Forget Everythings You Know About Pink Foyd: 50 Facts About Pink Floyd

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Kubrick asked Floyd to collaborate on more than one occasion, but word has it Roger Waters was trying to distance the band from Space-rock and reluctantly declined. Waters said later that it was a decision he regretted.

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If the Beatles had Peter Blake and Factory Records had Peter Saville, then Pink Floyd had Gerald Scarfe, an artist whose iconoclastic work has become as synonymous with the Floyd as it has scything satire.

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That’s not forgetting art director Storm Thorgerson of course, who collaborated almost as an auxiliary member of the band and came up with the iconic album cover for ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.

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As well as writing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, bringing the world Live Aid and taking a song about classroom shootings to no.1 (the Boomtown Rats’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’), Bob Geldof also starred in the lead role for Pink Floyd’s filmed version of ‘The Wall’.

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In 1977, the inflatable pig caused havoc with air traffic control when it became free of its tethers, veering into the Heathrow flight path. It was later found in a field in Kent.

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The last Pink Floyd album Roger Waters appeared on was ‘The Final Cut’ – a work he conceived and wrote with no help from the others (David Gilmour expressed misgivings about the record later).

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Waters took the other members of Pink Floyd to court in the mid-80s in the hope of barring them from continuing with the name. He recently admitted regretting the litigation.

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Russian astronauts took ‘Delicate Sound of Thunder’ with them when they boarded the MIR space station in 1989, making it the first album to be played in space (that we know of).

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The album ‘The Division Bell’ was named by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams.

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Richard Wright was sacked from the band during ‘The Wall’ sessions for not pulling his weight. He returned to Pink Floyd for their 1987 Gilmour-led ‘A Momentary Lapse of Reason’ album, but for legal reasons was not reinstated as a full member again until the group toured ‘The Division Bell’ in 1994.

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