The songs that “distracted” Pink Floyd from becoming yet another R&B band
The name Pink Floyd represents a very specific and cerebral form of music. Across the 1970s, the quartet crafted some of the most accomplished, profound, and influential sounds of all time, with The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here two highlights. These releases have that time-defying quality, resonating with many subsequent generations.
The band’s route to such splendour was complicated, and they had to outmanoeuvre several obstacles on the way. The most critical was the exit of original frontman, guitarist and creative director Syd Barrett, who departed the band during the making of their 1968 second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, due to a severe decline in mental health. With new guitarist David Gilmour in tow, the group were left to finish the record without Barrett, and what ensued was a strange period of experimentation, where they gradually forged the sound that made them world beaters with The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973.
Even before Barrett’s withdrawal, Pink Floyd had a long history, with several different names, members, and a shifting sound since they formed in 1965. Arguably, the most creative work they had to do in their career was hammering out an original sound from their R&B influences at their inception. As music was a much more linear, compact environment back then, every band of their generation had the same influences, so finding a unique sonic character was a real effort.
In the 2001 documentary, The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story, Pink Floyd’s original lead guitarist, Bob Klose, explained how the band’s unique sound, centred on Barrett’s rumbling guitar, emerged. He revealed that it all came from Barrett’s love of R&B pioneer Bo Diddley.
“People thought I was kinda good, but I probably wasn’t really. I mean, I played classical guitar a bit, so I could move my fingers in a moderately coordinated way, and I’d listen to a lot of blues, so I had a kind of inkling of what that was about. And Syd was listening to Bo Diddley and getting his rhythm thing going, so that’s what we would do,” Klose said. “Syd was beginning to write songs, and that was the interesting thing that was happening. We started off doing R&B covers, but gradually, it became Syd’s sort of cosmic Bo Diddley.”
Due to outside pressures, Klose quit the band in mid-1965. While it was a difficult decision, it proved pivotal for Pink Floyd’s career, allowing Barrett to take over as lead guitarist and further burnish his sound. He was now the band leader, and his madcap psychedelic music would move away from R&B, gradually taking the shape it had on the band’s celebrated 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a cornerstone of space rock.
According to drummer Nick Mason, the band’s debut single, the incongruous ‘Arnold Layne’, was essential because it “distracted” the band from R&B and led them down a more singular route, producing other slices of early psychedelia.
He told Rolling Stone in 2019: “This is a really unusual song. It’s part of the late-1960s thing where suddenly songs are more than just ‘I’m gonna get you, babe.’ The weird thing is that I think back in 67, and the end of 66, we thought we wanted to be an R&B band, and somehow got completely distracted by writing songs like this and ‘Bike’ and ‘The Gnome’ and that whole rather weird English way of life.”
Without ‘Arnold Layne’ and the others, Pink Floyd might not have produced their debut album. Without that, everything else that followed, good and bad, would have dissipated. Chance is a funny thing.
