Pink Floyd: The Third Coming

Three decades and 140 million albums later, the sheer familiarity of the Pink Floyd phenomenon obscures the strangeness of it all. Unlike any of their contemporaries, for whom drastic changes in line-up have normally spelled disaster, The Floyd are well into their third coming. They opened their account as the Syd Barrett band, hoisted themselves into the international superleague as the Roger Waters quartet, and having survived the successive departures of two inspirational leaders and principal songwriters, are now continuing to hold their own as the David Gilmour trio. Small wonder the accepted wisdom holds that with Pink Floyd it is the sights and the sounds that matter; that for them, personnel are little more than technicians servicing a vast, high-tech son et lumiere spectacle, or perpetuating a brand name. The band endorse and encourage this view of themselves as a personality-free zone, to the point of giving only one interview to mark the release of their new album, The Division Bell. "We don't have to promote a Bono or a Mick Jagger," drummer Nick Mason tells me. "The thing you have to remember is, we're so wonderfully boring."