The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour said was painful to make: “We’ll never get it to a good end”
No Pink Floyd album has ever come easy to David Gilmour.
He had already joined the band under duress when Syd Barrett wasn’t able to perform anymore, and it took the band years before they finally settled on a sound that worked when they made the tune ‘Echoes’. But even after figuring out what made Floyd sound perfect, there were bound to be a few records that gave Gilmour more than a few headaches trying to get off the ground.
Because when you think about it, Gilmour was initially supposed to be a hired gun. He was a surrogate guitarist when Barrett wasn’t able to play, but when the band became more of a democracy, it’s not like he was making rock and roll classics. It took him years before he had a song he was happy with, and while he did write fantastic tunes when he got his bearings, you could tell that he was still figuring out what being a member of Floyd meant when working through his side of Ummagumma.
But the best Floyd albums have always been when they combined all of their strengths. Dark Side of the Moon is the perfect example of everyone knowing their place in the group, and for as much as Roger Waters complained about the morale being at an all time low when working on Wish You Were Here, you could hear all of their individual voices on ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, from the bassist’s heartfelt lyrics to Richard Wright’s keyboard pads to the greatest guitar tone ever recorded when Gilmour’s electric comes in.
It all seemed to be working perfectly, but after Waters came up with a concept for The Wall, it had officially grown too big for one group. The rest of the band did manage to brave through it even while dealing with the firing of Wright, but The Final Cut was where Gilmour drew the line. He would still make music with Pink Floyd, but he wasn’t going to make anything that took as much time and effort as Waters put the rest of them through.
Then again, A Momentary Lapse of Reason feels like a case of Gilmour trying to run before he could walk as a frontman. He already had a knack for singing all of the tunes, but since Waters took all of the conceptual ideas with him, a lot of the album feels like a songwriting workshop rather than a fully fleshed-out project, even if tunes like ‘On the Turning Away’ and ‘Learning to Fly’ did end up sounding pretty great.
There was already the added pressure of Waters suing the band, but Gilmour had to admit that the album became one of the most difficult projects he ever worked on, saying, “Roger said to me to stop the band. I immediately said to him that I would continue making Pink Floyd-albums, with or without him. I was resolute. But A Momentary Lapse of Reason was hard to do. There were some moments when I thought: ‘What did I start now? We’ll never get it to a good end.’”
Admittedly, the record was a lot better than Gilmour was giving it credit for, but there was ample opportunity for things to go sideways as well. It’s easy to scoff at the 1980s textures that turn up on nearly every other song, but when you realise that the guitarist was thinking about rapping one of the songs by himself, most of us should be counting our blessings that this is what we ended up with.
And if you see where the band would be going later, they wouldn’t have been able to shut the door on their career properly with The Division Bell were it not for A Momentary Lapse of Reason. They needed to make a few mistakes before they got to the top of the mountain again, and since Waters took a lot of great ideas with him when he left, it’s remarkable that the band only managed to go through one ‘growing pains’ album before getting back up on their feet.
