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FLOYDIAN MAGIC
What was at the core of this success? Pink Floyd came to represent art and mystery in an age dominated by the commercial culture of artless, disposable messages. It was this promise of something better, something with depth and integrity that wont beyond the instant gratification of a three minute singe, that would beat the heart of Pink Floyd's longevity. Essentially they slowed down the soundtrack of pop music, took away its brittle chirprness and replaced it with a sonorous introspection that struck at both heart and soul.
It was an ethos that produced "The Dark side Of The Moon", the album that consolidated their reputation and seemed rooted in some form of alchemy, such was its power to capture the imagination
Pink Floyd weren't alchemists. Nor were they "normal" in the suburban sense. They were vulnerable, human and, despite their intelligence and stable middle-class backgrounds,they would find themselves just as prone to the pressures of tame as any wide-eyed pop star. The eager ex-students who leapt for joy when their first single "Arnold Layne" was a hit, would in later yearn become torn apart - first by drugs, and later by a biter rivalry that threatened many times to destroy the band.
But the very purpose of Floyd - to provide a creative platform for personal and musical expression - was maintained long after other reeds had faded. The revitalized Pink Floyd that returned to the fray in 1968, 1987 and again in 1994, after periods crisis and serf-examination, was a band that wanted to go on making music for its own sake and not merely for making yet more money. The colossal sales of an epic like Dark Side Of The Moon', which stayed in the US album charts for 15 years and sold over 28 million copies, was ploughed back into stage shows that became the most spectacular and elaborate ever devised.
Pink Floyd, a name coined in a moment of sublime inspiration by one of the band's earliest casualties, would come to dominate the lives of its founders. It might seem a menacing burden to carry around.
Indeed there came a time when Roger Waters, chief architect of much of the band's most successful material, would insist on giving up that burden, only to see his control slip away and the band continue to thrive in the most unexpected way.
Yet anger and resentment were not the only products of their time together There was a hidden message behind tall Buried not far beneath the Floydian surface and concealed by the obsessions with madness and paranoia evident in some of their most cerebrated works was - a sense of humor It was humor that enabled them to cope with the uncomprehending rejection that first met the fledgling Floyd when they took their primitive light shows and freaky sound to the masses in mid-Sixties Laughter kept the sanity intact when they encountered the pitfalls of the music business and endured the personal stress of cracking relationships Jokes, too, abounded in their most portentous works, although it might require diligent study to find them. The Moon - and Floyd - had its lighter, brighter side.
"What exactly is a dream... what exactly is a joke?' asked Syd Barrett at the close of 'A Saucerful Of Secrets', their 1968 classic album. Both jokes and dreams blended in the manic Floydian mix.
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It was these qualities, as much as the daunting statistics of success, that ensured their ultimate survival during the band's long flight from obscurity to mega-stadom.
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