The 1994 album David Gilmour doesn’t want to talk about: “I don’t feel like saying much”
There was no real way for David Gilmour to figure out how to bring back Pink Floyd after Roger Waters left.
The entire point of keeping the band together was to prove that Waters wasn’t the only person left in the band, but after convincing the world that they had better ideas of their own, not all of them turned up right away. They needed to learn a few lessons of their own if they wanted to survive, but Gilmour was determined to give the people something that was a little bit more interesting than typical prog-rock affairs.
But, really, there was no way that Gilmour was going to squeak by as if nothing happened the first time he started working with the new version of Floyd. Waters was simply too big to be replaced outright, and when you look at the people that got to sub in his place, a lot of them were more interested in taking the safe route than worrying about taking chances that would piss off the fanbase.
Which is probably why A Momentary Lapse of Reason stands as one of their most divisive albums. Floyd was always known for not going by the book and making songs that challenged the people, so to have them on a track that played everything on easy mode, it did feel like a little bit of a letdown, especially when doing research and finding out that Nick Mason didn’t even play on the full thing.
All they really needed at the time was a chance to regroup, and after a few more years, they had a much better handle on what they wanted to be on The Division Bell. Waters had become a distant memory, and while Amused to Death proved to be a decent solo record from him, Gilmour was far more concerned with seeing what they could do when facing the band’s past one more time.
Half of their songs in their prime were about looking back on their days with Syd Barrett, and Polly Samson was the perfect filter for a lot of Gilmour’s ideas. The whole project was a collaborative effort and even yielded some decent songs in the long run, but even with people like Richard Wright coming back to the fold, Gilmour felt that this was the one record that didn’t bear going back to.
The songs were great for what they were, but Gilmour simply felt that they had said their piece and there was no point in digging any deeper into it, saying, “I found that there’s very little that one wants to say about it. I mean, I don’t know if it’s just a stage in my life, but I just don’t feel like saying very much about how I write songs and what they mean and all that sort of stuff.” That said, a lot of the best messages of the album are better said in the songs than anything else.
The whole record deals with problems of miscommunication, and a lot of that comes from Gilmour trying to make sense of what the band was like without Waters and how he deals with his former bandmate tearing him down. And considering this was the last album of pop-minded songs, having tunes like ‘High Hopes’ be one of the final messages that the band imparts to the world was everything that they could have asked for.
Floyd fans may not have realised that this would have been the final time that all of them played together on record, but Gilmour felt it was best to leave the band where they were at this point in time. It was no use trying to make one of the biggest rock and roll records all over again, so why bother belabouring the point every single time they made a new record?
