Stamps from Great Britain to feature Pink Floyd album covers, performances

By Denise McCarty

Great Britain will honor the rock band Pink Floyd on 10 stamps to be issued July 7, according to a May 26 announcement from Royal Mail.

The designs of the stamps also were revealed on that date.

Six of them will feature album covers, and the other four will reproduce photographs of the band in concert. The four stamps are se-tenant (side-by-side) in a souvenir sheet.

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The Royal Mail announcement said that the stamps ”celebrate one of the most successful and influential British rock bands of all time.”

They also mark “50 years since Pink Floyd turned professional and became the ‘house band’ of the London Underground movement of music and arts,” according to Royal Mail.

Pink Floyd was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. The biography on the hall of fame website said: “Pink Floyd’s hallucinatory presentation of lights and music at London’s Roundhouse in 1966 brought psychedelia to the U.K. scene. The group carried rock and roll into a dimension that was more cerebral and conceptual than what preceded it. What George Orwell and Ray Bradbury were to literature, Pink Floyd is to popular music, forging an unsettling but provocative combination of science fiction and social commentary.

“In their early years, with vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett at the helm, Pink Floyd were the psychedelic Pied Pipers of the ‘London underground’ scene. In the Seventies, with bassist Roger Waters providing more of the songwriting and direction, Pink Floyd became one of the most influential rock bands of all time.”

In chronological order, the album covers shown on the stamps are The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, the band’s first album released in 1967; Atom Heart Mother, 1970; The Dark Side Of The Moon, 1973; Wish You Were Here, 1975; Animals, 1977; and The Endless River, 2014.

The cover of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, released in 1994, is included on a stamp in Great Britain’s 2010 Classic Album Covers set (Scott 2729). Like the stamps in that set, the Pink Floyd stamps will be cut to shape, showing a vinyl album emerging from its cover.

Royal Mail described the stamps in the souvenir sheet as celebrating “the ground-breaking live performances of the band, from the appearances at the now legendary UFO Club London in 1966 where they invented the ‘psychedelic’ light show; to the extremely ambitious staging for albums such as The Wall and the Division Bell tours.”

The Pink Floyd stamps can be pre-ordered from Royal Mail.

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