How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Pink Floyd by John Harris in the Guardian UK

How I learned to stop worrying and love Pink Floyd
He used to hate them. Now John Harris thinks they're our most influential band

John Harris
Friday November 5, 2004

The Guardian

Some time in the late 1980s, Roger Waters decided to go and see REM, who were then the hip kings of night-time radio and the weekly music press. The ex-creative chief of Pink Floyd was surprised to behold Michael Stipe using the encore to deliver a solo cover version of Dark Globe, a song recorded by Syd Barrett - Waters' one-time Floyd compadre, who had long since succumbed to debilitating mental illness, crashed out of the group in early 1968, and gone back to the familial home in his native Cambridge.
Waters decided to pay REM a backstage visit, anticipating a relatively friendly reception. Instead, he encountered an unexpected frostiness. "In the band-room afterwards," he told me recently, "Michael Stipe wouldn't speak to me. It was a bit like, 'Wanker! Syd was the true genius.' I could imagine Stipe would be a bit like that."

If Waters' suspicions were correct, Stipe's stance was not exactly controversial. Back then, with the aftershocks of punk still faintly audible, the post-Barrett Floyd were widely viewed as the bilious embodiment of everything that the Sex Pistols et al had raged so righteously against; Johnny Rotten, famously, had been fond of wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt, wittily customised with the graffito: "I hate." The Floyd were not alone - as someone who cut their musical teeth during that time, I can well remember the list of forbidden pleasures: Led Zeppelin (invented heavy metal, alleged misogynists); Crosby, Stills and Nash (wimpy hippy sell-outs, took too much cocaine); the Grateful Dead (acid-fried idiots - with beards), etc, etc. Even a love of the Beatles was held to be slightly questionable: better, it seemed, to stock up on records by the Wedding Present and deny that most of the 1960s and 1970s had ever happened.

These days, thankfully, most people's minds seem more open. The ongoing influence of Pink Floyd is a case in point: this year has seen the Scissor Sisters piloting a disco cover-version of Comfortably Numb - the wonderfully affecting centrepiece of the 1979 album-cum-sprawling treatise on rock stardom The Wall - into the upper reaches of the charts, while the abiding tenor of English rock remains palpably Floyd-esque. Whether intentionally or not, with 1997's OK Computer, Radiohead revived the idea of middle-class Britons delivering pained meditations on our existential woes, while couching their music in terms of upmarket art, a notion surely traceable to the Floyd's career-defining album The Dark Side of the Moon. Ever since, as proved by the transatlantic success of Coldplay, the potency of the idea has remained undimmed. In their own different ways, the bands Elbow, Doves and Muse are among its other modern champions.

In keeping with their reputation for a very English kind of fustiness, Pink Floyd's alumni seem only distantly aware of any of their supposed connections to the generations that followed in their wake. "I've never been very interested in modern music," says Waters. "I'll always listen to a new Bob Dylan album. But it takes an awful lot of something for anyone else to break into what I listen to."

David Gilmour, the guitarist who stood with Waters at the group's core until their ugly fall-out in the mid 1980s, seems more tuned in, though maybe only just. "I love Radiohead," he told me last year. "I don't like all of their stuff - tragically, I like some of their earlier things better. I'm 56, with hordes of children running round the place, so life is busy. I don't get many chances to sit down and really absorb whole albums the way I should do, but they've done some very good things. I can see why some people make the comparison. But it's hard to hear what he [Thom Yorke] says. He kind of mumbles, doesn't he?"

Irrespective of their latter-day influence, only the cloth-eared could deny the frequent majesty of the music Pink Floyd created from 1968 onwards. I speak with the zeal of a happy convert: from the age of 18, I was the kind of Barrett aficionado who thought his ex-colleagues' other work might cause an allergic reaction - but in 1993, the reviews editor at the NME handed me the 20th-anniversary reissue of The Dark Side of the Moon, and all my bigotry vanished.

The older indie and punk veterans who formed the music press's taste police had led me to expect some twiddly, borderline unlistenable embodiment of the abomination known as progressive rock; instead, give or take the odd extended guitar solo, I discovered an admirably graceful work, suffused with an accessibility and empathy that belied all those accusations of prog-ish pomposity. As Waters told me later: "If you write 'Breathe, breathe in the air / Don't be afraid to care', you leave yourself open to howling derision. People just go, 'You fucking wanker! How pathetic is that?' That album is very adolescent in its intensity, but I'm very happy now that I took that risk."

And so my passage into Floyd-dom began. This is not the place for a detailed breakdown of their oeuvre, but a few examples prove that even the most arcane aspects of their back catalogue throw forth unexpected delights. Anyone whose head was turned by the mixture of gentle oddness and human warmth once peddled by the Beta Band should listen to the first half of 1971's Meddle, and a wondrous song called Fearless in particular: sight unseen, you'd think you were listening to one of the better tracks from the BB's 1998 album The Three EPs. If you think the Clash tell you everything you need to know about the UK in the late 1970s, you should seek out 1977's Animals: pre-Thatcher disaffection expressed by jaded war-babies rather than naive punk rockers. "Bus-stop rat-bag," Waters snarls in the second verse of Pigs (Three Different Ones), a song at least partly aimed at the late Mary Whitehouse. "You fucked-up old hag."

One of my favourite Pink Floyd songs is tucked away on The Final Cut, the album that heralded Roger Waters' exit from the group, while sounding a prolonged note of alarm about the arrival of Thatcherism. Not Now John is a furious commemoration of the UK's passage from the post-war consensus into the grim realities of the 1980s: "Fuck all that," chirp its backing singers, as if hurling the welfare state and full employment into the historical dustbin. By way of compensation, all its narrator (played by a gravel-throated Gilmour) can offer is the suggestion that a friend should: "Come at the end of the shift, we'll go and get pissed."

Often, such songs extend way beyond three minutes. Occasionally, their over-arching thematic conceits tumble towards ludicrousness (as with The Wall, an album that contains the odd good song, but remains stubbornly difficult to swallow whole). From The Dark Side of the Moon onwards, however, Pink Floyd's music is always driven by a keen sense of having something important to say - and therein lies the crux of why "prog rock" is a lamentably innacurate tag.

"My big fight in Pink Floyd," Waters once told me, "was to try and drag it, kicking and screaming, back from the whimsy that Syd was into - as beautiful as it is - into my concerns, which were more political and philosophical. Even now, people talk about 'space'. What the fuck is that? None of it had anything to do with that. I don't know what's wrong with people. [Dismissively] Space - what the fuck are they talking about?"

Aside from all that, there is the compelling Pink Floyd soap opera, capably chronicled in drummer Nick Mason's recently published coffee-table memoir Inside Out. In prose that is both self-deprecating and insightful, he grapples with subjects that have often been off-limits - as when he deals with the group's ongoing guilt about Syd Barrett's decline, perhaps exacerbated by their failure to allow him any kind of extended break. "Even now, I'm astonished," says Mason. "How could we have been so blinkered, or so silly, or stupid? But it was different then. People didn't know as much about any sort of psychiatric disorder, let alone drugs, or anything else."

The book's underlying themes include the group's ingrained reluctance to bring underlying tensions into the open - "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way," as Dark Side would have it - and the dependably well-adjusted Mason's take on the 35-year saga of Waters' relationship with Gilmour, characterised since the mid-1980s by distance and animosity (Waters tried to call time on the band in 1985, Gilmour resolved to carry on under the group's name, and the pair have not spoken since). In the good days, Mason says, its basis was the kind of mutual dependence that attracts a word like "symbiosis". "I would suggest that it was all about Dave being able to do things that Roger couldn't - such as playing the guitar beautifully. And, you know, Dave's got a great singing voice. That's when it all works: when each adds to the sum of the parts. Go back to Dark Side: some of its appeal is Dave's very pure vocal quality."

"Roger had fantastic drive, and a very good brain for lyrics," Gilmour told me in 2003. "He was a very creative force. And I suppose I would say I had a much better sense of musicality than he did. I could certainly sing in tune better [laughs]. It did work very well."

By way of shining light on the relationship's subsequent collapse, consider Waters' response: "That's crap. There's no question that Dave needs a vehicle to bring out the best of his guitar playing. And he is a great guitar player. But the idea, which he's tried to propagate over the years, that he's somehow more musical than I am, is absolute fucking nonsense. It's an absurd notion."

In this context, it's perhaps surprising that whispers about a reunion - supposedly centred on the 30th anniversary of 1975's Wish You Were Here - have been circulating. As with the band's soft-spoken keyboard player Rick Wright, Gilmour has offered no comment; Waters, however, is so dismissive as to sound downright scornful. "I don't miss Dave, put it that way. I think we're both quite truculent individuals, and I don't think that's going to change."

"I certainly wouldn't put money on it at the moment," says Mason. "If they don't feel the other party can contribute anything, then it won't ever happen, but there can sometimes be a realisation that there are things they can do that you can't. But I think Roger has more than enough fish to fry."

On this score, he's probably not wrong: though Gilmour has been quiet of late, Waters' current projects include an opera about the French revolution, a Broadway version of The Wall, and the release of two songs online: Leaving Beirut and To Kill the Child, both aimed at subverting the Bush-Blair take on the politics of the Middle East.

None the less, Mason cannot help but daydream about some kind of public reconcilation. "I would love it," he concludes. "But I think the only way it would happen, which would be great, would be another thing like Live Aid, where you'd say, 'This is more important than any differences, and we'll do something wonderful.'"

He pauses before delivering a very Floydian prognosis. "I suppose it's not logically impossible ... "

· Inside Out is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £30.00. Leaving Beirut and To Kill the Child are available at www.roger-waters.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004