By the way, which one’s Pink?

• Artist: Pink Floyd

• Album: Echoes – The Best of Pink Floyd EMI Records

How could many of us have made it through high school without Pink Floyd? Those who grew up (more or less) in the ‘70s owe a lot to the musical soundtracks, the groovy album artwork by Hipgnosis, and the overwhelming angst of Britain’s laziest of space-rock bands.

Okay, they did tend to rest on their laurels a bit, kicking back for years without touring or recording after the staggering hit that was 1973’s Dark Side Of The Moon. Johnny Rotten, at the birth of Britain’s punk movement, was said to wear a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I HATE" scrawled above the band’s name. By the late ’70s the Floyds were busy being rich rock stars, having excised the pioneering loony spirit of Syd Barrett from the band and settled down to more, ahem, commercial interests.

But that’s only a fraction of the Floyd story. Echoes, a new double CD with surprisingly modest packaging, manages to relate a bit more of the story. From its opening Barrett-penned tracks (Astronomy Domine, See Emily Play), the CD skips around merrily back and forth through time, which may explain the multi-angled album photos recalling M. Escher’s illogical staircase.

After a blast of Barrett, circa 1967, the compilation jumps forward to 1979, and the first hit single from a band that supposedly didn’t release singles: Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) was the kind of teenaged anthem that most high schoolers could embrace at the time, scrawling its lyrics on their spiral notebooks (We don’t need no education/We don’t need no thought control). It was as if head Floyd member Roger Waters had lifted the burden of thinking from us angst-ridden teens. All we had to do was quote lyrics from The Wall, or write pseudo-deep, mystical lines from Time or Breathe under our yearbook photos, and people knew we were hip. Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. What daydreaming kid in trigonometry class couldn’t relate to that gem? Breathe, breathe in the air/Don’t be afraid to care. How deep, how sensitive.

Pink Floyd evolved from being a psychedelic shambala playing cacophonous space-rock to being a corporate entity, but that in no way makes them less memorable. Most of the tracks on this double disc stand up rather well, even by today’s standards. Smooth, sinuous production has always been their strong point. That Nick Mason was a drummer too much committed to… well, space… doesn’t take away from the effortless sheen of these tracks. Keyboardist Richard Wright grew more minimal, adding light touches, jazzy splashes here and there. His signature piece has to be The Great Gig in the Sky, a piano instrumental overladen with crazed soul screaming and organ. It sits alongside a later track, Marooned (from 1994’s The Division Bell), like a mirroring mood piece.

Pink Floyd were all about mood pieces, ultimately. There’s a melancholia to most of Dark Side of the Moon, but shades of frenzy were never far away from the mellow navel-gazing. David Gilmour was a master of crafting guitar themes, solos and riffs that lay low for most of the bass-heavy tracks, then exploded in cascading brilliance (as on Sheep). Waters provided the bass, usually a mesmerizing echo pattern that owed a bit to the minimalist composers of the time, as well as to German "prog" bands such as Tangerine Dream. The Floyd were a band that embraced technology like a child hungry for the treat: they weren’t afraid to make their albums sound better, perhaps, than the individual parts through peerless production, guitar pedals, looped sound effects.

After Barrett left the band in 1969 (having imbibed a bit too much acid even for those days), Waters took over the controls. CD 2 of Echoes opens with a tribute to Barrett, the lush 17-minute Shine On You Crazy Diamond. It ends with Bike, an oddly-metered little gem that shows just how brilliant Barrett was, even when he didn’t know where he was steering his own band. As the de facto mouthpiece for the band, Waters’ lyrics shifted from a preoccupation with madness and death to more humanistic concerns. Often relying on shlocky, obvious metaphors (Welcome to the Machine, Pigs), he was capable of oddly touching meditations on war, and how it left many young English children fatherless (When The Tigers Broke Free). The Wall (1979) marked a new era for the Floyd: a new generation of kids were discovering their mind-bending (if increasingly bombastic) psychoscapes, signalling the third and next to final stage of the band.

Diehard Floyd fans may quibble about the songs selected for this "best of" CD (Gilmour reportedly did all the picking; Waters wasn’t interested). Where is Careful With That Axe, Eugene, for instance? Or Dogs? Or the sizzling Run Like Hell? Fortunately, the later and more obscure tracks fit in well with their classic partners, thanks to seamless cross-fading. Even cuts from the Water-less Momentary Lapse of Reason and Division Bell sound quite listenable, if lacking a certain edge. Some trimming was done to accommodate Shine On and the overlong Echoes (from 1971’s Meddle), but one hardly notices. All the good stuff is here, and it does tend to take you back. Or possibly forward. Check out this collection and hear for yourself why bands like Radiohead are still huge fans.