Pink Floyd - Beyond the Wall of Rock

Pink Floyd are the pioneers of psychedelia and one of the greatest rock acts of all time. Over an extremely long career (marked by three distinct phases, each corresponding to a different line-up), they pushed the boundaries of pop and rock by embracing electronics and deepening their sonic research across a series of albums now regarded as milestones of 20th-century popular music. Another hallmark of theirs is having produced massive multimedia representations of their own music, through shows in which the visual component is an integral part of the sound itself.

The long history of the English band begins in the mid-Sixties, when three architecture students and an eccentric painting student laid the groundwork for entering rock legend outright, starting out in the clubs of underground, lysergic London and arriving, not without radical changes of style and line-up, at global success.

The band was born from the meeting between painting student Roger Keith Barrett (known to everyone as Syd, born 6/1/46 in Cambridge) and Roger Waters (Great Bookham, 9/9/44), an architecture student and guitarist in a band with an ever-changing name (Sigma 6, T-Set, Meggadeaths, Abdabs), in which two other aspiring architects also played: Nick Mason (Birmingham, 21/1/45) and Rick Wright (London, 28/7/45), alongside bassist Clive Metcalf and singers Keith Noble and Juliette Gale. In '65, after the group split up, Waters (on bass), Barrett (guitar), Wright (keyboards) and Mason (drums) decided to form a band (for a very short time guitarist Bob Close was also part of it): the name, chosen by Barrett, was Pink Floyd, derived from the first names of two American bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

In '66 came the time for their first performances in the clubs of underground London, with a repertoire that began to take on its own identity thanks to Barrett's early instrumental compositions. It was during this period that Pink Floyd met the men who would become their managers: Andrew King and Peter Jenner.

In "Swingin' London", Pink Floyd managed to stand out as one of the most original and unpredictable bands, thanks above all to their performances at the UFO Club, a venue where the group experimented with its first captivating light shows, trying to draw in the audience with image and slide projections and the heavy use of an effective lighting rig.

Between '66 and '67, Pink Floyd went into the recording studio for their first demos, with results that were less than encouraging: in fact, it would take a few more months before the release of the band's debut single, "Arnold Layne/Candy and a Currant Bun" (produced by Joe Boyd).

Success came immediately and was followed shortly after by a second hit single, "See Emily Play/The Scarecrow": the band appeared on "Top of the Pops" on three separate occasions and was finally ready for their debut album, released in the summer of '67: The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. The record, produced by Norman Smith, made an immediate impact thanks to its distinctive, thoroughly innovative sound and singular lyrics, split between dreamlike, spacey atmospheres ("Astronomy Domine", "Interstellar Overdrive") and short nursery-rhyme-like songs for which Barrett drew on the world of fairy tales ("The Gnome", "The Scarecrow", "Lucifer Sam").

"Astronomy Domine" is the account of a stellar journey undertaken by Barrett through the use of LSD: the pulsing bass represents the radio connection with Earth, while the ever-present guitar, together with a majestic, solemn vocal, seems to wander through a dark cosmic landscape, with Mason's frenzied drumming emphasizing the most dramatic passages.

The album's masterpiece, and perhaps the peak of Barrett's entire output, is however "Interstellar Overdrive". It's the chronicle of a human journey through the universe. Introduced by a horror-movie riff, it unfolds over eleven minutes following a single rule: at least one instrument must keep the rhythm. And over that rhythm unfolds an intensely acid-drenched jam session, made of speeding spaceships, colliding asteroids, aliens and alienation, walls of space, stellar storms, cosmic stillness, unreachable paradises. But Barrett is also a master storyteller of nursery rhymes, as in "Lucifer Sam", a sort of proto-hard rock track with a driving riff accompanied by keyboards that seem to evoke an Oriental atmosphere, "The Scarecrow", built on two castanets and a hallucinated vocal, and the comic, "freak"-style gag of "Bike".

The long "acid" trips and lighthearted atmospheres, combined with an intricate sound born from the fusion of different influences yet entirely unique and distinctive, allow the record to remain to this day one of the quartet's most universally beloved works. Following this success, now launched on a dazzling career, the four set off on tour in the United States, but it was precisely there that they ran into their first difficulties.

Barrett, in fact, began showing the symptoms of schizophrenia (most likely brought on by his systematic use of LSD), becoming increasingly absent from the life of the band: live shows became unbearable for him, as did the pressure the music industry placed on the man rightly regarded as the group's creative mind.

The band then opted for a compromise solution, bringing in guitarist David Gilmour (already a childhood friend of Barrett and Waters, born in Cambridge on 6/3/1946), who, according to the management's plans, was meant to cover for Barrett's absences (who nonetheless remained in the role of songwriter) during concerts. The singles "Apples & Oranges" and "It Would Be So Nice" failed to replicate earlier successes, and Barrett's increasingly erratic and unpredictable behaviour began to undermine the group's activity. His precarious mental state led the leader into impenetrable self-isolation and a gradual withdrawal from the music scene, but not before the troubled production of The Madcap Laughs (January 1970) and Barrett (November 1970), two excellent solo albums made with the help of Gilmour and Wright.

Pink Floyd's new manager became Steve O'Rourke. And the four survivors didn't lose heart, heading back into the studio to record their second album: A Saucerful Of Secrets.

Born out of a period of instability, the album doesn't skimp on strong ideas, particularly on the title track, which — as Waters himself would later observe — seems like the musical transposition of Pink Floyd's own artistic arc, opening in a mood governed by pure instinct and closing in a finale of stunning order and clarity. Nearly twelve minutes of daring psychedelic avant-garde, alternating terror and mysticism. It's the bassist who also pens the other key tracks on the record: the tribal-psychedelic raga that opens "Let There Be More Light", the mysterious and captivating "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun", a masterpiece of cosmic music, and "Corporal Clegg", which retains a firmer link to the style of the debut album. There's also room for two compositions by Rick Wright ("Remember a Day" and "See Saw"), who sounds remarkably inspired throughout the record, contributing substantially to its dreamlike sound. The album is rounded off by a Barrett composition, "Jugband Blues", a small, delirious sketch in which the guitarist shows himself to be perfectly aware of his state of mental isolation, declaiming lines that, read in hindsight, seem to answer in advance the album the other three would dedicate to him a few years later.

Overall, though, A Saucerful of Secrets is marked above all by David Gilmour's guitar work, which steers the band's music back toward territory more firmly rooted in rock-blues tradition.

1969 is a frenetic year for Pink Floyd on the artistic front: the band sets about developing two live suites to perform in concert, "The Man" and "The Journey", and makes its first real foray into film by writing the soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder's film More, followed by scores for Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" and Roy Battersby's "Music From The Body", the latter credited to Waters alone.

More, in particular, is perhaps one of the most underrated records in the Floyd catalogue, remarkably cohesive and delicate, its songs providing a backdrop to the film's atmospheres while bound together by a disarming melodic simplicity. Among all the compositions, standouts include the brief, acoustic "Cirrus Minor", "Green Is the Colour" and "Cymbaline", as well as the mini-suite "Main Theme", which seems to echo the central section of the earlier "A Saucerful of Secrets".

At the end of 1969, the four also release the monumental Ummagumma, destined to be ranked among their masterpieces. The album is made up of two parts: one recorded live, in which the band revisits its early successes, and one recorded in the studio, consisting of contributions the four musicians made as "soloists", with experimental compositions built around their respective instruments. Wright opens the album with "Sysyphus", an instrumental suite blending classical music and avant-garde. Waters tackles two tracks: the acoustic "Grantchester Meadows" (folk guitars mixed with electronic birdsong effects) and "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict", a purely noise-driven piece simulating the sounds of animals in the woods; while Gilmour treats us to a display of technical guitar prowess with his more contemplative "The Narrow Way". The album closes with Mason's ambitious instrumental piece ("The Grand Vizier's Garden Party"), naturally driven by percussion. On the live disc, expanded versions of some of their live staples shine (from "Astronomy Domine" to "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun"), along with a frenzied rendition of "Careful With That Axe Eugene", the track that accompanies the unforgettable final scene of "Zabriskie Point".

The following year finds Pink Floyd taking on a new long instrumental composition, given the curious working title "The Amazing Pudding". The band's intention is for this new extended piece to astonish audiences with orchestral effects unprecedented in their output. Scottish musician Ron Geesin is brought in to handle the orchestral parts, tasked with enriching the "bare" version of the suite that the four had already built and performed live at some concerts. The result is striking: the suite, which unfolds through extraordinary "dialogues" between symphonic music (with an imposing use of brass and choir) and rock, is titled Atom Heart Mother (taken from a news story about a pregnant woman kept alive by an atomic pacemaker) and becomes the title track of the new album, taking up the entire first side.

The suite's most evocative movements are "Breast Milky", marked by the now-famous dialogue between arpeggiated organ and cello, into which Gilmour's guitar eventually weaves, and "Funky Dung", with bass and organ working in counterpoint and Gilmour delivering one of the finest guitar solos of his career, before the arrival of Wright's choir and organ. The suite closes with "Mind Your Throats Please" and "Remergence", in which the themes of the overture and then of the cello-organ duet resurface. The finale is imposing, with ever-incisive guitar work and the orchestra and choir driving the musical crescendo.

Side two opens with Waters's delicate "If" (a simple guitar arpeggio, a hushed voice whispering words steeped in melancholic poetry, a dreamy guitar in the brief musical interludes) and continues with "Summer '68", a remarkable Wright piece, and with Gilmour's dreamlike "Fat Old Sun" (warm, persuasive vocals, guitar always composed yet relentless), before closing with the experiment of "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", made up of three distinct instrumental sections (the first centred on organ, the second on guitars, the third more varied and closer to the style of early Genesis), with a recording of an English breakfast playing in the background.

The first Pink Floyd album to be self-produced, and considered their "progressive" record, Atom Heart Mother is also remembered for its famous cover art, depicting a cow grazing in a field.

The success of such complex music soon translates into real staging difficulties, forcing the band to come up with new material that could be played anywhere in the world. Thus comes Meddle (1971), an album in which Pink Floyd, rather than abandoning their love of long-form suites (here side two is given over entirely to the sublime "Echoes"), scale back the symphonic digressions and lean toward a more rock-oriented sound, easier to reproduce live.

Memorable is the opening "One of These Days", an instrumental piece built around Waters's bass, experimentally amplified with a Binson echo unit, and enriched by Gilmour's extended slide-guitar solo. Also worth remembering is "Fearless", a quieter track distinguished by a Liverpool football crowd chant in its closing section.

In May 1971, Relics is also released, a collection gathering various singles that had never appeared on an LP, dating back to the Barrett era, but also a few gems from "early" Waters issued only as 7-inch singles, such as the gorgeous acoustic ballad "Julia Dream".

Afterwards, the four decide to record, under the direction of Adrian Maben, a concert with no audience amid the ruins of Pompeii: the result is exceptional, the band performing old and new material with striking effectiveness against an extraordinarily evocative backdrop. Adrian Maben's film Live At Pompei (1972) stands as a powerful and evocative testament to the extraordinary emotional and visual scope of Pink Floyd's music from this period.

In '72, Pink Floyd gets another chance to work on film music: once again it's Barbet Schroeder commissioning the score, this time for his new film, "La Vallée". This time the project turns out to be a failure, largely due to the film itself, judged by critics to be sloppy and inconclusive.

The resulting album, Obscured By Clouds, panned by critics, is still worth remembering above all for its markedly rock atmospheres, the maturity of Waters's lyrics, and a handful of catchy tracks such as "Free Four" and "Childhood End".

Around the same time, the band works on developing a conceptual suite about human alienation, provisionally titled "Eclipsed – A Piece For Assorted Lunatics". The suite is "road-tested" live for a long time before being worked up in the studio with the addition of special effects, with the help of sound engineer Alan Parsons. The result is one of the band's great blockbusters, The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973).

A superb exercise in audio production, bolstered by striking lyrical content (touching on the fleeting nature of life, money, the inability to communicate, and madness), the album nevertheless has a few flat moments, starting with the insipid "Money" (with Dick Parry's famous saxophone), and continuing through the sometimes crowd-pleasing tricks of "Speak to Me" and "On the Run" — which are nonetheless effective in conveying the protagonist's state of anxiety, blending noise and avant-garde sound design into moments of great sonic-spatial scope, and laying down the coordinates on which the pessimistic worldview of a rather disoriented Waters rests, a true ambassador of the theme of incommunicability of which "The Dark Side" is a dramatic portrait. There's no shortage, however, of moments of intense lyricism, as shown by "Time", gripping in its wonderfully successful fusion of words and music, with an overflowing guitar solo from Gilmour.

The first part of the record is rounded off with an elegy to madness, but also, at the same time, to human freedom, enslaved by a society that tends to oppress it: "The Great Gig in the Sky", dominated by Clare Torry's soul-gospel-derived vocalizing, able to blend blazing lyricism with almost cinematic drama. "Us and Them" seems to want to echo "Breathe In the Air", but the melody, while 100% Pink Floyd in spirit, only really convinces within the context of the album. Much the same could be said of "The Dark Side of the Moon" as a whole: what makes this work immortal is its unusual engagement with the art-system of the era, captured here from every possible angle. For rock music, it was a prodigious leap toward a futuristic era yet to come.

The result is sensational, and the doors to worldwide success swing wide open for the band: The Dark Side Of The Moon stays on the charts for an extremely long time, becoming one of the biggest commercial successes of all time. Both in Europe and in America, new fans flock to the Pink Floyd phenomenon, also leaving a heavy question mark over how to follow up such a fortunate work. From this record onward, Waters (author of all the lyrics) increasingly takes on the role of the band's leader.

For over a year the four remain inactive on the compositional front, before regrouping in the studio in '74 with only "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" as a certainty — itself a rather long track, built from the contributions of all four musicians and driven by Gilmour's guitar solos.

At first, the idea is to devote the first side to the suite and the second to two tracks: "Raving and Drooling" and "You Gotta Be Crazy". However, the long "gestation" of Wish You Were Here leads Pink Floyd to take a different path, channelling into the record the sense of apathy and mechanical detachment that hung over them: the two tracks earmarked for the second side are scrapped and replaced with new compositions such as the title track (destined to become one of the most famous songs in their catalogue), "Welcome To The Machine" and "Have A Cigar" (featuring Roy Harper on vocals), packed with allusions to the meat-grinder of show business. "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", meanwhile, is split into two parts that open and close the album. What emerges is a concept album about purity and innocence now lost, with none-too-veiled references to Syd Barrett, who is said to have snuck into the studio one last time during the recording sessions. Musically speaking, the album is an enjoyable stylistic exercise, even if, compared to previous albums, it lacks the innovative spark that had always characterised the English band's output.

To see Pink Floyd back in the studio, one has to wait until 1977, the year the four decide to gather onto a record the material left over from the previous album. The new work thus takes shape through the musical and lyrical reworking of old discarded pieces like "You Gotta Be Crazy" and "Raving and Drooling", following a new unifying thread: references to the animal kingdom. The two pieces become "Dogs" and "Sheep" respectively, and together with the new "Pigs (three different ones)" and the short opening and closing bookends of "Pigs On The Wing", they make up Animals, an invective against certain figures in society (with Waters's lyrics more scathing than ever), Orwellian-style replaced by animal species.

From a technical standpoint, the gripping rhythmic construction is worth noting, with all the instruments always in perfect harmony, almost fused together to generate a single sound, never resorting to virtuosity for its own sake.

After the release of Animals, Pink Floyd set off on a long and gruelling world tour. It's on this occasion that Waters, partly due to unpleasant incidents that would even see him clash with the audience, begins to develop the idea that would lead the four of them to build their final masterpiece: The Wall.

The album, inspired by that sort of "wall" of incommunicability that had grown up between the band and the audience (a wall that, as time went on, would be built up brick by brick in Waters's mind until it became an all-encompassing emblem of alienation and estrangement from the world), is spread across two records and covers various themes such as discrimination, education, show business, fascism, and autobiographical elements from Waters, increasingly the group's "domineering patriarch" (strong clashes with Gilmour arise during the recording sessions, and by the end of the album's gestation, Wright is pushed out). For the arrangements, the band once again resorts to striking effects and even orchestral parts, with outside help from Michael Kamen. While it boasts some exceptional tracks such as "Another Brick in the Wall, part 2", "Hey You", "Is There Anybody Out There?" and "Comfortably Numb" (with Gilmour's memorable guitar solo), the record is essentially a unified work: no track is detached from the one before it, and all of them serve the unfolding of the story, whose frustrated protagonist is the rock star Pink (who sometimes recalls the figure of Barrett, while at other times is Waters's own alter ego). "Another Brick In The Wall, part 2", in particular, would prove to be one of the band's biggest hits: heralded by the arrival of helicopters, it's a disarmingly simple song, built on a single chord yet enriched by yet another guitar solo from Gilmour and a children's choir made up of 23 kids aged between 13 and 15 from Islington Green School in London. The famous chorus line ("we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control") would be used by Black protesters on the anniversary of the bloodily suppressed Soweto uprising: South Africa's racist government would ban the song's broadcast and pull all copies from shops. Although steeped in a dark and pessimistic view of life, the album nonetheless ends with the "collapse" of the wall and the message of hope found in "Outside the Wall".

The album would be rewarded with sensational sales (remarkable for a double-length work) and would lend itself to a live staging as difficult as it was magnificent: the shows would be very few but memorable, with the wall built up bit by bit on stage, giant inflatable puppets and immersive projections. The Wall would also spawn an eponymous film, directed by Alan Parker and starring Bob Geldof in the role of Pink.

The band, however, emerges from the experience rather worn out: the rifts between the group's two driving forces (Waters and Gilmour) appear nearly impossible to heal, and Wright, as mentioned, is pushed out.

The four nonetheless decide to return to the studio to record an album that, in theory, is meant to gather up the material left over from the previous work.

The Falklands War, however, sparks something in Waters's mind, leading him to write new material with a common thread: the failure to realise the dream of postwar peace.

The resulting album, The Final Cut, is essentially a creation of Waters alone, with the other members relegated to the role of session musicians (and often not even that). Of all the Pink Floyd albums, it's the least engaging, even if the beauty of certain tracks (above all "The Gunners Dream" and "The Post-War Dream") remains beyond dispute.

Unfortunately, the album's title would very soon prove prophetic, marking Waters's final act as a member of the band.

The bassist's determination to dissolve Pink Floyd would lead to a long-running dispute, with legal fallout over the use of a name that had by then become synonymous with bestselling records, a battle ultimately won by Gilmour and Mason.

With the help of illustrious musicians and the lukewarm support of a decidedly unenthusiastic Mason, the guitarist released A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in 1987, while 1994 saw the release of The Division Bell, with Wright and Mason fully reinstated as composers and performers.

These albums, full of ideas that were anything but groundbreaking, were followed by their respective live counterparts, Delicate Sound Of Thunder (1988) and Pulse (1995), which at least show us musicians in fine form, still able to move an audience, with concerts boasting massive stage productions (worth recalling the famous Venice episode) and remarkable renditions of the band's glorious repertoire.

More recently came the release of shrewd commercial ventures such as The Wall Live and an unlikely "Best of", which at least have the merit of drawing new generations of fans toward the timeless legend of Pink Floyd.

Then, on 5 July 2014, Polly Samson, Mrs. Gilmour, shared news with the internet that, within a matter of hours, would ignite the fantasies and speculation of the various factions of Pink Floyd fans: a new album was on the way.

The Endless River is the open tribute from a band that, in practice, no longer exists, to Rick Wright, the pillar of Pink Floyd's unmistakable sound, who had passed away some years earlier after an incurable illness. It amounts to a little over 50 minutes of material exhumed from the The Division Bell sessions, reworked by David Gilmour, under the supervision of Phil Manzanera, Martin "Youth" Glover and sound engineer Andy Jackson. The record - essentially instrumental, aside from a couple of exceptions - is split into 18 tracks, themselves ideally grouped across 4 sides.

The first side opens and closes with two pieces ("Things Left Unsaid" and "Ebb And Flow") built on ambient, glacial textures of EBow-treated guitar and assorted keyboards. In between, "It's What We Do" oozes echoes of "Welcome To The Machine" and the ending of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond pt.2" from every pore. "Sum", opening the second side, is a Göttsching-style progression with synthesizer, guitar and percussion let loose. The following "Skins" is a variation on the theme, growing increasingly tribal toward the end. The brief "Unsung" rests on a bed of organ over which the usual liquid guitar solo unfolds. "Anisina" winks, rather suspiciously, one and a half eyes at the famous "Us And Them".

The third - and most substantial - section opens with "The Lost Art Of Conversation", a brief and persuasive back-and-forth between guitar and piano. "On Noodle Street" rests on a vaguely dub rhythm section before veering into territory belonging to Dire Straits's "Brothers In Arms". "Night Light" could pass for a film score, bearing an unmistakable resemblance to some of Angelo Badalamenti's work. The compelling theme of "Allons-y", meanwhile, could easily be a by-product of "The Wall". The fact that it too is split into two parts, just like something else we're all familiar with, certainly doesn't help change that impression. In between, "Autumn '68" seems to reference - really only in its title - the far more successful "Summer '68" from "Atom Heart Mother". Worth noting, in "Talkin' Hawkin'", is a reflection on verbal communication, recited in the artificial voice of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

"Calling", another cinematically evocative piece, ushers in the fourth and final side with great fanfare. "Eyes To Pearls" is essentially a reworking - whether intentional or not, we can't say - of "Moonhead", an unreleased track written by Pink Floyd back in 1969, commissioned by the BBC to soundtrack the Moon landing.

The construction of the following "Surfacing" is a device that paves the way for a pure exercise in Gilmour-style guitar playing. Closing the record is "Louder Than Words", the only proper song in the whole set. Released a month ahead of the album, it was played on radio stations worldwide, several times a day, to build anticipation and boost sales. The lyrics, written by the aforementioned Mrs. Gilmour, are naturally inspired by the band's own human story - a saga that, to paraphrase the lyrics, despite frequent clashes and more or less radical line-up changes, resonates through the history of rock music far louder than any words.

Ultimately, The Endless River is, in its inevitable fragmentary nature, a certainly well-crafted work, a legitimate and honest tribute. There isn't a single second of the record that could strictly be called bad. On the other hand - and this is the record's real limitation - there isn't a single second that doesn't sound already heard, and heard again. That said, it's hardly fair to say expectations had been set particularly high to begin with.

It certainly won't be a collector's relic for completists, shamelessly self-referential and far from essential, one that could ever dent a legend born almost fifty years ago and still showing no sign of ending.

2022 is the year of Animals 2018 Remix, an LP whose rediscovery had already begun with Roger Waters's recent and unmissable live shows, where "Dogs" and "Pigs" were at the absolute center of Waters's attempt to communicate with the audience (the emblematic "Trump Is A Pig"). This rediscovery has specific reasons behind it, chief among them that "Animals" is one of those albums carrying a universal message, one that remains - and will remain - valid in every era. However one looks at it, and whatever one's political views, societies of every age and every geographic region have always been divided into pigs, dogs and sheep, and sincere or naive attempts to overturn this obscene division always seem destined for tragic failure.

This new remix therefore has the merit of bringing such a still-relevant work to younger generations, but above all it makes for a truly rewarding listen (not on a PC or smartphone, of course). Every instrument sounds clearer and cleaner compared to Brian Humphries's 1977 version, which was, however, a product of its time - the year of rock's own revolution. The result is a remix that brings the sound closer to that of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" or "Wish You Were Here", and overall the listening experience could be called superlative when played on a good hi-fi system, with Rick Wright's keyboards splendidly reborn (perhaps too sidelined in the original given his poor relations with Waters), a bass with a decidedly fuller sound, and a guitar whose every single chord can be heard with striking clarity.

The advice – as always for such an important LP – is to listen to it in the purity of its sound, but also to read it and finally understand it once and for all. And perhaps to connect it to the other animals present in Waters's mythology, from the worms (the fascists, the racists) of “The Wall” to the monkeys (men who drift away from reality and soothe their pain in front of the TV) of “Amused To Death”. Because there's a strong common thread running through these albums that deserves to be studied and explored in depth, rather than listened to distractedly like any ordinary pop record.

In 2025, the celebrated 1971 live recording at Pompeii has finally been made available on vinyl and CD. Listening to Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII clearly gives a sense of the miracle those four brilliant young men managed to pull off, so confident in their own abilities that they bordered on madness and recklessness, pushing every one of their ideas to its most extreme consequences, at a moment when the alchemy between them was at its absolute peak.

That very balance between such overpowering personalities is visible in every moment of the live set: from the exhilarating version of a masterpiece like “Echoes” – perhaps the suite that stands at the pinnacle of British psychedelia, a magnificent synthesis of the affinity between Wright and Gilmour – to the twin tracks “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “One Of These Days”, which achieve a lysergic Floydian style so distinctive it sets them apart from any British or American psychedelic band, practically unmatched in intensity even by the most celebrated bands of the era.

Nothing changes in the tracks drawn from their second LP. “A Saucerful of Secrets” and “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”, with the iconic image of Roger Waters striking the gong, bear witness to the coexistence of such strongly defined personalities, who nonetheless know, depending on the band's needs, when to step forward and when to step back at just the right moments. It was precisely in that overwhelming self-assurance that the seed of trouble lay, the same trouble that would later lead to imbalance and eventual split. As Nick Mason says in one of the film's interviews, “things will be fine as long as none of us thinks he can do without the others” – effectively foreshadowing Pink Floyd's near future.

A flawless live album whose historical value goes far beyond the individual songs: it stands as a testament to an entire era, among the high points of rock's golden decade. A live set in which Pink Floyd also allow themselves moments of levity, as in the blues number “Mademoiselle Nobs”, an alternate version of “Seamus”, one of the acoustic tracks from “Meddle”, magnificently “sung” by a Russian greyhound named Nobs, who howls just as a Border Collie had done on “Seamus”.

A total work of art recorded at a turning point, Pink Floyd's Pompeii live marks (and closes) an entire era in the history of rock music. To be listened to again and again. To be watched and rewatched.

It may seem hard to believe, but in 2025 two Pink Floyd albums reached the top of the UK charts. First the celebrated Live At Pompeii, then the 50th-anniversary reissue of Wish You Were Here 50, crowned Christmas Number One Album in the UK.

Wish You Were Here occupies a particularly interesting position. Often overshadowed by its predecessor The Dark Side Of The Moon, arguably the album most beloved by Pink Floyd fans, it has often been labelled a “transitional record”. In the collective imagination, it has long been told as a work born out of a moment of crisis for the band, almost a minor effort, the product of the disorientation that followed an unexpected and all-consuming worldwide success.

In reality, this is an album that does grow out of a deep sense of loss, but it draws its strength precisely from that fracture. The loss of Syd Barrett, never truly processed; perhaps the loss of artistic freedom; perhaps the painful awareness of having definitively entered the meat grinder of the music industry – as spelled out with fierce clarity on “Have a Cigar”.

These feelings of emptiness and disorientation, after some initial struggles, explode into an extraordinary creative whirlwind, with the all-too-often underrated Richard Wright as its absolute protagonist, amid a balance between Waters and Gilmour that was soon to come to an end. It was precisely in these years that Wright experienced his most inspired period, and in many respects he is the one who saves the album. The keyboards that open “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” are simply legendary: a kind of simplified evolution of German Kosmische Musik that becomes ambient music ante litteram, carving itself indelibly into the listener's memory. Then comes David Gilmour's guitar, with a vibrato steeped in pathos – perhaps his most perfect notes ever – and those four notes that set off melodies and lyrics now firmly etched in the collective memory. For a band that felt itself to be in trouble, this truly amounts to a miracle.

But Wright's touch is everywhere. What would “Welcome To The Machine” – a chilling metaphor for entering the star system – or “Have A Cigar” be without the sound of his keyboards? Probably something radically different, and in all likelihood something that would not have survived in the collective memory for fifty years.

The 50th-anniversary reissue has the great merit of thoroughly evoking that unrepeatable period in Pink Floyd's history. The second disc digs into the album's genesis, offering embryonic versions of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (“Wine Glasses”, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond – Early Instrumental Version”), Gilmour's sung version of “Have a Cigar”, the violin variant of “Wish You Were Here” (rightly discarded), and the earliest demos of “The Machine Song”.

The third disc, on the other hand, already looks ahead to the band's near future, anticipating Animals through the earliest incarnations of “Sheep” (“Raving And Drooling”) and “Dogs” (“You've Got To Be Crazy”): versions still far from their final form, yet already surprisingly well-structured, bearing witness to just how long and complex the gestation of such intricate songs could be.

The journey closes with a series of live performances from the band's golden years, ranging from the The Dark Side Of The Moon repertoire all the way to the Los Angeles concert featuring one of the band's most iconic psychedelic tracks, “Echoes”. Here the saxophone almost seems to suggest a parallel universe, as if “Echoes” had briefly found itself inside The Dark Side Of The Moon.

What more is there to say, in the end? The weight of such a towering legend leaves one almost speechless. All that remains is to listen, in silence.

Contributions by Sigfrido Menghini, Alan Tasselli, Vittorio Iacovella, Valerio D’Onofrio (Animals 2018 Remix, Pink Floyd At Pompeii – MCMLXXII, Wish You Were Here 50)

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