Bibek Acharya
At the time of writing, Pink Floyd have a major new documentary screening in cinemas. This is fitting because the London prog band are as cinematic a rock band as you can get. Everything about them spoke to a higher level of ambition than their peers. From their musicianship to their songwriting to the very way their albums were sequenced.
The records they made at the peak of their powers, starting from 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon until 1979’s The Wall, run more or less as one continuous piece of music. The power this adds to the records as individual artistic statements can barely be measured. Just look at the 250 million albums the band have sold worldwide for proof.
Yet, those 250 million albums sold do strange things to a band. Their ambition made them that big, inarguably so. Yet it also turned the band from a group of prodigiously talented young musicians into a bunch of sniping, litigious egomaniacs. What is arguably even worse is the effect that size has on their music.
That size forced their music into becoming the most digestible, marketable version of itself, especially after the end of their imperial phase. In their pomp, they could release a record like The Dark Side of the Moon without needing to release a single first. ‘Money’ would follow as a single a week afterwards but they had the clout to only release one more, ‘Time’. Even then that was a whole year after the release of The Dark Side of the Moon.
How did success change Pink Floyd?
Once the 1980s hit and Floyd dissolved into an extended legal fistfight between guitarist David Gilmour and bassist Roger Waters, suddenly the band couldn’t dictate terms anymore. Pink Floyd, the band, became Pink Floyd the brand. The members of the group would start coming together to record music, not because they had that ambition and inspiration that made them megastars, but because they were contracted to.
This would continue long after the band finally released their contracted number of albums and went their separate ways. After all, the Pink Floyd brand was still valuable. If the labels in charge of it couldn’t release original studio albums, they’d just cannibalise the rest of their output for a few more sales.
2001 saw the release of just one of the many attempts to cash in on the Pink Floyd brand name, Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd. A fairly standard practice, it would seem. There’s no real issue with a greatest hits compilation, surely? Yet the problem with cherry-picking the work of Pink Floyd is that much of their greatest material was meant to be listened to specifically in the context of the album it’s from.Later, David Gilmour talked about this in an interview with Rolling Stone promoting the compilation, saying, “Some things just don’t have endings. ‘Us and Them‘, for example, was always cross-faded. We went back and listened to all the little snippets of mixed ends, and there just isn’t one. You have to just carry on into something, and it makes life a little difficult.”
Yet despite all that, the compilation was certified quadruple platinum a mere six years after its release.
