Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Pink Floyd

Armando Venditti is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best for a fifth time, joining us from Edmonton, and after Saga, Queen, The Tea Party and Rush he has set himself the hardest job the format has to offer: five songs by Pink Floyd. The band came together in London in 1965 around Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, taking their name from two Piedmont bluesmen — Pink Anderson and Floyd Council — whose records sat in Barrett's collection. David Gilmour arrived at the end of 1967 to cover for a founder whose mind was slipping away from him, and by 1968 Barrett was gone. What the remaining four built in his absence is one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in rock: cash registers and heartbeats, walls and pigs and prisms, records that treated the album as a single unbroken argument and sold north of 250 million copies doing it.

Armando's five turn out to be beautifully constructed. Every one comes from a different album, and the running order walks backwards through the catalogue: the great Waters-and-Gilmour truce of "Comfortably Numb" from 1979's The Wall, then a jump forward to "High Hopes," the Cambridge-haunted closer of 1994's The Division Bell — the song that gave Douglas Adams the album's title, with a hidden phone call tucked in after the last chime. From there we go back to 1975 and "Wish You Were Here," a song the band were mixing in the same building on the June afternoon that an unrecognisable Syd Barrett wandered in, head and eyebrows shaved, and nobody knew who he was. Then "Money," the improbable American hit in seven-four time, counted in by a hand-spliced tape loop of cash registers. And finally, furthest back of all, 1971's "One of These Days" — two basses through an Echorec, one line of vocal from Nick Mason put through a ring modulator and aimed squarely at a BBC disc jockey. Not a Barrett-era track anywhere in the five, and yet he stands in the middle of it; five picks that are, at heart, a case for David Gilmour's guitar. Replay the show and let Armando take you backwards through Pink Floyd.

Broadcast 31 August 2026