; Zabriskie
Point 148–150; see also specifc soundtracks
sources 25, 42–43
 Index
‘Southampton Dock’ 38, 61, 394
space rock 27–28, 211–212, 222–223, 248, 254,
303; categorisation and genre recognition
217–222; generic parameters 212–214; origins
of 214–217
‘Spanish Piece, A’ 30
‘Speak to Me/Breathe’ 33, 97, 133, 327, 475;
and electronic dance music 234, 236; musical
elements 264–265, 269; success and downfall
309, 313
state apparatuses see ideological repressive state
apparatuses
‘Stay’ 32, 302
Steinweiss, Alex 173–174, 173
stillness 178, 465–466, 471–475
‘Stop’ 37, 357, 461
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (Beatles) 445
structuration 450–452; see also temporal
structuration
stylistic evolution 296–298
Summer, Donna 234
‘Summer’68’ 31, 60
‘Sysyphus’ 31
‘Take It Back’ 40, 62, 94, 132
‘Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk’ 27–28, 79,
82, 467, 471, 477
Tangerine Dream 213, 218–220, 301; Alpha
Centauri 214; ‘Fly and Collision of Comas Sola’
220; ‘Nebulous Dawn’ 220; ‘Phaedra’ 233, 234
technique see playing technique
temporality 58, 450–453, 464–465; album level
475–476; corpus level 476–479; harmonic
language 469–471; instrumental segments
467–468; intros 466–467; outros 468–469;
song level 465–475; stillness and motion
471–475; temporal map 478; see also temporal
structuration
temporal structuration 449–450; and iconography
of war 457–458; narrative and messages
453–454; and obedience 458–461; present, past
and future 452–453, 454–456; and redemption
461–462; theoretical frame of reference
450–452; time and memory 281–283
‘Terminal Frost’ 39, 468
There’s Somebody Out There 202
‘Thin Ice, The’ 36, 65, 355, 362
‘Time’ 33, 121, 133; and genre 234, 247, 261,
264–266; and Gilmour’s guitar 97, 99; and
legacy 302; listening to and understanding 58,
60, 69; success and downfall 308–310; and
temporality 467, 471, 477
time signature 85, 227, 235, 258, 267–268, 271, 281
topophilia 440–442
totalitarianism 5, 37, 351–352, 366–367, 456,
461; and the history of The Wall 352–357; and
political aspects of The Wall 358–361; and reuse
499
of The Wall 363–366; and success of The Wall
357–358; and structure and narrative of The
Wall 361–363
touring see Animals in the Flesh tour; Division Bell
tour; live performances; Wall Live, The
trauma 8, 36, 54–55, 62–70, 361–363, 452–456
‘Trial, The’ 37, 327; and subjectivity 370, 372;
and temporality 456, 461; and totalitarianism
357, 361; truth and manipulation 385, 391, 394
truth 384–385, 396–397; contemporary meanings
392; editing truth 397–388; ethos, pathos and
logos 393–395; fact, fction, character, voice
385–387; interpretation 388–392; structure
and formula 395–396
t-shirts 114; ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ 5, 242–243, 254
‘Two Suns in the Sunset’ 38, 61, 332, 387, 394
UFO (Guru Guru) 220
UFO (Underground Freak Out) Club 14–17,
125, 127, 158, 160–163, 277–279
Ummagumma (1969) 9, 19, 30–31, 145, 385;
aesthetics and subjectivity 404, 406, 415–417,
471, 476–477, 479; and legacy 300–301, 303;
performance and sound 68, 83–84, 114, 119;
track listing 30; see also specifc tracks
uncanny, the 403–407, 412, 416, 418–420, 443
unconcept, the 404–406
underground, the 16, 157–163
understanding 49–53, 68–70; lament 59–64;
maps 53–55; nostalgia 55–59; trauma 64–68
unreal realities 404, 419
‘Up the Khyber’ 29, 147–148, 467, 469
‘Us and Them’ 33, 150, 242, 302, 310, 471;
performance and sound 60, 85, 133; truth and
manipulation 384, 389
‘Vera’ 36, 61, 69; and temporality 450, 455, 458;
and totalitarianism 356, 362
vocal-esque (or lyrical) quality 97–98, 97, 102
voice 385–387, 393–395
‘Waiting for the Worms 37, 65, 378; and
temporality 456, 461; and totalitarianism 357,
363; truth and manipulation 386, 391
Wall, The (1979) 5–7, 20–22, 26, 33–38, 41, 73;
absurdity in 375–377; and the aesthetics of
psychedelia 127–128, 132–135; aesthetics and
subjectivity 407, 428–431, 434–436, 449–450,
453; album cover 184–185; and the British
music media 166, 168–169; from despair
to hope in 456; genre 253–254, 257, 261,
264; and Gilmour’s guitar 92, 94; the hailed
subject in 370–372; history of 352–355; and
iconography of war 457–458; and legacy 303;
listening to and understanding 51, 64–70; and
live performances 112, 121–122; memorabilia
191–193, 195, 201; narrative and messages
 Index
453–454; obedience in 458–461; outside
and inside in 377–379; political aspects of
358–361; present, past and future in 452–453,
454–456; redemption in 461–462; reuse of
363–366; and the stage theory of grief 322,
330, 332; structure and narrative 361–362;
and subjectivity 369–370, 379–381; success
and downfall 312, 314, 357–358; theoretical
frame of reference 450–452; and totalitarianism
351–352, 366–367; the tracks 35, 355–357;
and transitional aspects 338–339, 344,
348–349; ‘The Trial’ scene 372–374; truth and
manipulation in 384–386, 389–392, 394–395;
the verdict in 374–375; and whimsy 279; see
also specifc tracks
Wall Live, The 204, 363–364
war 7–9, 60–62, 64–70, 353–356, 361–365,
384–385, 455–456; contemporary meanings
392; editing truth 387–388; ethos, pathos
and logos 393–394; fact, fction, character,
voice 385–387; iconography of 457–458;
interpretation 388–392
Waters, Roger 3, 5–11, 13, 17–22, 26–39, 43;
and the aesthetics of psychedelia 126–127,
130–131, 134–135; aesthetics and subjectivity
369, 375–376, 379, 407–408, 413–418,
428, 430–436; and album covers 176, 182,
184; and the British music media 157, 159,
161–163, 165–169; free improvisation and
collective composition 73, 75, 78–85; and
genre 234–235, 237, 250, 252–253, 257, 263,
265–268; and legacy 296–303, 305; listening
to and understanding 51, 54, 56, 60–70; and
live performances 112–115, 117, 119–122;
memorabilia 191–193, 195; and original
soundtracks 141–144, 146, 148–149, 151,
153; and the stage theory of grief 318–319,
321–322, 330, 334; success and downfall
307–315; and temporality 449–450, 453–458,
460–461, 466–468, 471, 475–478; and
totalitarianism 351–367; and transitional aspects
338–349; truth and manipulation 384–397;
and whimsy 275, 281, 289;
‘Wearing the Inside Out’ 40
weird, the 403–407, 412, 419–420, 444
‘Welcome to the Machine’ 34, 121, 229, 251,
345, 359; and the stage theory of grief 319,
327; and temporality 471, 478
‘What Do You Want from Me’ 39, 62, 97, 478
‘When the Tigers Broke Free’ 37–38, 66, 327,
330, 389–390, 435, 457
‘When You’re In’ 32, 152–153
500
whimsy 275, 288–290; and memory 281–283,
286–288; and the psychedelic self 276–281,
283–286; and time 281–283
White Album (Beatles) 173
Who, The 169, 246; ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’
233, 236
Wish You Were Here (1975) 6, 20–21, 26, 34,
41, 131, 313; aesthetics and subjectivity 433,
475–477; album covers 174, 181, 184, 187; and
the British music media 161, 165, 167–168;
free improvisation and collective composition
73, 80, 83; and genre 242, 247, 251, 253, 257,
261, 264; and legacy 301, 303, 305; listening
to and understanding 50–51, 61, 63, 69; and
live performances 114, 119; memorabilia 191;
and the stage theory of grief 319, 319, 321,
324, 327, 332, 334; and totalitarianism 352,
357, 359; track listing 34; transitional aspects
338–340, 343, 345; truth and manipulation
385, 394–395; see also specifc tracks
‘Wish You Were Here’ 98, 102, 121, 134, 327
‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ (The Who) 233, 236
‘Wots . . . Uh the Deal’ 32, 56, 68, 151,
153, 320
Wright, Rick 6–13, 17–21, 26–34, 37, 39–42,
394; and the aesthetics of psychedelia 126,
130, 132, 134, 136; aesthetics and subjectivity
408–413, 416–419, 431, 435, 466, 475;
and album covers 179, 185–186; and the
British music media 157, 161–162, 167; free
improvisation and collective composition 73,
75, 77, 80–85; and genre 216, 234, 247, 252,
268; and legacy 297–301, 303–304; listening
to and understanding 50–52, 56–63, 65, 68;
and live performances 113, 118; memorabilia
191; and original soundtracks 146, 149;
and the stage theory of grief 331, 333–334;
success and downfall 307–309, 313–315;
and totalitarianism 352–353; and transitional
aspects 338–339, 341–345; and whimsy
281, 290
yearning 68, 318, 320, 322–327, 329–331,
333–334
Yellow Submarine (Beatles) 173
‘Yet Another Movie/Round and Around’ 39, 57,
478
‘Young Lust’ 36, 356
‘Your Possible Pasts’ 38, 65, 327, 391–392, 396
Zabriskie Point (1970) 141–142, 148–151, 263,
302–303, 417