The recent passing of Pink Floyd's Rick Wright reminded me how my love of that band provoked so much scorn from friends who believed that post-hardcore groups like Sebadoh and Slint were the only viable forms of musical expression. A couple of years later, one of those friends conceded that Wish You Were Here was a bleakly beautiful song and that the Floyd were not quite the pompous prog behemoths of legend.

However, I can understand why they might seem dismissive, especially when considering the way in which Pink Floyd have been saddled with the lazy and much-maligned term "progressive rock". This is unfortunate, as all the terrible hallmarks of what we traditionally call prog rock are absent from their music. So click below to find out how Pink Floyd avoided the prog-rock pitfalls to emerge as a brilliant band.

Wacky time signatures
Pink Floyd rarely indulged in the show-off polymetric twaddle practised by Genesis or Yes. Genesis' Dance on a Volcano nearly made my A-level students sick when I played it to them as an example of prog rock. The ponderous 7/4 theme is genuinely queasy, with the melodic phrase feeling unfinished on the sixth beat. The seventh beat hangs in mid-air without function and induces an unpleasant vertigo sensation. It's completely unnecessary because, if they had continued the syncopation set up by the fifth note of the melody, the flow of this phrase would have naturally formed a seven-beat cycle. The only notable song where the Floyd lapse into an unusual metre is Money, one of their most commercially successful songs, which lopes along a 7/4 bass riff without batting an eyelid. They could do wacky time signatures if they fancied, without inspiring the likes of Marillion.

Jazz: Delicious hot, disgusting cold
Rick Wright was the most traditionally tutored musician in the Floyd and the other band members often spoke of the jazz influence he brought to the group. However, the most remarkable thing about Rick's training is how he let himself be moulded by the experimental tendencies of Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. It is testament to his sympathetic and sensitive ability that I rarely hear a jazz influence in Rick's work, even his own compositions. His best known, the headache-inducing/soothing Great Gig in the Sky, contains jazzy seventh chords, but is really just a series of beautiful chord progressions, and not jazz in any meaningful way. If you listen to the vile interpolation of jazz that erupts five minutes into King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man you will understand how a great Black Sabbath-style slab of noise can be ruined by prog excess.

Lyrics
The extent of swords and sorcery lyrics in prog is overstated, but when it strays from Tolkien it rarely improves. As with the music, an over-zealous air of trying to be clever prevails: "Complaining tongues are stilled; a thousand mouths are filled with rusting metal" sing Van de Graaf Generator, as if anticipating criticism. Hmmm. Compare most of the nonsense in prog rock with the casual spite of Pink Floyd's Dogs, which is as ferocious as punk, as elegiac as Wish You Were Here and as hazily nostalgic as Fat Old Sun. Good stuff I promise you.

Be careful what you borrow
Too often, prog rock is about nicking half-baked ideas from genuinely progressive music and executing them poorly. If you want unsettlingly beautiful shifting washes of texture then try Ligeti's Lontano, which predates the irritatingly new age Tangerine Dream. If you want to be rhythmically challenged, then forget the horrific noodling of Yes and check out Béla Bartók, who was inspired by the addictive rhythms of his native Hungary's folk music. Or in case I'm getting too Eurocentric, try the terrifyingly odd polyrhythms of Captain Beefheart and Steve Reich's mesmeric phase-shifting.

So there. Pink Floyd: not prog rock and excellent to boot. Strangely detached, but intensely moving; bleak but heartfelt. No Mars Volta or Muse, not even Radiohead (too much angst in that voice) are carrying the legacy of this incredibly idiosyncratic band forward. Strange echoes occur in odd places. I can hear similar lyrical themes of reserved English desperation set to fascinatingPink Floyd arrangements on Field Music's excellent Tones of Town.

Where else can I get my fix now there's no hope of that reunion?