“It sounds much more genuine”: David Gilmour on the best Pink Floyd album since ‘Wish You Were Here’
Dysfunction has always been at the heart of almost any Pink Floyd masterpiece. Even though every band member could come together and make beautiful music whenever they had the right idea, it didn’t come without hardship, whether that was losing Syd Barrett or Roger Waters insisting on putting his cynical stamp on everything he touched. Although the band’s run of post-Dark Side of the Moon albums has gone down in legend, there was only one record that stood out in David Gilmour’s mind as reaching the same heights as their classics.
Because looking at everything that came out after their 1973 masterpiece, there were hardly any duds for the rest of the 1970s. Even though Dark Side of the Moon has been etched into history and is probably the first thing that aliens will listen to when discovering the wonders of prog rock, Wish You Were Here is a far more pleasant record, if only because of how emotionally potent it was.
That was the sound of the group paying tribute to Barrett and trying to find some way to survive the rock landscape, but the rest of their career was birthed out of pain. While Gilmour was the co-captain along with Waters, there was no question of who had a better handle on steering the ship on Animals and The Wall, both of which feel like Roger Waters solo records that happen to have Pink Floyd members on them.
By the time of The Final Cut, though, it was clear that Waters’s conceptual adventures had reached an impasse. He had now turned every song into a glorified therapy session, and even with classic Gilmour solos behind him, all that people were left with were songs that read like emotional vomit half the time.
Although Waters left the fold in the mid-1980s, Gilmour knew there was still some untapped potential there when striking out on his own. A Momentary Lapse of Reason showed glimpses of that, but listening to the work the band made on The Division Bell, it was clear that Gilmour had finally figured out how to conjure up that Floyd magic on his own.
Being tied together by the concept of miscommunication, Gilmour felt that the record could stand alongside every one of their classics, saying, “On this album, both Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] are playing all the stuff that they should be playing. Which is why it sounds much more like a genuine Pink Floyd record to me than anything since Wish You Were Here. We went out last time with the intention of showing the world, Look, we’re still here, which is why we were so loud and crash bang-y. This is a much more reflective album.”
And while Waters’s grand concepts are sorely missed here, hearing Gilmour and Polly Sampson work out lyrics about people not communicating properly is a lot more engaging than anything on their last project. Now that Wright was also a part of the band again, hearing him performing on ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ was the kind of return that fans had been waiting for ever since he got fired during The Wall sessions.
Despite Gilmour having the last word on the band on The Endless River, The Division Bell does a much better job acting as a final statement from the core members of Floyd. Waters might not have been there, but this was Gilmour’s way of making the kind of record that Pink Floyd fans had fallen in love with back in the day.
