If there’s one band who knows a thing or two about tense affairs, it has to be Pink Floyd. Indeed, perhaps nowhere else in the world could you find a more successful yet dysfunctional band.
Of course, this is an unfortunate fate bestowed upon many rock outfits of a certain calibre, but usually it’s at least a decade or so down the road when a share of hits and egos attempt to start muscling each other out the way for the prime place in the spotlight.
In the case of Pink Floyd, however, such problems started at a far earlier point, when Syd Barrett left the band only three years in and was forever shrouded in infamy.
A little over a decade on, and the rest of the band had also largely fallen to pieces, with Richard Wright leaving in 1981 followed by Roger Waters in 1985 due to a series of boiling point tensions. That left David Gilmour and Nick Mason to go it alone as a double act for some time until time had healed the relations between their former bandmates, although even some grudges could never fully be let go of.
However, this left Gilmour in particular in the unique position to commentate on precisely where he thought everything began to go south for the band, and in his eyes, there was one definitive moment. Despite years of creating some of the biggest and best rock albums that have ever existed, there is a lot to be said for how this unfathomable success exceeds even the wildest of imaginations, and subsequently corrupts the soul. According to Gilmour, therein lay the exact downfall of Pink Floyd.
The guitarist explained as much in a 2002 interview when he said, “Oh yes, we were corrupted. Corrupted because, for a while, we thought we could do anything. Money eats up something inside you.” As you can imagine, they have the likes of Dark Side of the Moon to blame for that. But what was the specific moment in their tenure that this cog truly started to twist?
“Until Animals,” Gilmour confessed. “Then, maybe because of that poison of corruption, we blew up. Every one of us blew up in his personal way; the period of The Wall was our worst period. We had lost the meaning of our work.” In some ways, this is equal parts inevitable as it is surprising – to many, The Wall symbolised everything that the pinnacle of Pink Floyd came to represent, even if the whole process was fraught with tensions underneath. But going out and still delivering a performance was all part of the business they call show.
The dreamy, artistic ventures that Pink Floyd initially started out romantically envisaging turned into something far uglier and nastier as time wore on, but this is not to say that the imprint the band left on the rock scene was anything but indelible. Maybe the earliest sign of the struggles to come was Barrett bowing out so soon, or possibly it came later. But regardless, despite the mess and the murkiness, Pink Floyd still shone bright.
