Crazy Diamonds - A Re-Appraisal of Pink Floyd

Re-appraising Pink Floyd

You know that discussion/conversation; the one where you’re asked, ‘what is your favourite band of all time?’ Well, there have been times when I’ve said Pink Floyd, but the truth is Floyd have always been one of my favourites; up there in the top five, but they’ve probably never inhabited the top spot. I’m sure the surviving members of the band will rest easy about that; my opinion, after all, is just that, an opinion and one that is probably not important. 

Now we’ve got that out of the way, I can explain to you why I’m writing about them. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of retrospectives of the band; articles in papers and on line about their significance to the music industry; critics' favourite tracks and, of course, the acrimonious relationship the band has had with each other since the late 1960s; even if you only really hear about the feud between Roger Walters and David Gilmour which started in the mid-1980s and, apart from a couple of months in 2005, has raged on ever since. I decided after very recently going down a Pink Floyd rabbit hole that perhaps the band’s output needs a 2025 reassessment; they are an extraordinary band, but they’re also fantastic con artists and this breakdown of their studio albums will, hopefully, explain to you why I think this…

I think Floyd can be broken down into four eras.

1) A Brand New Paintbox

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – With a couple of exceptions, this is a quite extraordinary and whimsical album, which seems to capture an essence of the era it was created in. One of those exceptions is the solitary Roger Waters contribution Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk, which really sticks out like a sore thumb, yet so does Bike which Barrett wrote. There are some genuine group aesthetics going on in the two songs they all wrote together, a hint of what might have happened had Syd Barrett not suffered an acid-induced mental breakdown on an already fragile mind. It is a genuine masterpiece of a debut album and has to rank as one of the best albums of that era. What makes it so good is how playful and happy the band sound; yes it was 1967 and even though they had already started to see cracks appearing between them, this album feels like a celebration and there is little here that doesn’t belong. It makes you wonder what they would have done...

A Saucerful of Secrets – There are moments in this album where you have to consider where it came from. It exists in a very psychedelic period of music, but I can’t help think there’s a huge amount of Syd Barrett in this than is credited, but it is most definitely the same band, but different, but in a familiar way. What I think it comprises of is the stuff that the rest of the band had brought along to the original sessions that hadn’t been used or never made it to the being played stage. There’s a familiar feel to this album yet it sounds distinctly more contemporary than its predecessor. Corporal Clegg is Waters trying to be the whimsical but sinister Syd Barrett; it’s like Roger went, “I can write a pop song like Syd.” He didn’t, but it does belong on this transitional album. The inclusion of Jugband Blues was like an afterthought and nod of the head to the band’s founder, but it also sits at the very end, like there was this obligation to have one song by Barrett. Of course, it was a bit more complicated in real life and to go into that too deeply would take the focus away from the music. This is still a worthy album despite the bad taste it might leave for some partisan Barrett fans.

2) Obscured by Sound

More (Soundtrack from the Film) – There’s this story I know, it was told to me by an old friend who is no longer with us, who heard it from someone associated with Norman Smith, who was the band’s original producer. It goes something like this; during a tour after A Saucerful of Secrets was recorded, the band weren’t raking money in, there were a lot of arguments outside of the studio. In the bus on the way to a concert in Germany, Roger Waters had received a message from home and in it was the offer of a really good job with fantastic prospects at an accountancy firm in London. He was seriously considering taking the offer, he had grown disillusioned with music, felt bad about Barrett’s ‘sacking’ and wondered if it was for him, but Nick Mason talked him out of it and, allegedly offered to give Roger his backing on musical decisions.

Whether that had any bearing on More is obviously a debating point, but this is a dull as dishwater album. I know it’s a ‘soundtrack’ but it just feels like a bunch of half arsed songs thrown together. Arguably Cymbaline is the standout and that isn’t exactly a classic by any stretch. This, in a weird way, felt like one of those contractual obligation albums. There was nothing original here and no direction you can see. Knocked off would be a good description.

Ummagumma – A bit of a curate’s egg this; half live performance, half pieces by individual members feels self-indulgent and devoid of group ideas. There are very few good ‘songs’ and each member is given his moment, but if More felt like dishwater, this didn’t feel much cleaner. I don’t know if the money was coming in by this stage in their careers, I expect from what I read that they were never particularly wealthy in the late 1960s, despite all coming from very middle class Cambridge families, but this is an album devoid of artistic passion; what little pieces of inventiveness there are get lost in the meh that fills the rest of it. It really is for aficionados, although the musician who comes out of this with the most dignity is actually Roger Waters.

Atom Heart Mother – This is a joke, right? Whereas some people claim this is the point when Pink Floyd became the band that everyone remembers, I  now think this was an overblown attempt at making an album of concepts and it feels  very fake. I’d always had fond memories of this album, but  listening to Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast again proved to be quite an insufferable experience now and not at all the whimsical bit of nonsense I once believed it to be. The title track is big and flabby and the rest felt a little like filler – this isn’t anywhere near as clever as the band wanted it to sound, but I suppose their growing following lapped it up. I’m still not sure the band knew where it wanted to go.

Obscured By Clouds – The thing about this album is it comes after Meddle, but where that album heralded a new Pink Floyd, this was like an ending for the old band and the limited ideas they had. Another ‘soundtrack’ studio album, if More felt like an obligation then this felt like all the stuff that didn’t get past the ‘work it up’ stage on Meddle. I look at this album as being all filler; an album that allowed them to take some time, while using all the shite they had left hanging around. Listening to it recently, it is slightly disconcerting that you can get through so much of this album without realising it. It washes over you in a very background noise kind of way.

(Lots of) Money

Meddle – What is good about this album is that it’s what the other earlier albums wanted to be; one side has a big track and then it has another side of interesting rock music with a twist. The four felt like they were working as a band again and interestingly there’s a lot of Gilmour on this and while it’s very similar in format to Atom Heart Mother, it’s like that was a rehearsal and this is what time gave them. One of These Days is one of the best openers on any album ever and Echoes sounded like a confident group toying with new ideas. One of those ideas was giving Nick Mason more free rein to record all manner of things you wouldn't associate with a rock album. I often regard this as an overlooked album in the band’s oeuvre – the one that got away from best of lists.

The Dark Side of the Moon – Is this really one of the greatest albums ever made? The stats would indicate that it is extremely significant, but it’s now been over 50 years since it came out and while it is a fantastic compact album, there’s something about it that has dated more than other Floyd albums. I often wonder why it’s so revered; recently I realised that the two Floyd albums I’ve played the least in the 21^st century are this and The Wall and I think that’s because they are probably the two most recognisable albums for the average person who simply knows of Pink Floyd and isn’t necessarily a fan. Yet this is an album that has more of the band than individual songs – it feels like a period in the group’s evolution where all four members had something to offer and there was an equity here that had been ignored when Barrett departed – and in Floyd terms the band is often better than the individual.

I find this album is very much Richard Wright’s album; yes, the concept might have been thought up by Waters, but Wright’s presence here was essential. I somehow don’t think this would have been the album it became without Breathe, The Great Gig in the Sky and Us and Them, but he also contributed to Time and Any Colour You Like and I often wonder if the emergence of Wright as a writing force in the band might have tipped the often unpredictable Waters into the realms of paranoia – as ironic as it would have been. I expect in 1973 this really did blow a lot of people away; it is a remarkably accessible album with almost hints of genres that made it a gateway album for many people, many of who simply thought of Pink Floyd as some art rock bunch of Cambridge toffs. 

Wish You Were Here – For many years, this was my favourite Floyd album. It stood out like a beacon, but I think it might have had more to do with the fact that everyone I knew regarded The Dark Side of the Moon as their favourite. It was really the end of David Gilmour's writing influence – the era of BIG guitar solos and that distinct 'Gilmour feel' would gradually diminish by the time we reached the 1980s; yet oddly enough this was also the start of Roger Waters’ takeover of all the lyrics. While Gilmour has always been a really competent guitarist, Waters often struggled with his lyrics, like he was never really confident about that part of his abilities. 

However, the tale of the band being visited by Syd Barrett during the recording of this album, I believe is a key element. I know the band all have slightly differing versions of what actually happened the day Syd came to see how his old mates were doing, but one thing is constant – Roger Waters reaction to his old friend… Now, as a fan of the band I’ve read just about everything there is about them, I’ve been fortunate to have spoken to people who knew people close to the band and my journalistic instincts have often made me, maybe wrongly, read between the lines of what people said. I know people who claim that the reason Barrett wasn’t supported by the band more was down to Nick Mason’s desire to be a pop star and his ability to distort the truth; but the actual truth is probably more inane than that. When Syd lost it, it was the late 1960s and people who had mental breakdowns normally got stuck in a mental hospital like Shenley, Napsbury or St Andrews in Northampton; places the families of sufferers could hide their mad family members away. Syd’s apparent mental health issues were exacerbated by LSD, pot and amphetamines; he was open to putting anything into his body that made him ‘feel’. As someone who was probably an undiagnosed bipolar sufferer and other anxiety issues he wouldn’t have even known what the problem was because there was no mental health provision, so the drugs helped him function until they took over. Seven years after he ‘left’ the band, his reappearance probably brought the entire incident back with more clarity for a group of men now entering their late 20s and I think the lyrics on this album reflect that. I see this as more of an explanation than a tribute to Barrett. Floyd were notoriously unfriendly towards the music press but criticism and suggestions they wouldn’t have been where they were without Barrett probably stung; especially Waters who had been huge friends with Syd and was probably the least comfortable with kicking him out. So I expect the lyrics of this album work on a number of levels, but all could equally apply to Barrett and what happened to him. It gave Waters a framework to write to as well.

As far as the album is concerned, musically it is the Pink Floyd album; the one that says more than anything else. It is musically complicated with elements of jazz rock infused throughout it. The addition of Roy Harper singing on Have a Cigar also feels significant, because I wonder if EMI, who the band were with when it was Syd’s band, were maybe the main catalyst in annexing the troubled songwriter from the band and I think the lyrics in this track suggest as much; getting an old warrior like Harper to sing on it might have been symbolic. Aficionados of the band will always include two or three songs from this album in their lists of favourites and that is totally understandable.

Animals – How does a band heavily connected to its own past do something relevant in 1977, when punk had taken over and everyone thought bands like Pink Floyd were just a bunch of old hippies making music for boring old cunts? In all fairness, I was a prog loving young hippie when Animals came out and it was very much my go to Floyd album for many years, with Sheep being the track that made me start putting them on a pedestal. You know how you get into a band through a certain album, well this was mine. I was more than aware of Floyd for years, but this was the first album I went out and bought with my own money. The one I’d gently head bang to with my mates and discuss the finer, political points of Waters distinctly anti-right wing lyrics. Floyd weren't really old hippies (they were barely in their 30s) but this was full of anti-establishment anthems and I knew a few punks who often played this album. Maybe it’s because this is the most ‘rock’ album they ever made; this is angry, angsty and heavy, with big riffs, political lyrics and all Roger Waters, apart from a co-credit for Gilmour on Dogs.  

The band were more than aware that the music world was changing, none more so than Waters, who felt the band needed to be more relevant, so he took his concept album based around Orwell’s Animal Farm and made it contemporary – although his targets feel a little weak and petty nearly 50 years later. It’s an album about a love song, split into two halves, like bread, with a huge slab of angry rhetoric shoved in between, in what does feel like an attempt to at least shake off the bunch of old hippies tag. Waters was 31 when he wrote this, no age really when comparing it to now, but he really did feel as though Pink Floyd were being left behind and becoming irrelevant, when in reality they were at the absolute pinnacle of their careers and actually about to enter the end game of their peak as the world’s best band. This is, arguably, the best stuff Waters ever did, because he was motivated by the world around him; this was Pink Floyd acknowledging that the late 1970s existed and they were part of it.

The Wall – This really is the inspiration for this article. The Wall desperately needs to be reassessed in a world that has radically changed since it was penned. Overblown! Bloated! Not needed! All things said about this mammoth album, which might just be the band’s best album, ever. This tale of isolation, radicalisation and sadness hits so many buttons in 2025 you would have thought it had been written last week. I’m loathe to give Roger Waters a lot of credit for anything – part of me thinks Floyd were always heading south when he became principle song writer because they always worked best as a band mixing ideas to create excellent songs – but this really was a brilliant piece of writing, from the concept, that was relevant in 1979, to the music which is fantastically constructed.

If I had a problem with this album it would be the beginning of the marginalisation of Richard Wright. I don’t believe Waters had much, if anything, to do with Syd’s departure (smart money is on Nick Mason doing that), but there was definitely a problem between the band’s bass player and lyricist and the band’s keyboard player and sometime songwriter. Waters handled it badly and Wright’s inclusion on this album as one of the additional musicians felt spiteful and pernicious. That aside, the rift between the two almost felt fitting that it should happen during the creation of this. However, by this time, Waters had taken over virtually everything and started to view Pink Floyd as his band and the rest of them as his ‘session musicians’. The last album they worked together as a band on was Wish You Were Here, with Animals and this being constructed from sessions with the individual musicians. Waters and Gilmour weren’t getting on and because of the money they’d made from the mid-70s, the members were doing things you wouldn’t associate with a band that always portrayed themselves as relatively socialist - they seemed to become the snobs everyone accused them of being.

As for the album, it is concept album like no other really. Floyd were big on concepts but this truly felt like the ‘rock opera’ it was called. Almost every track segued into the next; the story was clear and the styles added to the contrast. Bob Ezrin played a large part in the construction of this album; as a producer he brought a different kind of clarity to the table. Probably the only thing that lets this album down was the mammoth success it had; not only did they have a #1 single, the album spawned a tour that was bigger and more brash than anything they’d ever done and then there was the film adaptation, directed by Alan Parker, which was the catalyst for the end of the band as we knew them.

The Endless Wibble

The Final Cut – I try to like this; there are moments in it (which I later discovered were songs written for The Wall but which never made it), but in general it was self-indulgent psychobabble bullshit about Waters’ dysfunctional upbringing and about his absent father. It also showcases Waters disdain with Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands Conflict and how veterans are treated; the problem is it’s largely dull and uninspiring and you can see why Gilmour and Mason had problems with it (especially as both were now wealthy enough to not give a fuck about social equality) and the missing Richard Wright leaves a bad taste in many people’s mouths.

It has its moments, but it also feels like an attempt to make Floyd relevant to the mid-1980s. Not Now John felt like a song with its roots in Alexei Sayle and The Young Ones, while the best song, the eponymous, The Final Cut feels as though it would have been better suited as the closing track on The Wall. Recent reappraisals have The Gunner’s Dream and Two Suns in the Sunset as songs that need to be considered amongst the best of the band’s oeuvre, but neither are that good. This is a Roger Waters solo album with Gilmour and Mason appearing as guests.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason – I was almost orgasmic when this album appeared. The first new Floyd album in almost FOUR years! It seems like a joke now, but when we were younger four years felt like an age. It was still a Pink Floyd album even if there was no Roger Waters on it, but there were all the familiar sounds which I was always drawn to. Sometimes I found Waters a little too harsh and preferred the rounded corners and slick guitar solos of David Gilmour – I even liked his first two solo efforts. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that, in reality, A Momentary Lapse of Reason was in fact simply a Gilmour solo album with Mason and Wright on it (and Wright was originally listed as – again – an additional musician, until 2014 when subsequent pressings redressed the balance).

As a Gilmour solo project with added Floyd members it really isn’t that bad and writing that feels like I’m being petty and slightly bitter because I really rated it when it came out and I still listen to it now and get enjoyment out of it. I mean, compared to The Final Cut it’s a fucking masterpiece. I suppose the biggest problem this album has is there’s not a lot to say about it. It’s full of songs that sound like Pink Floyd; there’s little in there you’d call classic, although I’ve always been a fan of One Slip, but the 2014 remaster and subsequent 2019 remix have managed to turn a crisp little song into a slightly murkier one with the subtle backgrounds disappearing.

One thing which I will always remember is the 1987 film about the making of the album’s cover. This was the summer of 1987, an era before the mobile phone became synonymous with everyone and when many people still looked like they’d wandered blinking from an earlier time. The album cover shoot took place on the east coast and needed to be done as quickly as possible because of the tides; this was an era before digital and Photoshop, so the beds you see in the cover photo are all there, as was the green sand. The shoot probably cost as much as the album did to put together and was the first album cover since Animals that used Storm Thorgerson as the principal art director. I have a fondness for this album that transcends the problems I have with it and how it was made, but frankly issues I personally developed about this are mine alone…

The Division Bell – Now this, to me, felt more like a Pink Floyd album even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as I anticipated. If I thought a four year wait between albums was long, there was a seven year one between this and A Momentary Lapse of Reason and it arrived in the mid-1990s, during a period in my own musical odyssey where Pink Floyd may not have featured any longer. That said, if you can get past the turgid lyrics, musically it feels more …complete, but only in places. This is an album that at times feels like the end and really it was because it would be 20 years before another Floyd studio album appeared and that in itself was more of a coda than anything to get excited about.

My biggest problem with The Division Bell is probably more to do with David Gilmour than anything else. I felt he was trying to rediscover the past rather than do anything new or even contemporary; so it’s full of Wright’s keyboards, Gilmour guitar riffs that wouldn’t have seem out of place in the 1970s, the use of female backing singers with the gusto of The Great Gig in the Sky, but nothing that felt at all 1994; in fact in places this is a turgid album that sounds like musicians who have run out of ideas. To be fair, the band were now all approaching their 50s and there are very few musicians who produce their best stuff at this age. The thing is David Gilmour was a guitar god in the 1970s and by 1994 he felt as relevant as Eric Clapton does in the 21^st century; although maybe not as racist or right wing. There is also this thing about him as a lyricist; he wasn’t that good at writing songs, music yes, but his lyrics were always a bit 'teenager', so much of this album was co-written with his wife Polly Samson and to be honest I think this irked many Floyd aficionados; I know it did me because... ‘Who was she?’ A perfect example of the poor writing on display was Poles Apart which wandered around before ending in a crescendo of mud.

Of course, by the mid-1990s Floyd were such rock gods that they could work with anyone they wanted to, so instead of doing something with the huge number of contemporary musicians making a mark, they chose to work with Stephen Hawking, or rather a Stephen Hawking sample from a BT advert. There was a certain amount of derision (so much so this album could have been called The Derision Bell) because it did feel like a going through the Floydian motions. It was, of course, a monster hit for the band and regardless of what Roger Waters thought and said between 1984 and with this album's release, he couldn’t stop Syd’s replacement from becoming Pink Floyd.

The Endless River – I’m not really sure why Gilmour decided to release this. Perhaps he and Nick Mason needed the cash, because it might be a tribute to Richard Wright but it’s a relatively piss poor way of doing it. Maybe if they’d assembled all of Wright’s classic Floyd moments and had them remixed or remastered by someone like Steven Wilson it would have served a better purpose, possibly including the one finished track on that just to bring it up to 2008 when Wright died.

It really is, for the most part, a bit of a dirge – which I suppose was what it was planned to be. But before we spend as little time as possible talking about this final studio album, I want to point out that between The Division Bell and this, Floyd or their record company released a shit ton of greatest hits albums, boxed sets, rare and unreleased tracks and probably noises made in the toilet recorded by Nick Mason. Pink Floyd might have pretty much ceased to exist as an extant band, someone, somewhere was milking their back catalogue like there was no tomorrow. I appreciate that some of these things needed to be released; the early recordings that had been switched to digital to get the best from them, but everything was remixed, remastered and redone for 20 years to the point where there was a distinct drop in quality. As I said before, A Momentary Lapse of Reason was remixed in 2019 and it took all crisp production work out and replaced it with a mushy sound that had no distinctiveness.

The album itself is more of a compilation of snippets and half-finished stuff than anything else and even the one actual song on it feels like a contractual obligation – which Gilmour suggested was the true motivation behind the album, in that the record company wanted another album and this was the easiest way to do it and honour their fallen bandmate.

I’ve played The Endless River about four times in the last eleven years; I don’t even think of it as a true Floyd album and while the two most recent listenings have made me feel a little more connected to it, it sits alongside many of Floyd’s ‘meh’ albums in that it will only ever get an airing when I fall back down that Pink Floyd rabbit hole…

In Conclusion

There was a period between 1971 and 1979 where Pink Floyd was the best band in the world. You could never accuse them during this period of selling out or losing their souls (like, say, ELP or Genesis), but trying to find excellent stuff by the band from other times is a tough ask. The Syd Barrett ‘era’ was a different beast, a different band and had mental illness and drugs not fucked up the genius that was Syd then maybe this would have been a completely different retrospective.

I love Pink Floyd’s music; it’s always a band I will return to, especially if I don’t feel like playing anything specific, so they’re always there ready to jump onto whatever player I’m listening to them on and continue a love affair that reached the peak of its passion on a sofa in the Crown pub, Hardingstone, in the December of 1979 – but that’s another completely different story. Everything after that was a decline, and in many ways outside of Floyd’s music too.