It has.
More.
Wonderful mix of styles. Some classics that became live regulars (“Green is the Colour”, “Cymbaline”). And amazing things like “Main Theme” which, frankly, is a proto form of late 80s/early 90s dance.
“Main Theme” for those that don’t remember it:
The only albums that do not have at least one classic song in it are TDB and AHM (although they both have several songs that are better than average for rock songs.) I’d like to have heard The Narrow Way live. I’m imagining it would sound somewhat like the Live at Pompeii version of Echoes, which was classic in its own way.
I’d say that High Hopes from TDB is pretty classic. And here’s The Narrow Way live. It’s very good.
****Piper at the Gates of Dawn **** is my favourite, but I voted “Wish You Were Here” as objectively best as there is not a dud track on it.
***Dark Side of the Moon *** is only so-so, might scrape into my top 5.
I discount everything after “The Wall” as not really Floyd, maybe my loss but at the time I thought it had run it’s course and moved onto other things by the time another album was released by the rump band.
**
NO!**
With a Pict.
Well, to be fair, Picts are (or rather, were) Celts.
Eh, for me it’s Pulse, hands down.
I usually try to be hip and not pick the obvious… I never vote for Zepp 4… or Sgt Pepper… Rumours… etc… THriller…
I voted for DSOM… its so fuckin perfect… flows… flows… And I’ve been mad for fucking years…
Somehow I missed this poll the first time around, so I’m glad it was resurrected.
Dark Side of the Moon is the obvious choice, but really any of the ‘studio albums’ from *Meddle *through Animals are masterpieces.
In the end, though, I voted for The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Stylistically it’s as different from the later albums as night is to…early-to-mid-evening…but there’s not a dud track on the entire album, and it set the stage for all that followed.
I apparently missed this one first time around as well. I was wondering if there was any particular reason DSoT and Pulse were included, but Is There Anybody Out There? was not? I wouldn’t have voted for it, but it seems strange to only include some live albums.
20 years ago, my choice would have been obvious. I worshipped The Wall, but I’ve changed since then. I was recently debating which Wall re-release to get, and came to the startling realization that the Final Cut is far and away my favorite PF album. Yeah, it’s essentially a Roger solo album, but it accomplishes what the Wall set out to do. The more intimate and stripped down nature of the album captures the feelings of despair and alienation in a far better manner.
In high school my 2nd favorite Floyd album was DSotM, but I can’t listen to major portions of it now. This is blasphemy I know, but I can’t stand to listen to Money anymore, and it ruins the album for me.
zombie or no
very difficult question. when they were rich and famous they could make some highly produced albums. when they were young they were on the forefront of psychedelic music and were in a saucer occupied by few others.
I have to go with The Wall; I’ll admit it’s because I know it the best. My high school marching band did it as our competition show one year. With the added electric guitars and keyboard it was much more fun that a Sousa compilation or a Broadway mash up. 
Hard to say. Probably Wish You Were Here; it has the best balance of styles, the most variety, shows off what the band could do, and does it with feeling. But on the other hand Animals rocks much harder and works as a coherent album, whereas Wish You Were Here is a big long song with some filler. But the Pink Floyd of Animals isn’t the Pink Floyd of Ummagumma, or Piper at the Gates of Dawn, or Pulse. But you’re asking for favourites rather than an objective best. So, inject vinegar into your eyes, put socks on your hands, grease up your ankles, and continue reading…
Going through them in order, Piper at the Gates of Dawn is one of those things I can admire and appreciate for its influence and crazed oddness without really enjoying it very much. But it does rock out, I’ll give it that. If you sent me back to the UFO Club circa 1967 I’d much rather rock out to this version of Pink Floyd than the Moody Bloody Blues, I can tell you. But I’ve always thought that “See Emily Play” was Barrett’s masterpiece - it distils his essence into three minutes, happy but manic with jarring bursts of jarring noise, always on the edge of falling apart - but they didn’t put that on the album, the silly sods. Saucerful of Secrets feels like a prototype and always left me disappointed that they didn’t make the title track fill up one whole side of the record. I can’t remember More. Ummagumma feels like a sampler of the previous records, a kind of functional album rather than a masterpiece to treasure, although I’ve always liked the cover. When I was at university it seemed that everybody worth speaking to had Ummagumma on LP, perhaps because it was cheap, I dunno why. You got two records for the price of one.
Good personality test, that. Does this person have Ummagumma on LP? If so, they are my friend. If not, they are dead to me. Should I have made the album titles bold instead of italic? They’d stand out more. I’ll have a think about this. I’ll add at this point that I have never once listened to Pink Floyd whilst under the influence of anything stronger than tea. I imagine that their pre-Dark Side work would sound transcendent if you were out of your gourd. But so would lots of other records. E.g. my early Tangerine Dream collection. Atem, you know. The hard stuff. Before they started playing notes. If anybody ever hands me a big back of LSD I’ll have to listen to my record collection again, and write down my impressions.
“Before They Started Playing Notes” would be a great book title. Perhaps for a book about early psychedelic records. Yeah but yeah but it’s the same with Atom Heart Mother, a nice idea that I don’t listen to very often. Feels like a grand farewell to their prog rock period. Also feels like a Ron Geesin solo record that has Pink Floyd on it. I can’t remember Obscured by Clouds. It was… like Dark Side of the Moon, but less memorable. It’s fascinating to compare the Atom Heart Mother suite with, say, “Dogs” from Animals. ITalics for the album titles, quotes for the songs. God, I hate quotes. They make me sound “pedantic” and “insincere”. Which is too close to the truth for comfort. But I can change. I can change.
Meddle, I missed that out. Always liked Meddle. Killer opening track “One of These Days”. Killer ending track “Echoes”. Killer middle track “Fearless”. “Pillow of Winds” isn’t bad. The rest of it’s a bit rubbish. But three killer tracks. That’s more killer tracks than Emerson, Lake, and Palmer managed in their entire career including their solo work. So I’d go with Meddle as the mid-period Pink Floyd’s masterpiece. And in formats where I can’t do italics, should the album titles be in quotes as well? Double quotes for the album titles, single quotes for the songs? Or just capitals?
I never heard anything from Dark Side of the Moon when I was a kid. They never played it on the radio here in the UK. Radio One only played chart singles, see, and it was never on television. Back in the 1980s it was the 1960s that was cool. The 1970s was dismally unfashionable. Hippies were ludicrous anachronisms, like Neil from The Young Ones. “We sow the seed, right; nature grows the seed, and then we eat the seed - and then, after that, we sow the seed” etc. Pink Floyd? Fuck that shit - MOTORHEAD! So I can distinctly remember the first time I heard the album; long after I’d read about it being a multi-million-selling classic. I borrowed it from the library and reverently listened to it with headphones. It was okay. Bit dull. Listenable. Bland. The music is clever and distinctive, but not as clever and distinctive as their earlier stuff; the lyrics are cutting and smart, but not quite as cutting and smart as their later stuff, although some of the individual lines are brilliant. Half a page of scribbled lines. Half a page of scribbled lines. I always wondered if Roger Waters felt that his work up until that point had been a waste, or if he was proud of having gone on tour and released records and so forth when so many 60s bands had fallen apart. They were smart kids, they could have got proper jobs. Instead of driving from polytechnic to town hall to polytechnic to converted cinema in an old van.
See, even if you finish the page, you’ve still only got one page of scribbled lines. You need hundreds of pages to make a novel. And the lines have to be neatly set out. And then you’ve got to go over them and revise everything. And then you have to take your work and sell it. And even if you sell it, and it gets published; it’ll end up in the second hand bin for 10p. With digital publishing it won’t even end up in the second hand bin. It’ll end up as part of a torrent of eighty million books. That semicolon back there was deliberate. It marked out a slightly longer pause - I was trying to give the impression that having a book published is more significant than a comma, but ultimately the moment passes. It was the punctuational equivalent of the pause at the beginning of a roller-coaster ride. All downhill from then on. The ride’s over.
But, yes. Wish You Were Here is basically Dark Side of the Moon with a bit of the older Pink Floyd reintroduced - it’s more musicy, for want of a better word - and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” has an anthemic quality that Dark Side lacks. It justifies its length. It’s minimalist but feels huge. The lyrics are short and to the point. I’ll stick with italics for the album titles.
And then Pink Floyd entered the modern age. Without turning into a load of poop, or splitting up, or running out of steam, or becoming a commercial sell-out like Genesis. Yeah, you’ll never see Pink Floyd topping the charts with a bloody disco song. And there’s no way the union of Roger Waters and David Gilmour could possibly split up; they’d be boring without each other and they know it. Animals is focused and disciplined and at first I thought I’d hate it - only three and a bit songs, and they’re not cosmic space jams - but it’s got “Sheep”, which is the best song about sheep ever. Yeah, the concept’s obvious. Feels strangely prescient of the cut-throat 1980s although it must have been written at the time of Harold Wilson’s last time in office, and James Callaghan. Margaret Thatcher existed but there was no guarantee she’d win the 1979 election.
Interesting to compare it with contemporary efforts by Yes (rubbish), ELP (absolute godawful rubbish), Led Zeppelin (dire, tired, sad rubbish), Genesis (boring rubbish). 'cause Roger Waters had something to say, about something. About something concrete. That he cared about. I never had a sense that ELP cared about anything at all. Keith Emerson came across as a very small man who could play the keyboard very quickly. Jon Anderson was a mass of platitudes. Peter Gabriel did care about some things but tried to hide it behind walls of art. Roger Waters is an unusual example of an arty prog rocker who came across as sincerely aggrieved about something relatively ordinary - dead dad, fucking stupidity of fucking stupid people - rather than a relatively wealthy man who was vaguely concerned with a few abstract concepts that didn’t really impact him in any way. In the same way that a Guardian reader is superficially concerned about carbon emissions, but is, in reality, far more interested in finding someone to look after their dog when they go on holiday - and where will they go on holiday this year, and shall they take their existing iPad, or buy a new one? Something about carbon emissions oh fuck that, how about an Asus Transformer? There’s a keyboard. Isn’t Windows 8 Metro just ghastly?
Um, yes. The Wall. First LP great, second LP I can barely remember. Another record I can admire - the production is incredible, the live show must have been extraordinary, and which other 60s throwbacks still had a bit of an edge circa 1979? - but Roger Waters is better as lyricist than a musician. As illustrated by The Final Cut, which is a poetry reading with ambient sound effects and music. Another album I can respect without liking very much. Like my lower intestine. I’m glad it exists, but I wouldn’t want to listen to it very often and I certainly never want to cut it out and fry it and eat it. In summary, the best Pink Floyd album would combine the music of Meddle and Wish You Were Here with the lyrical acumen and general atmosphere of Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut, with the experimental bent of Atom Heart Mother and the body of Kate Bush circa 1978 plus spiroid wingtips and a blow-out compartment at the back of the turret in case of ammunition explosion.
And so ended the story of Pink Floyd. The band split up shortly after The Final Cut and never reformed and certainly never considered releasing any more music. Roger Waters embarked on a solo career that started off poorly, remained poor, and then got really good - at which point he stopped for years before doing an opera, which I haven’t heard. David Gilmour’s solo career wasn’t all that bad, but it wasn’t very Pink Floyd-y until On an Island, which sounds just like Pink Floyd! Shame he didn’t call himself Pink Floyd instead of David Gilmour. No-one wants to buy a record by David Gilmour, but Pink Floyd albums fly off the shelves. And I’m sure Roger Waters wouldn’t have minded. Rick Wright died. So did Syd Barrett. Nick Mason lived. God moves in mysterious ways, eh? He didn’t want you, Nick. Not yet.
I mean, the thought of a live album where they play Dark Side of the Moon exactly as it was on the original record is ridiculous. Thank heavens they didn’t do that. No, thank heavens they released all those recordings of live shows they did in the 1970s, eh? Instead of for example a live album of The Wall that sounds just like The Wall because most of it was played from tape because it had to be performed exactly on cue in order to fit the stage show. No, it’s great that, INSTEAD OF THAT, they released ALL THOSE EXCITING EARLY 70s LIVE SHOWS that no-one has heard back when the band actually played LIVE ARARGARGHARG
In my opinion it couldn’t be less like DSotM, it’s the pure rockingest of all the Floyd albums (with DSotM square in the middle of that continuum.) The album it seems the most like to me is The Final Cut: both had very good, blues-rock influenced music and good lyrics, but while the music and lyrics did gel together they didn’t do so as trascendentally awesomely as they did on The Wall.
But I’ll forgive you since you don’t remember the album 
I suggest you go back to it. Being a soundtrack, it has a certain amount of forgettable background music, but also some of PF’s most gorgeous songs (“Wot’s…Uh…The Deal”, “Stay”, “Free Four”).
By the way, I enjoyed your post much more than I enjoy most posts of that length.
I forgot to add that it’s also like The Wall in that the last 1/4 is an order of magnitude worse than the rest. (Everything after “Stay”. I don’t remember if that’s one or two tracks.) (Come to think of it “More” has the same problem except pertaining to the entire second side besides the riff on the heavy metallish song on the first side.)
Back in high school I listened to all of PF’s stuff and I remember hearing The Final Cut and thinking “Huh, sure okay. War bad, etc” I had nothing against the album but it didn’t do anything much for me.
Decades later and I listened to it maybe a year or so ago after taking a British History course where we spent a bit of time on post WWII Britain through the Thatcher era and thought “Hey, this actually comes together!” It was like a whole new album I’d never heard before. I agree that the references are dated and it’s still a Waters solo album in disguise but it was an interesting experience.
This might as well have been my post. I agree 100%.
That being said, I think a good case can be made for Relics as the best (and certainly one of the best) Floyd albums ever. True most of the cuts were released on other albums, but some weren’t (Biding My Time, Paintbox) and some were so good (The Nile Song) that they deserved a release on a less obscure album (than the More soundtrack).
The entire package that is the Relics album gives it a unique, brilliant sound.
Although they did perform at Live 8 in 2005!