04/04/2024
ON THIS DATE (30 YEARS AGO)
April 4, 1994 – Pink Floyd: The Division Bell is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4/5
# Allmusic 2/5
# Q (see original review below)
The Division Bell is the fourteenth and last studio album by Pink Floyd, released in the US on April 4, 1994 (March 30, 1994 in the UK). It topped both the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart (for four weeks) and UK Albums chart.
The music is written mostly by David Gilmour and Richard Wright; Gilmour's new wife, Polly Samson, co-wrote many of the album's lyrics, and Wright performed his first lead vocal on a Pink Floyd album since 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon. Recording took place in a number of locations, including the band's Britannia Row Studios, and Gilmour's houseboat, Astoria. The production team included Pink Floyd stalwarts such as producer Bob Ezrin, engineer Andy Jackson and saxophonist Dick Parry.
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DAVID GILMOUR INTERVIEW
Questions and Answers with David Gilmour
Czerwiec 1994
Question: Did Astoria have any security problems during the
recording of "The Division Bell":
DG: No, no real problem. There was a story in the English press but it was an invention, in fact. It wasn't real at all .... it was just some TV station in England thought they'd get a good little yarn out of it, and they set up a camera on the opposite bank of the Thames and pointed it at us, and they came to the door and, and we said, 'No, we're not - We don't have anything to discuss.' And so they then got a - their reporter in a wet suit and stuff, and he swam off in a river somewhere, towards a houseboat somewhere, and pretended that it was ours. And I think they made some little tape up or something. I don't know -I don't know exactly really what happened. I never even saw the story on-air, but....it's not us. I mean, they never actually got to our boat with microphones or anything....Sorry to dispel the rumour, but it's actually not true.
On creating "The Division Bell":
DG: We started off by going into Nick's studio, Brittania Row studio in London, in January 93 with myself, Nick, and Rick, and Guy, the bass player from our last tour. And we just jammed away at anything for two weeks, just playing anything that we had in our heads or that we made up on the spot. And then we took all that over to Astoria and started listening to all the tapes and working stuff out. We found that we had 65 pieces of music...which we worked on all of to a certain extent, and then we started adding these things - We had a couple of sessions which we called 'the big listen' where we listened to *all* these 65, and all the people involved with it voted on each track, on each piece of music as to how popular it was with them. And so we then arranged these 65 pieces of music in order of popularity amongst the band, and then we dumped 40 of them, and worked on the top 25, which in fact became the top 27 because a couple more got added in.
And so the process went on from there with us working away on all these pieces of music and gradually either merging pieces together or scrapping them until we finally were down to about 12 to 15 things that we all kind of liked. And in the end one or two of them went by the way, and we were left with eleven on the album, I think.
Regarding one of the rehearsals prior to the Division Bell tour:
DG: We were working in an aircraft hangar, and the mixing console and the... is outside the doors of the hangar, and the stage and stuff is inside the doors. And at some point someone decided that it would be a good idea to close the doors, and the huge, huge electrically-controlled doors sliced through all our multi-core cables, which is a bit of a nuisance.
Like choices, interpretations are left up to the fans:
DG: I like them [fans] to wonder. I like them to explore the words and see what it means, and I like them to work the stuff out for themselves....I'm not going to give people an easy time of it. They've got to - you know what they say, 'The more work you put in, the more you get out.' That's very much [true] for the audience. Hopefully more pleasure will be derived by people who put more into the listening to this thing than would be if I explained my point-of-view exactly on everything. Everything is there in the words and music.
About the song 'Marooned':
DG: It had the scent of the sea about it, this tune, ever since, you know, probably from the sound of the guitar doing the whale-type thing. We called it 'The Whale Piece' for ages. 'Maroon' came up as a colour at one point in discussion for some title of something. 'Maroon' became 'Marooned' and it seemed to fit that tune. Titles is a long, difficult thing sometimes. And that one seemed to fit. And then we played it up a little bit at the end, putting wave noises and seagulls at the beginning to set the mood a little bit before it goes into it. There's no particular huge significance to 'Marooned'; it's just an appropriate title.
Regarding the saxophone on 'Wearing the Inside Out':
DG: On the last tour, we had Scott Page on the saxophone - great sax player, lovely guy. This time it didn't really look as if we were going to be doing as many songs with saxophone on the tour, from the way I was thinking about the tour. Funnily enough, at Christmas I got a Christmas card from Dick [Parry] who I hadn't seen for years, and who'd given up the saxophone entirely and I think was unemployed, living in a village near Cambridge, doing nothing. I knew that years ago he had sold his saxophones and gone into being a farrier, shoeing horses. And he had apparently given that up as well, and he had bought himself another saxophone a year or so ago, and he just sent me a Christmas card. I rang him up - I didn't even have his phone number for us. I just rang him up to say 'How are you doing?' He was talking to me about it and I had been thinking about what to do about saxophone on the tour because we weren't going to need a lot of it, but we needed some.
I asked him if he felt like auditioning for coming on the tour, to see if he still had his chops together, and he told me that he thought he was playing better than he'd ever played. And I got him down to the boat to have a little audition. And he played about three phrases and myself and Bob [Ezrin] said, 'Fine, he's still got it. Screw this auditioning business. See if we can stick him on something.' And the only place that seemed really appropriate was the opening for 'Eureka' - do, uh, not for 'Eureka.' For 'Wearing the Inside Out.' Sorry, I'm talking old titles. The only one we could think of that would be really appropriate for sax was 'Wearing the Inside Out,' so we put him on it. Boom, he's got that tone. It's fantastic. You can recognize it straight away. And so he's on the tour with us as well.
The guitar solo on 'Wearing the Inside Out':
DG: Funnily enough, I never really liked the guitar solo on the out. Everyone else said they did like it, but I wanted to dump it and do something else on there, 'cos I thought, 'God, I've got too many damn guitar solos again. They're all over the bloody record.' I didn't think that one was so good, but lots of people like it, I guess. It's grown on me a bit.
About 'Take It Back':
DG: It's got really nothing to do with my personal life, believe it or not. [laughs] But I'm not going to tell you what it *is* about. You're gonna have to work that out for yourself. [laughs]
I had an idea for a song about a specific subject that came from a book I was reading, but I'm not going to tell you what the subject is or what the book is. You'll just have to work it out for yourself.
On 'Keep Talking':
DG: I was worried about how people would see that I had taken something from a commercial and used it in a song in sampled form, but then I thought in the end, 'f**k it' really. It's great. It's powerful. If it moved me that way... it's interesting.
On rumors that the Floyd would work with Roger Waters again:
DG: There's been no approach or contact. Anyone that says anything different, that purports to know anything from the inside, is talking rubbish. We haven't discussed it, and there's absolutely no likelihood of that happening at all.... People are very keen on this idea. Only one person's got to say the slightest thing and it becomes a big rumour, you know? People are very... understandably, they're very keen on the idea of it all being happy families again, but I don't think it's very likely.
A lot of very good work came out of our time together, and a lot of very, very good words Roger wrote. It's understandable that people would have an affection for some possibility of going back the heyday, if you like, of our career. It's an irrelevance to me. You can't go back, and we wouldn't.
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Q MAGAZINE ARTICLE/ALBUM REVIEW
What Pink Floyd are telling the world in official communiques and presumably telling themselves - is that their first new album since 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason has taken them back to their golden age, before The Wall and before the war with Roger Waters. Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright began work a year ago by "improvising together" for two weeks. "The three of us actually played together. It's like the Floyd again," says Wright, once sacked by Waters, later restored by the others.
This recovery of the past is more than a matter of propaganda, though. Wright has the first lead vocal since Time, on Dark Side of the Moon, in 1973. The band's old sax associate Dick Parry makes his first appearance since Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the Syd Barrett tribute on 1975's Wish You Were Here. In fact, Parry's re-emergence came like a symbolic seal on the middle-aged Pink Floyd's retrospective yearnings. He quit music after his last session with them and lived quietly in a caravan near Cambridge. Then, last Christmas, he sent Gilmour a card saying he wanted to play again and within days found himself back in the studio and part of the new world tour band.
This may all have a fancifully nostalgic ring but there does seem to be a sound, strong emotional impetus behind it. The opening three tracks certainly suggest it's so. They are hallmarked, unmistakable Pink Floyd.
In the time-honoured vein of Floyd meditations, the overture, Cluster One, murmurs in quite mystifyingly. The initial ambient sound might be raindrops pattering, eggs frying or a stylus battering a blank groove. No explanations follow, as the crackle and hiss is joined by an electronic pulse, one finger picking out a piano melody, and a seagulling guitar, before the drums at last supply a tangible beat. The get-out adjective is "atmospheric". Instrumentals like this are Pink Floyd's new-fangled tango - they just sort of stand there and just sort of do it. Audience speculation is encouraged and that may very well be the point.
The aural dry ice is dispersed at once by What Do You Want From Me. Strident and angry, Gilmour the rock star bi***es at his audience. They demand so much it seems, and yet he doesn't know what it is. With a lyrical assist from his new partner-in-life Polly Samson (as on most tracks) he asks, "Do you want my blood, do you want my tears/...Should I sing until I can't sing any more/Play these strings till my fingers are raw." With his guitar in a most stately fury and the "girls" soul-choiring along, it's just plain weighty.
Patented Pink Floyd melancholy returns with Poles Apart, a song of three verses, no choruses and an unpredictable, tumbling melody which might make it one of those rare Floyd hit singles. Addressed to a friend now distanced, it could refer to Waters or Barrett according to how you take it: "Why did we tell you then/You were always the golden boy." The initial simplicities are followed by a departure into dreamy fairground hurdy-gurdying, and then by an outro which becomes the album's first fall from grace.
Maybe Gilmour's wide responsibilities had to lead to a loss of intensity somewhere. While his every vocal move reflects both care and a sense of adventure, his guitar playing falls too often into the expected patterns, identifiable but not distinguished. The sonorous, yet tame, ending of Poles Apart moves into the routine grandeur of an instrumental called Marooned and the album never again captures the powerful progression of those first three tracks.
Even among the best of the remaining songs, A Great Day for Freedom, Wearing the Inside Out and High Hopes, the fizzle factor crops up as big finishes focused on guitar solos go walkabout, then stop.
Still, The Division Bell does have many more of those Pink Floyd moments to come. Thematically, they spring from Gilmour's bold-to-arrogant way of yoking together global and personal issues as if they were all of a piece. Musically, it's that immutable Floyd style, awash with reminders and back-references.
For instance, the electronic pulse of Keep Talking cues folk memories of slowmo surf from Crystal Voyager while Gilmour groans that he's "drowning" in a sea of failed communication. (With his ex-wife? With Waters yet again? Autobiographical singing contrasts with clips of Stephen Hawking's computer-generated voice ruminating about "the power of our imagination" - a tacit irony being that this is the speech the great man sold to a recent British Telecon TV ad campaign.
The church bell tolling and bees buzzing through High Hopes put you in mind of Floyd's '70s FX adventures. Wright plays solemn piano and Gilmour grapples with that most vexed of questions, What became of the 60s generation? How ought he to see it from the "dizzy heights" attained "by desire and ambition", not to mention "a hunger still unsatisfied"? he wonders, while generally giving it some Meaning of Life.
A Great Day for Freedom and Wearing the Inside Out pull a lot of strands together. Being triggered by "the day the wall came down", the former starts from a position of potent ambiguity available to very few artists: the Berlin Wall/The Wall album/the Waters performance of The Wall in Berlin after the Wall came down. Not only that, but Gilmour/Samson also b**g in love (their own, whomever's) as the healing balm which can make all the hell of the world "slip away".Written by Wright and Anthony Moore (late of Slapp Happy and collaborator on A Momentary Lapse of Reason), Wearing the Inside Out has a hero similarly battered by the world. It benefits from the keyboard player's diffident voice and draws on classic Floyd mannerisms dating back to DSOTM; the immemorial English reserve frozen at the heart of the song is exposed to the naked flames of musical passion embodied both by female soul voices and by Dick Parry's sax. It's a measured tension, never resolved.
Bar the odd meander, most of The Division Bell is certified essence of Floyd. However, there are also three tracks on which, for once, they don't sound like themselves.
Lost For Words survives the loss of brand identify very well. It seems Gilmour adopt a distinctly Dylanish drawl, matched by Wright's country jangle on piano, to chronicle another tale of relationships gone rotten so irredeemably that when he offers to forgive and forget, "They tell me to please go f**k myself." (Waters must fume at how much his enmity has inspired his ex-oppo).
But if slightly Nashville Skyline Floyd proves acceptable, the sub-Simple Minds, not-nearly-U2 version wheeled out for Take It Back might better have been withheld from public gaze. Despite an obsessively wound-up vocal from Gilmour, it's a clumsy plod, as is Coming Back to Life. Big rock anthems? If this is retrospection, it's Pink Floyd mistaking someone else's past for their own future in the most inept way.
These misjudgements apart, The Division Bell should be just the job for Floydies and a striking listen for anyone else who bumps into it. They remain unique and uniquely enigmatic. Consider how peculiarly hard it is to imagine what reactions this album would provoke if Pink Floyd were unknown and this were their debut.
TRACKS:
Side one
1 Cluster One (Gilmour, Richard Wright) - 5:58
2 What Do You Want from Me (Gilmour, Wright, Samson) -4:21
3 Poles Apart (Gilmour, Samson, Nick Laird-Clowes) - 7:04
4 Marooned (Gilmour, Wright) - 5:29
5 A Great Day for Freedom (Gilmour, Samson) - 4:17
Side two
1 Wearing the Inside Out (Anthony Moore, Wright) - 6:49
2 Take It Back (Gilmour, Samson, Laird-Clowes, Ezrin) - 6:12
3 Coming Back to Life (Gilmour) - 6:19
4 Keep Talking (Gilmour, Samson, Wright) - 6:11
5 Lost for Words (Gilmour, Samson) - 5:14
6 High Hopes (Gilmour, Samson) - 8:31
