Almost as famed for their unwavering internal conflict as for their music, it wouldn't have taken a psychic to predict the collapse of Pink Floyd; the band left plenty of hints on their own.
Nothing lasts forever, particularly within the ever-fickle music industry. Sure, a very small minority of groups have been able to foster stable careers for a period of multiple decades, but, for the most part, great bands only tend to last a certain number of years before succumbing to inevitable internal conflicts and 'musical differences'.
Pink Floyd are a special case, though; a band that carried on for multiple decades, all the while slowly falling apart in the midst of intense ego battles and vicious arguments.
Harbingers of the UK's psychedelic age, Pink Floyd were a band like no other when they first emerged onto the airwaves during the mid-1960s. Under the leadership of the profound artistic visionary Syd Barrett, the band curated a repertoire of innovative, captivating psychedelic anthems and amassed a dedicated following for their mind-expanding sound. It didn't take very long, however, for the wheels to fall off this promising new psychedelic outfit.
Barrett's dependency on psychedelic drugs made the songwriter increasingly unpredictable and unreliable, which is not something that you want when you're attempting to become a successful band. Initially, the rest of Floyd brought in David Gilmour to alleviate some of the strain on their leader, but before too long, Gilmour replaced Barrett entirely, and Roger Waters took on the leadership role.
Of course, the band changed drastically in the post-Barrett era, exploring new sounds and avenues of inspiration, but the shadow of the original songwriter still hung over the group. After all, Waters and the gang had essentially kicked their comrade out of his own band rather than attempting to get him back on the straight and narrow.
In the meantime, the songwriter's mental health continued to deteriorate, and although he would see members of Pink Floyd occasionally over the next few years, he never quite recovered from those internal struggles, eventually becoming a recluse and abandoning all musical exploits.
It was in 1975 that Barrett saw Pink Floyd for the final time, during the Abbey Road recording sessions for Wish You Were Here, where he witnessed a performance of 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' which the band had written about him. "It was very strange. The lyrics were written – and the lyrics are the bit of the song about Syd, the rest of it could be about anything – I don't know why I started writing those lyrics about Syd," Roger Waters later revealed.
"I think because that phrase of Dave's was an extremely mournful kind of sound, and it just...I haven't a clue," the songwriter relented.
He did also note that the song was written "a long time before the Wish You Were Here recording sessions, when Syd's state could be seen as being symbolic of the general state of the group, ie very fragmented." Nevertheless, the song seemed to take on that meaning in the wake of the recording sessions.
It is no secret that Wish You Were Here was a particularly divided time within the Pink Floyd camp, with David Gilmour and Roger Waters constantly at each other's throats. So, even though 'Shine On' was written with Syd Barrett in mind, the song, along with the original band leader's presence during the recording, managed to imbue the effort with the theme of fragmentation, which would follow Pink Floyd around for another decade, before Roger Waters finally left the group.