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Pink Floyd · S1 E6
Pink Floyd Sound
Syd names the band after two obscure blues musicians from Georgia: Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Nobody in London has heard of either one. The name sticks immediately
Late 1965, a London pub gig. The band arrives to discover another group called The Tea Set already on the bill, and Syd Barrett, without hesitating, announces they will perform tonight as The Pink Floyd Sound.
Pink Floyd, Interstellar Overdrive. Ten minutes of feedback, distortion, and freeform improvisation that sounds nothing like any other band in 1967. Syd Barrett built the opening riff from a mangled memory of a Burt Bacharach melody.
Two Blues Musicians from the Piedmont
Pink Anderson was a medicine show singer and guitarist from Laurens, South Carolina, who spent decades playing blues on the travelling medicine circuit. Floyd Council was a guitarist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who recorded a handful of sides in the 1930s and spent the rest of his life in obscurity. Syd Barrett found their names while browsing the liner notes of a Piedmont blues compilation, and he fused them into a single name that sounded like it had always existed.
“Syd just came up with it. None of us had heard of Pink Anderson or Floyd Council. We didn't question it. It sounded right.”
— Roger Waters
TAP TO REVEAL: Did Pink Anderson and Floyd Council ever meet?
Interstellar Overdrive, Pink Floyd (1967)
From The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Barrett built the main riff by misremembering a Burt Bacharach tune, then the band tears it apart over ten minutes of improvisation. Listen for the moments where the band loses each other completely and then, impossibly, finds its way back to the riff.
The Marquee Club
90 Wardour Street, Soho, London. One of the early venues where Pink Floyd played under their new name. The Marquee was the proving ground for nearly every significant British band of the 1960s.
Flaming, Pink Floyd
From The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967). A bright, kaleidoscopic pop song that sounds like sunlight through a prism. Barrett's lyrics are pure childhood wonder, and the band wraps them in layers of organ, percussion, and studio trickery.
Why did Syd Barrett need to invent a new name for the band on the spot?
Pink Floyd has a name. Now they need an audience, and a club called the Countdown is about to give the band its first real stage.
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