The Magic and Majesty of Pink Floyd

The story of Pink Floyd is the story of the themes that raised and obsessed and tore at the band for almost four decades. That is, it's a story of madness, alienation, absence, hubris and a self-willed grace. There's really nothing else quite like it in popular music history. From the time they helped ignite a pop-cultural upheaval in London in the late 1960s to that touching appearance at Live 8, Pink Floyd always meant something in their moment. Indeed, the album that transfigured them in 1973, The Dark Side of the Moon, managed to reflect the doubts and fears of a generation that had to cope with the loss of the ideals of the 1960s, and did it so effectively that it established Pink Floyd as one of the biggest, best-loved bands in rock & roll. Seven years later, the epic and bleak The Wall only made them bigger. But The Wall — a story about a bitter, fucked-up loner rock star who could not bear the world around him — proved even darker than it first seemed, as its author, Waters, increasingly could not bear the band around him. "If one of us was going to be called Pink Floyd, it's me," he told Rolling Stone in 1987, though the rest of Pink Floyd had other ideas.

Despite both triumphs and wounds, the band's members couldn't escape a certain bond— not just a hatred for one another, but also a realization that without the community they once had, their music could never have mattered. Most of them were either born in or grew up around Cambridge — a well-off university town that prized a progressive streak — and appeared headed for careers in the arts. But what would bring Waters, Barrett, Mason and Wright together was a passion for the promising sounds of rock & roll, blues and R&B. Like other key British musicians — including John Lennon, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page — Pink Floyd would take the spirit of experimentation that they gained from art school and apply it to the raw form of rock & roll, with results that would transform the culture around them.

Waters left Cambridge in 1962 to take architecture courses at Regent Street Polytechnic in London, where he met fellow student Mason. He was already playing guitar— in fact, he sometimes practiced in class when he didn't want to study. In 1963, he and Mason joined an existing group, Sigma 6, where they met keyboard player Wright, who loved jazz and classical music. Wright and Mason were still fairly earnest about their possible architectural futures, but not Waters. He was already trying the patience of his lecturers. "I could have been an architect, but I don't think I'd have been very happy," he told journalist Caroline Boucher in 1970. "I hated being under the boot."

Barrett — another young guitarist and art student — arrived in London in September 1964, to study painting. Waters and Barrett had known each other back in Cambridge, where the charismatic Barrett was part of the bohemian set, learning about French existentialism and the 1950s Beat movement, and where he was already studying guitar with his friend David Gilmour. Barrett had a passion for the melodic form of the Beatles' music and for the blues-steeped pop of the Rolling Stones, but he was also given to unusual guitar tunings and an odd slideguitar technique, and he became interested in finding a looser form of spontaneity when playing rock & roll. By the time Barrett joined up with Waters in London, Sigma 6 had become the Abdabs, then the Tea Set. By the autumn of 1965 they had settled on a four-man lineup: Waters on bass, Wright on keyboards, Mason on drums and Barrett on lead guitar and vocals. Barrett also gave the group a new identity: the Pink Floyd Sound, derived from the first names of two obscure blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council (and from the names of his cats). "It was great when Syd joined," Wright said, according to author Barry Miles, who would also be a witness to the band's rise. "Before him, we'd play the R&B classics, because that's what all groups were supposed to be doing then.... With Syd, the direction changed; it became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards. Roger started to play the bass as a lead instrument, and I started to introduce more of my classical feel."