For too long, founder Roger Waters says, Pink Floyd has been saddled with a genre designation that he finds laughably inappropriate: Space rock. He says the band was always anything but — even during its far more trippy earliest incarnation under the auspices of the late Syd Barrett.
“How Pink Floyd fans ever came to formulate the philosophy that some how it was all to do with outer space, I think it had something to do with the fact that one song was called ‘Interstellar Overdrive,'” Waters tells Huffpost. “And another song was called ‘Astronomy Domine,’ both compositions of Syd’s. So that must mean it was about celestial orbs. But it was never about anything but inner space.”
Barrett, who died in 2006, was part of Pink Floyd’s earliest singles and its first two studio efforts — though by 1968’s Saucerful of Secrets, the original quarter of Barrett, Nick Mason, Waters and Rick Wright had already been expanded with the addition of David Gilmour.
Together as a foursome after Barrett’s exit, they would fashion one of the biggest selling albums of all time with Dark Side of the Moon. But again, that album focused on interior, rather than lunar, things.
“Even Syd’s songs, back in ’66 and ’67, were much more to do with his attachment to English literature and Hilaire Belloc, and a school of rather whimsical English writing,” Waters adds. “It was about personal experience. It had nothing to do with the firmament at all.”
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