Why Pink Floyd hated the term”space rock”
The psychedelic rock wave predated the Apollo 11 Moon landings and captured the celestial essence of the space race. It turns out that outer space and all of its beauty and mystique resonated pretty well with the psychedelic experience as gaggles of LSD-induced hippies cast their eyes to the night sky in wonderment. With the Starman guise and his 1969 hit ‘Space Oddity’, one would have thought David Bowie would be the quintessential space rock artist. However, Pink Floyd seemed to take this title.
During their early years led by Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd was among London’s original psychedelic rock bands. With Barrett’s eccentric lyrics and rudimentary light shows, they differentiated themselves from contemporary acts like The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. From the off, they staked a claim to outer space with ethereal soundscapes and the classic debut album opener, ‘Astronomy Domine’. The band consolidated their early space association with ‘Interstellar Overdrive’, which kicked off side two.
A Saucerful of Secrets was similarly embracing of celestial themes with ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ and ‘Let there Be More Light’, the latter inspired by an alleged UFO sighting in Cambridge, in its ranks. Following Barrett’s departure from the band in 1968, the material returned somewhat to Earth thematically. Waters’ conceptual outlook was more concerned with tangible human experiences, but Gilmour’s spacious, transportive guitar solos seemed to maintain the band’s association with space rock moving into the 1970s.
Today, Pink Floyd are still often referred to as a space rock band. The title of their most iconic album, The Dark Side of the Moon, helped drive the point home, and it seems that the comparatively terrestrial Animals and Th Wall could do little to dissuade the genre-imposers. As it turns out, it wasn’t just the band’s early space-bound concepts that led to the space rock label.
Following their early successes, Pink Floyd became particularly popular among the global physics community, even before they brandished a prism diffraction diagram. During the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, Pink Floyd provided a freeform instrumental jam while the BBC broadcast footage from the mission.
Almost 20 years later, Pink Floyd became the first rock band to have their music played in space when cosmonauts Sergei Krikalyov and Alexander Volkov took a cassette copy of Delicate Sound Of Thunder to play while docking with the Mir space station. “To say that we are thrilled at the thought of being the first rock band to be played in space is something of an understatement,” Gilmour reflected at the time.
Although Pink Floyd were just as fascinated with outer space as the next man in their generation of space races and moon landings, they were never comfortable with the space rock tag. During a 1973 interview with Zigzag following the release of The Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters and Nick Mason let out a bit of a sigh when asked about their “space rock” descriptor. “Christ!” Waters retorted. “I hardly ever read science fiction… People listen to Dark Side Of The Moon and call it ‘space rock’ just because it’s got Moon in the title…”
It seems that Pink Floyd were keen to escape their associations with sci-fi and even non-fictional astronomy following Barrett’s departure. While they had no issues with Soviet astronauts wanting to play their tapes in space, the ‘space rock’ tag sold the band short, focusing on a very small percentage of their material. Waters would be much happier to be described as a progressive rock band, but I imagine no tag at all would suit him best.
