Pink Floyd was formed in London in 1965 by students Syd Barrett, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright. They gained popularity performing in London’s underground music scene during the late 1960s, and under Barrett’s leadership released two charting singles and a successful debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). David Gilmour joined as a fifth member in December 1967 and Barrett left the band in April 1968 due to deteriorating mental health exacerbated by drug use. Waters became the band’s primary lyricist and, by the mid-1970s, their dominant songwriter, devising the concepts behind their most critically and commercially successful albums. Wright left Pink Floyd in 1979, followed by Waters in 1985. Gilmour and Mason continued as Pink Floyd and Wright rejoined them as a session musician and later a band member. Pink Floyd reunited with Waters in 2005 for a performance at the global awareness event Live 8. Barrett died in 2006 and Wright in 2008. The final Pink Floyd studio album, The Endless River, recorded without Waters and based on material recorded in 1993–1994, was released in November 2014. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and the U.K. Music Hall of Fame in 2005. By 2013, the band had sold more than 250 million records worldwide, including nearly 75 million certified units in the U.S.
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Roger Waters met Nick Mason while they were both studying architecture at the London Polytechnic at Regent Street. They first played music together in a group named Sigma 6, which Richard Wright and Syd Barrett later joined. The band went through a number of transitory names, including the Meggadeaths before settling on the Tea Set
The group first referred to themselves as the Pink Floyd Sound in late 1965. Barrett created the name on the spur of the moment when he discovered that another band, also called the Tea Set, were to perform at one of their gigs. The name is derived from the given names of two blues musicians, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council
The band’s debut album was released on August 5, 1967 and was the only one made under the leadership of Syd Barrett. Originally titled Projection, the title was taken from one of Barrett's favorite books, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. It contains a visionary encounter with the god Pan, who plays his pan pipe at dawn
In early 1967, the band first noticed significant changes in Barrett's behavior and the beginning of his mental breakdown. In December, the group added guitarist David Gilmour as the fifth member of the band. In March 1968, Pink Floyd met with their business partners to discuss the band's future and Barrett agreed to leave
The album was an immediate success and brought wealth to all four members. It topped the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart for one week and remained in the charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. With more than 50 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide
The concept of 1977’s Animals originated with Waters, loosely based on George Orwell's political fable, Animal Farm. The album's lyrics described different classes of society as dogs, pigs, and sheep. Waters designed the final art concept, choosing an image of Battersea Power Station, over which they superimposed an image of a pig
In July 1978, Waters presented two ideas for their next album. The first was a 90-minute demo with the working title Bricks in the Wall, and the other would later become Waters' first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. Although Mason and Gilmour were initially cautious, they chose the former to be their next album, The Wall
The album artwork for their fourteenth studio album, 1994’s The Division Bell, was designed by Storm Thorgerson and was intended to represent the absence of Barrett and Waters from the band. Thorgerson drew inspiration for the album cover from the Moai monoliths of Easter Island; two opposing faces forming an implied third face
On July 2, 2005, Waters, Gilmour, Mason, and Wright performed together as Pink Floyd for the first time in more than 24 years at the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park. The foursome had not performed together since a show at Earls Court in London on June 17, 1981
The band’s fifteenth and final album, The Endless River, was released November 7, 2014. It was the first studio album since the death of keyboardist and founding member Richard Wright, who appears posthumously. Described as a "swan song" for Wright, the album features unreleased material from the 1993-1994 Division Bell sessions
