When David Gilmour ordered the four prog-rock groups he hated the most
Among the much-maligned prog chapter of rock’s tapestry, Pink Floyd have always sat at the genre’s centre with mountainous stature.
The fact is, Pink Floyd were always diffident about the label. Burnished in the same psychedelic underground as their proggy peers, the UFO Club house band under original frontman Syd Barrett’s psychonaut captaincy flexed a rawer garage attack around the Anglo-eccentric surrealism that coated their frontman’s lyrical reportage.
After Barrett’s much mythologised departure from the band, a string of half-interesting records boasted the odd flash of brilliance until seriously hitting their stride with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Kicking off their golden album run, Pink Floyd would confidently march across the decade, conjuring heady space-rock marvels showered with critical acclaim and serious commercial success. To this day, Pink Floyd’s landmark eighth LP stands as the fourth-largest-selling album of all time, with over 45 million reported unit sales.
Pink Floyd’s X-factor was what saw them coast through punk unscathed. By the 1970s’ close, many of their peers had lapsed into serious career deadends during the new wave era, grand conceptual arcs and ambitious live theatre deemed terminally uncool by a new generation looking back to rock and roll’s plugged-in big bang 20 years earlier to reignite music’s burning vitality.
Pink Floyd were never about hectic compositional fuss or fantastical narrative indulgences. However, they favoured dark explorations of the human condition and cosmic jazz immersions, making sense to the street-level anguish fuelling punk’s explosive upend.
The fraught world of prog was a topic put to Pink Floyd’s soaring guitarist, David Gilmour. Having always orbited the band since their inception, but joining officially for 1968’s A Saucerful of Secrets, Gilmour always cut a distinct mark during the prog era, no peacocking showboating or million-noted fretwork, just exquisite solos that would occasionally puncture terse but expressive and emotionally stirring harmonies.
More likely to name-check the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the blues canon as key influences, Gilmour didn’t struggle too hard to reel off his most hated prog groups in order. “Probably Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis and King Crimson in that order,” Gilmour wryly told Q in 1999. “Oh God, what am I saying? Funnily enough, I don’t really like pop groups very much…”
Such an off-the-cuff list was likely tongue in cheek. Gilmour’s always had nice things to say about Yes guitarist Steve Howe, but King Crimson’s prized place as ‘least hated’ probably aligns with his taste, sharing far greater proximity to Robert Fripp’s unorthodox guitar technique over the remaining prog heavyweights. All in good jest, however, Gilmour is far too affable a bloke to ever excoriate the aforementioned “pop” groups with too great a venom.
Whatever the reality, Howe has never been coy about his feelings toward Gilmour’s guitar chops. “Pink Floyd really is one of the great bands of Rock and Roll,” he once stated. “Because they were there then, in the early days with Syd, they’re a great band. They’re still playing great music, and I love David Gilmour’s guitar work; it’s so much his personality.”
