The Pink Floyd songs not sung by members of the band
Earning their stripes as the band at the forefront of 1960s psychedelia and early prog rock, Pink Floyd were a band who were never afraid to push the envelope. Over the course of their long and illustrious career, the group has featured a variety of touring members and session musicians, but the backbone of the band remained the same, for the most part. Despite this, Pink Floyd have released a few tracks over the years that are sung by non-members.
The biggest change to occur within the lineup timeline of Pink Floyd was undoubtedly the departure of Syd Barrett. Often cited as the most interesting part of the early group, Barrett’s departure split fans of Floyd. Even today, many fans will only listen to the Barrett-era of Floyd, favouring the psychedelic influence of the guitarist over his replacement, David Gilmour.
Despite the controversial decision to continue without Barrett, with Roger Waters moving to the forefront of the group, the new incarnation of Floyd was the one to achieve mainstream international success. Pink Floyd quickly became one of the biggest rock groups in the world, particularly after the release of 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The album cemented Pink Floyd as being the poster band of the progressive rock movement, and it also gave the band their first track to feature a guest vocalist as its lead.
Making up the final track on the first side of Dark Side of the Moon, ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ began life as an instrumental organ track created by Richard Wright. For the album version of the song, the band wanted to recruit a female vocalist to “wail” over the track, and so Clare Torry was recruited. Working predominantly as a session musician, Torry was noted for her covers of pop songs on the Top of the Pops compilations. After three takes of improvised vocals over ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, the 25-year-old was paid only £30 for her work. In fact, the singer only found out she had made it to the final cut of the album after buying a copy herself.
The next Floyd track to feature a guest vocalist is thankfully less exploitative. ‘Have a Cigar’, taken from the hugely successful album Wish You Were Here, featured lead vocals from folk rock singer Roy Harper. Neither Waters nor Gilmour were happy with their own vocal performance on the track, which tackled Waters’ feelings of animosity towards the music industry, though it was later argued that Gilmour was apprehensive about singing vocals on the track as he did not agree with the sentiment of Waters’ lyrics. Harper, who was recording his album HQ at Abbey Road Studios at the same time Floyd was making Wish You Were Here, was brought on board for the song as repayment for Gilmour supplying him with some guitar riffs. While the track remains one of the stand-outs on the record, Waters has since said that he does not like Harper’s version of the song, wishing it had come across “more vulnerable and less cynical”.
For the vast majority of Pink Floyd’s recording career, those were the only two tracks to feature guest vocalists as their main voice. That was until 2022, when Gilmour and Nick Mason reformed the group to release ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up!’. Inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gilmour wrote the track along with Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk. With Waters leaving the band in the 1980s, after the release of The Final Cut, he was not involved in the making of this song and was openly critical about its content, saying that it “lacked humanity”.
While these three tracks might not make up the greatest hits of Pink Floyd, they each form interesting signifiers of how the band’s sound changed as their discography progressed. It is also fairly refreshing to hear the influence of other musicians outside the tumultuous line-up of Floyd. It seems unlikely fans will be treated to any further material from the band, with ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up!’ dubbed an “one off” by Gilmour, nothing ever seems set in stone when it comes to the prog rock pioneers.
