The Pink Floyd Story

The Pink Floyd Story was a six part radio documentary on Pink Floyd, that was broadcast between December 1976 and January 1977 on London's Capital Radio. The programme was presented by Nicky Horne and featured comments from the band and other personalities including John Peel.

Links To Peel
Peel contributed several episodes to the programme and on the first episode he mentioned how he discovered the band and his reaction to seeing them live and hearing their debut album: "'The first time I ever heard of them was when I was still working in California and it sounds very grand, but I'd sent a band over from Riverside to London, to stay with my mother actually in Notting Hill, called The Misunderstood, who made a couple of classic singles for Fontana and then disappeared, pretty much. "

"And the lead singer came back to try and sort out his draft thing and he came along, he came to stay with us in San Bernadino, and he kept going on about these people that he'd seen in London, Hendrix and the Pink Floyd, and I was very taken with the name at the time - the Pink Floyd seemed like a good name to me (still does, actually). So, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got back here, which was in the spring of 1967 to go and work for Radio London, was to go and see Hendrix and the Floyd and indeed I did. The first time I ever saw them was at the old UFO club in Tottenham Court Road, where all of the hippies used to put on our Kaftans and bells and beads and go and lie on the floor in an altered condition and listen to whatever was going on. "

"The Floyd were going on one night, I must admit, I'm ashamed to say it, I don't remember the Floyd as vividly as I remember Arthur Brown, 'cos I mean Arthur Brown, at that time, used to just stand there and insult the members of the audience in much the same way as people like Johnny Rotten seem to do now. "

"And, so the first time I ever... I used to see the Floyd y'know, but they were just like a band that you saw, y'know you didn't really pay a lot of attention to them, and I think the first time I really took a great deal of notice of what they were doing, was at the time of the release of the first LP. And then it suddenly seemed, you suddenly realised, like with the first Hendrix LP really, you suddenly realise that was something very, very important and I'd like to be able to convince you that I was into the Pink Floyd years before anyone else, but I was probably into the Pink Floyd a year after everybody else! But that first LP obviously came as a bit of a revelation...'"