Pigs might fly : the inside story of Pink Floyd

In July 2005 in Hyde Park, before a global audience in the tens of millions, Pink Floyd performed together on stage for the first time in 24 years.

As even Bob Geldof himself acknowledged, it was 'a far bigger story than Live 8 itself'.

From the moment the metronomic pulse of a human heartbeat thudded out to begin 'Speak to Me' to the soaring, stinging guitar solo by David Gilmour that climaxed 'Comfortably Numb', these four self-effacing men in their late fifties stole the show.

Almost a year later, the death of their troubled and reclusive founder-member Syd Barrett made headline news around the world.

Both events signalled a kind of closure to the remarkable tale of one of the world's biggest bands.

Now, in the first full-length history of the group for over 15 years, Mark Blake tells the complete story of how a group of middle-class Englishmen who grew up together in Cambridge went on to conquer the world with such classic albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, and put on some of the most pyrotechnically spectacular stage shows of all time. Drawing on his own interviews with all of the band members, plus almost a hundred new interviews with the group's friends, road crew, producers, designers, former housemates and university colleagues - some of whom have never spoken before - as well as musical contemporaries including Pete Townshend and Alice Cooper, "Pigs Might Fly" follows Pink Floyd all the way from the early psychedelic nights at UFO in the mid-sixties to the stadium-rock and concept-album zenith of the seventies, and finally the acrimonious schism that sundered the band in the eighties and nineties.

Along the way there are fascinating new revelations about Syd Barrett's chaotic menage at the time of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the band's painstaking and Byzantine recording sessions at Abbey Road, and the fractious negotiations to bring about their fragile, tantalising reunion in Hyde Park.

Meticulous, exacting and ambitious as any Pink Floyd album, "Pigs Might Fly" is the definitive account of this most adventurous, and at the same time most English of rock bands.