logo
Pink Floyd Charts A Brand New Hit Album

Pink Floyd Charts A Brand New Hit Album

Forbes27-03-2025
Pink Floyd hasn't released a new studio album in a decade, and there isn't another one coming anytime soon. Somehow, the rockers continue to rack up hit full-lengths in the U.K., proving just how strong its legacy — and fan base — is to this day.
The group has only rarely reunited in the past few decades, but that hasn't stopped the band from charting again and again thanks to a steady stream of archival releases, retrospectives, and special edition drops. This week, the band is back with another new bestseller, and the material it contains is far from recent.
The latest win for the legendary rock outfit comes as To Control Space - Live 1969 debuts. The newly-issued live collection opens at No. 28 on the Official Rock and Metal Albums chart in the U.K., giving Pink Floyd yet another placement on that genre-specific list.
To Control Space - Live 1969 is one of at least 50 appearances Pink Floyd has earned on the Official Rock and Metal Albums chart. That's an enormous sum for any act, and especially one that only ever released 15 studio albums. The rest of the sets from the group that have placed on the tally are compilations, box sets, and various live recordings, including this latest effort.
The band's new album is a rare and collectible recording that clearly struck a chord with longtime listeners. It was recorded all the way back in 1969 in Chesterfield, and features early performances of some of the band's more obscure and experimental material.
It hasn't been long since Pink Floyd last made an appearance on the Official Rock and Metal Albums chart, despite the fact that the group hasn't released a studio recording in a decade. To Control Space - Live 1969 marks the band's fifth debut on the tally in less than a year.
In 2024 alone, the group sent four different releases onto the ranking: Live at the BBC, September 1971; Winterland Eclipse, 1972; California Sun, Live 1970; and The Travel Sequence, Osaka, Japan, 1972. All four landed inside the top 40 between June and September.
This week, Pink Floyd earns the fifth-highest debut on the Official Rock and Metal Albums roster. The legendary rockers are beaten by Steven Wilson's The Overview (No. 1), Ricky Warwick's Blood Ties (No. 2), and Coheed and Cambria's The Father of Make Believe (No. 3). Live - Perpetual Change by Jon Anderson and the Band Geeks also enters the top 10, landing at No. 8.
While To Control Space - Live 1969 is the newest addition to Pink Floyd's charting catalog, one of its oldest releases – and easily its most successful – is also enjoying a boost this week. The band's landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon continues to perform well on several charts in the U.K. It currently appears on four tallies, and it climbs on half of them.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Michael Sloan, ‘The Equalizer' Co-Creator, Dies at 78
Michael Sloan, ‘The Equalizer' Co-Creator, Dies at 78

Yahoo

time3 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Michael Sloan, ‘The Equalizer' Co-Creator, Dies at 78

Michael Sloan, the co-creator of the original TV series The Equalizer, has died. He was 78. Sloan died Wednesday, Aug. 13, his family announced. While his cause of death isn't revealed, according to his family, Sloan 'passed away peacefully.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Terence Stamp, Brooding Legend of British Cinema, Dies at 87 Dan Tana, Former Owner of Namesake Hollywood Restaurant, Dies at 90 Ronnie Rondell Jr., Hollywood Stuntman Set on Fire for a Pink Floyd Album, Dies at 88 He was known for The Equalizer, where he co-created the action-crime series alongside Richard Lindheim. The show ran on CBS from 1985 to 1989 and starred Edward Woodward. The series inspired the 2014 Denzel Washington-led film of the same name and its 2018 and 2023 sequels. Sloan served as a producer on the movies. Most recently, in 2012, The Equalizer was adapted again into a show starring Queen Latifah, which ran for five seasons but was canceled in May. Born in New York City on Oct. 14, 1946, Sloan came from an entertainment industry family. His father was Fred Stone, an actor who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz on Broadway in 1902. He grew up in London, where he began to write and produce. After he moved back to the U.S. in 1974, his career in television started to take off. His additional writing and producing credits include McCloud, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Battlestar Galactica, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Quincy, M.E., which also earned him an Emmy nomination. While he was working on the thriller series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he met his wife and Little House on the Prairie star, Melissa Sue Anderson. The couple married in 1990 and shares two kids, Piper and Griffin. Sloan is survived by Anderson, Piper, Griffin and his sister, Judy. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword

Hollywood stuntman set on fire for Pink Floyd's iconic 'Wish You Were Here' album cover dies at 88
Hollywood stuntman set on fire for Pink Floyd's iconic 'Wish You Were Here' album cover dies at 88

Fox News

time19 hours ago

  • Fox News

Hollywood stuntman set on fire for Pink Floyd's iconic 'Wish You Were Here' album cover dies at 88

Ronnie Rondell, Jr., the Hollywood stuntman famously set on fire for Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" cover, has died at the age of 88. His death was announced by his family on the website of Hedges‑Scott‑Millard Funeral Home, a Missouri-based business. Rondell was listed as a resident of Camdenton, Missouri, at the time of his death. Rondell is survived by his wife, Mary Smith, whom he married in 1969, along with one son and three grandchildren, his obituary reported. He was preceded in death by his son Ronald and both of his parents. "Ronnie was a professional stuntman for many years and during his career he was a director and stuntman coordinator," the obituary reads. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Rondell appeared in movies including "Blazing Saddles," "Thelma & Louise," and "Lethal Weapon," in addition to "The Matrix Reloaded," and "The Hunt for Red October." The longtime stuntman started his own company, called Stunts Unlimited, in 1970. Most famously, Rondell was the man set ablaze on the cover of the 1975 Pink Floyd album "Wish You Were Here," a fan-favorite considered one of the best progressive rock albums of the decade. According to photographer Aubrey Powell, Rondell once noted that the stunt was particularly dangerous. "It's dangerous for a man to stand still on fire," Powell quoted Rondell as saying, per The Times. "Normally you're running and the fire's spreading behind you, or you're falling and the fire is above you, or you can always make out with camera angles that the stunt person is closer to the fire than they actually are. But to stand still…?" The cover, shot at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California, was meant to represent two music industry executives making a deal – a reference to the song "Have a Cigar." According to the Times, the photograph took fifteen attempts, and Rondell was coated in gasoline each time, and lost one of his eyebrows during the final take. "Ronnie was very gracious about it, considering," Powell added.

‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers
‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers

Yahoo

time19 hours ago

  • Yahoo

‘They set a man on fire and scrambled the RAF': The mad stories of Pink Floyd's album covers

The story of Pink Floyd is a whirlwind of death, madness, bad blood, herculean guitar solos and towering egos. But one of the highest-profile casualties in the tumultuous history of the band that put the 'grrr' in progressive rock was the moustache of stuntman Ronnie Rondell Jr, half of which was famously singed during the 15 attempts it took to photograph the instantly iconic cover of the band's 1975 masterpiece, Wish You Were Here. As captured by regular Pink Floyd collaborator Aubrey Powell on the Warner Bros studio backlot in California, the image of a smiling Rondell with his business attire ablaze, shaking hands with another man, became immediately part of the band's mythology. There is an argument that it is just as well known as the band's music, which has gone in and out of fashion since the prog era drew to a close in the late 1970s. But now there is a bittersweet coda with the news that Rondell has died at the age of 88. For Rondell, Wish You Were Here was just one flashpoint in a life full of thrills and spills. His career spanned eras – from 1960s Westerns such as How the West Was Won to superhero movies like Batman & Robin. But Wish You Were Here is in the first line in his obituary – and with good reason, as he had a part in one of the greatest ever album covers. Typically for Pink Floyd, however, both the record sleeve and the album were accompanied by soap-opera levels of drama. Here we delve into the making of five of their most celebrated LPs. Atom Heart Mother, 1970 Pink Floyd would look back on their fifth studio album with a degree of ambivalence. Though it went to number one and was one of their biggest hits up to that point, they came to regret its shaggy, experimental quality (including the sound of frying bacon and a kettle coming to the boil). 'A load of rubbish,' is how guitarist David Gilmour characterised the record, which took form as the group were coming to terms with the exit of their original leader, Syd Barrett – shown the door after his out-of-control acid habit left him hollowed out and permanently frazzled. 'We were at a real low point… I think we were scraping the barrel a bit at that period,' said Gilmour. Scraping the barrel they may have been with songs such as the 13-minute Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast and Breast Milky (part of the side-one song cycle). But in one respect, the LP was boundary-shattering – and that, of course, has to do the sleeves designed by their regular collaborators, the aforementioned Powell and Storm Thorgerson, who worked as Hipgnosis (and who knew the Floyd from their early days in Cambridge). Thorgerson and Powell would later come to be regarded as masters of the art of album design, but in the early 1970s they still had the mindset of unruly undergraduates making it up as they went. Which is how they came to present Pink Floyd with the mocked-up album sleeve consisting of a photograph snapped by Thorgerson of a Holstein-Friesian named Lulubelle III. It was intended largely as a joke, but Pink Floyd loved its daring – no album or artist title, no band photograph. Their label, EMI, was less enamoured of the concept. 'Ah, Friesians,' said Len Wood, the boss of EMI Records. Still, he knew better than to get in the way of a band whose blend of artsiness and whimsy had already brought great success – and three weeks later, Atom Heart Mother was topping the charts. Dark Side of the Moon, 1973 Determined to improve on the botched and indulgent, as they saw it, Atom Mother Heart, Pink Floyd produced their masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. According to Roger Waters, it was the last time the band were all on the same wavelength, and tensions between him and guitarist Gilmour would be exacerbated by the success and fame that followed in the record's wake. But while the music was among the best the Floyd would commit to tape, part of the appeal also lay in the masterful artwork by Hipgnosis, then busy parlaying their association with Pink Floyd into a successful career designing album covers for everyone from Led Zeppelin to 10CC. Unusually for Hipgnosis, the famous image of a white beam of light passing through a triangular glass prism and splitting into a spectrum of colours is entirely a work of graphic design, with no additional photography. 'The idea itself was cunningly cobbled from a standard physics textbook,' Thorgerson said in 2003. Powell added: 'In this book was a photo of a prism on a piece of sheet music and sunlight coming in through the glass window. It was creating this rainbow effect.' The band loved it – to Thorgerson's chagrin, as it was the first of several mock-up album sleeves he had prepared. Didn't they want to see the other options, he wondered, at a meeting at EMI Studios in Abbey Road? Drummer Nick Mason would later dub him 'a man who couldn't take yes for an answer'. Wish You Were Here, 1975 Pink Floyd were slowly falling apart when they came to make their follow-up to Dark Side of the Moon. To the perpetually angst-ridden Waters, the title track was a lament both for the absent Barrett (unrecognisable when, bloated and confused, he visited the group during the recording sessions) and also for the fact that they were becoming strangers to one another. He was commenting, too, on how the record business turned musicians against one another while cheerfully ripping them off. That was the message that Powell and Thorgerson seized upon for the cover. 'There was a lot of anger, especially in Roger, about the record business,' said Powell. 'So we're talking about the absence of sincerity, about people being ripped off.' They had the perfect image in mind: two businessmen shaking hands, one on fire – symbolising the cynical nature of the music industry and how someone always ended up getting burnt in a deal. However, in the era before CGI or sophisticated animation, a picture of a burning man required a man to be literally set alight. This led them to Stunts Unlimited, where none of the resident stuntmen were up for the gig. 'Who wants to be on a record cover when we can be in The Towering Inferno?' said one. There was just one exception – veteran Rondell, who was excited to take part in what he knew to be a dangerous undertaking, staying on the spot while on fire ('You're standing still and fire moves'). A few days later, Rondell was on the Warner Bros set in Burbank, in a suit and wig. The clothes were covered in flame-retardant material while Rondell was smeared in gel. They took 14 shots, hoping to get the perfect image – but Powell wanted to press on. On the 15th time, the wind changed direction, setting ablaze one of Rondell's eyebrows and half his moustache. Animals, 1977 Hipgnosis had started to lose the run of themselves by 1977, and Pink Floyd's dark, uneasy Animals. They suggested a cover image of a child watching his parents copulate 'like animals'. Thanks but no thanks, said Waters, who had an idea of his own: a giant inflatable pig floating over the partly decommissioned Battersea Power Station in London. Tension was running high leading up to the shoot, though not for the traditional rock 'n' roll reasons. 'Storm and Roger's relationship by the time we did Animals was pretty fraught anyway,' Powell said, 'and actually not necessarily related to Animals. They were squash partners. And Storm was notorious for turning up late to every single meeting we ever had in our careers at Hipgnosis. And he did the same to Roger. He turned up later and later and later for squash games. In the end, one day, Roger left the squash court, walked out and said: 'That's the last time I'm ever playing with you.' That was a defining moment in Storm and Roger's disintegration in their friendship.' Undeterred, Floyd commissioned a 40ft inflatable pig – made by Ballon Fabrik, the German firm that had constructed the Zeppelin airships. On December 2 1976, they and Powell arranged for 14 photographers to snap the pig over Battersea Power Station. But having initially declined to inflate, the airborne pig then made a dash for freedom – when a cable snapped, it strayed into the Heathrow airport flightpath and two RAF fighters were scrambled to track it down (it eventually turned up in the field of a farmer in Kent). After all that, the images were judged unsatisfactory, and so the band used a montage of the porcine balloon and of the ominous skies above the power plant – a metaphor for the dark forces of capitalism tearing apart the now thoroughly unhappy Floyd. The Wall, 1979 Waters was fed up with being a rock star, and his 1980 opus, The Wall, was a meditation on the divide he felt had been imposed between artist and audience. There was also a wall between him and the rest of Pink Floyd, and he would leave shortly afterwards – imagining that he had called time on the group (Gilmour and his bandmates felt otherwise and carried on Waters-less). A sign of changing times was the fact that The Wall's cover was designed not by Hipgnosis but by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. He had struck up a friendship with Waters, having collaborated on the stage design of the Wish You Were Here tour. 'Roger Waters and I got on pretty well. We had the same ironic/sardonic view of the world and we played a lot of snooker. I think he trusted me,' Scarfe would say. 'From my point of view, it was a happy arrangement,' Scarfe continued, 'because Roger in no way tried to impose himself on my work. He had the philosophy that if you employ an artist, you don't try to change what he does. We were working in separate fields – music and art – and yet the two helped one another. He saw the whole sleeve as being designed by me, but it was Roger's idea from the beginning that it should be a blank wall.' The words 'Pink Floyd' and 'The Wall' were scribbled out in a hurry. 'The writing on the front was just written by me, very quickly,' he said in 2022. 'I think I would have done it with a little more panache these days. We were actually worried about blemishing the purity of the cover, and almost wanted not to have a logo on the front.' The approach was the opposite of that of Hipgnosis. There were no elaborate photo shoots, no grand concepts. Just a cover as stark and blunt as the message of the album: that being a rock star wasn't much fun, and global fame was a hell from which there was no escape. All in all, it has weathered the years rather well. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store