Bassist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason began playing music together as teenagers while studying architecture at the London Polytechnic. By the end of 1965, they had been joined by keyboardist Richard Wright and singer/guitarist Syd Barrett. Barrett named the band Pink Floyd in homage to two favorite blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The band’s 1967 debut Piper at the Gates of Dawn was a landmark release of the psychedelic era, but Barrett soon exited the group while suffering from psychological issues.
With new singer/guitarist David Gilmour, Pink Floyd continued recording and performing, becoming one of the leading lights of the British progressive rock movement. By the mid-‘70s, Pink Floyd were wildly popular, with 1975’s Wish You Were Here becoming one of the band’s most beloved albums. With the Wish You Were Here 50th Anniversary Collection offering a new expanded edition of one of Pink Floyd’s masterpieces, here’s a look back at ten pivotal moments in the band’s history.
10. Pink Floyd’s first light shows at the Countdown Club
One of the band’s early names was Leonard’s Lodgers, a reference to Mike Leonard, who owned the flat where Waters and Wright lived. When the band booked a residency at the Countdown Club in London in 1965, they’d play several hours of music in a single night, learning to stretch out their material with instrumental improvisations. And Mike Leonard became the band’s first lighting engineer, improvising colorful visuals to accompany the sounds that the musicians were making with early guitarist Bob Klose.
After Klose left the band and was replaced by Barrett, the band’s profile rose with a residency at the UFO Club that also featured film projections and light shows. But even before Barrett’s arrival, the band had already begun to develop two of its enduring signatures: long, exploratory pieces, and an emphasis on a powerful visual component to their concerts. Even the Velvet Underground, who developed a similar style of performance in parallel in America, would not begin their Exploding Plastic Inevitable performances until 1966.
9. Hipgnosis enters the picture
Pink Floyd’s 1968 sophomore album A Saucerful of Secrets was a transitional work, the only album that featured both Barrett and Gilmour. It was also the first time that EMI Records allowed a band other than the Beatles to hire an album cover designer from outside the label’s staff, and Pink Floyd chose Hipgnosis, a new firm founded by their Cambridge friends Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell. The cover of A Saucerful of Secrets was an excerpt from the comic book Strange Tales, beginning the tradition that Pink Floyd’s album art would rarely show members of the band in favor of more abstract or thought-provoking imagery. Over the next decade, Hipgnosis would design some of Pink Floyd’s most recognizable album covers for Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, as well as classic albums by bands like Led Zeppelin and Genesis.
8. Pink Floyd plays Pompeii
One of Pink Floyd’s most famous concerts had no audience. In 1971, director Adrien Maben filmed the band performing in an ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, showcasing material from the band’s recent album Meddle along with some selections from their ‘60s releases. In contrast to other concert films of the ‘70s that often attempted to capture the energy of a typical night of a tour, 1972’s Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii was more of an immersive art film in keeping with the band’s tradition of creative visual spectacle. A 4K restoration of the film was released in theaters in 2025.
7. Gilmour takes the lead
Although Gilmour was ostensibly Barrett’s replacement as lead singer and guitarist in Pink Floyd, he never wrote songs as prolifically as Barrett. Over the course of the ‘70s, Gilmour became one of rock’s most revered guitarists, and sang lead on many of the band’s biggest hits, but he was often delivering lyrics penned by Waters. As Waters increasingly asserted leadership of the band, he began to clash with Gilmour, and their creative differences came to a head with 1983’s The Final Cut. Over the next few years, the bandmates engaged in a protracted legal battle, with the end result being that the band continued recording under the Pink Floyd name without Waters.
Gilmour led Pink Floyd for two enormously successful albums, 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994’s The Division Bell, both of which were supporting with lengthy tours. A final album, the mostly instrumental The Endless River, was released in 2014, recorded primarily during The Division Bell sessions.
6. The Live 8 reunion
Two decades after Pink Floyd’s bitter split with Waters, he rejoined the band for one special occasion in 2005. Bob Goldef organized the Live 8 benefit as a sequel to 1985’s legendary Live Aid concerts, and the most highly anticipated performance of the event was the classic ‘70s lineup of Pink Floyd. The band’s 23-minute set included songs from Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall. It remains the last Pink Floyd concert, and Wright died in 2008, with Gilmour and Waters resuming their feud in subsequent years.
5. “See Emily Play” climbs the charts
Pink Floyd’s arrival on the swinging London pop scene culminated in the chart success of the band’s first two singles, both penned by Barrett. “Arnold Layne” peaked at No. 20 in the spring of 1967. That summer, the follow-up “See Emily Play” did even better, peaking at No. 6 during a week when “All You Need is Love” by the Beatles topped the chart, and classics by Procol Harum and the Turtles were in the Top Ten.
After Barrett’s departure less than a year later, Pink Floyd moved away from three minute singles, recorded increasingly popular albums with longer compositions. “See Emily Play” remained the band’s only Top Ten single in the UK for over a decade, until 1979’s chart-topping “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II).”
4. Pigs fly on the In the Flesh Tour
In 1977, Pink Floyd embarked on the In the Flesh Tour in support of Animals, a concept album inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm comprising songs with titles like “Dogs,” “Sheep,” and “Pigs on the Wing.” The Hipgnosis cover art featured a pig-shaped balloon floating over London’s Battersea Power Station
Although it was a fairly uncommercial release with no radio hits, Animals sold well and the tour featured the band’s most elaborate and expensive stage show to date, with pyrotechnics and puppets. The tour’s most famous special effect helped bring the Animals cover to live with giant inflatable pig and sheep puppets, designed by Tim Hunkin, which flew over the audience.
3. The strange serendipity during the Wish You Were Here sessions
Although Barrett recorded two solo albums in 1970, he began to withdraw from public life over the next few years as his former band became more and more successful without him. Amidst reports of his deteriorating mental health and , Barrett’s final attempted recording session was at Abbey Road Studios in 1974. A year later, Barrett made an unannounced visit to the same studio while Pink Floyd was recording Wish You Were Here. Barrett’s head was shaved and his old friends didn’t recognize him at first. Coincidentally, they were working on an epic multi-part song written in tribute to Barrett, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” It was the last time they saw Barrett, who remained reclusive for decades and died in 2006.
2. Roger Waters builds The Wall
Roger Waters’ conceptual ambitions in the ‘70s culminated in the 1979 double album The Wall. Waters illustrated his growing alienation from Pink Floyd’s fans with a song cycle about the social isolation of a rock star named Pink, ultimately building a literal wall between the band and the audience on the tour supporting the album.
The Wall’s heady concept was, perhaps surprisingly, embraced by the world, thanks in part to the catchy disco-inspired groove of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II).” Director Alan Parker’s 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall, based on a screenplay by Waters, dramatized the album with Geldof playing the role of Pink.
1. Dark Side of the Moon becomes a phenomenon
With its interlocking songs, full of gorgeous melodies and contemplative Waters lyrics about insanity and mortality, 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon was a breakthrough moment for Pink Floyd, particularly in America. The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for just one week, but it had remarkable longevity, the only album in history to spend over 900 weeks on the chart. In the UK, where the band had always sold steadily and had topped the album charts in 1970 with Atom Heart Mother, Dark Side actually stalled at No. 2. The album that blocked Pink Floyd’s magnum opus from No. 1 was, absurdly, a K-Tel Records compilation called 20 Flash Back Greats From the Sixties.
