Pink Floyd

Random and bite-sized facts on all things from the band behind The Dark Side of the Moon. Totally random but totally fascinating if you're into it. Do you know Pink Floyd now?

Pink Floyd once designed a piece of music like an architectural drawing.

For “A Saucerful of Secrets”, Roger Waters and Nick Mason plotted the music on paper as a series of peaks and troughs — a visual structure before it was really a musical one.

Both were architecture students.

The music was built from the shape.

Before Pink Floyd became Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett had already supplied the name.

The “Pink Floyd” name came from two blues musicians whose records Barrett owned: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

But there was another curious detail: the group had been called the Tea Set, and Barrett apparently produced the new name when he discovered another Tea Set were due to play the same bill.

A last-minute solution became rock history.

“One of These Days” contains Nick Mason’s only vocal performance on a Pink Floyd record released at the time.

But it doesn't really sound like him.

Mason recorded himself speaking in a very high voice, then the tape was slowed down to produce the eerie, threatening voice heard on the track.

He later said they tried several voices before deciding his sounded the strangest.

Before “Echoes” became “Echoes”, Pink Floyd called it “Nothing”.

Not just once: the developing piece was divided into sections called “Nothing Part One” through “Nothing Part 36”.

The band were essentially assembling a 23-minute track from fragments with no finished song in sight.

“Atom Heart Mother” didn't have its famous title when Pink Floyd began playing it.

The breakthrough came when Ron Geesin showed the band a Times headline about a woman who had undergone heart surgery and had an atomic pacemaker fitted.

“Atom Heart Mother” suddenly had a name.

Pink Floyd's “Have a Cigar” has Roger Waters singing — but you don't hear him.

Waters found the song difficult to sing and suggested Roy Harper, who happened to be recording at EMI at the same time.

Harper stepped in and supplied the lead vocal instead.

The strange opening sound of “Echoes” began with a single piano note.

Rick Wright was playing around on a grand piano when Roger Waters suggested putting the note through a microphone and then a Leslie speaker.

That transformed an ordinary piano note into one of Pink Floyd's most recognisable sounds.

Pink Floyd's “One of These Days” contains a voice aimed at a BBC radio DJ.

The band disliked Jimmy Young's long, rambling broadcasts and sometimes played distorted fragments of his programmes before their concerts.

Nick Mason's slowed-down threat on the finished track was part of the same joke.

Hipgnosis originally had a very different idea for Animals.

One rejected concept showed a child opening his parents' bedroom door and discovering them having sex — “copulating, like animals”.

Roger Waters rejected it.

The eventual cover was his idea: a giant pig floating over Battersea Power Station.

Pink Floyd were given almost unlimited studio time while making Meddle.

Nick Mason recalled that their new contract traded a slightly reduced royalty for unlimited studio time.

At the time, he believed only the Beatles had had a similar arrangement.

“Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” really does feature Pink Floyd’s roadie making breakfast.

Alan Styles was recorded preparing cereal, bacon and eggs in Nick Mason’s kitchen.

The sounds were then incorporated into the music — including the clatter of plates and pans.

It wasn't a sound effect made by the band. It was an actual breakfast.

Pink Floyd once arrived at a concert without the music their brass section needed.

During a 1971 European tour, the score for “Atom Heart Mother” was accidentally left behind in Düsseldorf.

The second half of the concert in Münster was nearly cancelled because the brass section needed the score to perform the piece.

Imagine losing the sheet music to one of rock's most complicated live arrangements.

Before it became “The Dark Side of the Moon”, Pink Floyd had another name for one of its songs: “Religion”.

“Breathe” was originally “Travel”, while “Brain Damage” was called “Lunatic”.

These were working titles while the album was still being developed in 1972.

The finished songs eventually became almost unrecognisable from those early names.

Pink Floyd's giant pig nearly disappeared into the sky before it ever appeared on the cover of Animals.

During the second day of the Hipgnosis photo shoot at Battersea Power Station, the 40-foot inflatable pig broke free of its moorings.

The marksman hired to shoot it down hadn't been rehired that day.

The pig eventually came down in Kent.

The cover of Wish You Were Here almost began with something completely different: household objects.

Pink Floyd initially experimented with making music using objects found around the house.

They eventually abandoned the idea when they realised how much time and effort it was taking.

The album's theme of absence emerged during this period of uncertainty.

Before “Echoes” became “Echoes”, Pink Floyd didn't even know what it was.

The band developed the piece from dozens of separate musical fragments known collectively as “Nothing”.

These evolved into “Son of Nothing” and then “Return of the Son of Nothing”.

Only later did the 23-minute piece acquire its final identity as “Echoes”.

Pink Floyd once played live accompaniment to the BBC's coverage of the first Moon landing.

In July 1969, while Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, the band performed live “atmospherics” for the BBC's coverage.

It was a remarkably early meeting of Pink Floyd's experimental sound and the imagery of space that would become so central to their identity.

Pink Floyd's first concert in Japan was held at a festival where they were followed by the 1910 Fruit Gum Company.

It was the Hakone Aphrodite festival in August 1971.

Pink Floyd were the headline act, playing material from Atom Heart Mother and the still-unreleased Meddle.

They also performed “Echoes” — months before Meddle was released.

Before Pink Floyd had a record contract, Syd Barrett was already experimenting with recording techniques that would become central to their sound.

The early band recorded six tracks in 1965, including “Lucy Leave”, “Double O Bo”, “Remember Me” and “I'm a King Bee”.

They weren't released at the time.

They eventually surfaced officially 50 years later, in 2015.

Syd Barrett didn't just write psychedelic songs about imaginary worlds.

“The Scarecrow” was inspired by something much more ordinary: a scarecrow he saw while walking around the countryside near Cambridge.

Barrett turned the lonely figure into one of Pink Floyd's strangest early songs.

“Arnold Layne” was Pink Floyd's first single — and its subject wasn't entirely invented.

Syd Barrett said the song came from a real person who used to steal women's clothes from washing lines.

Barrett's mother and the mother of Roger Waters had apparently both experienced this happening.

A very strange source for Pink Floyd's first hit.

Syd Barrett's “Interstellar Overdrive” was already evolving before Pink Floyd entered a proper recording studio.

The band recorded an early version at Sound Techniques in Chelsea in January 1967.

It was an instrumental, and the studio recording was then used in the film Tonite Let's All Make Love in London.

The piece became one of the defining sounds of early Pink Floyd.

Syd Barrett's first Pink Floyd recordings weren't made at Abbey Road.

“Interstellar Overdrive” and “Nick's Boogie” were recorded at Sound Techniques in Chelsea on 11 January 1967.

It was only later that Pink Floyd began recording at EMI's Abbey Road studios.

The band's earliest studio experiments therefore happened somewhere quite different.

There is an extraordinary recording of Syd Barrett playing guitar with Pink Floyd in Stockholm in 1967.

The band performed “Reaction in G”, “Matilda Mother”, “Pow R. Toc H.”, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, “See Emily Play” and “Interstellar Overdrive”.

The concert was recorded on 10 September 1967 and was eventually officially released decades later.

“See Emily Play” wasn't just another Pink Floyd single.

It reached number six in Britain and was performed three times on Top of the Pops in 1967.

For Syd Barrett, this was the moment Pink Floyd suddenly had a genuine pop hit — while the band's experimental live reputation was still developing at the UFO.

Syd Barrett once appeared on television explaining Pink Floyd's music while sitting beside Roger Waters.

The 1967 BBC programme The Look of the Week featured the pair discussing the band before performing “Astronomy Domine” and “Pow R. Toc H.”

It is one of the clearest surviving pieces of film showing Barrett talking about Pink Floyd during his time in the band.

Rick Wright's first solo album wasn't really about sex.

Wet Dream sounds like an obvious title for a 1978 rock album, but Wright explained that “wet” referred to the sea.

He had been living in different countries and said the album was partly about longing for his real home.

Even Wright admitted he wasn't sure he'd made the right choice of title.

Rick Wright originally wanted to make Broken China an entirely instrumental album.

He said he had never been particularly comfortable with his voice and initially had no intention of singing.

Then the subject of the album became much more personal, and the music evolved around depression.

It became Wright's most autobiographical solo record.

Rick Wright said one of the things he loved about Pink Floyd's earliest years was that nobody knew what they were supposed to be doing.

Looking back at the UFO and Roadhouse period, he remembered the freedom of making music that record companies simply didn't understand.

For Wright, that uncertainty was part of the attraction.

Rick Wright's “Sysyphus” was partly an experiment in what the Mellotron could do.

He used it not simply for orchestral sounds, but for special effects and for string and bass parts.

He also played organ, piano, vibraphone, guitar and gong on the piece.

Wright later said the experiment had genuinely helped him creatively.

Rick Wright had a surprisingly strong connection with Greece.

He spent extended periods there while working on Wet Dream, and some of the album's songs were inspired by a village where he had originally gone on holiday.

By 1978, he described that place as his second home.

The sea became a recurring theme in the album.

Rick Wright once said that his keyboards were actually less obvious in Pink Floyd's sound than people might think.

In a 1979 interview, he argued that David Gilmour's guitar was much more immediately recognisable because it was so prominent in the Floyd sound.

Wright believed his own musical identity became easier to hear on his solo records precisely because he was working with different musicians.

Rick Wright didn't think Wet Dream was a finished statement.

Nearly twenty years later, he said he could hear ways he would have improved it — particularly the laid-back, jazz-influenced approach.

Yet he also said he appreciated that people still liked the album.

Wright's relationship with his own first solo record was more complicated than its later cult reputation suggests.