Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band who was also from Cambridge, was brought in as a fifth member. Dependent upon Barrett for most of their vision and material, the rest of the group was nevertheless finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio. An American tour had to be cut short when he was barely able to function at all, let alone play the pop star game. Barrett would go catatonic on-stage, playing music that had little to do with the material, or not playing at all. Around mid-1967, the prodigy began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. The reason Pink Floyd never made a similar album was that Piper was the only one to be recorded under Barrett's leadership. The record was not only like no other at the time it was like no other that Pink Floyd would make, colored as it was by a vision that was far more humorous, pop-friendly, and lighthearted than those of their subsequent epics. Dominated almost wholly by Barrett's songs, the album was a charming fun house of driving, mysterious rockers ('Lucifer Sam') odd character sketches ('The Gnome') childhood flashbacks ('Bike,' 'Matilda Mother') and freakier pieces with lengthy instrumental passages ('Astronomy Domine,' 'Interstellar Overdrive,' 'Pow R Toch') that mapped out their fascination with space travel. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, also released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. The follow-up, the kaleidoscopic 'See Emily Play,' made the Top Ten. The group landed a recording contract with EMI in early 1967 and made the Top 20 with a brilliant debut single, 'Arnold Layne,' a sympathetic, comic vignette about a transvestite.

Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements (particularly in the haunting guitar and celestial organ licks) with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, childlike wonder. In 1966, they began to pick up a following in the London underground on-stage, they began to incorporate light shows to add to the psychedelic effect. Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages incorporating feedback electronic screeches, and unusual, eerie sounds created by loud amplification, reverb, and such tricks as sliding ball bearings up and down guitar strings. And at first, Pink Floyd were much more conventional than the act into which they would evolve, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that was so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands. The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). The Cambridge native shared the stage with Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), and Nick Mason (drums). Soon after they first began playing together in the mid-'60s, they fell firmly under the leadership of lead guitarist Syd Barrett, the gifted genius who would write and sing most of their early material. While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandiose concept albums of the '70s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band. Their latter-day staleness cannot disguise the fact that, for the first decade or so of their existence, they were one of the most innovative groups around, in concert and (especially) in the studio.

After that time, they were little more than a dinosaur act, capable of filling stadiums and topping the charts, but offering little more than a spectacular re-creation of their most successful formulas. Despite their astral image, the group was brought down to earth in the '80s by decidedly mundane power struggles over leadership and, ultimately, ownership of the band's very name. At the same time they wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality in both sound and words. Since the mid-'60s, their music relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects to push pop formats to their outer limits.

Pink Floyd is the premier space rock band.

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