so far down my list of priorities that I don’t really think about it. I don’t have a good answer for you on that. I would rather do an album myself at some point, and get on with other things for the time being. Would I rule it out? Mmmm. Not a hundred per cent. One never knows when one’s vanity is going to take one.’
In June 2005, there came news so unlikely as to seem downright surreal. After a period of estrangement lasting two decades, Roger Waters and David Gilmour announced that they would both participate in a Pink Floyd reunion at the London Live 8 concert. ‘Like most people, I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the third world,’ read a statement issued by Gilmour. ‘Any squabbles Roger and the band have had in the past are so petty in this context, and if re-forming for this concert will help focus attention then it’s got to be worthwhile.’
Waters, meanwhile, issued a communiqué that sounded a slightly more gonzo note than his reputation as one of rock music’s intellectual sophisticates might have suggested. ‘It’s great to be asked to help Bob [Geldof] raise public awareness on the issues of third world debt and poverty,’ he said. ‘The cynics will scoff – screw ’em! Also, to be given the opportunity to put the band back together, even if it’s only for a few numbers, is a big bonus.’ His return, however temporary, seemed to provide retrospective confirmation that the Pink Floyd who had authored A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell had not been the genuine article, though the Gilmour statement came with a slightly different spin: ‘Roger Waters will join Pink Floyd to perform at Live 8’ ran the headline on the official Pink Floyd website.
The group’s performance at Hyde Park – ‘Breathe/Breathe Reprise’, ‘Money’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’, delivered with a poise and understatement that only served to enhance the music’s impact – sent interest in the Floyd’s music sky-rocketing; according to the Independent, the day after Live 8 found sales of the career anthology Echoes rising by 1,343%. Talk of a lasting rapprochement, however, was quickly squashed (for all the show’s wonders, Gilmour said the experience was as awkward as ‘sleeping with your ex-wife’). For the time being, their creative history thus remains sealed, long since hardened by hindsight into a picture of peaks, troughs and qualified successes.
To take a few example at random, 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is fondly loved by a devoted fan-cult, and couched in the semi-tragic terms of an artistic adventure that was ended far too soon. Ummagumma (1969) is treasured by only hardened disciples; Wish You Were Here often seems as worshipped as The Dark Side of the Moon. Animals and Meddle (1971) are the kind of records that those who position themselves a little higher than the average record-buyer habitually claim to be underrated and overlooked – and when The Wall enters any discussion, its champions often shout so passionately that any opposing view is all but drowned out.
By way of underlining Waters’s view of their history, the two albums that Gilmour piloted in his absence are rarely mentioned these days. The accepted view of their merits is that they represented ‘Floyd-lite’, an invention that worked very well as a means of announcing mega-grossing world tours, but hardly stood up to the band’s best work. That said, the idea that most of Pink Floyd’s brilliance chiefly resided in the mind of Roger Waters has been rather offset by the underwhelming solo career that began with 1984’s The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking – proof, despite the occasional glimmer of brilliance, that he too is destined to toil in the slipstream of the music he created in the 1970s.
The record with the most inescapable legacy is, of course, The Dark Side of the Moon – an album whose reputation is only bolstered by the fascinating story of its creation. Far from being created in the cosseted environs of the recording studio, it was a record that lived in the outside world long before it was put to tape: played, over six months, to audiences in American cities, English towns, European theatres, and Japanese arenas, while it was edited, augmented, and honed by a group who well knew they were on to something.
Perhaps most interestingly, it is a record populated by ghosts – most notably, that of Syd Barrett. In seeking to address the subject of madness, and question whether the alleged lunacy of particular individuals might be down to the warped mindset of the supposedly sane, Roger Waters was undoubtedly going back to one of the most traumatic chapters in Pink Floyd’s history – when their leader and chief songwriter, propelled by his prodigious drug intake, had split from a group who seemed to have very little chance of surviving his departure. For four years after Barrett’s exit, through such albums as A Saucerful of Secrets, Atom Heart Mother, and Meddle, they had never quite escaped his shadow; there is something particularly fascinating about the fact that the album that allowed them to finally break free was partly inspired by his fate.
All that aside, Dark Side is the setting for some compellingly brilliant music. There are few records that contain as many shiver-inducing elements: the instant at which the opening chaos of ‘Speak to Me’ suddenly snaps into the languorous calm of ‘Breathe’; just about every second of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ and ‘Us and Them’; the six minutes that begins with ‘Brain Damage’ and climaxes so spectacularly with ‘Eclipse’. Nor are there many examples of an album being defined by a central concept that would be so enduring. Other groups have come up with song-cycles based on ancient legend, the sunset of the British Empire, futuristic dystopias, and pinball-playing messiahs. Pink Floyd, to their eternal credit, opted to address themes that would, by definition, endure long after the record had been finished, and the band’s bond had dissolved.
That Dark Side hastened that process only adds to the story’s doomed romance. ‘With that record, Pink Floyd had fulfilled its dream,’ said Roger Waters, as the transatlantic static fizzed and he prepared to return to Dark Side’s new remix. ‘We’d kind of done it.’
Over in England, David Gilmour had voiced much the same sentiments; if only on that one subject, he and his estranged partner seemed to be united. ‘After that sort of success, you have to look at it all and consider what it means to you, and what you’re in it for: you hit that strange impasse where you’re really not very certain of anything any more. It’s so fantastic, but at the same time, you start thinking, “What on earth do we do now?”’
Syd Barrett and the Origins of Pink Floyd
On 22 July 1967, the four members of Pink Floyd were en route to the city of Aberdeen, the most northerly destination for most British musicians. The next night, they would call at Carlisle, where they would share the stage with two unpromisingly-named groups called the Lemon Line and the Cobwebs. Such was the life of a freshly successful British rock group in the mid-to-late 1960s: a seemingly endless trek around musty-smelling ballrooms, where the locals might be attracted by the promise of seeing the latest Hit Sensation, and musicians could be sure of being rewarded in cash. If London proved too far for a drive home, they and their associates would be billeted to a reliably dingy bed and breakfast.
If this aspect of Pink Floyd’s life hardly suggested any kind of glamour, they could take heart from the fact that they were – for the moment at least – accredited pop stars. The week they arrived in Aberdeen, their second single had climbed to number six in the UK singles charts, nestling just below The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ and Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. As with their first effort, ‘Arnold Layne’, ‘See Emily Play’ was a perfect exemplar of the influences wafting into Britain from the American West Coast being rewired into a very English sense of fairy-tale innocence, an impression