The 20 best Pink Floyd songs

‘Apples and Oranges’

Cambridge rockers Pink Floyd were fronted by Syd Barrett, who served as the band’s in-house songwriter. From their humble beginnings as a psychedelic lo-fi outfit, the band snowballed into something grander, resembling something of a Progressive outfit.

By the time they began writing elegies about the pull of the moon, Barrett had left the band, for a quieter, more contemplative lifestyle. A natural wordsmith, Barrett directly inspired David Bowie and Blur.

‘Apples and Oranges’ is one of his more charming compositions, and also dispels the rumour that his guitar skills weren’t as sharp as David Gilmour’s. The riff that cements the tune soars.

‘Corporal Clegg’

Although Barrett wrote the first few singles, his bandmates were finding him harder and harder to work with. Keyboardist Richard Wright started composing in his absence, but bassist Roger Waters – a self-confessed workaholic – proved a worthier substitute.

In what would become a common theme in his work, Waters reminds listeners of the devastation that the Second World War inflicted on Britain. Waters came from a generation robbed of their fathers, and the sadness soaks into ‘Corporal Clegg’.

Yet there is levity, as evinced by the cooing of a kazoo. Bandmates Gilmour and Wright sing this one, leaving Waters to tackle the harmony vocals. Even more surprisingly, drummer Nick Mason contributed to the vocals, making it one of the few songs to feature the four members of the classic lineup singing together.

‘Astronomoy Domine’

From the end of the record back to the beginning. ‘Astronomy Domine’, the first track to be featured on Pink Floyd’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn it became one of the band’s seminal moments on their discography.

In what was initially categorised as psychedelic rock, the song’s legacy is best remembered as Pink Floyd’s first step in the direction of space rock and opens with the sound of their manager, Peter Jenner, reading the names of planets, stars, and galaxies.

It saw the burgeoning talent of Barrett be given the proper space and opportunity to really let loose.

‘Cymballine’

Embarrassed by his voice, Waters regularly deferred to Gilmour during the early part of their career. Still, this tune – written as part of a soundtrack project – might have suited the bassist’s mellifluous tones.

That said, Gilmour acquits himself nicely to the tune, flitting from a ghostly falsetto into something more anthemic during the chorus. Behind him comes Wright’s jaunty, jangly piano, pirouetting across his instrument, like a drunken lover looking for his coins to procure one final drink.

Waters is also deserving of praise. He’s rarely given credit for his bass playing, but ‘Cymbaline’ features a riff that could only be described as funk-driven. In many ways, this track proves the blueprint for the universally adored ‘Money.’

‘Green is the Colour’

This album sees a significant moment for the group. As the band began to experience life without their frontman, Syd Barrett, and also their trusted producer, Norman Smith, More was the record that showed there was light at the end of the tunnel.

The LP is by no means a vintage piece of their back catalogue, but More is a reminder of the difficulties the band both faced and overcame to produce some of the finest albums of all time. Waters is at the helm of songwriting, and Gilmour takes on all the vocals—clearly, the band were finding their feet, but it does leave a difficult task of picking our favourite song from the tracklisting.

Created as a soundtrack for the film, picking out a favourite song is no mean feat, as they’re all intended to be played alongside one another. However, there’s something pure about ‘Green Is The Colour’, and it has to take the accolade.

‘Breathe’

Gilmour is arguably at his peak on the criminally underrated ‘Breathe’, bringing a kind of hazy distance that only the most ethereal of rock stars can hold in their esteem.

Written alongside Roger Waters and Richard Wright, Gilmour’s vocals are wonderful, but it is his steel guitar that really takes us to a new dimension. As those lilting riffs land beautifully next to Wright’s keyboards, Gilmour expels lyrics like a breath for fresh air and only enhances the song’s conception. Of course, the only real way to listen to this album is by pressing play and not stopping until the LP finishes. However, if you don’t have the time, ‘Breathe’ is the perfect place to begin.

‘Not Now John’

Written by Gilmour and Waters with Gilmour taking lead vocal, a song taken from The Final Cut is being given the respect it deserves as we put up ‘Not Now John’ as one of the guitarist’s best songs. The album in question was positioned more clearly as a Roger Waters solo record until this song.

However, like anything Gilmour did, the song was punctuated with enough talent to draw attention away from the rest of the LP. Rather than his guitar, it is Gilmour’s vocals that reign supreme on this effort. Powerful and pulsating, the song lands as one of the ‘what if’ moments of Floyd’s career.

Following Roger Waters’ departure from the band, they never saw fit to play it live. What could’ve been?

‘See Emily Play’

Perhaps the band’s most famous song from the time came shortly after they signed their major record deal with EMI. It was a track that made the most out of studio technology of the time and hinted that Pink Floyd wasn’t your everyday rock band.

Norman Smith, the producer of the record, had been working alongside George Martin on Beatles’ recording sessions and was able to compute Floyd’s vision. Wright’s keyboard is engaging but it’s Barrett’s lyrics that really grabbed the attention of the swinging London set.

It saw the group make their way onto Top of the Pops and gather up a good deal of airplay. It’s arguably the beginning of Floyd’s journey to the top.

‘Learning to Fly’

Waters left Pink Floyd in the mid-1980s, certain that the band would crumble without him. Gilmour had other ideas, however, and convinced Mason and Wright to work with him on A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Understanding that he lacked Waters’ songwriting abilities, Gilmour headhunted a number of outside writers (10cc keyboardist Eric Stewart among them) to help craft the record.

Unsurprisingly, the album sounded unfocused and certainly derivative, capturing many of the cliches that drowned audiences in the late ’80s. But for the choppy riff alone, ‘Learning to Fly’ is worth listening to, and the song carries a happy message. In times of trial, it’s important to soldier on and re-discover your wings. A comment about Waters, perhaps?

‘High Hopes’

By 1994, Gilmour had found a more appropriate substitute: his wife, Polly Samson. Understanding his roots, Samson wrote a song littered with imagery of green, agrarian countryside, changing before Gilmour’s ageing eyes.

Better still, the song was accompanied by a giddily inventive video, struck in the heart of the English countryside. Surrounded by great beauty, Gilmour had been spurned on into musicianship, hoping for a sign that could take him to greater heights.

And here it arrives: an eight-minute ode to the city that spawned Monty Python, W.H. Jude and Pink Floyd, culminating in one of Gilmour’s steeliest solos. The song remains a mainstay in Gilmour’s solo career, and he remains resolute that Pink Floyd should not reunite.

Listening to this tune, I can’t blame him. It’s as if he was disconnecting himself from the act he had spent 25 years steering, before thrusting himself into the endless river where new possibilities awaited him.

‘Money’

Probably the most instantly recognisable track on The Dark Side of the Moon is ‘Money’. The blues-heavy composition ostensibly earths the otherwise cosmic album to its roots in rock convention. It does so in the most pleasing way; the cash machine sounds at the beginning meet the cheeky bassline that leads toward the crashing convergence of Wright’s keys and Gilmour’s guitar.

The song is the most upbeat on the album and one of the most commercially accessible. The track was ironically the most commercially successful of the two singles released from the album as it looked to take a jab at the pitfalls of materialism and consumer capitalism.

‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’

The band’s sophomore album only went further in its exploration of sound. Though Pink Floyd would soon achieve mainstream success, they came straight out of leftfield for their first few attempts at a full-length record. However, one of the LP’s most pertinent moments was undoubtedly one of the most easily digested songs on the album: ‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’.

A favourite for us and drummer Nick Mason who, when asked for his favourite Floyd number, replied: “I usually cite ‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ as my favourite Pink Floyd song.” That’s because the track is “fun to play, and has interesting dynamics.” Mason and the band were sincerely influenced by jazz, and this is one song where that inspiration is easy to see.

The now-iconic use of mallets on the drum solo in this Roger Waters-penned tune was lifted straight from jazz. “I know exactly where it came from in terms of the drum part, which was Chico Hamilton playing in a film called Jazz On A Summer’s Day,” Mason remembers. “He does a drum solo played with mallets. It’s beautiful, and so different to any other drum solo.” The song remains a shining moment for Pink Floyd.

‘Dogs’

By Animals, Waters’ creative hold on the band was paramount, and he wrote the group’s tenth album virtually alone. Gilmour was awarded a co-writing credit on ‘Dogs’, and deservedly so; his plunging riff drives the song along.

Starting off as a blues number called ‘You’ve Got To Be Crazy’, the song soon evolved into a 17-minute monster, featuring Gilmour on lead vocals. Following a blinding succession of flourishes, Waters emerges on the microphone, closing the tune with tremendous gusto and menace.

Behind the scenes, tensions were rising, culminating in The Wall, a magnificent but uncompromising double album that saw Wright leave the band at the bassist’s insistence. By the time they recorded album number 12, Pink Floyd proved a thinly veiled pseudonym for Waters.

‘Us and Them’

‘Us and Them’ appears on the record as the pinnacle of its power. After a gentle start with shimmering keys and guitar sections, the whole band converge as Nick Mason’s drums surge alongside Dick Parry’s saxophone into the powerful choruses filled with considered lyrics from Waters and fantastic vocals from Gilmour.

This track gathers all of the threads shown in the rest of the album together to create a beautiful tapestry where all of the band members are seen at their best. 

Not many bands are able to transmit this feeling through an album track. Most have to wait for explosive singles to find themselves on the end of such worthy praise, but that was the difference between Pink Floyd and most bands.

‘The Great Gig in the Sky’

This one divides people: For some, it’s an aesthetic representation of carnal female desires, and for others, it’s just plain old Floydian wank.

What it does boast is a soaring performance from Clare Torry, searing through the speakers with a vibrancy that could only have arisen from intense concentration. Purportedly a two take job, the band queried whether or not they should use the performance, before bowing down to the urgency of the tune.

“It’s a great chord sequence,” Waters boasted. “The Great Gig in the Sky” and the piano part on “Us and Them,” in my view, are the best things that Rick did – they’re both really beautiful. And Alan [Parsons] suggested Clare Torry. I’ve no idea whose idea it was to have someone wailing on it. Clare came into the studio one day, and we said, ‘There’s no lyrics. It’s about dying – have a bit of a sing on that, girl’. I think she only did one take. And we all said, ‘Wow, that’s done. Here’s your 60 quid’.”

‘Echoes’

Alongside ‘Shine On, You Crazy Diamond’, this is the band’s masterpiece as a progressive rock band. Coasting at a leisurely 23 minutes, the song luxuriates in demonstrating the prowess of the band.

Mason has never sounded tighter, Waters has rarely sounded so creative, and Wright sings as if his life and soul depend on it. Indeed, the song could well be Wright’s defining moment with the group, which might explain why his bandmates have refrained from performing it since his death.

For Gilmour in particular, no one else should sing the tune but Wright. “There’s something that’s specifically so individual about the way that Rick and I play in that,” he admitted, “That you can’t get someone to learn it and do it just like that.”

‘Time’

The beginning of ‘Time’ sets the precedent of anxiety with its ticking clocks building in intensity before the alarm bells begin to ring.

By the time they were recording The Dark Side of the Moon, the boys weren’t boys anymore. In their late 20s, the album’s erudite conceptual musings appeared to convey the group’s anxieties of growing older and gaining maturity.

Waters once explained that ‘Time’ came to him as he realised that he was well and truly in the thick of life. He was no longer preparing for the rest of his life, he was in it, living and breathing toward an inevitable end. The haunting existential crisis in the song is beautifully enshrined in a captivating sonic odyssey highlighted by a classic Gilmour solo. Prog-rock didn’t get much better than this.

‘Wish You Were Here’

It’s common knowledge that Waters and Gilmour aren’t the chummiest of men. They seem intent on raking each other in public, decades after they finished working in a band together.

But I have no doubt that they recognise the strengths in each other, and ‘Wish You Were Here’ is the representation of this collaboration, incorporating Waters’ mournful lyric against Gilmour’s dynamic arpeggio.

Given the separation from his wife, the words were too probably too painful for Waters to perform, but Gilmour (arguably the most accomplished singer in the band) handles them with the tact and the integrity they deserve.

‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’

If you wanted an introduction to the man Roger Waters would become after he left Pink Floyd, then we should direct you to Wish You Were Here, the album which saw Waters lay down his disinterest with fame, once and for all. Perhaps working as a fable for the pitfalls of fame, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ sees Waters discuss his friend Syd Barrett.

The track is poignantly balanced and arguably shows Waters off at one of the high moments of his entire career, perfectly capturing his constant battle between poetic power and pulsing precision.

The album itself is a tribute to Barrett, but this song, in particular, brings the story of Barrett to the fore. A nine-part epic, it not only looked at the band’s past but offered a vision of their future: Roger Waters commanding searing songs and creating gigantic musical landscapes.

‘Comfortably Numb’

There isn’t much about ‘Comfortably Numb’, the song which was founded on an argument between Waters and Gilmour, that Floyd fans won’t know. It’s quite simply their Magnus Opus.

While on record, it ranks as one of the finest moments of The Wall; it was performing the song live that the vision of the track truly came to life. Gilmour’s solo was front and centre. During a performance, Roger Waters arrives at the stage bathed in the spotlight before the end of the opening verse as it fades out. Next thing you know, the chorus begins from David Gilmour placed around 30 feet up in the air with lights shining from behind him on to the audience; he begins his career-defining solo. As that ends and the audience erupts with praise, the lights go out, and we’re directed back to Waters.

Another similar interchange begins with the second verse as Gilmour again takes his place at the top of the wall. Another starring solo sees the crowd open-mouthed in admiration for the guitarist as he wails on his guitar. It’s a typification of how Floyd transferred their mammoth creativity into both the studio and the live show. Arguably the band’s most famous song, it’s hard to fight its position as our favourite.