I've dedicated this page to one of the most remarkable bands in progressive rock ever, Pink Floyd !

An abstract of the biography by Steven McDonald, All-Music Guide

Pink Floyd are the premier space-rock band. Originally the group concisted of Syd Barrett (lead guitarist), Roger Waters (bass), Rick Wright (keyboards), Nick Mason (drums), and later, David Gilmour (guitar). The name Pink Floyd, seemingly so far-out, was actually derived from the first names of two ancient bluesmen (Pink Anderson and Floyd Council). Since the mid-'60s, Pink Floyd's music has relentlessly tinkered with electronics and all manner of special effects. At the same time they have wrestled with lyrical themes and concepts of such massive scale that their music has taken on almost classical, operatic quality, in both sound and words. While Pink Floyd are mostly known for their grandoise concept albums of the 1970s, they started as a very different sort of psychedelic band, concentrating on the rock and R&B material that were so common to the repertoires of mid-'60s British bands.

Pink Floyd quickly began to experiment, however, stretching out songs with wild instrumental freak-out passages. Most importantly, Syd Barrett began to compose pop-psychedelic gems that combined unusual psychedelic arrangements with catchy melodies and incisive lyrics that viewed the world with a sense of poetic, child-like wonder. The debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in 1967, may have been the greatest British psychedelic album other than Sgt. Pepper's. Around mid-1967, however, Syd Barrett began showing increasingly alarming signs of mental instability. The rest of the group were finding him impossible to work with, live or in the studio. Around the beginning of 1968, guitarist Dave Gilmour, a friend of the band, was brought in to replace Barrett. The idea was that Gilmour would enable the Floyd to continue as a live outfit.

Gilmour was an excellent guitarist, and the band proved capable of writing enough original material to generate further ambitious albums, Waters eventually emerging as the dominant composer. Dark Side of the Moon,1973, finally broke the Pink Floyd as superstars in the United States, where it made #1. More astonishingly, it made them one of the biggest-selling acts of all time. Dark Side of the Moon spent an incomprehensible 741 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. In the 1980s, the group began to unravel. Each of the four had done some side and solo projects in the past; more troublingly, Waters was asserting control of the band's musical and lyrical identity. In 1986, Waters was suing Gilmour and Mason to dissolve the group's partnership; Waters lost, and Gilmour re-created Pink Floyd. The following live album, A Delicate Sound Of Thunder, presented the new Floyd in all its corporate glory, with Nick Mason backed up by another drummer and returning member Rick Wright buried in the middle of a keyboard battalion. The resulting performance hit the high points throughout - show after show after show.

Click here to read the complete AMG biography and see more pictures.

Discography

This discography is compiled from All-Music Guide. I have only included the albums and live recordings of the band. There aren't any compilations and such listed, because there are hundreds of them released in different countries all over the world.