The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour said no one worked on together: “A very, very difficult process”
What truly defines an album as belonging to a band? Is it determined by band membership or discretion? Some albums, like Endless Wire by The Who, feature key members but still raise debates about legitimacy. Other bands, meanwhile, often disown projects they regret, such as Summer in Paradise by The Beach Boys. Collaboration might be another factor, as evidenced by David Gilmour’s distancing from Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason because the group were barely talking, let alone working together.
Of course, that would mean discounting almost the entire latter half of The Beatle’s back catalogue, and no one in their right mind should want that. However, the 1980s did seem to be a particularly bad time to be in Pink Floyd, so maybe we should hear him out.
The conversation about authorship begins with their 1983 album The Final Cut, a record viewed by most Floyd fans as a solo album from bassist Roger Waters. Waters felt like the success of 1979’s masterpiece The Wall had given him carte blanche to lead the band without question.
In fairness, Waters had been the creative driving force behind the record, but Pink Floyd was, after all, a band. Perhaps they should have seen the writing on… The Wall (sorry) when Waters fired keyboardist Richard Wright halfway through the album’s production. By 1983, though, Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason had finally had enough of Waters’ authoritarian grip, and after the release of The Final Cut, Pink Floyd all but split up.
How did Pink Floyd continue?
Truly, few bands in history have hated each other with the ferocity that Floyd hated each other in the 1980s. After their solo albums flopped though, and under mounting pressure from their record label to release something under the Pink Floyd name rather than their own, they begrudgingly went back into the studio.
The last thing they were going to do was do that together, though. As Gilmour said to the Pink Floyd fan club: “Recording A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was a very, very difficult process. We were all sort of catatonic. Unfortunately, we didn’t really work together an awful lot.”
Sure, John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked on their songs in separate studios while making The White Album. That was due to their different creative visions and eagerness to see their own creative vision through. They weren’t making music while actively threatening to sue each other the way Waters and Gilmour were.
However, the 1980s were a great time to have been massive in the 1960s, with everyone from Roy Orbison to George Harrison having commercial purple patches, and it was no exception for the progressive heavyweights. Mind-bogglingly enough, the tour supporting …Lapse of Reason was the highest-grossing of the entire decade. Beating out the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna for the honour.
Not to question their no doubt airtight artistic reasons for this, but Waters, Mason, Gilmour and Wright were suddenly much more keen to collaborate on a follow-up album. This would eventually surface in 1994 as The Division Bell, but, this being Floyd, the bad vibes were never far away. The band ever since have spent the next three decades at each other’s throats, showing that maybe there’s no deeper reason for an album’s authorship than what can be agreed upon. Considering this is Pink Floyd we’re talking about, it will be a long, long time before that happens.
