Pink Floyd’s 10 best songs — Money is not even on the list

Pink Floyd are one of the best and biggest-selling bands of all time. Formed in London in 1965, they first gained a following as an early psychedelic group, before albums like Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall lifted them to the ranks of music mega-stars.

Dark Side of the Moon, released in 1973, is believed to be the fourth best-selling album of all time, with reported sales of 45 million copies, only beaten by Michael Jacskon’s Thriller, AC/DC’s Back in Black and Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard.

In total, Pink Floyd released 15 studio albums, as well as several more live albums, compilation albums and 27 singles. But it was not remotely plain sailing for the band. Founding member Syd Barrett left in 1968 due to his deteriorating mental health, while another founding member Richard Wright was dismissed from the band during the recording of The Wall (he was later rehired).

Then, after recording 1983’s The Final Cut, Roger Waters left the band for good, setting in motion a series of legal battles and acrimony that lasted decades. Fans have been hoping for a reunion of Waters and guitarist David Gilmour ever since. They got a brief one in 2005 when they played at the Live 8 concert. But we’ll never see Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason again as Wright died in 2008, two years after Barrett.

Pink Floyd are reportedly the ninth biggest selling music act of all time, behind The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Elton John, Queen, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and Rihanna.

It’s almost impossible to compile a list of their 10 best songs as there are at least 10 more which narrowly missed out on this list. And, of course, any list of a band’s “best” songs is purely subjective, relying not just on the melody, lyrics and musicianship but what they mean to people and at what point in their lives they heard it. And with that disclaimer in place, here are my 10 best-ever Pink Floyd songs.

10. Another Brick in the Wall (The Wall)

Another Brick in the Wall is possibly Pink Floyd’s most famous song, famous for its “Hey, teacher! Leave us kids alone!” line sung by a children’s choir and reaching number one in several countries, including the UK. The song is actually split into three parts on The Wall album, with Part 2 being the best-known.

9. High Hopes (The Division Bell)

It’s tough for any band to keep up such astronomically high standards after the departure of a key member. The Beatles would not have been as good if they’d carried on without John Lennon or Paul McCartney. And while it’s true that The Division Bell album, made several years after Roger Waters walked away, is not in the same league as The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon, it’s also true that few albums anywhere on Earth are. It’s got a lot of strong songs, and I’ve gone for High Hopes as the best.

8. Mother (The Wall)

From start to finish, the lyrics of Mother are chilling, suffocating and Roger Waters once explained to Mojo magazine that the song is about “the idea that we can be controlled by our parents’ views on things”. Coming from The Wall, it starts off with a heavy sigh, then the question “Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?” The chorus goes as follows: “Hush now, baby, baby, don’t you cry. Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true. Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you.” Nice.

7. Us and Them (Dark Side of the Moon)

Dark Side of the Moon is an astonishingly good album, with epic song after epic song, and there are many reasons it’s one of the highest-selling ever made. Undoubtedly, some people would say this album could account for all the band’s top 10 songs. But mega-famous songs like Money and Breathe don’t even make this list. But Us and Them is impossible to leave off. It’s unique.

6. Wish You Were Here (Wish You Were Here)

It’s amazing how some of the biggest and best-known songs just seem to happen by chance. Paul McCartney has famously recounted how he dreamed The Beatles classic Yesterday. And Roger Waters said he wrote Wish You Were Here “probably in an hour” after happening to overhear David Gilmour playing around with the song’s legendary guitar riff. He said the words “just came out” and he didn’t investigate their meaning too much because that would be like “investigating a butterfly”. However, he also said the album as a whole was about absence and the loss of Syd Barrett.

5. Echoes (Meddle)

Echoes is 23 minutes long and arguably the song that best shows Pink Floyd’s transition from their early experimental, psychedelic work to the enormous mainstream success which followed. Two years after Meddle came Dark Side of the Moon, which changed everything.

4. The Final Cut (The Final Cut)

The Final Cut was the last Pink Floyd album that included Roger Waters. Although the making of the album was reportedly plagued by conflict within the band, it contains some wonderful songs, with this one probably the pick of the lot. The album is an anti-war concept, which was changed part-way through as a response to the outbreak of The Falklands War. It also looks at the betrayal of British servicemen during World War Two, during which Waters’ father was killed. However, The Final Cut song itself is different, and seems to tell of a person’s isolation, depression and possibly even considerations of suicide. It opens with the verse “Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes, I can barely define the shape of this moment in time. And far from flying high in clear blue skies, I’m spiralling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.”

3. Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Wish You Were Here)

Another epic long song, Shine On… is sensational. Also from the Wish You Were Here album, it’s another that was created, and is listened to, with Syd Barrett in mind, with lines like “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Now there’s a look in your eyes like black holes in the sky.” Roger Waters says the album was about “absence and to some extent about the loss of Syd Barrett, who had succumbed to mental illness”. Waters said of Barrett in 2024: “I’ve been missing him since 1968.”

2. Brain Damage/Eclipse (Dark Side of the Moon)

These are officially two songs, but they merge into each other as one experience to close out the Dark Side of the Moon album before thsemelves fading out and leaving only the sound of a heartbeat. To stand out in an album this good is an achievement in itself and these two songs left me stunned the first time I heard them. They close with the line: “And all that is now, and all that is gone, and all that’s to come, and everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

1. Comfortably Numb (The Wall)

Trying to choose the “best” Pink Floyd song is, in truth, like trying to choose the “best” footballer, film or painting. It’s ultimately subjective. But if I was only allowed to listen to one song for the rest of my life, it would be Comfortably Numb, which ends with one of the greatest guitar solos in history. Thirty years on, I still watch the live performance of this song at Earl’s Court in 1994 open-mouthed. It’s perhaps the best live performance of a song ever.