The fall of Pink Floyd

Floyd's got ups and downs and they started too bad by four or five bad albums one by one at the beginning.

ferush wrote: Floyd's got ups and downs and they started too bad by four or five bad albums one by one at the beginning.

It really depends on what you call "a fall" - if we consider A Momentary Lapse Of Reason as being the nadir of their entire career (as some here suggest) then we have to take into account that it was a multi-platinum album that spurned tour that grossed £60M and a multi-plantimum live album (Delicate Sound Of Thunder). Critically and artistically it is not "up to the standard" of previous Floyd albums, but that standard is remarkably high for a band that had been in existence for 20+ years and had recorded 12 studio albums up until then - no other psyche/prog band had achieved that feat with that sustained level of success, 17 years after their first No.1 album (AHM). However, the relative success of AMLoR wasn't carried solely on the Floyd name either (unlike The Final Cut) - it was an album of its time and for that time it was actually a good one when compared to what else was being produced in 1987 by any band with Prog credentials (Rush, Marillion & Tull). It is easy to sit here in the relative comfort of 2010 and say it was a weak album, but from the perspective of 1987 it wasn't ... that we on the PA can rate Savatage's Hall Of The Mountain King as a "better" 1987 album is frankly laughable (and I love Savatage and HotMK) and is more a reflection of how we view AMLoR with respect to previous Floyd releases than how it stands up against releases by any other band in that year. We must remember just how dire 1987 was from a Prog perspective - Tull won the Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal album in '89 for their 1987 album Crest Of A Knave (not a bad album in itself either, but a long way short of being a good Tull album) - Marillion and Rush were being held aloft by "pop" singles success, not "prog" album sales (Hold Your Fire spurned three top 20 singles in the US, Clutching At Straws three top-30 hits in the UK) - Floyd sold AMLoR without radio airplay and without "hit" singles.

Edited by Dean - December 01 2010 at 12:42

Two great posts Dean.

The_Jester wrote: For me, the fall of Pink Floyd began when they became more comercial. It began to become comercial when Dark Side of the Moon was realesed. Even if there were good albums including Dark Side of the Moon after it, the band started to make comercial things and lead to the fall of Pink Floyd.

Another curious notion. Commerciality has always been the "bane" of Progressive Rock and "serious" musicians, but commercial success isn't the same as "selling-out". If what they produced was of little or no artistic merit, or failed to progress, be ground-breaking or experimental then I would have no alternative but to agree with you. But that isn't quite the case with Floyd - it is hard to describe a nine-part 26 minute "song", or an album with three tracks over 10 minutes, each as being in any way commercial. The Wall may have produced Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, but as an album in its entirety is it far from being commercial (musically or critically) or even that accessible. If you want to measure Floyd by the radio-play of two hit singles then so be it, but I struggle to see how that can reflect on the albums that they were lifted from.

They fell? Why just they fell? Abandoned members... Regret... Betrayal... Anger... Guessed, you might have just when.

JeanFrame wrote: ... I still really like what the band did after Syd by the way, but it pales by comparison to what would have been possible had the Barrett mind not flipped to the dark side.

I think they started to go off the rails a little with The Wall.  Still like the album and the movie though.  And I'm still pissed that when I went to see the band on their Division Bell tour that it was an outdoor show it was raining we weren't allowed to bring in umbrellas and they were all basically confiscated.  I think the band did it personally. 

darksideof wrote: Floyd Never Fell and without The Floyd we would never had prog as we know it.!! All their albums are quiet fantastic.

Great posts by Dean (as always).  It should be mentioned though that all members of Floyd had their sights set on commercial success (though maybe not Barrett, but we'll never know that for sure now).  However, they seemed to aim for that mostly in the business side, while the music remained completely in their control (they made sure of this fairly early on).  As Dean points out, you need to compare their albums to what was being released at the time.  This puts The Wall, and especially the Gilmour led era, into proper perspective.  As I've said, I wasn't crazy about those albums, but there was certainly very little as good as them at the time of their release (that I was aware of at the time, or that was considered "popular" music).

So, no, they never fell.  Also, Floyd is the best blend of commercial success and experimental music that there has ever been, in my opinion, and I'd challenge anyone here to name a better one.