YOU can’t underestimate the challenge facing David Gilmour as he fought to keep Pink Floyd afloat in the Eighties.
When the band’s main songwriter Roger Waters quit in 1985 after a fractious few years, guitarist and singer Gilmour still saw a future for the prog icons.
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He casts his mind back: “It was an alarming time. It was a big thing to carry on Pink Floyd with Roger having gone.
“He was a big, big part of it, a major talent and our primary lyricist. So it was difficult.”
The gaping hole left by Waters summons an insight from Gilmour that most Floyd aficionados would agree with.
He says: “The Roger and me thing? I would think of myself as more of a melodic type and Roger is more of an aggressive wordsmith.
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“Different sides of us came together to create what we became.”
But Gilmour also knew that the pure, beautiful notes he produced on his black Strato-caster were still worthy of the Pink Floyd name, even if they were to be played minus the presence of the mercurial Waters.
Likewise, the inventive rhythms of drummer Nick Mason and the exquisite keyboard passages of Richard Wright.
At the same time, Waters was determined to shut down the creators of The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, to confine them to rock history alongside The Beatles, and he was prepared to use legal means to get his way.
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It was against this “painful” backdrop caused by the “damaging” departure of their bandmate that Gilmour, Mason and Wright began work on Pink Floyd’s next chapter – one with no Waters but as long as the one with him.
The undervalued period is being marked by a mammoth box set, The Later Years 1987-2019, containing a revised version of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason with new drum parts by Mason and more abundant use of Wright’s keyboards.
The album is a revelation, dismissing the original’s thin Eighties production for a rich, more organic sound and demonstrating that songs like Learning To Fly, On The Turning Away and Sorrow are really rather good.
There’s also a blizzard of live and unreleased studio recordings, both in CD and video form, which also help cast the period in a more favourable light.
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Gilmour has given just one interview for the release, in the form of a four-part podcast with BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt called, in typical Floydian fashion, The Lost Art Of Conversation.
Available in four weekly, wide-ranging episodes from Monday, SFTW has been given an exclusive sneak preview.
In Part One, Gilmour talks about when Waters was in the process of leaving: “I had been working for some time in the studio, but what was going to happen was in the air for a long time while Roger decided whether he was going to f*** off into the ether or not.”
He recalls discussing his plans with Mason during the summer of ’86 and says: “I asked him if he fancied coming in and doing some work and he was quite keen on the idea.”
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Gilmour also got in touch with producer Bob Ezrin, who’d worked on The Wall and his second solo album About Face (1984). “Bob’s a very good driving force. You could say brutally honest with his opinions and he wouldn’t let you get away with anything that isn’t up to the standard you set yourself.”
The result of their labours was A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, released in 1987 and partly recorded on Gilmour’s old boat-cum-studio, The Astoria, moored on the Thames.
However, it was far from the idyllic scene that the grand Edwardian houseboat might conjure up, as he explains.
“Not to dig up too much ancient, horrible territory, but we were in the middle of a major lawsuit and between every little bit I was doing, I was on the phone to lawyers and that was just eating away at me, us and our time in the studio.
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“It was a nightmare. The image of a beautiful scene bobbing on a river wasn’t the reality of the sessions.”
Gilmour is asked if the resulting LP was seen as a make-or-break moment. “I don’t think so,” he replies. “I thought we were going to make an album, do a tour and, maybe after that, we would reassess.
“For me, the album went very, very well. The lawsuits were tricky but we put some first show tickets on sale for a big stadium in Toronto and three nights sold out in four hours.”
Emboldened by this success, Floyd’s future with just three core members was assured and, by the end of ’87, a settlement had been reached with Waters.
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But if things had gone the other way, Gilmour still maintains: “I’m a pretty tough, stubborn and determined person and I suspect I’d have found a way to keep it going!”
His last word on A Momentary Lapse Of Reason offers fresh perspective. “In the Eighties, there was a mass of new technology — new keyboards, synthesizers — and we were keen to make a record of its time,” he says.
“We embraced this technology with massive enthusiasm. But it was a fashion and fashions go out of fashion.
“In years after the album, there were moments when I thought that we hadn’t followed the timeless template that perhaps we should have done.”
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Another seven years passed before Floyd released their next album, 1994’s The Division Bell and there was greater confidence this time around.
“Rick and Nick were both on the 1987, ’88, ’89 endless tour,” says Gilmour. “They were playing their socks off. Fantastic.
“I guess it was in January ‘93 we thought we would go into Nick’s studios in Britannia Row (in Islington), just the three of us. That started the ball rolling.”
Floyd soon reconvened on The Astoria to work on songs such High Hopes and A Great Day For Freedom in earnest — and there was a new, significant contributor.
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“One of the things that had changed the course of my life was meeting my wife-to-be Polly Samson,” says Gilmour.
“She became quite a large part of it (The Division Bell), not just as a lyricist. I should’ve given her a producer credit. She wanted me to write lyrics and bullied me by asking me questions about my childhood. I then persuaded her to take part and she was very, very good at it. It helped enormously and she became the primary lyricist on the album.”
Their working relationship helped restore credibility to Pink Floyd lyrics post-Waters.
“We’d work all day on the boat and would go back home and play things we were working on. Polly would be digging for the point of the songs and pushing them towards their main point. She became invaluable to me.”
In High Hopes, Gilmour knew he had a “killer, all-time great Floyd song” and Samson “came up with lots of very good lines”.
Despite the live shows, there was to be only one further Pink Floyd studio album, 2014’s The Endless River. It was released six years after Wright’s death but featured his efforts on offcuts from The Division Bell, including a compilation of fragments known as The Big Spliff.
And if that was the end of Pink Floyd’s recorded output, their timeless music from EVERY era will be played endlessly.
