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Pink Floyd: from Cambridge to the far side of the moon

Before there was a prism, an inflatable pig or a wall, there were young people from Cambridge finding their way to London. Roger “Syd” Barrett was the son of a doctor and grew up in a home where music and drawing mattered. The death of his father while Syd was still a teenager was an early loss. Barrett went on to Camberwell School of Art; his old Cambridge friend Roger Waters studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. Waters had lost his own father, Eric Fletcher Waters, in Italy during the Second World War before he was old enough to know him. The two losses were different, but absence would become an unusually persistent subject in their later music. Band history ↗ Waters’ father ↗

Architecture brought Waters together with Richard Wright and Nick Mason at the Polytechnic. Wright, the son of a biochemist, brought a keyboard player’s feeling for jazz and harmony; Mason’s patient drumming gave the music space to move. Barrett’s imagination provided the first unmistakable voice. David Gilmour, another Cambridge acquaintance, had studied at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology and played in other bands before he joined later. None of these musicians pursued an academic career: art, design and architecture were their routes into making a band. Even the group’s visual identity had Cambridge roots: their friend Storm Thorgerson later helped create album covers, including the prism. Thorgerson’s biography ↗ Wright’s background ↗

In mid-1960s London, Barrett’s concise, peculiar songs lived beside improvisations that could fill a room with sound. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), belongs to that moment: playful words, guitar noise and the sensation of wandering through a stranger’s storybook. Listen to “Astronomy Domine” ↗. By 1968 Barrett’s difficulties made touring and recording together untenable. Gilmour joined, at first alongside Barrett. The band eventually continued without its original singer. Syd made solo records with some help from former bandmates and later lived away from public life. It is tempting to turn him into a simple rock tragedy, but his family, his painting and his work outside the band were part of his life too. Debut album ↗

For several years the four remaining musicians searched. They wrote for films, tried long-form pieces and learned to use the studio as an instrument. Meddle (1971) made their collective strengths audible: the second side is given entirely to “Echoes” ↗, whose slow growth depends as much on Wright’s keyboards and Mason’s restraint as on the voices of Waters and Gilmour. A performance filmed at Pompeii placed them in an empty amphitheatre rather than before a screaming crowd, a useful image for a band learning to make the music itself the spectacle. Meddle ↗

The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) was a leap in clarity. Waters assembled ideas about work, fear, money, aging and death; all four helped turn them into a continuous experience. Wright’s chords soften the edges of “Time” ↗, while “Money” ↗ makes an unusual rhythm feel almost like a pop single. Its success changed the band’s circumstances so dramatically that their next record could hardly avoid examining the machinery around them.

That record, Wish You Were Here (1975), looks at the business of selling music and the experience of someone no longer present. Barrett unexpectedly visited the studio during its making; the encounter has become part of the album’s history, though the songs were already concerned with his absence. In “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” ↗, Gilmour’s unhurried guitar and Wright’s keyboards make a long introduction feel like a remembered conversation. The gentle “Wish You Were Here” ↗ speaks just as directly. Album history ↗

The tone hardened on Animals (1977), a portrait of social power imagined through dogs, pigs and sheep. Waters drove the concept and lyrics, but Gilmour’s guitar gives “Dogs” ↗ much of its bite. During that tour Waters felt an increasing distance between a stadium audience and the people on stage. He developed the image into The Wall (1979), a partly autobiographical narrative. The loss of his father, school discipline and the strain of relationships all become bricks in the protagonist’s isolation. The show literally built a barrier in front of the band. “Comfortably Numb” ↗ holds Waters’ bleak narrative and Gilmour’s soaring musical response together in one song. Wright’s relationship with Waters deteriorated during the sessions, and the group was no longer working with the easy give-and-take heard on Meddle. The Wall ↗

After The Final Cut (1983), Waters left in 1985. Arguments over who could use the Pink Floyd name followed. Gilmour and Mason continued, with Wright returning; the later albums have a different center of gravity. “High Hopes” ↗, closing The Division Bell (1994), looks backward without sounding like the 1970s records. Wright died in 2008. The four had briefly reunited for Live 8 in 2005, a moment of shared music rather than a lasting renewal of the partnership. The Division Bell ↗

The members’ later family lives have also shaped what they make. Gilmour’s wife, the novelist and lyricist Polly Samson, contributed words to the later Pink Floyd albums and to his solo work. Their daughter Romany sang on Luck and Strange (2024). Waters has continued touring and revisiting Floyd material as a solo artist; the loss of his father remains a thread through his work and his public anti-war campaigns. Gilmour and Mason recorded “Hey Hey Rise Up” ↗ with Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk in 2022 to support Ukrainian humanitarian relief. These are separate creative lives now, even when both return to songs they once made together. Pink Floyd news ↗

Why David and Roger remain apart

Their disagreement began in the music and in control of the band, long before today’s politics. More recently Gilmour has strongly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, whereas Waters has emphasized NATO’s and Western governments’ role in the conflict and called for a ceasefire. Waters also advocates a cultural boycott of Israel in support of Palestinians. He says his criticism of Israeli policy is not antisemitism. In 2023 Samson publicly accused him of antisemitism and being an apologist for Putin; Gilmour endorsed her statement, and Waters rejected the accusations. Those allegations and denials should be attributed, not presented as established facts. Statements and response ↗

In an October 2024 interview Gilmour said he would “absolutely not” share a stage with Waters again and connected that decision to his view of Waters’ politics. That is the clearest direct public answer found for this edition, checked in September 2026. It does not tell us what either man thinks in private. Calling them simply political opposites would flatten a complicated history: they also dispute what a former collaborator owes a band, who controls its legacy and how artists should speak about war. Gilmour’s interview ↗ Waters’ statements ↗

The Rolling Stones: five lives, one moving beat

The Rolling Stones began with an encounter between two former schoolmates at Dartford railway station. Mick Jagger carried American blues and rhythm-and-blues records; Keith Richards recognized what was in his hands, and a friendship was renewed. Their paths still looked respectable on paper. Jagger, whose father worked in physical education, was studying finance and accounting at the London School of Economics. Richards studied at Sidcup Art College, with music filling the space that his classes could not. His mother Doris loved jazz and popular music; his grandfather Gus, a musician, had introduced him to the guitar. None of this was an academic career in waiting. Records were the real curriculum. Early history ↗ Jagger at LSE ↗ Richards’ grandfather ↗

Brian Jones, who helped assemble and name the group in 1962, brought a deep attachment to the blues and an appetite for new sounds. Ian Stewart played piano and helped hold the early operation together, though he was kept out of the public lineup. Bill Wyman arrived on bass and Charlie Watts on drums. Watts had studied graphic design at Harrow School of Art and worked in advertising; he loved jazz and made a little illustrated book about Charlie Parker. Away from the group’s image of excess, he married Shirley in 1964 and remained with her for the rest of his life. His drumming rarely shouts for attention, but the spaces he leaves are what let Richards’ guitar lean forward. Watts interview ↗

The early band learned by playing the songs of American musicians they admired. Listen to their version of “Time Is on My Side” ↗ (1964): it is an interpretation, not yet the sound of a self-contained songwriting empire. The two friends soon began writing together. “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” ↗ (1965) makes the leap audible: Richards’ riff and Jagger’s dissatisfaction cut through a whole era of pop. On “Paint It, Black” ↗ (1966), Jones’ sitar helped pull them beyond straight blues. Early singles ↗

They tried psychedelia in 1967, then returned to earth with a harder, more dangerous sound. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” ↗ (1968) is built on a riff; “Gimme Shelter” ↗ (1969) seems to hear catastrophe approaching. The period was personally devastating. Jones’ role had diminished; he left the band and died in 1969. Mick Taylor joined, bringing a more fluid lead-guitar voice. Their records now sounded lived-in, worn at the edges and impossible to separate from the upheaval around them. The Stones Chronicles ↗

Sticky Fingers (1971) and Exile on Main St. (1972) stretch through country, gospel, blues and soul. The group worked under the pressures of tax exile and fame, but “Tumbling Dice” ↗ sounds like a band finding room for every instrument inside one rolling groove. The songs did not emerge from Jagger and Richards alone: Watts and Wyman’s rhythm section, Taylor’s guitar and the contributions of singers and session musicians changed the texture. The famous partnership sat inside a larger musical household.

Ronnie Wood joined in 1975 after playing with the Faces. Like Richards, he had passed through art school; he studied at Ealing College of Art and continued painting alongside music. His guitar did not try to replace Taylor’s note for note. Instead Wood and Richards developed a loose two-guitar conversation. Their lives were public and sometimes chaotic, yet family was never absent from the story: Wood’s children and painting appear in his own accounts, while Watts kept his marriage and home life much further from the rock circus. Wood on art and family ↗

The Stones could absorb a new rhythm without pretending to be a new band. “Miss You” ↗ (1978) meets the dance floor, with Jagger sounding both lonely and completely in command. “Start Me Up” ↗ (1981) distils decades of interaction into one unmistakable opening. Later tours became vast productions, and Jagger and Richards’ differences became part of the legend, but a stage and a shared repertoire kept drawing them back together.

Watts died in 2021. Steve Jordan took the drum seat for live shows, knowing he was entering a conversation that had lasted almost sixty years. In 2023 Jagger, Richards and Wood released Hackney Diamonds, a new album of original material, with “Angry” ↗ announcing it in a burst of guitar. That record is one more chapter, not an ending invented for the sake of a tidy story. The best way to hear the band is still to travel from a borrowed blues song to a new one and notice what the players kept—and what they changed. 2023 release ↗

Koja style · 25 songs

Miloš’s selection in its original order. The Spotify link above plays the playlist; the links below search YouTube for each recording. MusicScout hosts no audio files.

Song links open YouTube or its search results. Choose official recordings where available. The historical and political passages are attributed through links in the text. Last researched: 23 September 2026.