“Stop the band”: The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour always doubted
The fact that David Gilmour became the de facto leader of Pink Floyd is practically a miracle.
He was already appointed to the band as nothing more than a hired gun when Syd Barrett started to lose his way after their first record, but even after becoming the default frontman of the group, it was always a collaboration between all the band members to get their sound to be perfect whenever they made their masterpieces. So when Roger Waters decided that everything was going to be going his way, Gilmour wasn’t about to roll over and let his bandmate walk all over him for the rest of his life.
Then again, the idea of Waters being in charge of every single piece of Pink Floyd is downright laughable when you look at the raw contributions he made. Sure, he is behind some of the greatest lyrics that the band have ever come up with, and he should be commended for making the indelible bassline that kicks off ‘Money’, but when you look at Wish You Were Here and Animals, none of the lyrics would have mattered if they didn’t have Gilmour’s bends on ‘Dogs’ or the fantastic motif in the middle of ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’.
That’s without even bringing up Richard Wright’s contributions to records like Dark Side of the Moon, but it turned out that no one really understood the importance of everyone until they weren’t there anymore. The Wall is a brilliant concept and should be commended as one of the greatest risks that the band has ever taken on, but since almost every song is written solely by Waters, it doesn’t really feel like the full band effort that it was supposed to sound like.
And if the band was already having problems with the original version of The Wall, The Final Cut was when Waters started getting really petty. Aside from crediting the whole thing to himself and listing his bandmates as performers, his decision to “end” the band after that record wasn’t going to happen without a fight. Just because he had had enough didn’t mean that Gilmour wanted to stop, and the lengthy court battle for the name was the guitarist’s attempt to keep his baby afloat.
Waters did eventually walk away with the rights to use The Wall, but it’s not like Gilmour had the best idea of where to go after spending months upon months in court hearings. A Momentary Lapse of Reason does at least have the spirit of a Floyd record in songs like ‘Learning to Fly’ and ‘On the Turning Away’, but given that Gilmour was at his least inspired after going through his spat with Waters, there were moments where even he started to question why he bothered in the first place.
He was going to keep Pink Floyd alive, but looking back, he remembered thinking that A Momentary Lapse of Reason wasn’t the record he wanted to start with, 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.’”
While you can definitely hear the kinks in the armour on this record, The Division Bell is a far more compelling album than what the Gilmour-led Floyd started out with. It doesn’t quite have the same immediacy in its lyrics that Waters did on his solo material, but given that the band was going to officially retire from the road after this, ending their career with a song like ‘High Hopes’ was as good a note as they could have hoped to go out on.
So while A Momentary Lapse of Reason wasn’t the album that Gilmour wanted it to be, it has become more of a statement than it is an album. The whole record feels much better suited to his solo career, but after fighting for the right to make the music that he wanted to, the whole record was a means of keeping the spirit of Pink Floyd alive with Nick Mason and Richard Wright behind him.
