Founded in 1965, Pink Floyd originally consisted of guitarist Syd Barrett, bass guitarist Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist Richard Wright. While playing London’s underground music scene in the late 1960s, they developed the experimental, progressive rock that would later come to define them.
Under Barrett’s creative leadership, Pink Floyd released two singles in 1967 that drew the attention of Britain’s and America’s growing pop culture, “Arnold Layne” and “See Emily Play,” as well as a successful début album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Fearing that he may have to leave the band due to his increasingly difficult battle with mental illness, Barrett allowed guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour to join the band in late 1967, then departed from the group the following year. With bassist Roger Waters becoming the band’s chief songwriter and conceptual leader, Pink Floyd went on to become one of the world’s most innovative and successful bands in music history, achieving worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with albums like Animals, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, and the most commercially popular album in history, the phenomenal, The Dark Side of the Moon. Read more . . .
