PINK FLOYD – LIVE IN NYC 1977

Pink Floyd were an English rock band formed in London in 1965. Gaining a following as a psychedelic pop group, they were distinguished for their extended compositions, sonic experimentation, philosophical lyrics and elaborate live shows, and became a leading band of the progressive rock genre. They are one of the most commercially successful and influential bands in popular music history. Pink Floyd were founded by students Syd Barrett (guitar, lead vocals), Nick Mason (drums), Roger Waters (bass guitar, vocals), and Richard Wright (keyboards, vocals).
Under Barrett’s leadership, they released two charting singles and a successful debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). Guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour joined in December 1967; Barrett left in April 1968 due to deteriorating mental health.

Waters became the primary lyricist and thematic leader, devising the concepts behind the albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and The Final Cut (1983). The band also composed several film scores.

Following personal tensions, Wright left Pink Floyd in 1979, followed by Waters in 1985. Gilmour and Mason continued as Pink Floyd, rejoined later by Wright.
The three produced two more albums—A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994)—and toured both albums before entering a long period of inactivity.
In 2005, all but Barrett reunited for a one-off performance at the global awareness event Live 8. Barrett died in 2006, and Wright in 2008.
The last Pink Floyd studio album, The Endless River (2014), was based on unreleased material from the Division Bell recording sessions.
Pink Floyd were one of the first British psychedelia groups, and are credited with influencing genres such as progressive rock and ambient music.
Four albums topped US or UK record charts; the songs “See Emily Play” (1967) and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (1979) were their only top 10 singles in either territory.
The band were inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005.
By 2013, they had sold more than 250 million records worldwide, with The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall two of the best-selling albums of all time.

Lyrical themes
Marked by Waters’ philosophical lyrics, Rolling Stone described Pink Floyd as “purveyors of a distinctively dark vision”.
Author Jere O’Neill Surber wrote: “their interests are truth and illusion, life and death, time and space, causality and chance, compassion and indifference.”
Waters identified empathy as a central theme in the lyrics of Pink Floyd. Author George Reisch described Meddle’s psychedelic opus, “Echoes”, as “built around the core idea of genuine communication, sympathy, and collaboration with others.”
Despite having been labelled “the gloomiest man in rock”, author Deena Weinstein described Waters as an existentialist, dismissing the unfavourable moniker as the result of misinterpretation by music critics.

Legacy
Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially successful and influential rock bands of all time. They have sold more than 250 million records worldwide, including 75 million certified units in the United States, and 37.9 million albums sold in the US since 1993.
The Sunday Times Rich List, Music Millionaires 2013 (UK), ranked Waters at number 12 with an estimated fortune of £150 million, Gilmour at number 27 with £85 million and Mason at number 37 with £50 million.

In 2004, MSNBC ranked Pink Floyd number 8 on their list of “The 10 Best Rock Bands Ever”. In the same year, Q named Pink Floyd as the biggest band of all time according to “a points system that measured sales of their biggest album, the scale of their biggest headlining show and the total number of weeks spent on the UK album chart”.
Rolling Stone ranked them number 51 on their list of “The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. VH1 ranked them number 18 in the list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”.
Colin Larkin ranked Pink Floyd number 3 in his list of the ‘Top 50 Artists of All Time’, a ranking based on the cumulative votes for each artist’s albums included in his All Time Top 1000 Albums.
In 2008, the head rock and pop critic of The Guardian, Alexis Petridis, wrote that the band occupy a unique place in progressive rock, stating, “Thirty years on, prog is still persona non grata …Only Pink Floyd—never really a prog band, their penchant for long songs and ‘concepts’ notwithstanding—are permitted into the 100 best album lists.”
Pink Floyd have won several awards. In 1981 audio engineer James Guthrie won the Grammy Award for “Best Engineered Non-Classical Album” for The Wall, and Roger Waters won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for “Best Original Song Written for a Film” in 1983 for “Another Brick in the Wall” from The Wall film.
In 1995, Pink Floyd won the Grammy for “Best Rock Instrumental Performance” for “Marooned”. In 2008, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden presented Pink Floyd with the Polar Music Prize for their contribution to modern music; Waters and Mason attended the ceremony and accepted the award.
They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame in 2010.
Pink Floyd have influenced numerous artists. David Bowie called Barrett a significant inspiration, and The Edge of U2 bought his first delay pedal after hearing the opening guitar chords to “Dogs” from Animals.

Other bands and artists who cite them as an influence include Queen, Radiohead, Steven Wilson, Marillion, Queensrÿche, Nine Inch Nails, the Orb and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Pink Floyd were an influence on the neo-progressive rock sub-genre which emerged in the 1980’s. The English rock band Mostly Autumn “fuse the music of Genesis and Pink Floyd” in their sound.
Pink Floyd were admirers of the Monty Python comedy group, and helped finance their 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 2016, Pink Floyd became the second band (after the Beatles) to feature on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail.
In May 2017, to mark the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s first single, an audio-visual exhibition, Their Mortal Remains, opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The exhibition featured analysis of cover art, conceptual props from the stage shows, and photographs from Mason’s personal archive. It was extended for two weeks beyond its planned closing date of 1 October.