Pink Floyd

Roger Waters,  Richard Wright,  Nick Mason  &  Syd Barrett

Dark Side of the Moon, released March 1, 1973

The Dark Side of the Moon was recorded between May 1972 and January 1973, with EMI staff engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road.  The title is an allusion to lunacy rather than astronomy.  The band had composed and refined the material on Dark Side while touring the UK, Japan, North America and Europe.  Hipgnosis designed the album's packaging, which included George Hardie's iconic refracting prism design on the cover.  The Dark Side album cover features a beam of white light, representing unity, passing through a prism, which represents society.  The resulting refracted beam of coloured light symbolises unity diffracted, leaving an absence of unity.   Dark Side of the Moon is featured here in its entirety. The album is one of the most commercially successful rock albums of all time; a US number 1, it remained on the Billboard chart for more than fourteen years, selling more than 40 million copies worldwide.  In Britain, the album peaked at number 2, spending 364 weeks on the UK chart.  Dark Side is the world's second best-selling album, and the twenty-first best-selling album of all time in the US. The success of the album brought wealth to all four members of the band; Richard Wright and Roger Waters bought large country houses, and Nick Mason became a collector of upmarket cars.  Some of the profits were invested in the production of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Engineer Alan Parsons received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical for The Dark Side of the Moon, and he went on to have a successful career as a recording artist with the Alan Parsons Project.

The Wall (LP), released November 30, 1979

In July 1978 Roger Waters presented the group with a 90-minute demo with the working title Bricks in the Wall.  A rock opera that explores themes of abandonment and isolation.  Based on the central figure of Pink—a gestalt character inspired by Waters' childhood experiences: the death of his father, abuse from schoolteachers, overprotective mother, and the breakdown of his marriage; all contributing to his eventual isolation from society, represented by a metaphorical wall.  Pink would become drugaddled and depressed by the music industry, eventually transforming into a megalomaniac, a development inspired partly by the decline of Syd Barrett.  At the end of the album, the increasingly fascist audience would watch as Pink tore down the wall, once again becoming a regular and caring person. The Wall features a harsher and more theatrical style than Pink Floyd's previous albums.  Wright left the band during its production but remained as a salaried musician, performing with Pink Floyd during the Wall tour.  The album was one of the best selling of 1980, and by 1999 it had sold over 23 million RIAA certified units (11.5 million albums) in the United States.  Top selling singles from the album were Another Brick in the Wall pt2, Run Like Hell and Comfortably Numb.  Rolling Stone magazine placed The Wall at number 87 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The Wall concept also spawned a film, Pink Floyd - The Wall, the original idea for which was to be a combination of live concert footage and animated scenes.  However, the concert footage proved impractical to film.  Alan Parker agreed to direct and took a different approach.  The animated sequences would remain, but scenes would be acted by professional actors with no dialogue.  Waters was screen-tested, but quickly discarded and they asked Bob Geldof to accept the role of Pink.  Geldof, initially dismissive, was eventually won over by the prospect of participation in a significant film and a large payday.  Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1982, Pink Floyd – The Wall premiered in the UK in July 1982.

The Endless River, released November 10, 2014

The Endless River is based on material recorded in 1993 and 1994 during the Division Bell recording.  The sessions were held at Britannia Row Studios and aboard the Astoria, where Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and Gilmour's On an Island (2006) were also partly recorded.  Pink Floyd engineer Andy Jackson edited six hours of recording to an hour-long composition tentatively titled The Big Spliff. However, Pink Floyd decided not to release it. The Endless River has been described by the band as a predominantly ambient and instrumental album.  David Gilmour described the record as follows: The Endless River has as its starting point the music that came from the 1993 Division Bell sessions.  We listened to over 20 hours of the three of us playing together and selected the music we wanted to work on for the new album.  Over the last year we’ve added new parts, re-recorded others and generally harnessed studio technology to make a 21st century Pink Floyd album.  With Rick (Richard Wright died of cancer on September 15, 2008) gone, and with him the chance of ever doing it again, it feels right that these revisited and reworked tracks should be made available as part of our repertoire. Gilmour stated that The Endless River will be Pink Floyd's last album, saying: I think we have successfully commandeered the best of what there is... It's a shame, but this is the end.

Wanderin' Spirit
December, 2014
"Pink Floyd"