by Mark Blake
Elsewhere, young American rock band Nirvana’s amalgam of punk and heavy rock, added to the scuzzy good looks of their singer Kurt Cobain, had helped them sell millions of records. A host of like-minded ‘grunge’ rock bands followed, with old-timer Neil Young even making an album with Nirvana’s rivals Pearl Jam. The Division Bell was littered with guitar solos, but there was no ‘grunge’ to be found here, thank you. As Gilmour explained, ‘The Floyd is a big old lumbering beast, but it’s my big old lumbering beast, and I like it.’
Released in March 1994, the ‘New Floyd’ cruised to number 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. Nobody could have been surprised. Within months, Gilmour was telling the press that The Division Bell sounded more like a genuine Pink Floyd album than anything since Wish You Were Here. The opening instrumental, ‘Cluster One’, with its static crackles and extra-terrestrial twittering – like signals from another galaxy – was certainly familiar Pink Floyd territory. Anyone flipping through the track selector on their CD player might also notice that most of its eleven songs began with some abstract keyboard whirl or sonorous note of unidentifiable origin.
However fearful some may have been of Pink Floyd acquiring their own Yoko Ono, the lyrics on The Division Bell had greater clarity than most of those on A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Gilmour was unwilling to explain, but it seemed as if his new partner had coerced him into exploring his feelings in greater detail than usual. ‘A Great Day for Freedom’ seemed, at first, to address the demise of the Berlin Wall, but there was another message, of lost optimism and hopes dashed. Similar themes of new beginnings countered with mournful reflection seemed to inform the whole album. Gilmour was in love, perhaps, but still feeling guarded.
‘High Hopes’ was the album’s runaway highlight. With its tolling church bells, keening vocals and remembrance of times past, it was as if the older, world-wearier voice of Atom Heart Mother’s ‘Fat Old Sun’ had come back twenty-five years later to update the story. ‘What Do You Want From Me?’ was more combative, musically and lyrically. A slow blues over which Gilmour fired off questions – ‘Do you want my blood, do you want my tears?’ – it had, he admitted, been inspired after a row with Polly Samson, over lack of communication. ‘Marooned’ combined whale song with the sound of an Ibizan beach bar at sunrise, and later landed the band a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. The Division Bell was more interesting, though, when Gilmour was forced out of his guitar-hero bunker, and made to start singing again, about love and, possibly, sex on ‘Coming Back to Life’, and his own inarticulate nature on ‘Keep Talking’, supplemented by a sample of the computer-aided voice of Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time.
The album floundered on ‘Take it Back’, a Simple Minds/U2-style arena anthem that would have fitted better on A Momentary Lapse of Reason or even Gilmour’s solo album, About Face. Or neither. Yet for the hardcore fans, the most notable coup was Richard Wright taking his first lead vocal since Dark Side of the Moon. ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ had been co-written by Wright with Anthony Moore. It had, commented one Floyd insider, ‘taken Moore to climb inside Rick’s head and get the words out’. Anyone even fleetingly familiar with Wright’s past experiences in Pink Floyd and, one suspects, life in general would have been drawn to the words. The quavering tone and painfully raw lyrics suggested a man finding his way back to civilisation for the first time in a long while. ‘There’s a lot of emotional honesty there,’ offers Bob Ezrin. ‘Fans pick up on the sad and vulnerable side to Rick.’
‘Poles Apart’ was the one song that connected most directly with the ghosts of Pink Floyd’s past. Gilmour wouldn’t be drawn on it, but Samson later confirmed that it was about Syd Barrett in the first verse and Roger Waters in the second. There was even a mêlée of Wurlitzer sounds, a psychedelic motif from the era of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, to separate the two. Gilmour sounded genuinely reflective, about shared experiences, and friendships lost along the way.
While Pink Floyd had become a whipping boy for critics bemoaning the bloated self-satisfaction of ageing rock stars, their original singer had suffered no such disapproval. Disappearing when he was still young and pretty, Barrett had enchanted many punks in the late seventies and left-field rock bands in the eighties and nineties, on both sides of the pond. Michael Stipe, lead singer with R.E.M., was a staunch Syd devotee. Roger Waters met R.E.M. backstage after an early show in London, and found Stipe very unwelcoming. ‘He sat in the corner with his back to me,’ remembered Waters. ‘Then he went back on stage and did an encore, an a cappella version of Syd’s song “Dark Globe”, which might have been his way of saying, “Syd was all right, but you’re an arsehole.”’
In England, another Cambridge band, The Soft Boys, had since 1980 been modelling their neo-psychedelic sound on classic Syd. By the time Pink Floyd released The Division Bell, a wave of newer young English groups, including Blur, had emerged, taking their cue from The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles and Syd-era Floyd. The Barrett myth remained undiminished.
In 1992, Atlantic Records had contacted Syd’s family, offering them £75,000 for any new recordings they might be able to make of Barrett. The family turned them down. In spring 1993, EMI followed a twentieth anniversary reissue of Dark Side of the Moon with Crazy Diamond, a boxed set of all Syd’s known recordings. A month later, Syd’s First Trip, the film of Barrett supposedly tripping in Cambridge, was released on video. The original film was bolstered with extra footage of the band with Andrew King outside Abbey Road. Everyone seemed astonishingly fresh-faced and good-looking, dolled up in their best pop star finery. Some years later, Pink Floyd purchased the rights from film-maker Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon and had it withdrawn from circulation.
‘I sold the film via Steve O’Rourke,’ says Nigel. ‘They wanted it because I wanted to sell it to them, as I needed the money. I never called the film Syd’s First Trip, though. I don’t think it was the first time Syd had taken acid. Syd was dead keen to take LSD and dead keen to be filmed.’
The Division Bell had helped finally realise Steve O’Rourke’s wish to be featured on a Pink Floyd album. At the end of ‘High Hopes’, he could be heard talking on the phone to Polly’s young son, Charlie, who suddenly hangs up on him. To date, O’Rourke’s voice is the last one heard on what may well prove to be the last ever Pink Floyd album. Not that anyone, even David Gilmour, was announcing it as such at the time. Rumours began, again, of a reunion with Roger Waters. ‘We haven’t discussed it, and there’s absolutely no likelihood of that happening at all,’ warned Gilmour. With another world tour booked, the guitarist had no desire to share the stewardship of the ‘big old lumbering beast’ with anyone else.
The lumbering beast analogy would be reflected in some reviews of the new record. ‘The album gives off the uncomfortable whiff of middle-age and graying sensibilities,’ complained Tom Graves in Rolling Stone. David Bennun in Melody Maker likened it to ‘chewing on a bucket of gravel’. Stuart Maconie in Q was more obliging: ‘Musically, it’s that immutable Floyd style, awash with reminders and back-references. They remain unique and uniquely enigmatic.’ The fiercest critic of all would be Roger Waters. ‘Lyrics written by the new wife?’ he bellyached to writer John Harris. ‘I mean, give me a fucking break! Come on. And what a nerve, to call that Pink Floyd. It was an awful record.’
The guitarist dismissed his estranged bandmate’s griping as sour grapes. Perhaps he was too much of a gentleman to point out that Waters was the only member of the band ever to have included a photograph of his wife on a Pink Floyd album (Ummagumma). Or perhaps he’d just forgotten.
While not yet Gilmour’s wife, Polly soon would be. He had already asked her to marry him, and, after deliberating, she agreed. ‘David got me to write some songs for Pink Floyd, which was his very clever way of giving me my self-respect,’ she told writer Suzi MacKenzie. Having been living ‘on her wits for a couple of years’ and bringing up her son alone, Samson had, she claimed, been wary of looking for a husband that w
ould automatically remove her money worries. By writing on The Division Bell, she earned a lot of money, and was, she said, ‘able to go into the marriage well-off ‘. The two would marry in July 1994 at Marylebone Register Office.
For all Waters’ protestations to the contrary, The Division Bell was a better and more confident album than A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The band faced the same obstacle as any group from their generation: how to make new music that could compete in fans’ affections with the music they had made in the past. They could never top Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon. Instead The Division Bell offered careful nods to those benchmark albums, while ensuring that at least some of its songs – ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Poles Apart’ – wouldn’t immediately send audience members scurrying to the refreshment stands and bathrooms next time they hit the stadium trail.
‘There is lots about The Division Bell that I still love,’ offers Guy Pratt. ‘It still suffers from some eighties production hangovers. “Keep Talking” I find unlistenable, it’s a great mess, but a lot of it reminded me of the pre-Wall Pink Floyd. “High Hopes” is one of those songs I never get bored of.’
The scale and spectacle of the Momentary Lapse … tour presented an immediate challenge when faced with doing it all again. The band’s first response was to commission the building of a Skyship 600 airship, complete with Pink Floyd insignia. The airship accompanied a press reception for the album and tour in the US. A similar A60 airship was then unveiled for the launch in England. In the meantime, the band submitted to three weeks of intense rehearsals at an airforce base in North Carolina.
‘David, Nick and Rick have no limit on the budget for this tour,’ claimed Steve O’Rourke. Just as well. The Division Bell tour would require a 200-strong crew, and the use of a Russian military freight plane and two Boeing 747 cargo planes just to transport the stage set, designed by Mark Fisher, from the USA to the UK.
The set revisited familiar Pink Floyd themes, but simply upgraded and updated everything. A ‘Bigger, Better, More’ policy was in full effect. There were new films for ‘Money’, ‘Time’ and ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, courtesy of Storm Thorgerson. There were three stages, so that while one was being set up in one stadium, the other two could be set up in place for the next two shows. There were two giant pigs, 400 Varilights, 300 speakers, a 40ft circular projection screen, two pulse lasers … and, to help fund the extravaganza, a hefty sponsorship deal from Volkswagen.
Gilmour immediately rued the decision. ‘I confess to not having entirely thought it through before we did it. Having our name allied to Volkswagen is something I have no taste for. Any money I made from it went to charity.’
The tour opened on 29 March at Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium. The extended band was the same as it had been for the Momentary Lapse … tour, but now included saxophonist Dick Parry in place of Scott Page, with backing singers Durga McBroom, Sam Brown and Claudia Fontaine. Another veteran of Pink Floyd gigs past was tour manager Tony Howard, once the band’s booking agent back in the days when they were signed to the Morrison Agency.
Tony Howard’s presence wasn’t the only link to the past. The Floyd’s show opened that night with ‘Astronomy Domine’, the first song from the first Pink Floyd album. Looking for a visual effect to accompany it, the band got in touch with the Floyd’s original lighting designer, Peter Wynne-Willson. Since 1967, Wynne-Willson had been responsible for some groundbreaking lighting designs and inventions. But The Division Bell tour would be his first encounter with Pink Floyd since 1968, when he ran into them unexpectedly in Amsterdam, where he was working with an impoverished theatre troupe: ‘Dave Gilmour, very sweetly, told Floyd’s management to get me a plane ticket back to the UK, as I was living a fairly meagre existence.’ Twenty-seven years later, Wynne-Willson was called on to replicate the lighting and oil slide effects that had once dazzled the stoned faithful at the UFO club.
On the band’s last tour, they’d played the whole of their new album. This time, excerpts from The Division Bell were spaced out between the likes of ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’, ‘One of These Days’, ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Money’. Still dwarfed by the myriad special effects whizzing around them, the band had changed since A Momentary Lapse … Nick Mason was no longer quite so overshadowed by second drummer Gary Wallis. While the shimmying backing singers offered the only hint of glamour, a shorn, slimmed-down Gilmour, now on an exercise regime, looked healthier than he had done in years.
In Houston, Texas, the final encore of ‘Run Like Hell’ was abandoned when a thunderstorm left the stage drenched. As the tour progressed through Mexico, California and back to Texas, the most notable change was the audience. Pink Floyd were now selling tickets to entire families and to those too young to have seen them back in the seventies. The US industry trade mag Billboard believed that the recent re-release of Dark Side of the Moon and its reappearance in the charts had brought the band to a younger generation. Gilmour was delighted: ‘There are people who say we should make room for younger bands. That’s not the way it works. They can make their own room.’
But as guitarist Tim Renwick recalls, ‘The Division Bell tour was much more staid than the one before.’ The presence of Polly Samson, Nick Mason’s new wife ‘Nettie’, and Richard Wright’s soon-to-be third wife Millie ensured that ‘everyone now had to go to bed a lot earlier’.
‘On the last tour, the whole attitude had been, “Right, what club are we hitting tonight?”’ recalls Tim. ‘The next tour was a complete contrast. Security was much tighter as well; as they didn’t want too many party animals turning up from the last tour. It was still enjoyable, but I think there was some resentment from some of the younger members.’ They also knew whom to blame.
‘There was a certain amount of anti-Polly stuff going on,’ admitted Gilmour. ‘Whether it was anti-woman or anti-newcomer, but there was power-struggling going on. It was a boys’ club before Polly. I think she was seen as the fun police, unfairly, but she got a lot of flak for that.’
When the two had first begun their relationship, Gilmour had agreed to stop taking cocaine. ‘I became too fond of the coke,’ he admits. ‘I think it happened because I got divorced and decided to go on the razzle and it all coincided with the Floyd coming back. There were various reasons. Taking the decision to stop was the hard bit, but once I’d done that I found it easy. But lots of people were invested in the person I was, the person who had the coke, and had no interest in me becoming a different and better person.’
Polly’s day job as a writer and journalist also gave her a different view of the show. ‘I think she gave reviews of the show more credence than we did,’ says Guy Pratt. ‘But this meant that we ended up changing some things in the show because a reviewer didn’t like it. That certainly annoyed me, and I did let my feelings be known on a couple of occasions. Although I managed to do it without losing a friendship.’ He adds, ‘That tour was riven with tension. But I think it was all the better for it. Pink Floyd was borne out of tension for so many years that I think it still functioned at its best when it wasn’t just a band of happy misfits.’
There was another potentially divisive factor to be considered. Unlike on the last tour, at the end of the show now, the three originals stepped forward to take the first bow alone. Which, according to Nick Mason, left some of the supporting players feeling aggrieved.
In turn, the others and various crew members established their own little clique, a mocked-up club beneath the stage, where they played after the show or sometimes even during the interval. The club was nicknamed ‘The Donkey’s Knob’.
The presence of the band’s children on some dates was another stark reminder of their lives away from Pink Floyd. Nick Mason’s eldest daughter was now working for him on the tour; some of Gilmour’s children would join him on the dates; while bassist Guy Pratt would cement intra-band relations further by later marrying Gala Wright. ‘It was the most un-rock ‘n’ roll tour,’ says one insider. ‘They were all in new
relationships and they were being family men again.’
There would be one significant throwback to the old days, though. On 15 July, at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome, the band changed their setlist. The whole of the second half of the show was now given over to Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. The band had been considering playing the whole album since 1987. Now, they’d finally committed themselves to do it. Nick Mason found it an emotional experience. ‘It reminds me of our history, the way we were then,’ he said. ‘It made us a big American band. But we reached a new plateau and immediately suffered for it from not knowing what to do next. The band disagreements, which never existed before, started then.’
Dark Side … would be played again two nights later at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and at random throughout the rest of the tour. In the meantime, the advent of the Internet had given the more technically advanced Pink Floyd fans a new medium with which to communicate. A couple of months into The Division Bell tour, postings began to appear on a Pink Floyd Internet newsgroup by an unknown individual known only as Publius. He/she invited fans to scrutinise the artwork, lyrics and music on The Division Bell for clues to an enigma or puzzle hidden within the album, hinting at a prize to anyone that could solve the riddle. The initial postings were greeted with scepticism, until, as promised by Publius in a posting beforehand, the words ‘Enigma Publius’ were spelled out in lights at the base of the stage during the show at the Giants Stadium.
Later on in the tour, as predicted, a similar message flashed up on the stage at London’s Earls Court. When interviewed, the band members denied all knowledge, as did Storm Thorgerson and Steve O’Rourke, who were considered the likeliest culprits. However, a set of Floyd reissues at the end of 1994 threw up more ‘evidence’. One photograph included in new CD insert artwork for A Momentary Lapse of Reason included the word ‘Enigma’ in the bottom right-hand corner; another contained the word ‘Publius’.
