Pink Floyd: The band that Pete Townshend ditched The Who to see
At the dawn of the 1960s, the traditional rock show was reasonably tame. Even though acts like The Beatles had started to ignite a frenzy in audiences across the world with their fantastic material, it took The Who to take things up a notch, with Pete Townshend creating war onstage whenever he strapped on his guitar, usually ending every show by smashing one of his guitars to pieces in front of the crowd. While the band’s live shows were unrivalled, there was one group that was doing it better than anyone else in Townshend’s mind.
Then again, The Who didn’t initially want to put together one of the biggest shows of the time. When working on their first gigs, Townshend had the idea of smashing his guitar when he accidentally broke it when it went through a wall at one of his shows, getting an enormous reaction when he eventually put the instrument out of its misery.
When working on the beginnings of his stage repartee, Townshend would even take a few moves from the artists he had seen before him, adopting a move from Keith Richards to create his trademark windmill arm onstage. While The Who may have been an assault on the sense during their time together, Pink Floyd was hard at work paving the way for the future of rock and roll.
While Floyd may not have been the first progressive rock band, Syd Barrett was transfixed by the idea of taking music to places it had never been before. With the release of their debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the band created a psychedelic tapestry of sound that they would never equal again, with Barrett slowly losing his mind when going in to cut the next album, A Saucerful of Secrets.
Although the group could deliver their material in the studio, it was nothing compared to the massive shows they would put on live. Throughout the club scene, Floyd would create lavish visuals that made the audience feel like they were being transported into outer space, featuring various flashing lights that would leave the listener desensitised whenever the music came on.
When talking about the group’s ability to put on a live show, Townshend would later say that he would happily abandon his act in favour of watching Pink Floyd perform, saying, “A Pink Floyd gig is the only reason I ever missed a Who show, apart from car crashes or serious illness. On January 20th, 1967, I skipped a Who gig in Morecambe to take the famous Eric Clapton to see this guy Syd Barrett play guitar with Pink Floyd. On another occasion, I went all the way to Los Angeles to take Nicolas Roeg, the film director, to see The Wall in February 1980”.
Then again, Floyd had gone through significant changes to their stage setup in the time between the Barrett era and The Wall. Taking cues from what Townshend had done in the rock opera Tommy, Roger Waters created one of the most ambitious stage setups in rock history, featuring a wall being constructed before the audience before finally being torn down towards the end in a grand spectacle. While The Who and Pink Floyd may fall on different sides of the musical spectrum, the prog-rock giants understood Townshend’s mindset of music being about more than just a catchy single.
