Pink Floyd - Define5.com


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		Pink Floyd

From a premier psychedelic act in the sixties to one of rock and roll's biggest groups in the seventies and eighties, Pink Floyd has enjoyed a phenomenally successful career. The band created one of the music industry's biggest-selling recordings of all time in 1973's Dark Side of the Moon (twenty-five million sold worldwide at last count, and it stayed a record 566 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 chart). Yet Dark Side was but one of several No. 1 records in the U.K. and U.S. for Pink Floyd, as the group successfully merged progressive, ambient, and blues influences into its own highly distinctive blend of futuristic rock.

The story of Pink Floyd is a tale of two bands. One that lasted barely two years and had two hit singles, while the other went on to be one of the biggest grossing acts on the planet. Like so many psychedelic veterans of the swinging sixties, the reason for this career schizophrenia is rooted in that decades' equivalent of living fast and dying young - living fast and becoming an acid casualty. The Floyd's cosmic figurehead Syd Barrett is still, to many, the true source of the band's greatness, just as Peter Green was to Fleetwood Mac or Skip Spence to Moby Grape. Yet, like the Mac, true fiscal greatness arrived years after their resident genius burned out and was ejected. As to which story is more fascinating, the listener is left with a simple choice - the legend or the reality.

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