Pink Floyd

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Pink Floyd were the epitome of psychedelic rock emerging in 1967 in Great Britain from the ashes of San Francisco's acid-rock. The work of Pink Floyd was, fundamentally, to confer a unitary structure upon the genre. Their early albums, in fact, fused the 3 strands of American psychedelia: the melody (eccentric songs a' la White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane), improvisation (jams a' la Velvet Underground) and the abstract (the "freak-out" by Red Crayola). Thus Pink Floyd, between 1967 and 1969, coined the standards of psychedelic rock which would inspire future generations.

Through their ups and downs, Pink Floyd understood the limitations and implications of the genre, and continued to re-invent it, transforming it little by little into a genre for meditation and relaxation (from the genre of hippies against the "Establishment" to the genre of yuppies integrated into the "Establishment"). For the rest of the group's career, Pink Floyd did not hesitate to adapt the original sound of psychedelia to a sound that was smooth and velvety. Thus Pink Floyd elevated the sound of psychedelia to a universal language, regardless of the desires of the public, a little like the years when jazz-rock was "selling" to the distressed African-American and skeptical Caucasian populations.

Pink Floyd was formed in London in 1966 by two groups of students, one from Cambridge and the other from London. The first group featured Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, both vocalists and guitarists, that were performing as a folk duo in 1964; while the second group was composed of Nick Mason (percussionist) and Richard Wright (keyboardist). Wright was a classically trained pianist and a fan of both Miles Davis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Moving back and forth between the 2 groups was Roger Waters (bassist and singer) who studied as much in Cambridge as he did in London. After forming several Merseybeat-inspired bands with Mason and Wright in 1965, in 1966 Waters also drafted Barrett.

Barrett, a fan of Bo Diddley (he had already written the song Double O Bo in 1965), was a mind open to any experience: from Asian mystical painting to the chemistry of music. When he decided to put his hand to music, he sought to distort blues-rock to fit his hallucinogenic imagination. The quartet, named Pink Floyd in honor to 2 misunderstood American bluesmen, began to perform regularly at local underground gigs, from Marquee to Roundhouse, showing great interest in electronic effects and light shows (the first ever in Great Britain). The group participated in diverse manifestations, such as long jams of electronic blues-rock, becoming legendary among the London underground scene.

Barrett was the strongest personality within the group at this point, as well the youngest. He composed a great deal of the music and lyrics; he played the guitar alternating between tonal phrasing and veering to dissonance.

The 45s of the group's first 2 years (1967 and 1968) were profoundly marked by ego and bewilderment, evident in the preference for disturbed effects, in the propensity for witty adages, always within the acidic moral of their verses. Paving the way was Arnold Layne, the story of a perverse adolescent using the typical melodic progression of psychedelia (malicious vocals, spatial keyboard, sobbing guitar along with martial rhythms) and the retro, Candy And A Currant Bun, with an unusual contrast of voices: that of the narrator - slimy and bad, and a sinister scream that accompanied the voices in the background, following a course that anticipated the cosmic flights and noisy finale. The highlight of these experiments in contortion of convention was in the use of the instruments, the voices, and recording studio; the aesthetic of the genre (folk? blues? jazz? classic?) loses its meaning in the general uproar; the vocal harmonies remained vaguely folk-rock, surf, and rhythm but with a Gothic or surreal bent with sound effects that were not more than simple fillers.

See Emily Play was further research, above all, in colorful flights of fancy on the keyboard, hysterical distortions on the guitar, and harmonic composition: the melody takes a backseat, a beat submersed in "found" sounds (organ at supersonic speed, insistent dissonance and reverbs of the guitar, and vaudeville rhythms). Scarecrow, a retro track, was a Dadaist joke, a voiceless refrain. In Apple And Oranges, the group's third manifesto, they used harsh guitar, played rhythm on bells, and a chorus immersed in a sequence of cosmic falsetto on church organ.

The other 45s, which did not bear the signature style of Barrett, revealed the growing importance of the keyboard with respect to the vocals and guitar as well as the return to a melodic beat (though more refined). Julia Dream, in particular, bore the signature of Waters: the first soft watercolor, smooth and touching, from the emerging new leader of the group; it was a renaissance ballad for acoustic guitar with whistling from a mellotron keyboard, adapted to the hallucinogenic "trip", which perhaps remained their masterpiece. Other songs showed the group's indebtedness to the vaudeville of the Kinks (It Would Be So Nice) and the arrangements of Sgt. Pepper (Paint Box).

The gimmick was always the same: muddle a melody with growing hallucinogens. These fleeting visions were of the cosmic fire to come, colorful embellishments for the universal sabbath, still exploring the dark side of tonal music, without venturing into the wide open space of abstract psychedelia.

These singles were compiled on Relics (Harvest, 1971), which contained the studio version of Careful with that Axe Eugene.

The first long-play album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (Tower, 1967), which came out in the summer of 1967, had a huge impact on the music scene in Great Britain. In this album, Pink Floyd summarized their new musical grammar, a new mode of interpreting music towards the youth. The album was dominated by the personality of Barrett, an excellent storyteller and intrepid navigator of the stars, with an idyllic voice and demonic guitar. The intermittent radio signal that was Astronomy Domine was the greatest invention within English rock during this period: bliss in crescendo, intervals of hissing and throbbing from the guitars, and a voice deformed by astronomical distances. This was the manifestation of an extension to the ordinary meaning of psychedelia. It was both an expansion and liberation where the sky was the only limit, and Barrett would go even beyond. Wright and Mason, with their long notes, stormy and vast, invented a new style of accompaniment. Half of the album consisted of short surreal songs, free from the influence of hallucinogens such as See Emily Play, in which eccentric lyricism and space-rock instrumentals coexist. There were other miniature fantasies and harmonic syntheses, full of sound gaffes and mysterious lyrics. The guitar continued to create an atmosphere of panic, as in Lucifer Sam, a mix of a thriller sound track, a tribal dance, and an exorcism by black magic. The ballad was another form used with alienating effects in Matilda Mother, martial and fatalistic, which soared upon a heavenly chorus, and The Gnome, one of the group's most catchy refrains, was a classical fairytale. The most serious aspect of Barrett's psychedelia was documented in Chapter 24, which adapted raga-rock to cosmic arrangements (gags which took on many forms, such as suspense & dilated organ), and in Power R Toc H, the sabbath which announced the fierce instrumental vein of the group (like classical piano attacked by a bunch of drugged tribesmen, a sudden acceleration of time, celestial breaks by the organ, and haunting sounds of the woodlands).

In the end, the vaudeville style was the inspiration for Flaming (a collage of sound effects) and The Bike, a surreal sketch, a drunken prank consisting of random noise (sirens, cuckoo clocks, bells, bass drums, rusty chains, and animal sounds), revealing the insanity of Barrett, the goliard. Introduced by one of the most terrifying guitar riffs in the history of rock, Interstellar Overdrive (a long instrumental track), was a masterpiece inside a masterpiece. A synthesis of subliminal messages from gurus and acid priests, streams of consciousness a' la James Joyce & science fiction, of surrealism, and of Freudian psychoanalysis; the entire suite is a chameleon-like frenzy on which Barrett more violently abandoned the role of dissonant minstrel (psychedelic variation of a folk-singer), of metaphysical jester, of novice guru, and took on the role of cosmic musician. The framework for the group's tonal music crashed into the deafening chaos of free improvisation. Abandoning melody, the old excuse for instrumental tricks, the tricks now held their own. Every instrument lived free, possessed and deformed by the intensity of performance. The cosmic sense provided by the galactic beep on the guitar, celestial pulses on the bass, loud bangs on the drums, electrical shocks by the cymbals, and above all the spatial noise of the keyboard; the instruments changed roles, chasing each other and overlapping, but there was always one instrument which simulated spatial noises such as radio signals, whizzing spaceships, whistles and rumbles that come and go along stellar orbits, and primordial chaos which supported everything.

Syd Barrett retired in the spring of 1968 and was replaced by David Gilmour, whose style dominated the second album, on A Saucerful Of Secrets (Tower, 1968). At this point, the music did not fully reflect this change; the surreal faded slowly while the cosmic evolved. In reality, the group's cosmic sound needed to be supplied by human desire and without Barrett, the sound was salvaged only by painstaking experimentation. So it happened, however, that the group projected a coldness not there before. The title track, a long suite on side 2, was one of the greatest masterpieces of psychedelic rock: A Saucerful Of Secrets. The structure followed that of the group's debut: the delightful melodies lost their Barrett-inspired Dadaism, there was greater monotony in the execution due to a lack of imagination in the arrangements, and an excessive clean-up of guitar sounds. Waters, who took the lead, and Gilmour, who supported him, were fans of soft, refined, and relaxed music. Thus the vocals became sweeter and the keyboard became accustomed commonplace conduct. Gilmour's guitar style was slow and rare, knowing more of dreams than nightmares, slowing down and seemingly stopping time, descending into consciousness, opening the gates of paradise. It had no markings of the troubled Barrett.

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun was a celebrated hit of cosmic music but in reality was a pale remake changing Barrett's nightmares into an Eastern sounding dreams; the suggestion was still considerable, because the sweet sound sneaked it in, driven by a frantic and deafening percussion and by a monotonous litany whispered under the notes of the obsessive bass. Let There Be More Light was a raga-rock that followed the progression of a psychedelic song (cosmic tribalism, solemn melody, dissonant chaos), Corporal Clegg resembled a drunken vaudeville band (a most comical joke), and Jugband Blues (Barrett's last influence) was not in tune with the seriousness of the other tracks (but more penetrating and communicative in that voice: with commonplace wind instruments, a choir of mountaineers, and an intimate guitar which fades - a quiet, melancholy coda) and still suffered the effects of the surrealism of Barrett. See Saw, with a string section and Remember A Day, in a more soft, catchy version, announced an atmospheric music played completely on the group's trademark sounds.

The title track lasted nearly 12 minutes and was a more consistent effort to intrude on the avant-garde. This hallucinogenic "trip" was refined in total religiosity, imposing and frightening, blending Eastern and Christian liturgies into a unified cosmic yearning. The clusters of piano notes, the noises that rattle in the background, the electronic voices that filles the voids, the pangs of the organ, the apocalyptic drum, the piercing guitar, the dissonance, and the hailstorms of random harmonics, were among the most daring psychedelic sounds ever attempted. The upward movement established a strict tonal order: spontaneous disorder by the individual instruments. A church organ with full keyboard and Gregorian choir closed in a crescendo of gloomy celestial tones, creating a concert of 3 movements (the first was noise, the second was percussion, the third was the keyboard and choir) piecing together the most masterful contemporary rock. The final chorus opened up an immense abyss of seduction and terror.

After this album, the career and the sound of Pink Floyd changed drastically. The group's version of psychedelic rock was already interpreted as atmospheric music and the 3 sound tracks they composed within just a few months highlighted this aspect.

More (1968), the happiest of the 3 sound tracks, was a simple and graceful album, without all of the experimental ambitions found in Secrets and without the irreverent genius found in Piper. This was also where Waters began to dominate the group, his signature noticeable on 11 out of 13 songs, giving a definite direction to the sound of the group as in Cirrus Minor (a delicate woodland impressionism with cathedral organ and chirping in the background), The Nile Song (a werewolf hard-rock), Cymbaline (a delicate serenade on flute, guitar, piano and soft vocals), Main Theme (a brief lounge instrumental), and Quicksilver (an experimental number, dark and sparse); sophisticated songs embellished by spatial/psychedelic markings. More put into plain view the uncertainties held by Waters, who was unable to follow in the footsteps of Barrett and still had not decided between avant-garde lust and light music.

In 1969 the group released its most ambitious work, the double album titled Ummagumma (Harvest, 1969), which included a live recording of 4 elongated versions of the group's hallucinogenic/cosmic war horses, as well as a studio recording, subdivided into 4 parts, 1 for each musician. The live tracks were Astronomy Domine, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (a version that was more ceremonial, esoteric, Eastern, and cosmic), A Saucerful Of Secrets (a romantic version with a poignant hymn-like finale by Gilmour), and a thriller version of Careful With That Axe Eugene. This last track was a new classic, a thriller that pulled one subtly under an Eastern hypnotism, whispered supernaturally in an atmosphere of impending tragedy, and which was suddenly torn open by piercing screams, with blocks of music that just whiz by. Disintegrated, the track goes back to being soft and innocent, waiting for another victim. It was part embrace, part "trip", part nightmare, part delirium. The album recorded in the studio was austere and a bit pretentious; a theorization of the ideology of music of the quartet, each speaking from the angle of his own instrument. The 4 parts of the album were harmonic experiments executed in perfect freedom.

David Gilmour, in the third part titled Narrow Way, was the most uncertain, presenting the concept of lounge music, intelligent and refined, but above all, relaxing. His guitar repeated infinitely (at first folk, then heavy-metal, then Hawaiian style, then acid) in a series of minimalist variations, leaving to the electronics the job of creating a lively atmosphere with small dissonant vortexes. However, when the electronics were missing the tracks fell into a melodic soft-rock with a hallucinogenic refrain (the melody was taken from Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane). Nick Mason, in the fascinating track The Grand Vizier's Garden Party, was influenced by Kontakte by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and carried out as an experiment that was as fascinating as it was self-indulgent, behaving like a child who wants to discover all the hidden sounds of his toy instruments. The multiplicity of noise and the group's treatment of electronics were of utmost importance: this exercise had as its origins the practice of forming noisy arrangements which would become the trademark of the group. Richard Wright tried his hand at synphonism, and in the impressive Sisyphus (in 4 movements) for the first time, the group's music can be compared to classical music. Wright easily created the effects desired from the keyboard, using touches of novice-like roughness as well as those of a seasoned performer. A menacing symphonic opening followed by a brief romantic piano sonata. A tempest of dissonance on piano and a chamber piece for percussion introduced the suspenseful finale, and metaphysically speaking, a frightening crescendo like a cosmic hurricane through a quiet countryside.

Roger Waters contributed 2 typical ballads: Granchester Meadows (delicate acoustic guitar in a folk style with electronic bird chirping) and Several Species Of Small Furry Animals (a possessed rhapsody for electronic voices and percussion which simulated a flurry of woodland critter sounds). Waters, more human that Wright, less banal than Gilmour, and more gifted than Mason, found the much sought after balance between experimentation and soft-rock, which for better or worse, was the fundamental invention for the future of the group. The number of experiments was impressive but within this work, it was monumental, placing Pink Floyd at the lead of avant-garde rock and helping to sow the seeds of psychedelic rock consumption.

With the end of the great season of psychedelia, Pink Floyd was under pressure from recording studios to record an album that was more "pop", in which they could justify an investment. Pink Floyd conceded and thus began the more "commercial" period of the group. It started with the album Atom Heart Mother (Harvest, 1970). Collaborating with Ron Geesin, the group set out to produce a high class album, in which would be presented, in a nutshell, all the elements that would make this album a best seller. The eponymous symphonic suite was a summary of the group's new style of compromise: in rapid sequence there was baroque church organ followed by romantic violin a' la Brahms, Gregorian chorus as in Saucerful, jazz-funk piano, cosmic dissonance, and the pompous theme of an overture that kept re-occurring, all to a rhythm that was more sleepy than martial. The pop style songs of More, on the second side, highlighted the level of maturity achieved by the soft, delicate melodies of Waters (If), and of the sweet and dreamy psychedelia by Gilmour (Fat Old Sun). At the end of the album was born the "concrete" concert which consisted of everyday sounds in Alan's Psychedelia Breakfast (with sequences of romantic kitsch, true playing, and acoustic folk). Summer 68, a humble song with folk-rock vocals, classical piano, and psychedelic trombone was written by Wright and was perhaps the true gem of the album. The album had strengths and weaknesses but remained, perhaps, the greatest achievement in the genre of classical rock, by far greater than the attempts of Nice and The Moody Blues.

The next album, Meddle (1971) had the same theme as Atom Heart Mother with the focus on a long suite and pop songs. The songs were more traditional and the suite less experimental. One of the tracks, One Of These Days, was the prototype of the painstaking but dazzling production technique that would make Pink Floyd rich and famous: in practice, recording studio musical effects. that turn a fat bass line into a massive rhythm locomotive, wrap it into disorienting distorted keyboard sounds, pin it against a charging tribal pulsation, and finally couple it with a lengthy Hendrix-ian guitar solo. The long suite titled Echoes distilled the transcendent stagnation of a medley of musical styles: a slow motion "bip-bip" by Barrett (performed on the piano by Wright), pulses in crescendo a' la Interstellar Overdrive, babbling as in Ummagumma, the funk of Atom Heart Mother, and the pathos of A Saucerful Of Secrets. Echoes unleashed the decisive blow: clean, smooth and anesthetized, the cosmic sound of times past became flat elevator "muzak". Undoubtedly this was the doing of studio production, in which infinite details were pieced together and superimposed to create an elegant flow of pleasing sounds. This piece is where Roger Waters emerged as the lead composer of the band. The sound track Obscured By Clouds (1972) was the group's low point.

The group found international success with the album Dark Side Of The Moon (Harvest, 1973), which abandoned the suite form in favor of sophisticated atmospheric songs superbly produced and arranged - which made this album one of the best selling of all time (it remained on the Billboard charts for more than 600 weeks). The producer was < A HREF=../vol13/aparsons.html>Alan Parsons who was phenomenal in transforming the experiments of Ummagumma into effects for truly refined music, and Waters, who composed all of the lyrics, picked a winning theme: alienation. This combination had its origins in classical music. The creative drumming by Mason reduced the experimentation of Ummagumma to a joke and the cosmic keyboard of Wright was limited to atmospheric accompaniment: the whole monumental symphonic unit of Ummagumma was compressed and downsized to the form of a song with narrowly formal balance.

Waters' epic personal tragedy weaves from song to song with fluent and colorful rhetoric, as a collage of melodies with the highest level of cohesion among sounds. The sensational pieces are: the instrumental On The Run (with helicopter, running steps, heavy breathing, and minimalist synthesizer loop), the morphing ballad Time (clock symphony, martial bass riff, polyphonic percussion, gentle carillon, syncopated funk narration, ethereal acid prayer-like refrain with backup of female voices, Hendrix-ian psychedelic guitar solo and a quasi-psychotic operatic vocal solo, like Morricone on steroids), and Money (cash registers, desolate litany, pneumatic funk rhythm, vibrant sax solo, hard-rocking guitar solo) the latter two being "white" disco funk classics. The form of the Waters-style ballad peaks in Breathe, dainty and dreamy, the prototype of what would become one of the group's preferred formats (languid whimpers on guitar and dreamy vocals), in Us And Them, a sort of slow-motion waltz, a whispered reverbed psychedelic lullaby that soars in a triumphal mode, as if completing what was left unfinished by A Saucerful of Secrets, lounge-jazz saxophone solo, and Brain Damage, the ideal continuation and fulfillment of that gospel-like crescendo. As refined as it was, this sound does nothing more than repeat the same refrain and the same tempo. The best track was perhaps the humble The Great Gig In The Sky, a wordless visceral vocal "flight" by vocalist Clare Torry that (again) evokes the ending of A Saucerful of Secrets over gentle piano notes.

The apex of this new path was perhaps best represented by Wish You Were Here (Harvest, 1975), an album that sold less than the others but offered, in reality, a more futuristic production, totally centered upon the synthesizers. Frequent outbursts of electronics creating an oppressive and tragic world view, focused more on the devastated psyche of the narrator (Waters) than on the metaphysics of the cosmos. The music, in fact, now explored abnormal mental states: insanity in Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the omnipotence of the "system" in Welcome To The Machine (perhaps an allegory on the music industry which engulfed the art). The former, opened by a somnolent guitar wail against a wall of droning and tinkling keyboards, morphs from agonizing blues guitar lament to anthemic horn-driven refrain. The latter, completely composed in layers on an electronic keyboard and guitar, one of the group's thriller classics, opened the doors to industrial music that, on hypnotic rhythms of mechanical equipment, constructed symphonic poems of apocalyptic pathos. Pulsing synthesizers continued to grow in popularity beginning in Germany with Kraftwerk but added diverse "voices" to the repertoire: organic warbling, simulations of neo-classical arches, and cosmic, languid glissandos. It was the first time that an album lost its languid and dreamy rhythm (but not, alas, its mournful vocals). Suggestive and atmospheric, the long suite in 9 parts dedicated to Barrett (the diamond referred to in Shine On You Crazy Diamond) shuffled funk dance rhythms, menacing symphonism, poignant riffs, gospel crescendos and funeral marches, but also a bit of verbosity and redundancy. There was 4 minutes before the famous arpeggio by Gilmour giving tone to the track and almost 10 minutes before Waters sung his lullaby. This track was, in reality, a long pause, filled with artificial sounds (the advantage to being able to spend 6 weeks in the most costly studios in the world). Shine On You Crazy Diamond spends the first nine minutes in an instrumental overture (with two solos by Gilmour) before the singing begins.

The album, above all, brought the Carthusian technique to maximum perfection in Dark Side.

The vulgarization of psychedelic music created a phenomenon parallel to the world of the underground, but in the case of Pink Floyd (converts to funk and disco) it was the betrayal of the good and beautiful. The sound of Pink Floyd careens on the tranquil melodies of the highest class: heavy guitar that tinkers on a soft and colorful fabric, stylized voices, a clean and rare aestheticism, a slow pace to avoid overloading the mind, and the fading of the music in long warbles: lounge psychedelia. The guitar solos by Gilmour, the electronics of the subconscious by Wright, the melancholy and dilated melodies by Waters, were the culmination of a long pursuit to a new genre of consumer music communicated on the second album.

Pink Floyd became an institution within consumer music, and in reality of music no longer produced: limited to placing the group's trademark, the unmistakable tonal perfection and composure.

The only mitigating factor of the concept for relaxing albums of this period, of the sound tracks at interim levels, and of the group's decadent, progressive involution, was a vague and ambiguous dedication to social ills: Dark Side indulges in the cause of alienation (time and money), Wish You Were Here sought a remedy for loneliness (in terms of insanity and technology), Animals (in large part composed of songs discarded from the previous album and already known live) was an allegory fabricated by Orwell revisited, a bestial industrial man (17 neurotic minutes in Dogs, the space-funk suite Sheep). The lyrics of Waters were dark, paranoid, pessimistic, but time came to do business with the fears of modern man. Waters and Gilmour had, above all, discovered a way to excessively elongate the theme of a song, allowing the melody to fluctuate on the thick clouds of the electronics, percussion and melodic drones on guitar - a format that would become the standard for music production during the 80's.

The group was so dominated by Waters, and his personal trauma, that Gilmour and Wright recorded their own albums, respectively David Gilmour (Columbia, 1978) and Wet Dream (Harvest, 1978), and Mason collaborated with Robert Wyatt and Gong.

If the albums of the trilogy of existential humanity only presented stereotypes, the double album The Wall condensed the meditation and commercialization of a decade into an unoriginal philosophy of "walls" which separate the two things. This album, ready to assimilate to the novelty of the music world - to disco rhythm such as the discrete music of Brian Eno, was the true reflection of Pink Floyd, always able to interpret the latest style. Wall signaled the point of max cohesion to be reached by the academic-commercial sound of the group: everyday noise in the background assayed and restored, sound segments that mixed mantras and the music of Ligeti, chromatically descriptive, the monolithic architecture of cotton candy. Symptomatic of the 3 parts of this melodrama of funk were tracks like Another Brick In The Wall (plus Comfortably Numb, which was the fourth) with choirs of school children. Comfortably Numb also contains Gilmour's best guitar solo. It was also the self-celebrating album for Waters, who since 1973 had led the group and was the author always credited on the cover. His songs, which were the softest and most dream-like, were recorded being sung in a dramatic and solemn manner that resembled the crooning a' la Broadway musicals or the metaphysical ballads by Genesis, recalling the disorder of the previous 2 albums, demonstrated by the insanity of Barrett who still tormented the souls of his companions. The alienation, the paranoia, and the nervousness which afflicted the nightmares of Barrett permeated into the private story of Waters, who was immersed in a series of devastating nightmares echoing in the emptiness. The interludes among the major tracks contain brief instrumental pieces or semi-acoustic sing-songs, often with noises inserted, which exacerbate the drama and pompousness of the work, to the point of being excessively morbid, if not apocalyptical. Redundant, smoky, full of special effects, and narcissistic, the music had no other way to display the paranoia of Waters, with a peak of desperation in the mellow ballad Hey You, and achieved its best in the expressionist psychodrama of the finale: In The Flesh, Waiting, Trial, which gradually moved towards the Brechtian style cabaret.

The Wall is also the album on which, de facto, the band disintegrated. Session musicians were brought in the studio to replace Wright and Mason who seemed increasingly less interested in playing Waters' music.

The Wall became a film and the symbol of the falling of the Berlin wall. In the first 10 years it sold 20 million copies.

Nick Mason recorded an album as well with Robert Wyatt and jazz composer Carla Bley, Fictitious Sports (EMI, 1981), published for only 2 years after being recorded, which at time the sound seemed to be a continuation of Rock Bottom from the early and legendary jazz-rock for small orchestras by Frank Zappa (Siam, Do Ya, and above all, Wervin').

The Final Cut (1983) was de facto a solo album by Roger Waters but credited to Pink Floyd. It was an oratorical requiem in which the depression from nervous exhaustion peaked. Technically speaking, it was an album overflowing with special effects and tri-dimensional sound (holophonic), which raised the otherwise banal motives of the folk tunes and militant marches. Lyrically speaking, the sound arsenal was serving an anti-war diatribe with an autobiographical background (of Waters, obviously) that mixed soft and epic tones. Substituting for the synthesizers of Wright were a harmonium and sting instruments. Waters seemed delirious, as if reincarnated in the post industrial era of Dylan in Masters Of War, against the evil of humanity.

The group became less of a group: Gilmour recorded his second solo album, About Face (Columbia, 1984), ditto for Wright with Identity (Harvest, 1984), as well as Mason with Profiles (Columbia, 1985), and Waters under his own name recorded the awful The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking (Columbia, 1984).

Waters continued to preach in his tragic yet smooth music, in his militant way despite his falsetto aesthetic which transformed the sales classification. His solo albums were Radio KAOS (1987) (another apocalyptic concept) and Amused To Death (1992) (another anti-war concept).

After Waters left, Gilmour remained the leader of the Pink Floyd and moved his guitar sound toward a more humane and aggressive style. Learning To Fly was the hit from A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987), the first Pink Floyd album without Waters (Wright played some keyboards as a contributor, not as a member, so that Pink Floyd was just the duo of Gilmour and Mason). It was not by chance that this hit was also the quintessence of their languid and disoriented style.

The instrumental, Marooned, is the highlight of The Division Bell (1994), the album that marked the official return of Wright. Pink Floyd during this time were above all a great machine of live performances, as immortalized on the live album titled Delicate Sound Of Thunder (1988) and Pulse (1995).

By 2000, Pink Floyd had sold more than 180 million albums.

Pink Floyd reunited for the first time since 1981 for a charity concert for Africa in the summer of 2005.

David Gilmour returned with the soporific On An Island (2006), his first solo album in over 20 years, featuring Robert Wyatt and David Crosby. Rattle That Lock (2015) was Gilmour's worst album of his career.

Richard Wright still recorded the concept album Broken China (1996). He died in 2008 at the age of 65.

Endless River (2014), Pink Floyd's first album since 1994 was ambient new-age music, mostly instrumental, a sound collage constructed from outtakes of decades-old recording sessions.

In his old age Roger Waters became more famous for his anti-Western political opinions than for his shows or compositions. The only albums since 1992 were the opera Ca Ira (2005) about the French revolution, with a libretto written by French songwriters Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil, and the collection Is This the Life We Really Want? (2020), whose songs sound like clones of old Pink Floyd hits sung by an old man.