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Like many 1960s rock bands in the London scene, Pink Floyd set out as a run-of-the-mill rhythm and blues project. The first stable line-up, Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright, found its footing in live sets consisting primarily of covers. All the while, original bandleader Barrett was preparing to shake the foundations of contemporary rock music with his unique eye for abstract lyricism and colourful composition.
In their debut single, ‘Arnold Layne’, Pink Floyd debuted their psychedelic sound with ethereal vocal harmonies, fuzzy guitar melodies and Wright’s shimmering keyboard work. As they began work on their first album, Pink Floyd started to gain a reputation as a “space rock” group thanks to songs like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and ‘Astronomy Domine’. Such songs resonated profitably with the concurrent space race, which culminated in the Apollo 11 Moon landings in 1969.
To consolidate their early image as intrepid psychonauts, Pink Floyd created rudimentary light shows using rotating colour slides and domestic light bulbs. “At the launching of the new magazine IT the other night, a pop group called the Pink Floyd played throbbing music while a series of bizarre coloured shapes flashed on a huge screen behind them … apparently very psychedelic,” read a 1967 gig review in the Sunday Times.
After achieving success with The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd entered a long period of sonic transition. By 1968, the psychedelic wave had begun to lose its intensity, entering latency before re-emerging as progressive rock in the early 1970s. Pink Floyd traced this trajectory following Barrett’s departure and the induction of David Gilmour as a replacement on guitars.
With uneven releases like Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, Pink Floyd faltered somewhat with a lack of sonic coherence as they dipped a toe into the 1970s. However, following a promising change of tides in Meddle, they struck a zenith with The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, which marked the beginning of a prog-rock reign for the remainder of the decade.
Few would disagree that The Dark Side of the Moon was among the 1970s’ most influential releases. Waters devised a compelling concept for the album, which the band orchestrated perfectly, using unprecedented sound effects and production techniques. Pink Floyd continued to impress through the punk wave, offering juxtapositional complexities in Wish You Were Here and Animals. By the time they started work on The Wall, Waters’ final conceptual masterwork for the band, their work at the musical vanguard was all but finished.
Progressive rock, as defined by bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and Rush, lost its momentum towards the end of the 1970s. The comparative simplicity of punk quelled the flames and reset the scores before a new period of renewed creative effervescence. By the early 1980s, synth-pop began to dominate the charts, but the most interesting musical developments occurred in the new wave and post-punk realms.
In a 1996 interview with Howard Johnson, Richard Wright discussed some of his favourite records from his vast collection. After naming some old classics from Aaron Copland and Miles Davis and some contemporary favourites from The Band and Steely Dan, the keyboardist revealed where his tastes lay in the early 1980s as Pink Floyd passed the baton to a new generation of artful rockers.
Of his ten selections, two of the albums featured the revered avant-pop partners David Byrne and Brian Eno. Picking out the 1980 masterpiece Remain in Light, one of three albums Eno produced with Talking Heads, Wright commended the innovative, Afrobeat-inspired “cross-rhythms”. “You could always tell with this band that they weren’t writing to be commercial – they were just doing the music that they really felt,” he added. “There was something incredibly spontaneous about them. I’ve never seen Talking Heads live, although I wish I had.”
Wright stuck with Talking Heads through the 1980s and fortunately grabbed himself a copy of Byrne and Eno’s 1981 side project album, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. The album built upon Talking Heads’ progressive, funky rhythms of late in a more experimental guise, leaning on spoken word samples in place of Byrne’s vocals. “This knocked me sideways when I first heard it – full of drum loops, samples and soundscapes, stuff that we really take for granted now, but which was unheard of in all but the most progressive musical circles at the time,” Wright said of the album.
The keyboardist praised Eno’s fresh compositional ideas above all else. “I’ve often eulogised Eno’s musical abilities, but alongside his talent, he’s also a very nice guy. Sickening, isn’t it?” he added enviously before picking out a highlight on the album: “There’s a song called ‘The Jezebel Spirit’ where there’s a snippet of a preacher, and the way the sounds were mixed in was so fresh, it was amazing.”
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