Pink Floyd
Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright started out as a London R&B covers band before Barrett's fractured pop songwriting turned them into psychedelia's most vivid architects. After Barrett's departure, the group rebuilt itself around Waters's conceptual ambition, producing The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as some of the best-selling, most structurally audacious albums in rock history. Few bands did more to prove an album could be a single, sustained idea rather than a collection of singles.
Before they were writing original psychedelia, the group then still playing straight R&B covers recorded a version of Slim Harpo's swamp-blues standard 'I'm a King Bee' among their earliest 1965 studio demos, evidence of how deep their blues apprenticeship ran.
listen forPlay Slim Harpo's 'I'm a King Bee' and then Pink Floyd's own 1965 original 'Lucy Leave,' recorded around the same sessions — the loping blues phrasing is still audible just under Barrett's fledgling songwriting voice.
Syd Barrett coined the band's name on the spot by combining the first names of two Piedmont bluesmen he'd spotted in the liner notes of a Blind Boy Fuller compilation: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council — a naming tribute more than a direct sonic one, but proof of how far into blues records collector Barrett's ear had gone.
listen forPlay Pink Anderson's 'Every Day in the Week Blues' and then Pink Floyd's 'See Emily Play' — the sonic gulf is enormous, but both are the work of a single songwriter-guitarist bending a simple form toward something eccentric and personal.
The other half of the band's namesake pairing, Floyd Council was a North Carolina Piedmont blues guitarist Barrett discovered on the same 1962 Blind Boy Fuller liner notes as Pink Anderson — again a naming tribute rather than a claimed musical influence, but a direct line back to the pre-war blues Barrett grew up collecting.
listen forPlay Floyd Council's 'Runaway Man Blues' and then Pink Floyd's debut single 'Arnold Layne' — listen for the shared DIY intimacy of one guitarist-songwriter's voice carrying a whole recording, decades and genres apart.