If this introductory piece turns up in more than two separate locations it’ll be because Hughesy has managed to find what look like more than two expressions of the same we’ve got this thing going, let’s see where it leads us impulse.
The Argumentative Reader might think I’m stretching things a bit when I seem to be lumping Pink Floyd and Traffic under the same umbrella, but it all comes back to a common origin in a guitar and organ based R&B combo with a remarkable front man.
One could probably make a case for shifting Jethro Tull under the same umbrella, although the original quartet tended towards blues rather than R&B and didn’t feature keyboards. Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond was an associate who was slotted into the lineup a little further down the track.
The parallels, to me, lay in the fact that we find two old favourites that I started re-investigating around the same time who found themselves on their feet and, more or less, scratching their heads and wondering, OK, so where do we go from here?
Traffic had their origins in a trio of minor players from the Birmingham scene who found themselves in a band with ex-Spencer Davis Group whizkid Steve Winwood. A band who needed original material who couldn't cast back to obvious R&B influences Winwood had mined on the way to Gimme Some Lovin' and I'm a Man. Pink Floyd were a quartet who found themselves suddenly short of a writing front man and couldn't cast back to work the same influences Syd Barrett had drawn on. You could do that, but you'd need to be Barrett to make it work.
Pink Floyd’s origins lay in a quartet of art and architecture students who’d been gigging around London under a variety of names including Sigma 6, the Meggadeaths, the Abdabs or the Screaming Abdabs, Leonard's Lodgers, and the Spectrum Five before settling on the Tea Set. That lasted until late 1965 when another outfit operating under the same name turned up at one of their gigs. Guitarist Syd Barrett then coined a new name, the Pink Floyd Sound from the given names of two Piedmont blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
It was, after all, the mid-sixties.