Comfortably Numb (From The Wall, 1979)
Pink Floyd in full stadium singalong rock mode, this is a standout cut from the album that was fuelled by, and channelled, Roger Water’s apparent distaste for the band’s colossal success. Yet whatever alienation he felt from the audience is off-set here in a song that manages to uplift the listener individually and glimmers with sonic invention while working on the broadest canvas. Interestingly, guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason both joined Waters onstage at the O2 in 2011 to play Comfortably Numb. It’s the Pink Floyd song that could thaw a mile-thick chunk of Arctic perma-frost.
Echoes (from Meddle, 1971)
Mason has lately returned to live performance with the excellent Saucerful of Secrets, a Pink Floyd tribute band that features an actual member of the original line-up, fronted by Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp. (He delivers a formidable impression of Pink Floyd’s lost psychedelic wanderer, Syd Barrett.)
SoS stick to the early material, and while Echoes is the centre-piece of the post-Barrett album Meddle, it’s a wonderfully evocative demonstration of how far they’d come in a relatively short time. At 23 minutes, it’s more about atmosphere than songcraft or emerging pop smarts, although the version they performed in 1972’s Live in Pompeii film sees the band get unexpectedly funky in the song’s middle section. “The point at which we found our focus,” Gilmour later noted, although a new contract with EMI granted them unlimited studio time.
Wish You Were Here (from Wish You Were Here, 1975)
Another crowd-pleaser, not to mention a song that’s been butchered by every London busker or wannabe guitar hero. But the sheer ubiquity of Wish You Were Here cannot detract from a song whose aching melody and thematic universality secures its place at the summit of the Floyd canon. Written about Syd Barrett, the beauty here is that really this is a song about whomever you want it to be about, that gently pulses with the most beautifully realised melancholy.
But it’s not wholly mainstream. The chorus only appears once, and while the throb of early synths dates the production a little, here was proof that the enormodrome-bound Pink Floyd that emerged from the Dark Side of the Moon success had plenty more in the tank.
Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968)
Pink Floyd had managed several hit singles soon after signing to EMI. But by ’68 the long-playing album had become the principal currency as pop morphed into rock and acquired a new ‘heaviosity’. Happily, they were perfectly placed to take advantage of the paradigm shift. See Controls for proof, a cosmic, improvisational set-piece from a band who had risen to prominence as the house band in the lysergic UFO club on Tottenham Court Road.
Barrett was by now becoming unreliable, temperamentally unsuited to the hallucinogenics that were core to his musical extemporisations. David Gilmour, an old Cambridge friend, had joined the band and this track is notable for featuring all five of Pink Floyd’s key personnel. Avatars for rock’s new experimentalism, Controls is trippy, thrilling and dangerous.
Time (from Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)
Engineer Alan Parsons played a critical role in the production of Pink Floyd’s most successful album. Time serenades the listener with the sound of a variety of clocks he’d recorded for an EMI sound effects album. Then we’re dropped into a deep, worrisome guitar note, before Mason gets busy on a set of rototoms, a percussive highlight from a drummer who doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his contribution to the band’s sound.
After which the track gets majestically airborne in the best Floyd tradition, the sound of four young men facing down the uncomfortable realities of life and the pernicious effects of madness. “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” may be their single most famous – and affecting – lyric.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond Parts I-IV (Wish You Were Here, 1975)
Progressive rock has its adherents, of course, but surely it was 19-minute odysseys like Crazy Diamond that punk sought to blast into oblivion? Not exactly. Even Sex Pistols’ frontman John Rotten would later admit that actually he liked Pink Floyd after all.
Listen to this, the opening track on Wish You Were Here, and resistance is futile. Like the title track, this one was inspired both by Syd Barrett and the band’s failure to intervene as his mental health went into a steep reverse. In those days, grown men didn’t talk about their feelings, the emotionally constipated Pink Floyd less even than most. But they did write songs about them, and this is one of the greatest.
Sheep (from Animals, 1977)
Mason, intriguingly, had produced The Damned’s second album (they’d wanted Syd Barrett, who was clearly indisposed), so Floyd as an entity wasn’t completely detached from the primal punk roar. Animals, too, was an album that demonstrated that this was a band whose ‘progressiveness’ was of a different order to the awful likes of Yes or ELP. That said, Sheep still checks in at 10 minutes-plus, a righteous blast of pumping bass, prowling guitar, and portentous keyboards as Waters vents his spleen as only he could. Magnificently deranged.
Us & Them (from Dark Side of the Moon, 1973)
If Sergeant Pepper’s was the first, Dark Side surely crystallised the idea of the concept album. On which basis, it’s almost impossible to pick one track off a record conspicuously designed to be listened to as a whole. (Indeed, Pink Floyd held out on Spotify for many years for precisely this reason.) Us and Them showcases the band’s peerless ability to build mood, texture and dynamic, starting slowly and seductively before becoming vast and irresistible. Radiohead may have been paying attention.
Learning to Fly, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987)
One to debate. As the band splintered in the mid-Eighties, Pink Floyd set new standards for rock band acrimony. Waters assumed that as he was the principal songwriter, the band would quite obviously collapse into irrelevance without him. But they soldiered on, David Gilmour taking the creative lead alongside keyboard player Rick Wright and the indefatigable Nick Mason on drums.
The result was an album swollen with the production possibilities of the decade, more of a vehicle for the record-setting world tour that followed than an essential addition to the catalogue. Yet Learning to Fly was a highlight, an ode to aviation as both Gilmour and Mason settled into rock aristocracy middle age by, yes, learning to fly. It also assisted Pink Floyd’s ascent into the MTV era.
