Is David Gilmour right: Were Pink Floyd ever a prog band?
What even are genres, really? We prescribe labels to sounds, trying to categorise them in neat boxes, but nothing ever easily fits.
The Rolling Stones are rock and roll through and through, as the labels go, but what about the blues? Joni Mitchell has forever been called a folk artist, but what about her jazz years? For Pink Floyd, they’d always been called a progressive rock act, but David Gilmour never agreed with that.
Not only do these labels so often feel wrong or unsuited, but the artists themselves don’t even get a choice in the matter. I guess it’s people like me who are in charge of that as the press come in, write their first reviews of a band and brand them forevermore. Or, sometimes it comes from the suits at their record label, sticking a clear category on them to make them easier to market.
Pink Floyd were never going to be an easy-to-market band, and it was never their focus. Even when they first gained attention during the Syd Barrett years, it didn’t stop them from going all in on nothing but woozy and weird tracks. When things levelled up even more with Gilmour at the helm and albums like The Dark Side of the Moon making them a global phenomenon, they still didn’t simplify themselves.
Maybe that’s part of the reason why they first got stuck with the prog rock label: people simply didn’t know what else to call them. Their music wasn’t just rock or just psychedelia. Especially when Gilmour took over, the influences were so vast and the sound was so huge that no descriptor was accurate. So instead, they were called ‘progressive’, perhaps as a lazy way of simply saying they were the future.
There are some requirements, though. The genre of prog rock is defined by a few things: classical influences, use of keys, big instrumental sections and simply more complex compositions. Pink Floyd undeniably tick all of those boxes as their concept albums especially are full of big, grand, extended instrumentals with orchestral details and Richard Wright holding it down on keys.
So, what did David Gilmour think?
They met the requirements, but Gilmour still never felt like it was right. “We didn’t talk about style, and I’ve never talked about progressive rock, or thought that we were, whatever, progressive rock,” Gilmour said, still feeling strange about the way the badge was pinned to them.
To him, it wasn’t one they wanted or maybe even deserved, as he added, “To me, progressive rock is very, very serious players who can really do their stuff”.
Gilmour seems to think that progressive rock requires more classical training, meanwhile, Pink Floyd were still approaching everything like boys in a band, throwing shit at a wall and seeing what stuck. Their process was looser, and while they were influenced by classical elements, none of them really would have claimed to have the know-how or the skills of a classical player.
I could argue back. I could argue that it’s not about training or qualifications, and that really all genres simply come down to something as hazy and fickle as ‘vibes’. But surely Gilmour’s own word should be final when it’s his music we’re talking about.
