The Pink Floyd album Richard Wright called frustrating: “It wasn’t going in the right direction”
When talking about the legacy of Pink Floyd, Richard Wright tends to get the shaft far too often. He may have been responsible for soundtracking the best progressive rock songs of all time from behind his keyboards, but the fact that Roger Waters considered him to be disposable by the time they were working on The Wall is one of the biggest misconceptions in rock history. Wright deserved to be in Pink Floyd as much as anyone, but when he began work on The Division Bell, it wasn’t about to get easier.
Before we even look at his work on the album, let’s put ourselves in Wright’s shoes for a second. You’ve just been asked to return to the band that you considered your baby for decades, and now, with David Gilmour at the helm instead of Waters, there’s a completely different energy to work with.
Whereas Waters would paint a picture with words and try to create some grand concept around everything, Gilmour was looking to create subtle moments extracted from jam sessions throughout the band’s development, which is what made fans either love or hate A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Although this would feature Wright and Gilmour harmonising once again, the pianist struggled to get everything recorded, telling Mark Blake, “I felt that it wasn’t going in the right direction all the time. I like the record, but it was also frustrating. As a writer, you can always end up disagreeing with the people you’re working with about certain things.”
Then again, this might also be centred around the elephant in the room that every Pink Floyd fan either loves or hates: Polly Sampson. After Waters left the fold, Gilmour gave lyric duties to his girlfriend, helping him pen some of the biggest songs of the album, including ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ and ‘What Do You Want From Me’.
That also might be down to how most of the album was constructed. Since most of the tracks were made up of different live jams that were whittled down after analysing them, something that Wright may have thought was the best sound for the record could have fallen flat in the final mix.
As far as direction is concerned, though, the band does have the same kind of thematic elements of the best Pink Floyd albums…only a bit more muted this time. Although there are some songs that don’t hit the same way that ‘Money’ did, the theme of not being able to communicate properly is extremely pertinent for a group like Floyd, having already lost contact with founding member Syd Barrett and continuing to lose touch with Waters over the years.
Maybe Wright may have felt uneasy trying to get on the right track for The Division Bell, but that uneasiness was why the album worked so well. This album is all about missed connections and relationships that are blocked by emotion, but as long as they kept talking, everything would work itself out just fine.
Check out The Division Bell below.
