50 YEARS OF PINK FLOYD
A giant teacher puppet stands next to The Wall, opposite a recreation of Battersea Power Station from 1977’s Animals cover As Floyd moved away from psychedelia, their sound evolved through longer soundscapes, experimental tones and a rockier edge.
Meddle in 1971 and the following year’s Obscured By Clouds pointed to change but the world was blown away by 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. The album sleeve is one of the most For the cover of Division Bell, collaborator Storm Thorgerson built two large steel heads, each the height of a double decker bus, in a field near Ely, Cambridgeshire.
They were photographed in profile to give the illusion of a third face when joined together, which Thorgerson later said was a reference to Syd Barrett, whose influence never left the band.
Obsessed with design and concept as well as music, the band announced the album and world tour in 1994 while displaying a purpose-built airship. recognisable album covers of all time and one room is taken up by a holographic representation of it
But it almost never existed. Designer Storm Thorgerson initially came up with a version of Marvel’s Silver Surfer but the band rejected it. Thorgerson also came up with the mournful looking cow for Atom Heart Mother and the pig over Battersea Power Station on Animals. Dave Gilmour’s guitars, including his Black Strat, are displayed alongside Richard Wright’s early-70s Mini Moog synthesiser, Nick Mason’s drums and Roger Waters’ bass.
And the exhibition includes films of band members explaining how the equipment was used to create their ground-breaking sounds.
Floyd also spent weeks recording sounds from household items and appliances but Nick Mason admitted: “The most we ever achieved was a small number of tentative rhythm tracks.” There’s not an 80s kid out there who wasn’t mesmerised – or possibly traumatised – by Floyd’s video of a grotesque teacher and marching hammer heads for the Christmas 1979 No1 single, Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2).
The Wall is one of the most influential concept albums of all time. With themes of abandonment and isolation, it tells the story of a character called Pink, reportedly inspired by the lives of Roger Waters and Syd Barrett. Pink loses his dad during WW2, is bullied by teachers, cowed by an overprotective mother, suffers the breakdown of his marriage and retreats into self-imposed isolation from society. A section of wall houses masks, puppets and a cane used on Roger during his own school days. There’s also a giant teacher puppet taken from Roger’s solo tour of The Wall. During The Wall tour a four-piece “surrogate” band would open the show wearing rubber masks based on the faces of Pink Floyd members.
The masks, on show at the museum, added to the general nightmarish atmosphere of the performance. Later, when The Wall was made into a film, children wore plastic pink faceless masks as they were ground down by “fascist teachers”. Wish You Were Here Animals The Wall The Final Cut A Momentary Lapse Of Reason The Division Bell The Endless River