Much of the rest of it was filled by wildly veering musical approaches, big misfires, aesthetic excesses, pratfalls, and wide-ranging acts of buffoonery you wouldn’t find surprising in a This Is Spinal Tap outtake reel.Īnyway, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the band’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Floyd recorded over a longer period, of course, but both groups have released about the same number of albums, and had about the same span of decades to sell their work to new generations - and in new configurations.Īnd yet … the band’s famous works were recorded over an extremely short period, in a recording career that has now stretched nearly to five decades. The upshot: Pink Floyd has sold more albums worldwide than the Beatles. You can read his 51 pages of Pink Floyd sales data here. He obsessively collects worldwide sales data. Over the years, I’ve become extremely impressed with an amateur music-industry analyst who lives in France, Guillaume Vieira. The members of the band - Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright - approached their work seriously and blew minds in the process.Īnd it’s possible this perennially popular band has had its popularity underestimated. Its mid-’70s sonic triumphs - including The Dark Side of the Moonand Wish You Were Here - are both aural delights and meaningful works of art whose message is conveyed through sound. It’s all part of the river of life.Pink Floyd may be the only rock band that can credibly be compared to both the Beatles and Spinal Tap. And like The Beatles before them, Pink Floyd had to come to an end. It was this combination of ideas that gave Pink Floyd their sound, and this body of work holds up with The Beatles. Personally, I think Animals offers the strongest exhibition of raw ideas and tightly coiled guitar performances. It’s unlikely that Waters or Gilmour will get back together, either in the studio or on the stage, so the best way to celebrate their synchronicity is to listen to their past work. Because then it was back to the instrumentals that the band were best known for, culminating in the startling The Endless River.
By that point, the band were sensible enough to recognise the changing tides, bowing out with a work that exemplified the contrasts, contradictions and characters that led Pink Floyd to this point of unvarnished truth. Between them, the band re-shaped the lexicon of progressive rock, curating three concept albums during the mid-1970s.Īs if furthering the point, Pink Floyd created one final concept album for the 1990s: The Division Bell.
#Roger waters song series#
Between takes, Waters could return to his bass playing, offering Gilmour a counter-melody, servicing the tunes with a series of punchy chords.īut it wasn’t friendship that funnelled the backbone of the band, it was work, and as long as the band could enjoy working together, they wrote some excellent work. In an effort to appease both camps, the band played ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ at Live 8, giving both men the opportunity to sing lead vocals. Gilmour sees Wish You Were Here as the band’s finest work, while Waters singles The Wall out as the band’s creative zenith. Nick Mason calls Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters “extraordinary” The double album wove into Waters past as he absolved himself from the childhood spent mourning a deceased father and distancing himself from the guilt he felt for asking Syd Barrett to leave the band. Waters didn’t sing on the original, and he didn’t play bass, which probably made him feel like it had nothing to do with the integrity of his original demo.
#Roger waters song free#
Maybe he felt that giving he would be giving the band a free pass by performing a tune that highlighted each and every one of Gilmour’s talents. The show did indeed go on, but Waters was in no mood to give the band his blessing in 1990. And yet, Gilmour managed to reboot the brand to write a commercially successful album in A Momentary Lapse of Reason, before leading Floyd into the largest tours of their careers. Now, let me proffer my own theory: Waters had left the Pink Floyd orbit, convinced that the band would falter without him. Waters was always the first to recognise Gilmour as the superior singer, but that hasn’t stopped him from singing ‘Wish You Were Here’ or ‘Welcome to the Machine’ in public, so this omission struck many of his critics as a curious take.
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