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Roger Waters.

Roger Waters was a primary creative force in Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1983. He first met Syd Barrett, who would become the band's lead singer and guitarist, during his school days when both attended a Saturday art class. He moved to London to study architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic and there
formed a band with drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright;
he played bass and sang. Barrett joined them, forming Pink Floyd.

Though Barrett was the band's main songwriter at first, Waters wrote or co-wrote three songs
on the first LP, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (U.S. release: September 1967),
including the sole composition "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk." By the time of the group's second album, A Saucerful of Secrets (July 196 cool , Barrett had been replaced by David Gilmour
and Waters had begun to take a more prominent role, contributing three songs and one co-composition to the LP. He also wrote or co-wrote all but one of the tunes for the band's soundtrack to the film More (July 1969) while his first solo work came on Ummagumma (November 1969), a two-LP set that consisted of one disc of live material and a second disc on which each band member contributed his own tracks.

As of Atom Heart Mother (October 1970), Pink Floyd began to work up its material as a group,
though Waters still contributed the sole composition "If." Working with Ron Geesin,
he wrote the soundtrack for The Body (December 1970),
his first work outside Pink Floyd. He also wrote or co-wrote eight of the ten selections
on Obscured by Clouds (June 1972), Pink Floyd's soundtrack for the film The Valley.
Pink Floyd's recordings were moderately successful through 1972.
But The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1973), for which Waters wrote all the lyrics
and some of the music, was a commercial breakthrough that became one of the most
successful albums in rock history. (He was the sole author of the album's Top Ten hit "Money.")
He took an increasingly dominant role in the writing of subsequent Pink Floyd albums,
writing all the lyrics and collaborating on the music for Wish You Were Here
(September 1975), writing most of Animals (February 1977) and The Wall
(November 1979), and writing all of The Final Cut (March 1983).
All were million sellers, with The Wall in particular rivaling the sales of The Dark Side of the
Moon. (Waters was the sole author of "Another Brick in the Wall Part II," a gold,
number one single drawn from The Wall.) Following the release of The Final Cut,
Pink Floyd broke up and its members launched solo careers. Waters re-emerged with
The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (April 1984), which went gold. He followed with
Radio K.A.O.S. (June 1987) and went on tour to promote the release. Meanwhile,

David Gilmour's solo album About Face (February 1984) was also a gold seller,
but he was discouraged by that showing and recruited Mason and Wright to re-form Pink Floyd.
Waters sued, seeking an injunction to prevent the trio from touring as Pink Floyd without him,
but he lost the case, and the Gilmour-led Pink Floyd went on to tour and recorded successfully.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Waters organized an all-star performance of
The Wall in Berlin on July 21, 1990. It was filmed and recorded,
resulting in the album The Wall - Live in Berlin (September 1990).
He released a third solo album, Amused to Death (August 1992), but did not tour,
though he made an appearance at a benefit concert in 1993.
He spent much of the 1990s working on an opera, Ca Ira, in French and English.
But in July and August 1999, he mounted his first U.S. tour in 12 years.
It was so successful that he returned for a second leg in June and July 2000,
and the concerts served as the basis for the two-CD set "In the Flesh".

Syd Barrett

Roger Keith (Syd) Barrett was born in Cambridge, England on January 6, 1946. He has two elder brothers and a sister called Rosemary. He went to Cambridge High School for Boys where he was two years below Roger Waters. He led a comfortable middle class English family life. His father died when he was 12 years old, soon after he started at secondary school.

He seems to have always been artistic and musical. Though he decided to study painting his interest in music also began at an early age:

"My first musical instrument, at a very tender age, was a ukelele. Then, when I was eleven years old, my parents bought me a banjo.

"A year later I talked them into buying me a guitar; quite a cheap one; and I learned to play it from tutor books and from friends who could play a little.

"At fifteen, I took a dramatic step forward, becoming the proud possessor of an electric guitar, with a small amplifier that I made myself. And with this kit, which I fitted into a cabinet, I joined my first group - Geoff Mott and the Mottoes - playing at parties and the like around my home town of Cambridge.

"For a couple of years, from the age of sixteen, I was not with any regular group, and during this time I acquired a 12-string guitar and then a bass guitar which I played with another local group, The Hollering Blues.

"Then I decided to go to London; took a while to get in the scene; and joined forces with three boys I had met (Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright). I switched to lead guitar and after using various names, we decided to call ourselves The Pink Floyd."

Syd shared his musical education in Cambridge with his friend Dave Gilmour who taught Syd quite a few things about playing the guitar. After technical college Syd moved down to London to study painting at Camberwell Art School in Peckham. He had been travelling up and down between Cambridge and London but now he settled and shared a flat with Roger Waters in Highgate.

"Roger Waters is older than I am. He was at the architecture school in London. I was studying at Cambridge; I think it was before I had set up at Camberwell. I was really moving backwards and forwards to London. I was living in Highgate with him, we shared a place there, and got a van, and spent a lot of our grant on pubs and that sort of thing.

"We were playing Stones numbers. I suppose we were interested in playing guitars. I picked up playing guitar quite quickly. I didn't play much in Cambridge because I was from the art school. But I was soon playing on the professional scene and began to write from there"

Both Syd and Roger wrote in those early days, not just Syd as some critics have suggested. Syd's material fitted easier into the pop music framework as it was then since he wrote short 'songs' with chart potential. Syd explained it:

"Their choice of material was always very much to do with what they were thinking as architecture students. Rather unexciting people I would've thought, primarily. I mean, anybody walking into an art school like that wouldn't have been tricked, maybe they were working their entry into an art school.

"But the choice of material was restricted, I suppose, by the fact that both Roger and I wrote different things. We wrote our own songs, played our own music. They were older, by about two years I think. I was 18 or 19. I don't know that there was really much conflict except that perhaps the way we started to play wasn't as impressive as it was to us, even, wasn't as full of impact as it might have been. I mean, it was done very well rather than considerably exciting. One thinks of it all as a dream."

Richard Wright

Richard William Wright was born in London on 28 July 1945 of a well to do family. His parents, Bridie and Cedric Wright had two other children, daughters: Selina and Guinvere. He went to the exclusive Harberdashers' school and at 17 he went to the Regent Street School of Architecture and there he met bassist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason. They set up a group at college and were joined six months later by lead guitarist Syd Barrett.

Richard Wright:" It was great when Syd joined. Before him, we'd play the R&B classics, because that's what all groups where supposed to then. But I never liked R&B very much. I was actually more of a jazz fan. With Syd, the direction changed, it became more improvised around the guitar and keyboards. Roger started playing the bass as a lead instrument and I started to introduce more of my classical feel."

They went under various names, including The Meggadeaths, Sigma 6, The Abdabs(Juliette Gale was part of the Abdabs who married Ricahrd Wright.), Leonard's Lodgers and The T-Set, before settling on the name The Pink Floyd Sound, which was taken from of Syd Barrett's favorite bluesmen, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. As their confidence grew, they went from pop and R&B covers to their own extended psychedelic improvisations. Barrett became the band's chief songwriter in their early stages, contributing most of their songs on their first album (The Piper at the Gates of Dawn) and their two hit singles 'Arnold Layne' and 'See Emily Play'. After two Top 20 singles and a Top 10 album in'67 , Pink Floyd looked set for a successful career but Syd's experiments with LSD led him to become even more bizarre and eccentric, until eventually he was dismissed from the group in April 1968, to be replaced by David Gilmour.

After David Gilmour replaced Syd Barrett, the band gradually redefined their style over half a dozen albums. They released two singles after Piper: "Apples And Oranges" where the b-side included the Wright song "Paintbox". The A-side on the other single "It would be so nice" is by Wright too. The next album was "A Saucerful of Secrets" which included two Wright compositions. The following year, Pink Floyd released "More" and "Ummagumma". The band was allowed to combine a straightforward live album with a second disc, comprising four sections, each recorded by one band member as a solo activity. Rick Wright's instrumental contribution, Sysyphus (parts 1-4) was named after a character in Greek mythology. Part 1 is a mystical synthesizer with timpani, while in places Part 2 could easily be taken for a romantic-era classical piano sonata. Part 3 is very experimental, and Part 4 opening with bird-song, relies heavily on Wright's Mellotron, eventually returning to the theme of Part 1. Ummagumma was followed by "Atom Heart Mother" in 1970, but it wasn't until 1971's Meddle with the side-long Echoes inspired by Wright's single piano note fed through his Leslie rotating speaker, that the band regained the prospects they'd shown four years earlier.

The next album, Dark Side Of The Moon, ensured their place in rock history. Released in 1973, the album became more than just a soundtrack to a generation (many of whom first discovered the delights of stereo listening to it in headphones). It spent an unprecedented 15 years in the Billboard Top 200 album charts and to date it has sold 28 million copies (rising at the rate of a million a year) making it the third highest selling album ever. Wright co-wrote many of the tracks on this epoch-making album but his most memorable contribution was The Great Gig In The Sky.

The next two albums - Wish You Were Here in 1975 and Animals in 1977 - consolidated their position as one of rock's biggest names but, as frequently happens, the band's phenomenal success put an increasing strain on their personal relationships and the creative tensions gave way to conflict. Solo albums were a safety valve and Wright released Wet Dream in 1978. Wright was accompanied by top session musicians Mel Collins (sax), Snowy Whithe (guitar), Larry Steele (bass) and Reg Isadore (drums). No singles were released from the album, and Wright did not perform any concerts.

By the time they came to record The Wall in 1979 Roger Waters was assuming control of the band. Wright felt the full brunt of this when Waters threatened not to release The Wall unless Wright left the band. Wright spent the next two years as a paid employee, playing The Wall in America, Britain and Germany.

None of this was public knowledge until Wright's name was conspicuously absent from Pink Floyd's 1983 album, The Final Cut. However, within months the band had imploded under the weight of the acrimony between the survivors. After leaving Pink Floyd, Wright formed a shortlived partnership, called Zee who released Identity ('84), with Dave Harris, former leader of New Romantic band Fashion, with Wright composing music for Harris' lyrics. There were again no live dates. This is the only Floyd solo album never released on CD anywhere.

Wright rejoined Pink Floyd in 1987, after Gilmour and Mason had reconstituted the band, during the recording of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. He arrived too late to contribute any songs but played on the world tour that confirmed Pink Floyd's status as one of the world's biggest drawing live attractions.

However on Pink Floyd's most recent studio album, The Division Bell, the band returned to the co-operative principles that had got lost during the late '70's. Wright co-wrote Wearing The Inside Out with lyricist Anthony Moore and co-wrote the music for Cluster One, What Do You Want From Me, Marooned, and Keep Talking with David Gilmour. More important, as Wright says, "On this album the three of us actually played together. It's like the Floyd again." Millions of fans felt exactly the same way during Pink Floyd's Division Bell world tour which played over 100 shows, culminating in their 14-night stint at London's Earls Court in the autumn of 1994.