‘Echoes’: The Bright Side of Pink Floyd

“Echoes--The Best of Pink Floyd,” an album that surveys the celebrated British group’s long career, constitutes a near-miracle on at least one front.

It’s not just that “Echoes,” arriving in stores today, distills, on a pair of CDs, the band’s extensive output, which includes some of the most ambitious and biggest-selling albums in rock history.

No, the most remarkable aspect of “Echoes” is that it’s probably the first thing long-feuding Pink Floyd principals David Gilmour and Roger Waters have agreed on in almost two decades.

“The record company has been wanting it for some time, so we all finally [got around to agreeing] to do one,” says guitarist-singer-songwriter Gilmour. “As usual, Roger and I were arguing through our intermediary, James Guthrie. We sort of argued this, that and the other for quite a long time, but we finally got down to it in the end, and no one has [complained] too bitterly.”

That fact alone will ratchet up interest in “Echoes,” an album that record retailers and Capitol Records executives hope will become one of the hits of the holiday season.

“Expectations are big not only on [the label’s] end, but on our end,” says Tower Records’ Southwest region sales director Bob Feterl. “We’re going to do great with it, and their whole catalog is going to be picking up like crazy because of it.”

No one expects “Echoes” to approach the phenomenal sales posted in the weeks before and after Christmas last year by the Beatles’ “1” hits compilation, but retailers see it brightening what has been a fairly lackluster autumn at the cash register.

The big challenge for Gilmour and lyricist-singer-bassist Waters was simply agreeing on how to do justice to the band’s legacy. Gilmour hasn’t spoken in years to Waters, who acrimoniously quit the band in 1984. They still didn’t talk directly-- that would have been a full-on rock miracle--while collaborating on the first Floyd compilation put together with the active participation of all four longtime members.

Gilmour and Waters did, however, reach consensus--not only with each other but with drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright.

“It’s a tricky one, I can tell you,” says longtime Pink Floyd producer-engineer Guthrie, the middleman between Gilmour and Waters. “It’s a very delicate situation; they don’t get on. I’d say everyone was unanimous on about 80% of the material. But in that other 20%, there was a lot of discussion. Some of the conversations became quite heated because this music is so much a part of all of our lives.”

Indeed, the group’s 1979 concept album “The Wall” has been certified platinum (sales of 1 million) 23 times over by the Recording Industry Assn. of America. Pink Floyd also holds the record for chart longevity with its 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon,” which remained on Billboard’s Top 200 list for more than 14 years.

“Echoes” includes 26 songs spanning the band’s 1967 debut album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” when guitarist-singer-songwriter Syd Barrett fronted the group, through its most recent studio album, 1994’s “The Division Bell,” one of two Pink Floyd albums released after Waters left.

The “Echoes” cover, designed by veteran Pink Floyd art designer Storm Thorgerson, carries out the “best of” concept graphically with a melange of images from the group’s original album covers.

In many other ways, it’s an unconventional project.

“We all thought it should be an interesting and fun album, showing everything from our career and done the way we’ve tended to do things,” Gilmour says. “Quite early on we agreed it shouldn’t run chronologically. We thought it would be good to juxtapose certain pieces with each other and cross-fade from one song into another. So it’s a little bit more than just stringing together the individual tracks.”

Gilmour and Guthrie say the album should yield some new perspectives even for those intimately familiar with Pink Floyd’s brooding, psychologically probing music, variously categorized over the years as progressive rock, space music and head music.

At its mid-’70s peak, Pink Floyd typified the grand-scale rock that punk rockers decried in their return to a musically simpler, more impassioned style.

“I thought they had a big point,” says Gilmour, 54. “They were completely right with just about everyone--except us.... I don’t feel a great affinity for most of the other people we were lumped together with in the so-called ‘progressive’ movement. That never felt much like a club I ever wanted to be a member of.

“Unfortunately, the punks didn’t really have the music to carry it through,” he adds. “Punk in my memory was more an attitude than a musical movement. I don’t remember ever feeling that threatened by punk. But it did influence our next album, ‘Animals’ [from 1977], which was a bit harder and more up-tempo than most of our stuff. That was the direct influence punk had on us.”

Pink Floyd’s legacy has survived the punk onslaught and can be felt in a new generation of bands that strive to evoke an alienation and dark, interior worlds akin to those Floyd explored in “Dark Side of the Moon” and “Wish You Were Here.”

Pete Howard, editor of the ICE newsletter for CD collectors, believes that “there’s a real need for a good Pink Floyd compilation. It’s a welcome addition that will give a lot of younger consumers a great introduction to the band. I’m so glad they’re doing a double CD. For a group as expansive as Pink Floyd, you couldn’t contain it on one disc. It’s not like the Beatles [“1”] album that was mostly two-and three-minute hits.”

(There are two earlier Floyd compilations, one on Columbia and one Capitol, as well as 1992’s nine-CD set ‘Shine On,’ which packaged seven full albums and some early singles.)

“In the end,” Guthrie says of “Echoes,” “I think it’s a pretty good compromise.”