Pink Floyd: Why They Released That Weird Final Album
This week marks the tenth anniversary of what is likely Pink Floyd’s “final” album, The Endless River. But is it really a Pink Floyd album? Is it really an album at all?
It’s understandable if you’ve kind of forgotten about it. Pink Floyd’s actual last album was 1994’s The Division Bell. (Or, if you’re a Roger Waters devotee, it might be 1983’s The Final Cut). But twenty years after The Division Bell, Pink Floyd — founding drummer Nick Mason and longtime guitarist/singer/songwriter David Gilmour — announced one final album. Released on November 10, 2014, most of the album was recorded in 1993, during the sessions for The Division Bell, and featured the band’s founding keyboardist Richard Wright, who died in 2008.
Most of the album in instrumental music; sometimes it’s more like ambient new age sounds. There was one actual song with David Gilmour singing, “Louder Than Words.” It was co-written, as many of Gilmour’s solo and Pink Floyd songs are, with his wife Polly Sampson. It sounded like a song inspired by Gilmour’s famously contentious relationship with Roger Waters, who was famously vexed when he learned that Mason and Gilmour were legally allowed to continue as Pink Floyd after he quit the band (he has since said that he regretted that).
In the song, Gilmour sings, “We bitch and we fight/Diss each other on sight/But this thing we do/These times together….It’s louder than words/The sum of our parts/The beat of our hearts/Is louder than words.”
But it was a curious choice to release this as a “new” album, especially when Floyd had released a deluxe edition of The Division Bell for its 20th anniversary earlier in 2014. It seems like these tracks would have seemed more logical as part of a “super deluxe” version. And David Gilmour seems to agree. As he told the Los Angeles Times, “When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together called ‘The Big Spliff’ — a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams there was out there on bootlegs. A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them. My mistake, I supposed, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record. It should have been clear what it was – it was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell.”
Gilmour’s new solo album, Luck And Strange, is out now. He’s currently wrapping up a string of dates at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
