WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW

Most thought 1994's The Division Bell was Pink Floyd's final statement. But after sifting through surplus material, 20 years later, with a little help from his friends, David Gilmour pulled The Endless River out of the hat.

- Daryl Easlea

“It comes from all sorts of ideas,” David Gilmour said in 2014, of Pink Floyd’s then-new album The Endless River. “Some of it is improvised, quite a bit of it is just the two of us, Rick [Wright] and me, or the three of us, improvising together. Some of it is half-written ideas that one of us had come up with, rehearsed and considered as a start point for something.”

Those ideas often came about on the Astoria, Gilmour’s houseboat moored on the River Thames in West London. It was also there, in 2012, that engineer Andy Jackson, who had worked with Floyd and Gilmour since 1980, learned there was to be a new Pink Floyd album, some 20 years after they had last released fresh material, and after years of Gilmour saying “absolutely, definitely not”.

It was no secret that there was a surplus of material from the sessions that produced 1994’s The Division Bell. Due to the amount, at one point it had been envisaged as a double, with one disc of tracks with vocals and the other built from the instrumental sessions that began at Floyd’s Britannia Row studios and continued on the Astoria in early 1993. All featured Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright. The purpose of these sessions was to create ideas for songs.

“After two weeks we had taped an extraordinary collection of riffs, patterns and musical doodles,” Nick Mason wrote in his book Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd. “Some rather similar, some nearly identifiable as old songs of ours, some clearly subliminal reinventions of well-known songs.”

From these, around 40 workable ideas emerged. As The Division Bell took shape, it became clear that there would be no time to fashion these instrumentals into an album. As a result, the recordings languished.