Fifty years after the release of Wish You Were Here, we count down the best of the band’s Syd Barrett years, their difficult recovery and later reunionLow on memorable tunes, big on racked, strangulated lead vocals, possessed of a worldview that makes every other Pink Floyd album look like a gushing font of Pollyanna-ish optimism, The Final Cut is a slog.But The Gunner’s Dream cuts through the gloom, thanks to a heartbreaking, fragile melody.Overshadowed by the albums that preceded and followed it, Obscured by Clouds might be the most underrated release in Pink Floyd’s catalogue: it boasts fantastic instrumental experiments, musical signposts to The Dark Side of the Moon and, in Wot’s … Uh the Deal?, a beautifully careworn, Beatles-y ballad undersold by its daft title.The studio half of Ummagumma is a mess – a band audibly searching for direction without success – but it contains one unequivocal triumph: Roger Waters’ evocation of the parkland on the banks of the River Cam, its pastoral calm spiked with a curious sense of menace, as if something nasty is lurking in the undergrowth.The More soundtrack throws up everything from proto-heavy metal and mock-flamenco to bongo solos.

But Cymbaline – soaring choruses, Rick Wright-heavy coda – is both splendid and oddly prescient: “Apprehension creeping like a tube train up your spine” sounds like a Dark Side of the Moon lyric that arrived four years too early.The final track on The Endless River, the final Pink Floyd studio album is, by some distance, the best song of their post-Waters era: it’s elegiac and gorgeous, and Polly Sampson’s lyrics touchingly suggest that the band’s music will ultimately drown out the members’ vitriolic public rifts.Brilliantly, a few years after it came out, they started slagging each other again: plus ça change.The choral experiments of Atom Heart Mother’s lengthy title track might have attracted the most attention, but its highlight was tucked away on side two, a sighing, utterly lovely slice of very, very English late August melancholy that sounded like country rock by way of Parker’s Piece.Rocking out was never really Pink Floyd’s forte – see 1969’s hopelessly leaden The Nile Song for proof – but Run Like Hell is the exception that proves the rule: powerfully claustrophobic and paranoid, driven by a relentless disco-facing beat and David Gilmour’s echoing guitar (inspired by the cellos on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations).

Despite his departure in 1968, Barrett seems to haunt Dark Side of the Moon’s concluding medley.The eerie, nursery rhyme-like verses of Brain Damage sound distinctly Barrett-esque; the lyrics allude to his decline.The song is also oddly equivocal: Eclipse’s epic climax is undercut by the Abbey Road studios doorman Gerry O’Driscoll grumbling “there is no dark side of the moon, really”.Animals is a tough but potent listen: its relentlessly bleak, contemptuous tone is as much an expression of mid-70s malaise and frustration as punk was.Dogs embodies the album’s grim mood – screeching synths disrupt the quieter sections, the lyrics are a tirade of misanthropy and hopelessness – and its glowering power: Gilmour’s guitar solos are particularly blazing.

The original Pink Floyd’s last stand, a dark coda to the summer of love, and the sound of LSD’s psychological wreckage washing up in rock for the first time.Barrett delivers a depiction of his own mental disintegration in a chillingly dead-eyed voice, a Salvation Army band erupts into free-form mayhem: it’s both disturbing and extraordinary.Based on a Wright piece rejected from the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point for being “too sad”, the tone of Us and Them is utterly defeated: the chorus feels like someone trying to rouse themselves into action before sinking back into a crestfallen torpor.But it’s also exceptionally beautiful, making dejection exquisite.People who saw the original iteration of Pink Floyd live often claim their studio recordings were too poppy to do them justice.

But that scarcely matters when the pop songs were as original and creative as See Emily Play – the psychedelic experience crammed into three fabulous minutes, a definitive summer of love artefact.After a few tentative years, Pink Floyd 2.0 finally found their footing on Meddle, something the band members clearly realised: built around Waters’ echo-laden bass, there’s a thrillingly brawny, confident swagger to opener One of These Days.If you want to hear Depeche Mode paying homage, head to Violator’s Clean.The most obvious sign that there was life after Barrett on A Saucerful of Secrets, Set the Controls … was long, partly improvised, hypnotic (and a huge influence on the nascent Krautrock scene), but resolutely not music to relax and float downstream to: it’s too creepy and unsettling.

Pink Floyd are synonymous with intra-band rancour, but they once worked perfectly as a sympatico unit,The lengthy instrumental intro of Shine on You Crazy Diamond is a masterpiece of scene setting: Wright’s keyboards and Gilmour’s mournful guitar perfectly fix the mood for the arrival of Waters’ bereft lyrics,Barrett’s psychedelic Pink Floyd at full power: they sound raw and visceral, like a garage band from Mars,Barrett’s guitar playing is astonishingly inventive, the lyrics spew out references to planets, comic books and Shakespeare in a lysergic gush: it’s nearly 60 years old and it’s still incredibly exciting,The post-Barrett, pre-Dark Side Floyd’s uncontested showstopper, Echoes was essentially an array of musical fragments painstakingly pieced together, although you’d never know: from its icy intro to a triumphant finale, its 23 minutes flow effortlessly.

The guitar playing is lyrical and expressive, the downcast verses beautiful, the ambient interlude creepy: it’s got the lot.It sold 30m copies, but The Wall still divides opinion: alienated masterpiece or insufferable monument to rock star solipsism? But everyone seems to agree on Comfortably Numb: its movement from wistful (but vaguely menacing) verses into a blissful (but faintly unnerving) chorus is exhilarating, and the cathartic guitar solo is a wonder.It’s hard to pick a highlight from Dark Side of the Moon, but Time is the song that packs the biggest emotional punch.A mediation on ageing written by a man still in his 20s should feel callow and speculative; instead, the lyrics of Time become more impactful the older you get.As simple and direct as 70s Pink Floyd got, which might explain why it’s been covered by everyone from Sparklehorse and Thom Yorke to the metal band Avenged Sevenfold and – yes! – Susan Boyle.

Or perhaps it’s because, from its opening riff to its closing guitar-and-scat-vocal solo, it’s an incredible song.Waters’ lyrics are deeply personal – addressed to Barrett, they first ponder whether he might have made a mistake in retreating from music, then collapse into sighing remorse – but there’s an affecting universality to their sense of loss and regret.There’s also a warmth and empathy noticeably absent in Pink Floyd’s subsequent work.