It may have all started with Syd Barrett, but the persistence and creativity of Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour meant that Pink Floyd went from one of England's top underground psychedelic bands to one of the biggest rock bands on the planet - all thanks to an album wondering if there really was a dark side of the moon. Pink Floyd in the 1970s: Decades focuses on the band throughout the 1970s - undoubtedly the peak of their success - from the weird brilliance of Atom Heart Mother to the epic, autobiographical storytelling of The Wall. In between, the band achieved tremendous success with Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, yet struggled to come to terms with their place in the pantheon of rock music on Wish You Were Here and Animals. The decade of Pink Floyd's greatest successes was mired in shifting musical trends, a balance in power from a democratic equality to one man calling most of the shots, and the large, looming spectre of their erstwhile founder guiding some of the greatest songs and albums of all time. The book explores the music, the defining moments, and the personality clashes that very nearly destroyed the band.

Featuring interviews with and articles on each of the biggest artists of the decade, Uncut History of Rock: The 1970s takes the reader on a journey through the decade, not only covering the music and how it was made, but the people behind it - and what made them. With hundreds of incredible photographs as well as iconic album covers and posters, this book allows you to re-live the greatest decade of music the world has ever seen in all its glory.

With their early experiments in psychedelic rock music in the 1960s, and their epic recordings of the 1970s and '80s, Pink Floyd became one of the most influential and recognizable rock bands in history. As "The Pink Floyd Sound," the band created sound and light shows that defined psychedelia in England and inspired similar movements in the Jefferson Airplane's San Francisco and Andy Warhol's New York City. The band's subsequent recordings forged rock music's connections to orchestral music, literature, and philosophy. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall" ignored pop music's ordinary topics to focus on themes such as madness, existential despair, brutality, alienation, and socially induced psychosis. They also became some of the best-selling recordings of all time. In this collection of essays, sixteen scholars expert in various branches of philosophy set the controls for the heart of the sun to critically examine the themes, concepts, and problems—usually encountered in the pages of Heidegger, Foucault, Sartre, or Orwell—that animate and inspire Pink Floyd's music. These include the meaning of existence, the individual's place in society, the interactions of knowledge and power in education, the contradictions of art and commerce, and the blurry line—the tragic line, in the case of Floyd early member Syd Barrett (died in 2006)—between genius and madness. Having dominated pop music for nearly four decades, Pink Floyd's dynamic and controversial history additionally opens the way for these authors to explore controversies about intellectual property, the nature of authorship, and whether wholes—especially in the case of rock bands—are more than the sums of their parts.

The endurance of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon on the Billboard Top 100 Chart is legendary, and its continuing sales and ongoing radio airplay ensure its inclusion on almost every conceivable list of rock's greatest albums. This collection of essays provides indispensable studies of the monumental 1973 album from a variety of musical, cultural, literary and social perspectives. The development and change of the songs is considered closely, from the earliest recordings through to the live, filmed performance at London's Earls Court in 1994. The band became almost synonymous with audio-visual innovations, and the performances of the album at live shows were spectacular moments of mass-culture although Roger Waters himself spoke out against such mass spectacles. The band's stage performances of the album serve to illustrate the multifaceted and complicated relationship between modern culture and technology. The album is therefore placed within the context of developments in late 1960s/early 1970s popular music, with particular focus on the use of a variety of segues between tracks which give the album a multidimensional unity that is lacking in Pink Floyd's later concept albums. Beginning with 'Breathe' and culminating in 'Eclipse', a tonal and motivic coherence unifies the structure of this modern song cycle. The album is also considered in the light of modern day 'tribute' bands, with a discussion of the social groups who have the strongest response to the music being elaborated alongside the status of mediated representations and their relation to the 'real' Pink Floyd.

Unless you lived through the 1970s, it seems impossible to understand it at all. Drug delirium, groovy fashion, religious cults, mega corporations, glitzy glam, hard rock, global unrest—from our 2018 perspective, the seventies are often remembered as a bizarre blur of bohemianism and disco. With Pick Up the Pieces, John Corbett transports us back in time to this thrillingly tumultuous era through a playful exploration of its music. Song by song, album by album, he draws our imaginations back into one of the wildest decades in history. Rock. Disco. Pop. Soul. Jazz. Folk. Funk. The music scene of the 1970s was as varied as it was exhilarating, but the decade’s diversity of sound has never been captured in one book before now. Pick Up the Pieces gives a panoramic view of the era’s music and culture through seventy-eight essays that allow readers to dip in and out of the decade at random or immerse themselves completely in Corbett’s chronological journey. An inviting mix of skilled music criticism and cultural observation, Pick Up the Pieces is also a coming-of-age story, tracking the author’s absorption in music as he grows from age seven to seventeen. Along with entertaining personal observations and stories, Corbett includes little-known insights into musicians from Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, James Brown, and Fleetwood Mac to the Residents, Devo, Gal Costa, and Julius Hemphill. A master DJ on the page, Corbett takes us through the curated playlist that is Pick Up the Pieces with captivating melody of language and powerful enthusiasm for the era. This funny, energetic book will have readers longing nostalgically for a decade long past.

The Flaming Cow offers a rare insight into the brilliant but often fraught collaboration between Pink Floyd and composer Ron Geesin, the result of which became known as Atom Heart Mother – the Floyd’s first UK number one album. From the time drummer Nick Mason visited Geesin’s damp basement flat in Notting Hill, to the last game of golf between bassist Roger Waters and Geesin, this book is an unflinching account about how one of Pink Floyd’s most celebrated compositions came to life. Alongside unpublished photographs from the Abbey Road recording sessions (the only ones taken) and the subsequent performances in London and Paris, Geesin goes on to describe how the title was chosen, why he was not credited on the record, how he left Hyde Park in tears, and why the group did not much like the work. The Flaming Cow rose again, firstly in France, then in London in 2008. After 40 years Atom Heart Mother remains a much-loved record, and The Flaming Cow explores its new-found cult status that has led to it being studied for the French Baccalauréat.

An authentic and compelling story of the group that gave alternative London its first real soundtrack and launched on the rock world a radical combination of music, light shows and pyrotechnic stage effects.A revealing diary of Pink Floyd's daily routine, from their roots in Cambridge to cult status in Sixties London. Author Barry Miles saw the band play when they were still called The Pink Floyd Sound and he wrote the first ever article about them for a New York underground newspaper in 1966. He also knew band members socially, witnessed the rapid decline of Syd Barrett and became actively involved in setting up some of Floyd’s major gigs.Barry Miles is an acclaimed music writer and expert on 'Beat' poetry and poets. A founder of the Indica bookshop and gallery in the Sixties, he went on to launch International Times and write for NME. He ghost-wrote Many Years From Now, Paul McCartney's autobiography and has written books on The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa.