The Moon Landing Inspired Pink Floyd’s Most Overlooked Song

50 years ago today Pink Floyd commemorated the moon landing with an improvised, seven and a half minute performance of a song titled, “Moonhead”, a spacey, atmospheric piece commissioned by the BBC that featured “cosmic guitar effects, pulses of percussion, and Waters’s ominously descending bass line,” “an eerie piece of improvisation that translates the breathtaking awe of the moon landing into music.”

The song was mostly lost to obscurity until being released in 2016 as part of the box set titled, “The Early Years 1965–1972” but as The Atlantic article says, “For seven and a half minutes on the night of July 20, 1969, Pink Floyd took thousands of BBC viewers to the moon. Of course, two men were already there: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronauts who became the first human beings to set foot on the lunar surface. However, the members of Pink Floyd—David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright—weren’t using science, calculus, and technology to transport people through space on that fateful evening. They were using music.”

Read the entire article here.