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Poles Apart

Is Pink Floyd a blues band?

Floyd is blues in sound and spirit

by Christopher Hughes

A How, How, How, How

Pink Floyd is The Blues, in their own Floydian way!

In name, sound and spirit, Pink Floyd are not only influenced by the blues, but flat out play the blues, just in their own Floydian way. To some folks, this statement is obvious. I happily grew up knowing the stories about Pink Floyd playing blues standards (whatever that is!) but only the first and last minutes were recognisable, the rest being the four of them happily jamming away in a way that we all know and love.

Now those few minutes may have gone from the set list, but the music, the blues, never did. Furthermore, the departure of Syd Barrett and arrival of David Gilmour made not one jot of difference to the mix. If anything it made it even more bluesy.

So let's split it up a bit.

Firstly, in name, Pink Floyd are the blues. Pink Anderson and Floyd Council were robbed of their Christian names by a man nicknamed after a blues musician, Syd Barrett. While being nicknamed Syd, Roger Waters, David Gilmour and a whole bunch of others in Cambridge spent the best part of their teenage years happily listening to the likes of Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy and Bessie Smith. Although it has never been documented, I'm sure when Syd said "Pink Floyd, from Pink Anderson and Floyd Council," at least the Cambridge Set would have gone "good!" The rest is history.

The next logical area to cover is the very sounds that Pink Floyd made. For example, there are obvious tunes such as "Biding My Time," "Seamus," and to a lesser extent "Fearless" that simply drip blues. But throughout the Floyd canon there are many more examples of a far more subtle version of the blues. When you consider standard tricks of the trade, the blues use things like slide guitar and long bending notes (sound familiar?) as well as clear, simple plucked notes (more familiarity) and just as often, that simple rhythm that makes you want to click your fingers and wiggle your rear bits.

Now that might not be all Floyd, but it certainly can be heard and felt in tracks such as "Breathe," "High Hopes" and "Marooned." As a for the odd ass wiggle, you can't go past the live version of "Money," especially in the Momentary Lapse years.

Further, the early Seventies saw and heard frequent blues encores which were good old twelve-bar blues; the perfect come down after the highs of two or more hours of Pink Floyd.

But the blues goes beyond what you hear, to what you feel. My two example of that true, heart-wrenching "Blues Lament," "The Spirit of the Blues" no less, are prime examples of the blues. "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" is simply one long lament for a lost friend. It does all the things blues asks in musical terms, but really gets to the listener through the words.

If you listen to any of the masters from that bygone era of the blues, they are forever bemoaning the things that have gone wrong in life. "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" is exactly that.

My second example is a bit more left field. "You Gotta Be Crazy," from the 1975 tour, both sounds like the blues, but also laments all that is wrong in a competitive world.

By the time it became "Dogs" on Animals, it had lost that feel, becoming slightly quicker, and an awful lot nastier. But in 1975, it still had that mournful loss, with its words and music almost weeping out of the speakers. Quite frankly, as so many people (fans and non-fans alike) say, Pink Floyd is all so depressing.

To say Pink Floyd, or practically anyone who has recorded modern music, is not influenced by the blues, is to deny the history of music itself. So a purist of Delta Blues and the magic that is Robert Johnson or Bessie Smith may not hear a note of that wondrous, natural sound in Pink Floyd, but it is clearly there.

Furthermore, in the case of our heroes, it goes beyond a mere influence and becomes an actuality. Some will call it prog-rock, space-rock, and even dinosaur-rock; big, fat and bloated. But they are just names and labels.

When you hear Pink Floyd and feel Pink Floyd, you also hear and feel the blues.

Christopher Hughes is a staff writer for Spare Bricks.

Being bluesy is just not enough

by Sean Ellis

"White people ought to understand... their job is to give people the blues, not to get them. And certainly not to sing or play them! I'll tell you a little secret about the blues: It's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played." —George Carlin

Before the question of whether or not a blues influence can be heard in Pink Floyd's music can be answered, one must first ask, "What does the blues sound like?" B.B. King once said that the sound of the blues is the sound of "a good man feeling bad."

This definition is, to me, unsatisfactory. It's too open. The Final Cut, for example, is certainly the sound of Roger Waters feeling bad over the state of political affairs and their aftermath, yet I can detect no overt traces of the blues in it.

The blues is characterized by a certain shuffle rythym and the sort of boogie-woogie guitar patterns that Chuck Berry (among others) structured an entire style of playing around. Pink Floyd have a handful of songs that may fit this particular paradigm, but they are not typical of the entire Pink Floyd canon.

The Pink Floyd "sound" (pun only slightly intended) is characterized by panoramic soundscapes created by the interplay of Wright's ethereal keyboards and Gilmour's majestic guitar. Gilmour uses the same scales that are found in blues music, but this alone does not make him a blues guitarist. One can find evidence of a jazz influence in Gilmour's playing on "Any Colour You Like" and a country influence in "A Pillow Of Winds."

While Gilmour is typically placed in the "British Blues Guitar Greats" category, this is based upon his own, personal style of playing which is only a part of the total sound... not the be-all end-all of the sound.

It is the sound that we are talking about here, as Pink Floyd's lyrics do not fit the stereotypical blues subject matter of of "my woman left me and I feel bad about it, hell hounds on my trail." The subject matter of blues is usually concerned with basic human emotions in regard to love, death, poverty and oppression, but these subjects are also covered in just about any form of music.

The blues are also a form of music in which the artist describes the world as he/she sees it; it's a way for the artist to describe their circumstances in a way that allows them to connect with their audience who may be experiencing the same things themselves. This is also true of folk, rap, rock and country, however.

So, when dealing with the sound of Pink Floyd's music, to say that a blues influence dominates is to ignore the presence of jazz, folk and even classical music, all of which are equally evident.

The blues is a form of music that touched pretty much every idiom that came after its creation. Rock music is said to have begun as a synthesis of blues and country music. An online search that I conducted turned up the revelation that blues is at the heart of jazz. To touch something, to influence something, however, is quite a different thing from being a part of it, though.

The Beatles influenced everyone and every form of music that came after them, yet as time passes, that influence becomes less obvious. For example, one would be hard pressed to identify the influence of The Beatles in the music of Linkin Park.

Perhaps no band is as "un-blusey" as The Beatles, and yet "Come Together" and (more tellingly) "Yer Blues" fit the blueprint of blues music as few songs by "non-blues" artists do.

Syd Barret named Pink Floyd after two American blues artists and yet Piper at the Gates of Dawn is lacking any real elements of blues music. There are no shuffle rhythms, no boogie-woogie, and no lyrical subject matter relating to anything other than Barrett's fertile imagination. Even Roger Waters' "Take Up They Stethoscope And Walk" seems devoid of any grounding in the real world.

This is even more remarkable when one considers that only a year before its release, Pink Floyd were still largely a rhythm and blues cover band.

Of course, one could point at later works such as "Biding My Time" and "Seamus" as well as the bluesy instrumental encore that ended many of Pink Floyd's live shows as evidence of a blues influence, but a certain doubtful light is cast upon that when taking into consideration the statement that Roger made to Jim Ladd in 1980: "...occasionally throughout our career we have done tunes that are a pastiche of something else..."

In that context, these songs can be seen as simply pastiches of the blues, rather than a legitimate attempt to create blues songs. After all, Pink Floyd are known as "conceptual artists," so it's not too taxing on the imagination to believe that they would drop a blues pastiche into an otherwise non-conceptual album such as Meddle in much the same way that they drop a lounge jazz tune on the same album in the form of "San Tropez."

"Seamus," in my opinion, doesn't show any more of a true blues influence than "Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two" shows a true Disco influence or "Young Lust" a true cock rock influence. The suggestion that Pink Floyd would do a pastiche of a sound just to be doing it is at odds with the intent of the true genre artist who makes a sound because that's what he feels or relates to.

Sean Ellis is a staff writer for Spare Bricks.

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