The story of Pink Floyd

Architecture students and a Cambridge crowd

The story begins in September 1962 at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, where two architecture students, Roger Waters and Nick Mason, got talking. Later that year a third student, Richard Wright, joined them in a college band called Sigma 6. Waters played guitar, Mason played drums, and Wright played whatever was going, piano if the pub had one, otherwise guitar or trombone. They rehearsed in a basement tearoom at the college and cycled through names like the Meggadeaths, the Abdabs, the Screaming Abdabs and Leonard's Lodgers. That last one was a joke about their landlord, Mike Leonard, a part time tutor who rented Waters and Mason a flat in Stanhope Gardens in Highgate and even played organ with them for a while.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Waters had grown up in Cambridge, and he brought old friends from there into the picture. His father, Eric Fletcher Waters, had been killed at Anzio in Italy in February 1944, when Roger was just five months old, a loss that would echo through his lyrics for decades. At school in Cambridge, Waters knew a younger boy called Roger Keith Barrett, known to everyone as Syd. Waters's mother had even taught Syd at junior school. Syd lost his own father to cancer in December 1961, weeks before his sixteenth birthday. On the day his father died, he left the page in his diary blank. He threw himself into painting, guitars and songwriting.[1] [2]

Another Cambridge teenager, David Gilmour, was the son of a university zoology lecturer. He had borrowed a guitar from a neighbour, never gave it back, and taught himself from a Pete Seeger book and record. At the local art and technology college, Gilmour and Barrett spent their lunchtimes playing guitars and harmonicas together. They later hitchhiked and busked their way around the south of France, where they were arrested for busking. Back in London, the student band took on a new lead guitarist, Bob Klose, which pushed Waters over to bass. By 1964 Barrett had moved to London to study painting at Camberwell, and he joined the group too. Klose was the most accomplished player of them all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For a while their singer was Chris Dennis, a technician in the Royal Air Force. When the RAF posted him to Bahrain in early 1965, Barrett stepped up as frontman. The band, now called the Tea Set, landed a residency at the Countdown Club near Kensington High Street, playing three sets of ninety minutes each from late at night until early morning. To avoid repeating songs, they learned to stretch them out with long solos, the seed of everything that came later. In mid 1965 Klose bowed to pressure from his parents and tutors and quit to concentrate on his studies. Barrett took over lead guitar, and the line up that would make history was in place.[1] [2]

Then came the name. At one gig in late 1965 the Tea Set discovered that another band on the bill had exactly the same name. Barrett came up with an alternative on the spot, the Pink Floyd Sound. He took it from two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, whose names he had spotted in the sleeve notes of a Blind Boy Fuller record in his collection. For a while they were also billed as the Pink Floyd Blues Band. Within a year their new managers suggested dropping the Sound, and they became the Pink Floyd. The word the would fall away a few years later, leaving the two words the world now knows.[1] [2] [3]

Kings of the London underground

In March 1966 the band played the Marquee Club, and in the crowd was Peter Jenner, a young economics lecturer at the London School of Economics. He was struck by the strange sounds Barrett and Wright were making. With his friend Andrew King, Jenner became their manager. Neither had any music business experience, so they used King's inheritance to set up a company called Blackhill Enterprises and bought the band around a thousand pounds of new equipment. The four musicians and two managers became equal partners, each with a one sixth share. Not everyone was a fan yet. After one show at a Catholic youth club, the owner refused to pay, saying it was not music. When the managers took him to a small claims court, the magistrate agreed with the owner.[1] [2]

The band found their true home in London's growing counterculture. On the fifteenth of October 1966 they played the launch party for the underground paper International Times at the Roundhouse, in front of about two thousand people, including Paul McCartney and Marianne Faithfull. Their slide and light show was one of the first in British rock, built with coloured slides, household lights and, thanks to a lighting man named Peter Wynne Willson, polarisers, mirrors and stretched condoms. On the twenty third of December 1966 the UFO Club opened in a basement on Tottenham Court Road, run by Joe Boyd and John Hopkins, known as Hoppy. Pink Floyd played the opening night and became its house band, drawing crowds with long, loud improvisations.[1] [2]

In February 1967 Pink Floyd signed with EMI for an advance of five thousand pounds. Their first single, Arnold Layne, came out on the tenth of March. Barrett wrote it about a man who stole women's underwear from washing lines, and Waters later said it was based on a real person, since both their mothers took in female students as lodgers in Cambridge. The pirate station Radio London refused to play it. Andrew King later admitted the management spent a couple of hundred pounds trying to buy the record into the charts. It reached number twenty anyway. The follow up, See Emily Play, grew out of a concert called Games for May, where the band first used a quadraphonic sound system. It reached number six.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The debut album was made at EMI's studios on Abbey Road, produced by Norman Smith, who had engineered the Beatles' records. The Beatles were next door making Sgt. Pepper, and Pink Floyd sat in on one of their sessions, for Lovely Rita. Barrett wrote nearly everything, whimsical songs about gnomes, scarecrows and bicycles alongside space rock workouts like Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive. The title, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, came from a chapter of The Wind in the Willows, one of Barrett's favourite books. It was released on the fourth of August 1967 and reached number six in Britain. One night that April, the band had arrived at an all night festival at Alexandra Palace around three in the morning and took the stage just as the sun came up.[1] [2] [3]

Losing Syd

Even as success arrived, Syd Barrett was slipping away. He was taking large amounts of LSD, along with other drugs, and friends noticed a blank, faraway stare. When Gilmour visited the See Emily Play session in May 1967, his old friend looked straight through him. On their third Top of the Pops appearance, Barrett complained that John Lennon did not have to do Top of the Pops. At shows he would strum one chord all night, or not play at all. June Child, who worked for the managers, recalled getting him onto a stage where he simply stood, guitar hanging from his neck, arms by his sides. Gigs were cancelled, and the press was told he had nervous exhaustion.[1] [2] [3]

The band tried to get him help. Waters personally drove Barrett to an appointment with the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, but Barrett refused to get out of the car. A stay on the Spanish island of Formentera with a doctor friend made no difference. Their first American tour in late 1967 was painful. On Pat Boone's television show Barrett gave a blank, silent stare and would not move his lips to mime See Emily Play. At one Californian show he slowly detuned his guitar on stage. Andrew King cut the tour short and flew everyone home. On a British tour supporting Jimi Hendrix that November, David O'List of the Nice sometimes had to stand in when Barrett could not play or did not turn up.[1] [2]

In December 1967 the band asked David Gilmour to join as a fifth member, on thirty pounds a week, to cover for Barrett on stage. The plan was for Syd to stay on as a songwriter who did not tour, the way the Beach Boys had kept Brian Wilson. It did not work. At what turned out to be a final rehearsal, Barrett taught them a new song called Have You Got It Yet, changing it every time they played so nobody could learn it. Waters called it an act of mad genius. On the twenty sixth of January 1968, driving to a show at Southampton University, someone asked if they should pick Syd up. Someone else said, let's not bother. They drove on without him.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixth of April 1968 it was announced that Barrett had left. Jenner and King believed he was the real genius, so they stayed with him and parted ways with the band, and a young agent named Steve O'Rourke became Pink Floyd's manager. Barrett's last song on a Pink Floyd album was Jugband Blues, recorded with a Salvation Army brass band, in which he thanks the listener for making it clear that he is not here. Waters later admitted mixed feelings, saying Syd was their friend, but most of the time they now wanted to strangle him. For weeks afterwards Barrett would sit in the studio reception, waiting to be invited in, or turn up at gigs and stare at Gilmour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Barrett made two solo albums in 1970, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, with Gilmour, Waters and Wright helping in the studio. Songs were recorded as he played them, false starts and all. Gilmour later wondered aloud whether they had been trying to show what Syd was really like, or trying to punish him. At a London concert in June 1970 Barrett played four songs, then politely put down his guitar and walked off. After a short lived Cambridge band called Stars, and a last session in 1974, he left music for good. When his money ran out in 1978 he moved back in with his mother in Cambridge, went back to his birth name Roger, and spent his days painting and gardening.[1] [2]

Finding a new voice

Without their main songwriter, Pink Floyd had to reinvent themselves. The second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, came out in June 1968, with songs by Waters and Wright and the only track on which all five members play, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. Neither Waters nor Mason could read music, so they drew the title piece out like an architectural diagram. Producer Norman Smith was unconvinced, complaining that they could not do twenty minutes of this ridiculous noise, and when Mason struggled with one drum part, Smith played it himself. The cover was the first by their Cambridge friends Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, trading as Hipgnosis. The day after its release, the band played the first ever free concert in Hyde Park.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next few years were a laboratory. They scored films, including Barbet Schroeder's More, and spent nearly a month in a luxury hotel in Rome working for the director Michelangelo Antonioni on Zabriskie Point. He used only three of their pieces, and one reject, The Violent Sequence, later became Us and Them. In July 1969 they improvised live on BBC television during coverage of the Apollo moon landing. That November came Ummagumma, a double album with one disc of live favourites and one where each member got half a side to himself. Wright later called his own part pretentious, and Gilmour admitted he just waffled his way through his.[1] [2]

In October 1970 Atom Heart Mother became Pink Floyd's first number one album in Britain. Its twenty three minute title suite was finished with the help of the composer Ron Geesin, a brass section and a choir, and the cover showed nothing but a cow in a field, with no band name at all. The piece got its title in a hurry before a BBC broadcast, when Geesin pointed Waters to a newspaper headline about a woman fitted with a nuclear powered pacemaker. The band later disowned it. Waters said he would happily see it thrown in the dustbin, and Gilmour called it a load of rubbish. That same year, after their gear was stolen in New Orleans, Gilmour bought a Fender Stratocaster in New York that would become famous as the Black Strat.[1] [2] [3]

The real turning point was Meddle, released in November 1971. Its second side was Echoes, a twenty three and a half minute piece that grew from studio experiments the band had jokingly labelled Nothing, parts one to twenty four. It opens with a single ping from Wright's piano fed through a rotating speaker, and its eerie screeching middle came from Gilmour plugging a wah wah pedal in backwards by accident. Waters wrote the words about strangers passing in the street, the first hint of the themes of empathy and connection he would chase for years. The same album had a lighter moment too, a blues called Seamus, featuring the howls of Steve Marriott's dog, whom Gilmour was looking after.[1] [2]

In October 1971 Pink Floyd filmed one of the strangest concerts in rock history, in the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Pompeii, with no audience at all. The director Adrian Maben had lost his passport there on holiday, gone back to look for it, and been struck by the silence of the ruins. The band insisted on playing live with their touring gear, but the site did not have enough power, so a cable of about seven hundred and fifty metres was run from the town hall. A few local children sneaked in and were allowed to watch quietly. Live at Pompeii premiered in 1972, and more than half a century later it would give the band another number one album.[1] [2]

The Dark Side of the Moon

In late 1971, at a band meeting at Nick Mason's home, Roger Waters proposed an album about the things that make people mad: time, money, conflict, death, and the pressures of life on the road, with the memory of Syd Barrett hanging over it. Crucially, they worked it up on stage first. The new suite premiered in Brighton in January 1972, and it was played to the press in London that February, more than a year before release, under the title Dark Side of the Moon, A Piece for Assorted Lunatics. For a while they renamed it Eclipse, because the band Medicine Head had used the title. When that album flopped, they switched back. The title was about lunacy, not astronomy.[1] [2]

Recording ran from May 1972 to February 1973 at Abbey Road with a young staff engineer, Alan Parsons, who had worked on the Beatles' Abbey Road. For Money, Waters recorded coins thrown into a mixing bowl in his wife's pottery studio, along with a cash register and tearing paper, and spliced them into a loop in seven four time. Parsons had recorded the clocks at the start of Time in an antique shop for a sound test. The sessions were fun, sometimes interrupted so Waters could watch Arsenal or so everyone could catch Monty Python on television. At the mixing stage the producer Chris Thomas was brought in as a fresh pair of ears to balance Waters's wish for a dry sound against Gilmour's taste for echo.[1] [2] [3]

The voices scattered through the album came from a simple trick. Waters wrote questions on cards and asked roadies, studio staff and visitors to answer them into a microphone in a darkened room, starting with favourite colours and moving on to violence and death. The studio's Irish doorman, Gerry O'Driscoll, supplied the closing words, that there is no dark side of the moon, really, it is all dark. Paul and Linda McCartney were interviewed too, but were judged to be trying too hard to be funny. For The Great Gig in the Sky, Parsons suggested a session singer called Clare Torry. With no words and no melody, she improvised a wordless vocal in a few takes on a Sunday night, was paid thirty pounds, and left thinking it would not be used.[1] [2]

The Dark Side of the Moon was released in America on the first of March 1973 and in Britain on the sixteenth. Hipgnosis designed the famous cover, a beam of light through a prism, drawn by George Hardie after Wright asked for something simple and bold. At the London press launch, three of the four band members stayed away because the quadraphonic mix was not ready, and guests met life sized cardboard cut outs instead. The album topped the American chart and then refused to leave. It stayed on the Billboard album chart for 736 weeks until 1988, and by early 2026 its total had reached nearly a thousand weeks. It has sold well over forty five million copies.[1] [2]

Success changed everything. Money gave the band a top twenty hit in America, and the album made all four very rich. Waters and Wright bought country houses, while Mason began collecting expensive cars. The band left Capitol for Columbia in America with a reported advance of a million dollars. Waters later remembered playing a tape of the finished album to his wife at home, and watching her burst into tears at the end. That was when he knew they had made something complete. There was a sting in the tail years later. In 2004 Clare Torry sued for a share of the songwriting on The Great Gig in the Sky, and after a settlement in 2005 later copies credit her alongside Wright.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wish You Were Here and Animals

Following Dark Side was hard. Back at Abbey Road in January 1975, the band felt drained and directionless. Their engineer Brian Humphries remembered days spent playing darts, firing an air rifle and drinking before going home. Then a mournful four note guitar phrase that Gilmour had stumbled on reminded Waters of Syd, and it became Shine On You Crazy Diamond, a long tribute to their lost friend, split to bookend the album. Waters added two bitter attacks on the music business, Welcome to the Machine and Have a Cigar, where a record executive asks which one's Pink, a question someone had really asked them. When Waters strained his voice, their friend Roy Harper, recording next door, sang Have a Cigar instead.[1] [2]

On the fifth of June 1975, the day David Gilmour married his first wife Ginger, the band were mixing Shine On You Crazy Diamond when an overweight man with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows wandered in carrying a plastic bag. Nobody recognised him at first. It was Syd Barrett. Waters was reportedly reduced to tears, and Storm Thorgerson said that he sat and talked for a while, but he was not really there. When asked what he thought of the song written about him, Barrett said it sounded a bit old. He came for two or three days, then stopped coming. Apart from Waters glimpsing him in Harrods a couple of years later, it was the last time any of them saw him.[1] [2] [3]

Wish You Were Here was released in September 1975 and went to number one in Britain and America. Its theme was absence, and Hipgnosis took that literally, sealing the sleeve in black shrink wrap so the cover could not be seen. Underneath was a photograph of two businessmen shaking hands, one of them on fire, shot in Los Angeles with a real stuntman. On the fifteenth take the wind changed and singed his moustache. Critics were lukewarm at first, but Wright, Mason and Gilmour all later named it their favourite Pink Floyd album. The tour ended at Knebworth that July, where Roy Harper, furious that his stage costume had gone missing, smashed up one of the band's vans and delayed their set up.[1]

In 1975 the band bought a block of old church halls at Britannia Row in Islington and turned it into their own studio. There they made Animals, released in January 1977, a snarling album loosely based on George Orwell's Animal Farm that cast society as dogs, pigs and sheep. The only pig named outright was the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Tensions were rising. Wright got no writing credit for the first time, and Gilmour resented that his long song Dogs earned him less than Waters's short Pigs on the Wing. For the cover, a forty foot inflatable pig was floated over Battersea Power Station. On the third of December 1976 it broke free, drifted into the Heathrow flight path, and came down that night on a farm in Kent, scaring the cows.[1] [2] [3]

The In the Flesh tour of 1977 took Pink Floyd into stadiums for the first time, and Waters hated it. He began travelling to shows alone and leaving straight afterwards, and at one point Wright flew home threatening to quit. In Chicago the band suspected the promoter of underreporting the crowd, so they hired a helicopter, a photographer and a lawyer, and counted about ninety five thousand people instead of the sixty seven thousand claimed. The tour ended at Montreal's Olympic Stadium on the sixth of July 1977. Irritated by noisy fans at the front, Waters spat at one of them, and was shocked at himself straight away. That night he talked about wanting to build a wall between the band and the audience.[1] [2] [3]

The Wall

In July 1978 Waters brought the band two ideas. One was a ninety minute demo called Bricks in the Wall. The other later became his first solo album. They chose the wall. They also badly needed money. Their financial advisers, Norton Warburg, had put millions of pounds of the band's money into risky ventures to cut their taxes, and most of it was lost, leaving them facing tax rates as high as eighty three per cent. On advice, all four left Britain by April 1979 for at least a year as tax exiles, recording in the south of France. Gilmour said that ever since, there was not a penny he had not signed for.[1] [2]

To help shape the story, Waters hired the Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, known for his work with Alice Cooper. He came recommended by Waters's wife Carolyne, who had once been Ezrin's secretary. Ezrin wrote a forty page script around a character called Pink, a rock star built from Waters's own life and Syd Barrett's collapse, who walls himself off after losing his father in the war, suffering at school and in marriage. The atmosphere was grim. Waters mocked Ezrin's smaller share of royalties with badges reading NOPE, for no points Ezrin. Richard Wright, struggling with a failing marriage and later saying he had been depressed, was contributing little. Waters gave him an ultimatum, and Wright agreed to leave once the album and tour were finished.[1] [2] [3]

Ezrin was sure Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two could be a hit if it had a disco beat. Gilmour went to clubs to study disco and found it awful, but the groove stuck. Ezrin also had engineer Nick Griffiths record pupils from Islington Green School, near the studio. Twenty three children sang, their music teacher hid the lyrics from the head teacher, and the school got a thousand pounds but no royalties, a claim the former pupils won in 2004. Released in November 1979, the single became the last British number one of the seventies and the first of the eighties, and topped the American chart too. The Wall album spent fifteen weeks at number one in America. In South Africa it was banned in 1980 after students protesting apartheid education took up the song.[1] [2]

Comfortably Numb began as a wordless Gilmour demo. Waters wrote the lyrics from memory of being injected with a sedative before a 1977 concert in Philadelphia, calling it the longest two hours of his life. The two men fought over the arrangement, Waters wanting orchestra and Gilmour wanting it stripped back, and settled on a mix of both. Gilmour later called it the last embers of their ability to work together. The Wall tour of 1980 and 1981 was played just thirty one times in four cities, with a wall of cardboard bricks built across the stage and torn down at the end. On the opening night in Los Angeles, pyrotechnics set the stage curtains alight. Backstage, the band's four motorhomes were parked in a circle with their doors facing outwards.[1] [2] [3]

The tour lost money, around six hundred thousand dollars, and the only band member who profited was Richard Wright, who had come back as a salaried musician. In 1982 the director Alan Parker turned The Wall into a film, with Bob Geldof as Pink and animation by Gerald Scarfe. Geldof had called the story rubbish before agreeing to star, and the film went on to win two BAFTAs. Then came The Final Cut in March 1983, written entirely by Waters and dedicated to his father. Angered by the Falklands War, he aimed it at Margaret Thatcher. Wright was gone, Gilmour's name was dropped from the production credits after rows, and Rolling Stone called it essentially a Roger Waters solo album. It still reached number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3]

Waters leaves and the fight for the name

By 1984 all four members were making solo records, and none sold like Pink Floyd. That year Gilmour, Mason, Waters and their manager Steve O'Rourke met for dinner to talk about the future. Mason and Gilmour left believing the band would carry on after a break. Waters left believing they had agreed it was over. Mason later wrote that they walked out of the restaurant with diametrically opposed views of what had been decided. In December 1985 Waters told the record companies he was leaving, and in 1986 he went to the High Court to try to dissolve the partnership, calling Pink Floyd a spent force creatively. Gilmour recalled warning him the band would continue, and Waters replying, in stronger words, that they would never manage it.[1] [2] [3]

Gilmour pressed ahead, recording on the Astoria, a houseboat on the River Thames near Hampton Court that he had turned into a studio. A Momentary Lapse of Reason came out in September 1987 and reached number three in Britain and America. Richard Wright returned, but only as a paid session player on eleven thousand dollars a week. Waters dismissed the record as a quite clever forgery. The tour was a huge risk, and Mason put up his treasured Ferrari 250 GTO as collateral to fund it. When Waters sued over the use of the flying pig, Pink Floyd added a large set of male genitals to theirs to make it legally different. On the twenty third of December 1987 the two sides settled. Gilmour and Mason kept the name, and Waters kept The Wall.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The late eighties tour was a triumph, including a free show on a barge in Venice's Grand Canal in 1989. Waters answered in July 1990 with The Wall, Live in Berlin, staged on empty ground near Potsdamer Platz months after the Berlin Wall fell, with guests including Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Cyndi Lauper. The reported crowd was two hundred thousand, and some estimates doubled it. Gilmour, Mason and Wright were not invited. Pink Floyd returned in 1994 with The Division Bell, made largely with Wright, whose five co writing credits were his first since Wish You Were Here. The novelist Douglas Adams came up with the title, and the album went to number one in Britain and America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gilmour's partner, the novelist Polly Samson, helped write many of the Division Bell lyrics, including High Hopes, about his Cambridge childhood. She did not want credit, but Gilmour insisted. According to the album's history, she also helped him with a cocaine addiction he had developed after his divorce. They married in 1994, with Storm Thorgerson as best man. The Division Bell tour sold more than five million tickets, and the live album Pulse came in a case with a flashing red light on the spine. The tour's final show, on the twenty ninth of October 1994, turned out to be Pink Floyd's last concert tour ever. In 1996 the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Barrett did not attend.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

One more time, then goodbyes

Steve O'Rourke, Pink Floyd's manager since 1968, died of a stroke in Miami in October 2003. Two years later Bob Geldof, who had played Pink in the film, was organising Live 8, a set of concerts about global poverty. Gilmour said no. Geldof went to Mason, who called Waters, and Waters then phoned Gilmour, their first conversation in two years. On the second of July 2005, in Hyde Park, Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason played together for the first time in twenty four years. Before Wish You Were Here, Waters said they were doing it for everyone who was not there, and particularly for Syd. At the end, as Gilmour began to walk off, Waters called him back, and the four men embraced.[1] [2] [3]

Offers poured in. The band reportedly turned down well over a hundred million pounds for a farewell tour. Gilmour gave away his own Live 8 profits to charity, and in 2006 said Pink Floyd were over, that he was sixty and it was simpler to work alone. That same year, on the seventh of July 2006, Syd Barrett died of pancreatic cancer in Cambridge, aged sixty. He had lived quietly for decades with diabetes and stomach ulcers, while reporters and fans kept seeking him out despite his family's pleas. No member of Pink Floyd attended the funeral. Wright called him the guiding light of the early band, and Gilmour asked people to remember the madcap genius who made them smile with songs about bikes, gnomes and scarecrows.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 2007 all four surviving members appeared at a Barrett tribute concert at London's Barbican, though Waters played separately from the other three. Richard Wright had found new joy playing in Gilmour's solo band, calling it the most fun tour of his life, and singing Arnold Layne alongside David Bowie on a live single. On the fifteenth of September 2008, Wright died of cancer at his home in London, aged sixty five. Waters said it was hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice, and Mason compared his quiet role to George Harrison's in the Beatles. A week later Gilmour played Wright's song Remember a Day on BBC television. He said again that it would be wrong to carry on as Pink Floyd without him.[1] [2] [3]

The early 2010s brought some warmth. In 2010 the band won a High Court case against EMI, which had wanted to sell their songs individually online, a ruling The Guardian hailed as a victory for the album as an art form. Waters and Gilmour played a small charity show together that July, and in May 2011 Gilmour appeared on top of the wall during Comfortably Numb at Waters's London show, with Mason joining for the encore. In April 2013 Storm Thorgerson, the designer behind so many of their covers, died. Then Gilmour and Mason returned to hours of unused music from the Division Bell sessions, to build a last album around Wright's playing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Endless River came out in November 2014, a mostly instrumental double album that Mason described as a tribute to Wright. One piece features Wright playing the Royal Albert Hall's giant pipe organ at a rehearsal in 1969. The only sung track, Louder than Words, had lyrics by Polly Samson, inspired by watching the band at the Live 8 rehearsals, where she noticed they hardly spoke to each other yet communicated brilliantly through music. The cover came from an eighteen year old Egyptian artist, Ahmed Emad Eldin. It became the most pre ordered album ever on Amazon in Britain and went to number one. Gilmour called it the end, and there was no tour.[1] [2]

Feuds, Ukraine and a legacy that keeps selling

Peace between Waters and Gilmour did not last. Mason, who stayed close to both, said in 2018 they were still at loggerheads, and that Waters believed writing was everything while playing and singing mattered less. A remix of Animals was held up for years because the two could not agree on the liner notes, and Waters complained publicly that Gilmour would not let him use the band's website and social media. Meanwhile Mason formed a new band, Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets, with Guy Pratt and Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, to play the early songs many newer fans had never heard. In 2019 Waters joined them at New York's Beacon Theatre to sing Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2022 the Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the band BoomBox abandoned an American tour to defend his country, and posted a video of himself in uniform singing a 1914 patriotic song in a Kyiv square. Gilmour saw it through his Ukrainian daughter in law and called Mason. On the thirtieth of March they recorded at Gilmour's home with Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney, while Wright's daughter Gala watched. Khlyvnyuk, recovering in hospital from a shrapnel wound, gave his blessing. Released on the eighth of April 2022 as Hey, Hey, Rise Up, it raised money for Ukrainian relief. Waters, who had refused to condemn Russia's invasion, criticised the song, and the band's quarrel became a very public war.[1] [2] [3]

In February 2023 Polly Samson publicly accused Waters of being antisemitic, a Putin apologist and a list of other things including lying, misogynistic and a megalomaniac. Gilmour shared her post and added that every word was demonstrably true. Waters called the claims incendiary and wildly inaccurate and said he rejected them entirely. His political statements have brought other serious trouble. Frankfurt tried to cancel a 2023 concert until a court overturned the ban, German police investigated the Nazi style uniform he has worn in Wall performances since 1980, and the music company BMG dropped him in 2024. Waters says he opposes fascism and denies antisemitism. In February 2025 a London judge ruled that his remarks about the journalist John Ware were defamatory in meaning, allowing Ware's libel case to go ahead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The infighting also stalled the sale of the band's catalogue. Gilmour said it was three people saying yes and one saying no. Finally, in October 2024, Pink Floyd agreed to sell their recorded music, name and likeness to Sony Music for about four hundred million dollars, though not the songwriting rights. Each man kept making music. Waters recorded his own version, The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, in 2023, with spoken words and no guitar solos. Gilmour released Luck and Strange in 2024, with keyboards Wright had recorded in 2007, and toured it with his daughter Romany singing beside him. In 2025 a restored Live at Pompeii played in cinemas, and its soundtrack became Pink Floyd's seventh number one album in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The legend keeps growing. On the thirteenth of March 2026, Gilmour's Black Strat, the guitar on Money, Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Comfortably Numb, sold at Christie's in New York for fourteen and a half million dollars, making it the most expensive guitar ever auctioned. Gilmour had sold it for charity in 2019 for just under four million. In June 2026 the band released 8 Tracks, a compilation of seventies classics sequenced by Steven Wilson. And as of 2026, Cambridge is marking what would have been Syd Barrett's eightieth birthday, with an exhibition, a tribute album and a sold out concert on the tenth of October at the Corn Exchange, the hall where Syd played his last show in 1972. Proceeds go to mental health charities.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Pink Floyd

Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Cambridge contemporaries who became rock's most famous feuding pair. Waters wrote the concepts and words, Gilmour gave the music its voice, and together they made Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. They fought over credits, arrangements and control, spent years in court over the name, embraced at Live 8 in 2005, and fell out again in public over reissues, Ukraine and Waters's politics.[1] [2] [3]

Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. Childhood friends from Cambridge, where Waters's mother taught Syd at junior school. Waters helped bring Syd into the band, drove him to a psychiatrist he refused to see, and then was part of the decision to drop him. Syd's decline haunted Waters's writing on Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, and Waters was reportedly reduced to tears when Syd appeared at Abbey Road in 1975.[1] [2] [3]

David Gilmour and Syd Barrett. Teenage friends who played guitar together at lunchtime and busked around France. Gilmour ended up replacing Syd, then produced and played on his solo albums. He later made sure Syd kept receiving his Pink Floyd royalties, and after Syd's death he recorded Arnold Layne with David Bowie as a tribute.[1] [2]

Roger Waters and Richard Wright. Classmates at the Regent Street Polytechnic whose partnership soured in the late seventies. Wright said Waters stopped letting him write, and during The Wall Waters forced him out, keeping him on only as a salaried player for the tour. They were estranged for eighteen years until a backstage meeting in 1999, and stood together one last time at Live 8.[1] [2]

David Gilmour and Richard Wright. Their similar voices harmonised on songs like Echoes and Time, and Gilmour praised how Wright's voice blended with his own. Gilmour brought Wright back into Pink Floyd after Waters left, and Wright spent his last years happily in Gilmour's solo band. Gilmour called him his musical partner and friend, and refused to continue Pink Floyd without him.[1] [2]

David Gilmour and Polly Samson. The novelist Polly Samson married Gilmour in 1994, during the Division Bell tour. She co wrote much of The Division Bell and the lyrics of Louder than Words, and has written most of the words on his later solo albums. In 2023 her public attack on Roger Waters, endorsed by Gilmour, reignited the band's feud.[1] [2] [3]

Pink Floyd and Storm Thorgerson. A schoolmate of Barrett and Waters, Thorgerson co founded the design group Hipgnosis with Aubrey Powell and gave Pink Floyd most of their iconic covers, from the prism of Dark Side to the burning man and the flying pig. He was best man at Gilmour's second wedding, and died in 2013.[1] [2]

Pink Floyd and Peter Jenner and Andrew King. The first managers, a young economics lecturer and his childhood friend, who spotted the band at the Marquee in 1966 and made them equal partners in Blackhill Enterprises. Convinced Syd Barrett was the real genius, they chose to follow him when he left in 1968, and Jenner later produced his first solo sessions.[1] [2]

Pink Floyd and Steve O'Rourke. A trained accountant who started as their booking agent and managed the band from 1968 until his death in 2003. He negotiated the Columbia deal and the split with Waters, who fired him in 1985 for keeping the others informed. Like Mason, he raced at Le Mans.[1] [2]

Pink Floyd and Bob Ezrin. The Canadian producer shaped The Wall's story, pushed the disco beat and children's choir that made Another Brick in the Wall a number one, and acted as referee between Waters and Gilmour. He later co produced A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell with Gilmour, and in 2023 criticised remarks by Waters in a documentary.[1] [2] [3]

Nick Mason and Pink Floyd. The only member on every Pink Floyd album and the band's diplomat. Mason sided with Gilmour in keeping the name, yet stayed on good terms with Waters, drumming at his shows and later welcoming him on stage with his own band. He wrote the band's history in his memoir Inside Out.[1]

Rare facts about Pink Floyd

• Roger Waters's mother once taught a young Syd Barrett at junior school in Cambridge. Barrett attended Morley Memorial Junior School, where Mary Waters was a teacher. The two boys later went to the same high school in Cambridge, long before either picked up a guitar in earnest.[1]
• David Gilmour's first guitar was borrowed from a neighbour, and he never gave it back. Inspired by the Everly Brothers, Gilmour borrowed the guitar and taught himself using a book and record set by the folk singer Pete Seeger.[1]
• Richard Wright taught himself several instruments at twelve while recovering from a broken leg. Laid up with the injury, Wright learned guitar, trombone, trumpet and piano. His mother encouraged him to focus on piano, and he later studied music theory privately.[1]
• The band's landlord briefly replaced Richard Wright on keyboards. While Wright took a break from his studies, landlord and tutor Mike Leonard bought a Farfisa organ and played with the group. That Farfisa then became Wright's main instrument.[1]
• Richard Wright was the band's first roadie and on stage guitar tuner. As the most technically trained musician, Wright tuned Barrett's guitar and Waters's bass at gigs. Before they had a crew, he loaded and unloaded the gear too.[1]
• Arnold Layne was inspired by a real thief of women's underwear from Cambridge washing lines. Roger Waters said both his and Syd's mothers took in female students as lodgers, so their lines were full of underwear, and someone kept stealing it.[1]
• Pink Floyd's managers admitted trying to buy Arnold Layne into the charts. Andrew King said the management spent a couple of hundred pounds trying to push the single up the chart, and stressed that EMI had nothing to do with it.[1]
• Syd Barrett drew the train on the sleeve of See Emily Play. Barrett had trained as a painter at Camberwell art school, and the illustration on the single's picture sleeve was his own work.[1]
• Pink Floyd sat in on the Beatles recording Lovely Rita. While making The Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Abbey Road in 1967, Pink Floyd worked next door to the Beatles, who were making Sgt. Pepper, and were invited to watch a session.[1]
• Pink Floyd's early light show used stretched condoms. Road manager Peter Wynne Willson updated the lighting rig in 1966 with polarisers, mirrors and stretched condoms to create their swirling psychedelic effects.[1]
• Pink Floyd played live on BBC television during the Apollo 11 moon landing. In July 1969 the band improvised an instrumental they called Moonhead as part of the BBC's coverage, a natural fit for their space themed reputation.[1]
• The title Atom Heart Mother came from a newspaper headline about a nuclear powered pacemaker. Needing a name before a BBC broadcast, Ron Geesin told Waters to look in the Evening Standard. A story headlined Atom Heart Mother Named described a woman fitted with a plutonium powered pacemaker.[1]
• The howling dog on Meddle's Seamus belonged to Steve Marriott of Humble Pie. Gilmour was dog sitting at the time. The track often tops polls of the band's worst songs, but they filmed a similar blues with a dog from a Paris circus family for Live at Pompeii.[1] [2]
• Nick Mason's menacing line on One of These Days was sung in falsetto at double speed. Mason recorded his threat to cut someone into little pieces sped up in a high voice, then played it back at normal speed to get its strange, distorted tone.[1] [2]
• The Dark Side of the Moon's final line has an unheard ending. Abbey Road doorman Gerry O'Driscoll went on to say that the only thing that makes the moon look alight is the sun. The band loved his first line so much they cut the rest.[1]
• Paul and Linda McCartney were interviewed for Dark Side, but their answers were cut. The band felt the couple were trying too hard to be funny. Their Wings bandmate Henry McCullough did make the album, saying he did not know, he was really drunk at the time.[1]
• The rainbow on the Dark Side cover has only six colours, with no indigo. The usual spectrum lists seven colours, but George Hardie's design leaves indigo out. The spectrum continues inside the gatefold, where it turns into the album's heartbeat line.[1]
• Clare Torry only found out she was on Dark Side when she saw her name on the album in a shop. She left the session thinking her wordless vocal would be dropped. She had been paid a standard Sunday fee of thirty pounds.[1] [2]
• The opening of the song Wish You Were Here was recorded from Gilmour's car radio. Gilmour turned the dial on his car radio, and the classical music briefly heard is the finale of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony.[1]
• The burning man photo cost the stuntman his moustache on the fifteenth take. Stuntman Ronnie Rondell wore a fireproof suit and wig under a business suit. The first fourteen takes went fine, then the wind changed direction.[1]
• Pink Floyd hired a helicopter to count their own Chicago crowd in 1977. Suspicious of the promoter's figure of sixty seven thousand, they sent up a photographer with a lawyer. The real crowd was about ninety five thousand, a shortfall to the band of six hundred and forty thousand dollars.[1]
• A German promoter once gave Pink Floyd a live piglet, which wrecked a mirrored hotel room. The gift came in Munich on the 1977 tour. The piglet left broken mirrors and mess across the room, and manager Steve O'Rourke had to deal with the fallout.[1]
• Bootleggers date Wall tour recordings by Roger Waters's pig speeches. Before Run Like Hell, Waters gave a different short speech about the inflatable pig at every show, which lets collectors tell exactly which night a tape comes from.[1]
• Richard Wright was the only band member who made money from The Wall tour. Having been forced out of the band, he played the tour on a salary. The tour lost about six hundred thousand dollars, which the remaining members had to cover.[1] [2]
• Nick Mason bought a rare Ferrari 250 GTO in 1977 for thirty seven thousand pounds. He paid for it with Dark Side royalties. It is one of only thirty six ever made, is now valued at more than thirty million pounds, and he still owns it.[1]
• The spoken voice on Learning to Fly is Nick Mason on his first solo flight. Mason and Gilmour were both taking flying lessons in the mid eighties, and together they even bought a small de Havilland Dove aeroplane.[1] [2]
• The author Douglas Adams named The Division Bell. He wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Hipgnosis had once designed a British paperback cover for that novel.[1] [2]
• Early copies of the live album Pulse had a flashing red light built into the case. The light ran on a battery said to last more than six months. The contractor who designed it was awarded a platinum disc.[1]
• The Division Bell songs were picked with a points system that Richard Wright gamed. Each member scored every candidate out of ten. Wright gave all his own pieces ten and everyone else's nothing.[1]
• Syd Barrett once walked the fifty miles from London back to Cambridge. After a few weeks back in London in 1982, he walked home to Cambridge, where he lived for the rest of his life.[1]
• Syd Barrett's Cambridge house was sold to a French couple who had never heard of him. After more than a hundred viewings, many by fans, the house went to buyers unaware of its history. An auction of his paintings and belongings raised a hundred and twenty thousand pounds for charity.[1]
• David Gilmour paid for a teenage Kate Bush to record her first professional demos. Impressed by a tape from a family friend, Gilmour funded three demo tracks when Bush was sixteen and arranged for an EMI executive to hear them. EMI signed her.[1]
• One Endless River track features Richard Wright on the Royal Albert Hall's pipe organ in 1969. Autumn '68 uses a recording of Wright playing the giant organ during a rehearsal for Pink Floyd's show there on the twenty sixth of June 1969.[1]
• The Islington Green School choir kids were paid with concert tickets and records. The school got a thousand pounds, but there was no deal for the children. After a change in copyright law, the former pupils successfully claimed broadcast royalties in 2004.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.