100 Best Albums
- 1 MAR 1973
- 10 Songs
- Wish You Were Here · 1975
- The Wall · 1979
- The Wall · 1979
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
- The Wall · 1979
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon · 1973
Essential Albums
- You could say The Wall started taking shape the night Roger Waters leaned over the edge of the stage and spit in a fan’s face. This was July 1977: The band was finishing out their lengthy In the Flesh tour to stadium-size crowds, working at scales unfamiliar and uncomfortable to everyone involved. Risky investments had put them under major financial pressure; audiences seemed more interested in the party than the show; band rapport had gotten so strained that Waters started referring to the rest of the members as “the muffins”. And so, alone in a crowd of about 80,000 people, standing under the 40-foot-long inflatable pig that had become a central prop of the band’s set, Waters spit. Later that night, he told the producer Bob Ezrin and a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin’s that he sometimes fantasised about building a wall between himself and the audience—an embodiment of how isolated he already felt, and a device by which he could protect what little of himself he thought he had left. What emerged from that mental image was one of the last, and one of the greatest, gasps of the concept album—that naively romantic idea that music could somehow reach out of the confines of the recorded medium and tell a story that would resonate with the metaphoric heft of a novel. At 80 minutes, The Wall didn’t spare listeners any of Waters’ creative largesse. If anything, it laid bare his inner turmoil (and outer critique) with almost forensic precision: The album traces the long arc of a fictional rock star named Pink Floyd, who evolves from lonely boy to maniacal fascist. Pink starts pointing fingers at everyone from Mom (“Mother”) to the education system (“The Happiest Days of Our Lives”, “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”) to blacks, gays and Jews (“In the Flesh”) to modern life in general (“The Thin Ice”) before realising that maybe the problem was him all along (“Stop”, “The Trial”)—an arc even more resonant in light of our societal reckoning with the evil men do. Yeah, it’s a lot, especially as a morality play put on by the rich and famous. But despite their popularity, Pink Floyd were never exactly a friendly band. If anything, The Wall holds up in part because of how profoundly ugly it is, the externalisation of feelings so cruel and noxious that people hate to admit even having them, let alone mining them for art. (In that respect, they had more in common with punk than the punks would probably admit.) What had once felt expansive (take the long song-suites of Animals or The Dark Side of the Moon) now felt claustrophobic and fragmented, a picture rendered in shrapnel. In nudging Waters towards his most theatrical impulses, producer Ezrin—famous in part for helping create Alice Cooper—gave the album a narrative through line as comforting and familiar as an old myth (the traumatic rise and tragic fall, the superhero rendered human once again), but gave the impression of wholeness where Waters’ collage-like vision didn’t necessarily imply one. At one point, Ezrin suggested that guitarist David Gilmour go to a club to hear the then-new sound of disco. Gilmour hated it, but got the point: Listen to the rigid pacing of “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” and “Run Like Hell”—this wasn’t music about freedom, but about being martially locked in place. By the time you get to “Comfortably Numb”, a life without feeling doesn’t sound half bad. In addition to elevating them to implausibly greater levels of fame, The Wall marked the last time Waters and the rest of the band would work together in a meaningful way. During the album’s sessions, Waters effectively forced keyboardist Rick Wright out; shortly after 1983’s The Final Cut, Waters quit. In between, they managed to take The Wall on tour. Waters got his wish: During the first half of the show, roadies constructed a wall, brick by cardboard brick, approximately 40 feet in the middle and 130 feet across the top—an embodiment not just of Waters’ concept, but of the band’s general ability to strong-arm reality to suit their dreams. Ezrin, who had run afoul of Waters after unwittingly telling a journalist friend what the conceit of the show was going to be, was forced to buy his own ticket.
- As sprawling as their earlier epic The Dark Side of the Moon yet more focused, this 1975 jewel featured lengthy, left-of-centre excursions (“Shine on You Crazy Diamond”) that were both majestic and reverent—along with a couple barbs thrown at the music industry ("Have a Cigar", "Welcome to the Machine"). It's also partly Pink Floyd’s anguished and glorious tribute to the gifted Syd Barrett—whose career with the band ended seven years earlier—and a moving set from top to bottom.
- 100 Best Albums The Dark Side of the Moon is a little like puberty: Feel how you want about it, but you’re gonna have to encounter it one way or another. Developed as a suite-like journey through the nature of human experience, the album not only set a new bar for rock music’s ambitions, but it also proved that suite-like journeys through the nature of human experience could actually make their way to the marketplace—a turn that helped reshape our understanding of what commercial music was and could be. If pop—even in the post-Beatles era—tended toward lightness and salability, Dark Side was dense and boldfaced; if pop was telescoped into bite sizes, Dark Side was shaped more like a novel or an opera, each track flowing into the next, bookended by that most nature-of-human-experience sounds, the heartbeat. Even compared to other rock albums of the time, Dark Side was a shift, forgoing the boozy extroversion of stuff like The Rolling Stones for something more interior, private, less fun but arguably more significant. In other words, if Led Zeppelin IV was something you could take out, Dark Side was strictly for going in. That the sound was even bigger and more dramatic than Zeppelin’s only bolstered the band’s philosophical point: What topography could be bigger and more dramatic than the human spirit? As much as the album marked a breakthrough, it was also part of a progression in which Floyd managed to join their shaggiest, most experimental phase (Atom Heart Mother, Meddle) with an emerging sense of clarity and critical edge, exploring big themes—greed (“Money”), madness (“Brain Damage”, “Eclipse”), war and societal fraction (“Us and Them”)—with a concision that made the message easy to understand no matter how far out the music got. Drummer Nick Mason later noted that it was the first time they’d felt good enough about their lyrics—written this time entirely by Roger Waters—to print them on the album sleeve. For one of the most prominent albums in rock history, Dark Side is interestingly light on rocking. The cool jazz of Rick Wright’s electric piano, the well-documented collages of synthesiser and spoken word, the tactility of ambient music and dub—even when the band opened up and let it rip (say, “Any Colour You Like” or the ecstatic wail of “The Great Gig in the Sky”), the emphasis was more on texture and feel than the alchemy of musicians in a room. Yes, the album set a precedent for arty, post-psychedelic voyagers like OK Computer-era Radiohead and Tame Impala, but it also marked a moment when rock music fused fully with electronic sound, a hybrid still vibrant more than five decades on. The journey here was ancient, but the sound was from the future.
- Even though Pink Floyd’s debut album followed Sgt. Pepper’s by a couple of months, nothing could have prepared the world for the magical blend of genius and LSD-induced madness that drove Floyd frontman Syd Barrett’s dazzling psychedelic vision. Barrett’s cubist guitar riffs collide magnificently with Rick Wright’s hypnotic, snake-charmer organ lines amid a dizzying merry-go-round of sound effects. All the while, Syd’s equally abstract lyrical approach freely mixes fairy-tale imagery with cosmic explorations—the ideal soundtrack for journeys through both outer and inner space.
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About Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd are notable not only for what they popularised (immaculate hi-fi production, elaborate concept albums, planetarium laser shows) but for what they negated: With their carefully cultivated sense of mystique, they proved you needn’t play the role of camera-mugging pop stars to become one of the world’s most famous rock bands. Which is ironic, given that they were initially led by the irrepressibly charismatic Syd Barrett, whose madcap genius spawned the brain-scrambling psychedelia of 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But after Barrett’s erratic behaviour prompted his dismissal from the group a year later, Floyd transitioned into a more enigmatic cosmic-rock collective powered by Roger Waters’ propulsive basslines, Richard Wright’s ethereal keyboard drones, drummer Nick Mason’s tense time-keeping and the deeply emotive guitar squeals of Barrett’s replacement, David Gilmour. Albums like Ummagumma and Meddle ushered in the progressive-rock era with their sprawling, side-long compositions (and, decades later, proved foundational to indie movements like post-rock and doom metal). But with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd were no longer strictly the domain of underground-music heads. Harnessing their exploratory aesthetic into a taut, seamless song cycle, the album would spend 14 consecutive years on the Billboard charts, and it remains the benchmark for studio-crafted art-rock excellence that bands like Tame Impala continue to chase, while its pioneering use of electronics inspired adventurous dance acts like Daft Punk. Dark Side was also the record where Waters’ lyrical voice came to the fore, through critiques of British society that were as cutting as anything coming from the punks who purported to hate the band. Waters’ vision became evermore paramount on a string of classic LPs that explored personal loss (1975’s Barrett-inspired elegy Wish You Were Here) and political power structures (1977’s Orwellian parable Animals), culminating in 1979’s colossal arena-rock opera The Wall (though the fact that the latter release yielded Pink Floyd’s only No. 1 single, ”Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”, affirmed the band’s knack for providing accessible gateways into dense, demanding works). Waters continued to exert outsized creative control over the band until his 1985 departure, after which the remaining members carried on under the Floyd name into the ‘90s. Following a one-night-only reunion with Waters in 2005 for Live 8, and Wright’s death from cancer in 2008, Gilmour and Mason released the final Pink Floyd album, The Endless River, in 2014, bringing one of the most transformative and tumultuous bands in rock history to a peaceful rest.
- ORIGIN
- London, England
- FORMED
- 1965
- GENRE
- Rock