Credit: Storm Thorgerson / Sony Music Entertainment
Sat 8 August 2026 18:00, UK
Picking a favourite Pink Floyd album is incredibly difficult, given they’re a band with so many different eras under their belt.
A lot of people who enjoy prog rock will cite their debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, as one of their very best offerings. This was a pretty definitive record at the time, as it saw the band at their most experimental, well and truly pushing the limits of what the genre of rock could be. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull has previously cited the album as being one of the band’s very best.
However, Roger Waters despised the record because he felt it represented a moment in Pink Floyd’s history when they were being experimental for the sake of it. They didn’t actually have a plan or reason behind the music they were making, and instead, they were merely stringing together random bursts of sound so that it would throw listeners off somewhat.
“I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said when discussing the band’s debut record, “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
Waters was much more of a fan of the band’s later records, the elongated concept albums that still came with an experimental approach to music, but that also had a lot more structure. The first time that they really perfected this style of music was with their album The Dark Side of the Moon, a psychedelic offering which is still considered one of the greatest albums ever made, and the members of Pink Floyd seem to agree. In fact, Nick Mason said he thought it was the best album they ever put out.
“I’d choose Dark Side, it’s the most complete album,” he said, “There’re lots of others I like, but Dark Side has a lovely mix of everyone contributing to it. It’s got some great songs, and [the now-departed] Roger [Waters]’ lyrics are extraordinary.”
You won’t find any member of the band speaking poorly about this album, and it remains a staple of the psych genre; however, it wasn’t David Gilmour and Richard Wright’s favourite, which came a couple of years later with Wish You Were Here. The reason this record is considered a little bit better than its predecessor is simply that each member had a tad more freedom in the creation of it.
Further reading: From The Vault
There was a plan to follow when it came to putting together The Dark Side of the Moon. Granted, that plan was executed to perfection, but it restricted members of the band somewhat when it came to truly experimenting with both their individual sound and the output of the band as a whole. As such, when Wish You Were Here came along, the band could continue to plan their albums and keep them cohesive, but said plan wasn’t so strict that people were stopped from tapping into their chaotic creative side.
When David Gilmour was speaking about the album, he said he loved it because each member of the band was “working on all cylinders”.
Richard Wright agreed and noted that he put a great deal of his individuality into that album, so much so that when it came to writing the next LP, Animals, he felt as though he was out of ideas. Wish You Were Here, for both Gilmour and Wright, is the best the band ever made, as it follows the same structure as some of their more ‘complete’ albums, but it also left enough room to play around in.
