小简介
平克·弗洛依德（Pink Floyd），一支完成实验巨著的辉煌乐队，通过音乐留给了人们许多想象的空间和对生命的思考。无论是传奇化的人物Syd Barrett、Roger Waters，还是富有挑战性是伟大作品《The Piper At The Gates of Down》和《The Wall》，都引发我们一种冲动：去进一步了解乐队的兴衰历程。
Roger Waters、 Rick Wright和Nick Mason是伦敦剑桥工艺学校的同学，他们组成了校园乐队， Roger Waters邀请好朋友Syd Barrett参加。Syd Barrett根据自己的爱好，分别取了两位乔治亚布鲁斯艺人的名字——Pink Anderson和 Floyd Council ，组成乐队的大名——Pink Floyd，这年为1965年。
第二年，伦敦著名的马奎（Marquse）俱乐部星期天下午举办地下音乐的演出，平克·弗洛依德在表演中丢弃了布鲁斯的风格，由Syd Barrett创造更有表现力的音乐，那种迷幻的乐风使平克·弗洛依德很快成为伦敦最嬉皮士化的乐队。乐队实验与革新的声望随着UFO俱乐部的建立而得以延续，这时，UFO已成为伦敦迷幻运动的焦点。UFO位于伦敦Tottenham Court大街。
1967年2月，平克·弗洛依德录制了第一首单曲“Arnoid Layne”，EMI动手签下了乐队，购买了这首单曲。据说乐队被介绍给唱片公司的发行人时，有人问：“你们中间哪一个是Pink？”后来在专辑《Wish You Were Here》中提及了此事。“Arnoid Layne”的主题尽管是关于易装癖者的事，但依然出入意料地升至英国排行榜20名，BBC电台播出此曲时遭到了禁播通知。 同年5月，平克·弗洛依德和大名鼎鼎的Jimi Hendrix、Cream同台演出。6月，第二支单曲“See Emily Play”更上层楼，赢得英国排行榜第6名，不过DJ Pete Murray认为12年之内这支乐队不会再有单曲上榜。8月，首张专辑《The Piper At The Gates of Dawn》发表，这张实验色彩很浓的大碟充分展现了乐队灵魂Syd Barrett的天赋。11月，平克·弗洛依德首次访美。而Syd Barrett不断增加服用LSD的剂量。当电视节目“The Pat Boone show”主持人采访他时，Syd Barrett发生错乱对于提问只是干瞪着眼。Syd Barrett的行为引起了关注，Roger Waters只能请来另一位朋友David Gilmour，Syd Barrett不再在现场演出中露脸，只在幕后创作。
David Gilmour在这之前，是一支地方性的乐队Jokers Wild的成员。 1968年4月，Syd Barrett因不能从事音乐而被请出了乐队，从此，平克·弗洛依德少了一名重要的创作者, Barrett在故乡剑桥被隔离开来。6月第二张专辑《A Sauceful od Secrets》出版。随着Barrett的离队，Roger Waters逐渐取得了乐队灵魂的地位。1969年7月为Barbet Schroeder的电影配乐的《More》发表，同年10月出版的双唱片《Ummagumma》中的一半录音是现场版本。12月，乐队前灵魂Syd Barrett以个人身份推出单曲“Octopus”，未获成功。第二年年初，在Roger Waters和David Gilmour的帮助下，Barrett出版了个人专辑《The Madcap Laughs》。 70年10也，平克·弗洛依德推出专辑《Atom Heart Mother》。这部作品奠定了乐队在下一个十年中一直享誉世界的音乐形式，也就是体现了Roger Waters在整体构思上的概念性的把握。
11月，Syd Barrett出版了《Barrett》。但并未作任何宣传，这成为了他的绝唱，他返剑桥成为一名遁世者，拒绝着乐队成员和其他人为使他重返乐坛所做的一切努力。 1971年8月，平克·弗洛依德有2发表了一张专辑，是精选集《Relics》。其中与两首是以前被删去不用的歌。11月，专辑《Meddle》问世。 72年，Barrett奇迹般地出现在一个剑桥的三人组合中，但仅有的三次演出没有任何录音，使歌迷大失所望。Syd Barrett再次隐居令评论界对他大感兴趣。同年6月，平克·弗洛依德再为Barbet Schroeder的电影《Ubscured By Clouds》配乐。 73年5月，录制了将近1年时间的概念专辑《The Dark Side of The Moon》出版，这张专辑将平克·弗洛依德的事业推向了顶峰，在Billboard排行榜上足足呆上736周，一直持续到88年。并一下子在全世界售出13万张。 1975年9月，向Syd Barrett致敬的专辑《Wish You Were Here 》发表。制作中Barrett来到录音棚拜访乐队，但从此他再也未受到任何诱惑而出现在乐坛上。
小提琴手Stephane Grappeil为专辑出了大力。 76年12月，专辑《Animals》封套的拍摄捅了大乱子，使平克·弗洛依德上了头条新闻。乐队为了拍摄封套，放了一只40米高的充气猪，飘荡在Battersea车站上空。国家航空机关警告伦敦所有飞行员“有一只猪在上空”。当人们最后一次看见它时，它已飘在Kent Chatham1万8千米的高空。
78年，乐队成员谋求个人发展。Mason为The Damned乐队制作第二 张专辑《Music For Pleasure》。5月David Gilmour发表同名专辑，而 Rick Wright完成了首张个人专辑 《Wet Dream》。 79年12月，辉煌巨著《The Wall》（类似于Roger Waters自传性作品）发表震惊了世界。80年，为《The Wall》而作的现场演出造起了长160米，高30米的墙，在演出中这样的墙要被庆祝式地摧毁。由于财力原因，演出演到29场就入不敷出了。Rick Wright也因与Roger Waters意见不和而离开了乐队。
1982年，电影《The Wall》由阿伦·派克执导，并由歌星Bob Geldo出演。 1983年，乐队由一张战争题材的专辑《The Final Cut》由Roger Waters创作而发表。从此，平克·弗洛依德的内部矛盾越来越激化。随后的几年几位成员把主要精力投入到各自的专辑中去。
86年，Roger Waters自组临时组合The Bleeding Heart Band。同年10月，Waters上诉伦敦最高法院。作为平克·弗洛依德乐队的灵魂及大部分歌曲的创作者，要求法院解除乐队成员的关系，并制止David Gilmour等三人继续沿用乐队的名字。 随后的几年里，乐队获准一直保留了原名，Roger Waters和David Gilmour等人的矛盾始终加剧着。而自从87年Roger Waters正式离队，平克·弗洛依德似乎也名存实亡了。
Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits. At the same time they wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. Despite their astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the 1980s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name. After that time, they were little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular recreation of their most successful formulas. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.
While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandiose concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). And at first, Pink Floyd were much more conventional than the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.
Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback; electronic screeches; and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground; on-stage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, childlike wonder.
The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, "Arnold Layne," a sympathetic, comic vignette about a transvestite. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic "See Emily Play," made the Top Ten. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming fun house of driving, mysterious rockers ("Lucifer Sam"); odd character sketches ("The Gnome"); childhood flashbacks ("Bike," "Matilda Mother"); and freakier pieces with lengthy instrumental passages ("Astronomy Domine," "Interstellar Overdrive," "Pow R Toch") that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The record was not only like no other at the time; it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and lighthearted than those of their subsequent epics.
The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. Barrett would go catatonic on-stage, playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio.
Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live outfit; Barrett would still be able to write and contribute to the records. That couldn't work either, and within a few months Barrett was out of the group. Pink Floyd's management, looking at the wreckage of a band that was now without its lead guitarist, lead singer, and primary songwriter, decided to abandon the group and manage Barrett as a solo act.
Such calamities would have proven insurmountable for 99 out of 100 bands in similar predicaments. Incredibly, Pink Floyd would regroup and not only maintain their popularity, but eventually become even more successful. It was early in the game yet, after all; the first album had made the British Top Ten, but the group was still virtually unknown in America, where the loss of Syd Barrett meant nothing to the media. Gilmour was an excellent guitarist, and the band proved capable of writing enough original material to generate further ambitious albums, Waters eventually emerging as the dominant composer. The 1968 follow-up to Piper at the Gates of Dawn, A Saucerful of Secrets, made the British Top Ten, using Barrett's vision as an obvious blueprint, but taking a more formal, somber, and quasi-classical tone, especially in the long instrumental parts. Barrett, for his part, would go on to make a couple of interesting solo records before his mental problems instigated a retreat into oblivion.
Over the next four years, Pink Floyd would continue to polish their brand of experimental rock, which married psychedelia with ever-grander arrangements on a Wagnerian operatic scale. Hidden underneath the pulsing, reverberant organs and guitars and insistently restated themes were subtle blues and pop influences that kept the material accessible to a wide audience. Abandoning the singles market, they concentrated on album-length works, and built a huge following in the progressive rock underground with constant touring in both Europe and North America. While LPs like Ummagumma (divided into live recordings and experimental outings by each member of the band), Atom Heart Mother (a collaboration with composer Ron Geesin), and More... (a film soundtrack) were erratic, each contained some extremely effective music.
By the early '70s, Syd Barrett was a fading or nonexistent memory for most of Pink Floyd's fans, although the group, one could argue, never did match the brilliance of that somewhat anomalous 1967 debut. Meddle (1971) sharpened the band's sprawling epics into something more accessible, and polished the science fiction ambience that the group had been exploring ever since 1968. Nothing, however, prepared Pink Floyd or their audience for the massive mainstream success of their 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon, which made their brand of cosmic rock even more approachable with state-of-the-art production; more focused songwriting; an army of well-time stereophonic sound effects; and touches of saxophone and soulful female backup vocals.
Dark Side of the Moon finally broke Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it made number one. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprehensible 741 weeks on the Billboard album chart. Additionally, the primarily instrumental textures of the songs helped make Dark Side of the Moon easily translatable on an international level, and the record became (and still is) one of the most popular rock albums worldwide.
It was also an extremely hard act to follow, although the follow-up, Wish You Were Here (1975), also made number one, highlighted by a tribute of sorts to the long-departed Barrett, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." Dark Side of the Moon had been dominated by lyrical themes of insecurity, fear, and the cold sterility of modern life; Wish You Were Here and Animals (1977) developed these morose themes even more explicitly. By this time Waters was taking a firm hand over Pink Floyd's lyrical and musical vision, which was consolidated by The Wall (1979).
The bleak, overambitious double concept album concerned itself with the material and emotional walls modern humans build around themselves for survival. The Wall was a huge success (even by Pink Floyd's standards), in part because the music was losing some of its heavy-duty electronic textures in favor of more approachable pop elements. Although Pink Floyd had rarely even released singles since the late '60s, one of the tracks, "Another Brick in the Wall," became a transatlantic number one. The band had been launching increasingly elaborate stage shows throughout the '70s, but the touring production of The Wall, featuring a construction of an actual wall during the band's performance, was the most excessive yet.
In the 1980s, the group began to unravel. Each of the four had done some side and solo projects in the past; more troublingly, Waters was asserting control of the band's musical and lyrical identity. That wouldn't have been such a problem had The Final Cut (1983) been such an unimpressive effort, with little of the electronic innovation so typical of their previous work. Shortly afterward, the band split up — for a while. In 1986, Waters was suing Gilmour and Mason to dissolve the group's partnership (Wright had lost full membership status entirely); Waters lost, leaving a Roger-less Pink Floyd to get a Top Five album with Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987. In an irony that was nothing less than cosmic, about 20 years after Pink Floyd shed their original leader to resume their career with great commercial success, they would do the same again to his successor. Waters released ambitious solo albums to nothing more than moderate sales and attention, while he watched his former colleagues (with Wright back in tow) rescale the charts.
Pink Floyd still had a huge fan base, but there's little that's noteworthy about their post-Waters output. They knew their formula, could execute it on a grand scale, and could count on millions of customers — many of them unborn when Dark Side of the Moon came out, and unaware that Syd Barrett was ever a member — to buy their records and see their sporadic tours. The Division Bell, their first studio album in seven years, topped the charts in 1994 without making any impact on the current rock scene, except in a marketing sense. Ditto for the live Pulse album, recorded during a typically elaborately staged 1994 tour, which included a concert version of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Waters' solo career sputtered along, highlighted by a solo recreation of The Wall, performed at the site of the former Berlin Wall in 1990, and released as an album. Syd Barrett continued to be completely removed from the public eye except as a sort of archetype for the fallen genius.
Band members
