The Floyd eh? Scourge of punks everywhere. Purveyors of doom-laden, overlong pretentio-bollocks and bringers of Prog Rock ‘concept’ albums to the masses. Middle-class Cambridge boys turned collectors of sports cars. A faceless enormo-beast resident in stadiums teeming with stoners and hippies ‘tripping’ to icily-executed laser displays, diatribes against the ‘machine’ or ‘thought control’, and endless symphonies with whale-song in the middle, probably called something like ‘Echoes’.

True, true, all true. And the problem is…?

That Pink Floyd broke boundary after boundary is undeniable. ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (1968) – equal parts whimsy and terror – created the blueprint for every discordant, leftfield ‘freak-out’ heard since, probably the reason why, in indie circles, Syd Barrett’s Floyd remains a set text. Then Syd went schizo and fucked off, leaving the others to flounder in a series of proggy embarrassments, redeemed only by the mellifluous ‘Meddle’ (1971). The sudden, startling success of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (1973), however, seems like the musical equivalent of finding a grand behind the sofa. Watch ‘Live at Pompeii’ and see them casually invent both techno and Sigur Ros, the jammy bastards.

By the end of the decade they’d evolved into the world’s most depressing band. The epic misanthropy of ‘The Wall’ (1979) was studded with numerous fuck-joe-public gestures, like the building of an actual giant wall between the stage and the audience, behind which the Floyd played. Probably. Over the next two decades they descended into bitter, internecine warfare and a legal fight for the Pink Floyd brand. But for a long while their story had been one of thrilling musical invention.

At the apex of this career stands ‘Wish You Were Here’ (1975). Critics routinely slated Floyd for being emotionless, technophile robots (even though nobody minded when it was Kraftwerk). The dolts clearly hadn’t listened to this album. Don’t get me wrong, songs like ‘Have a Cigar’ and ‘Welcome to the Machine’ are as obvious and dreary as those capitalist-baiting titles suggest. Elsewhere their heart is broken. The album’s title-track is still the only Floyd song you’ll hear sung by the captain of the school football team trying to show his ‘sensitive’ side to the girlies. Even this is overshadowed, however, by the triumph of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ – not only the most beautiful thing the Floyd ever wrote, but the most beautiful thing anyone ever wrote.

Opening like some giant, choral dawn, ‘Shine On’ turns into twenty minutes of sonic morphine. A tribute to Syd Barrett – their lost genius and childhood pal, whom none of them had spoken to in years – the Floyd finally reconnected with him, and in doing so transcended him. ‘Remember when you were young,’ sings Waters, ‘You shone like the sun / Now there’s a look in your eyes / like black holes in the sky.’ This most painful of lyrics is matched by Gilmour’s slow, plangent guitar-playing, in which guilt seeps from every note. The Floyd hadn’t forgotten that their success not only caused Barrett to retreat into madness, but forced them to dump him when he became an encumbrance. This was to be their catharsis.

At the height of Floyd’s fame, struggling themselves to cope with the colossal success of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, Waters aches for Barrett’s lost innocence. Syd is their muse, the song’s subject, but also a symbol of a larger malaise. Waters looks around and sees the death of the Sixties dream – a dream which the free-form early Floyd had embraced – amongst the mindless chatter of record-company execs and the sterility of sales figures. The business which had help drive Barrett mad had swollen into a monster by the Seventies, and Waters was seething. It was only to get worse. He and Gilmour would soon be enemies in a battle for possession of Pink Floyd, but here they are in absolute sympathy with each other, operating through each other, united in their grief. Gilmour’s playing and Waters’ writing seem to meld, psychically, with Barrett’s departed spirit, forming some kind of weird uber-Floyd. Even keyboard-player Rick Wright is at the peak of his game, laying slabs of raw melancholy beneath the guitar. ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, then, is the Floyd most utterly of itself – Floyd in excelsis – its soul preserved and shimmering in the moment before Waters increasingly bitter approach to both the world and his band-mates tore it all to pieces. ‘Shine On’ is an open wound of a song: understated, sad, but somehow uplifting, exhorting Barrett to clamber back out from his madness and reconnect with the world. He never did, of course, dying last year to leave a tiny but remarkable body of work. As such, ‘Shine On’ not only pays tribute to Barrett’s legacy but defines it, in those four tolling notes of Gilmour’s guitar and in Waters bleeding lyrics: ‘Come on you raver, you seer of visions / Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner…and shine!’ ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’? You’re a heartless bastard, Johnny Rotten, you really are.

Alan Bissett was born in Falkirk in 1975. He is the author of two novels: Boyracers (Polygon, 2001) and The Incredible Adam Spark (Headline Review, 2005). He also edited the anthology Damage Land: New Scottish Gothic Fiction. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, including Chapman, Product and The Hope that Kills Us: an anthology of Scottish Football Fiction. In 2000 he was shortlisted for the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story prize. He has a BA (Hons) and MLitt in English from the University of Stirling, and taught English in secondary schools before becoming a novelist. A former lecturer in creative writing at the University of Leeds, he is currently tutor on the MPhil in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. To read Alan’s story ‘Honey I’m Still Free’ on the showcase section of this site, click here

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.