Pink Floyd - The Division Bell

Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985.  In his mind the band was a “spent force” creatively.  Perhaps with him still in the band, it was.  He wrote all the songs on The Final Cut.  Rick Wright was out of the band after The Wall shows were complete in 1981.  David Gilmour’s guitar provides little more than a cameo to most of the songs, and he sings lead on only Not Now John.  Nick Mason was replaced by Andy Newmark for the album finale, Two Suns in the Sunset. Gilmour wanted to wait so he could contribute songs to The Final Cut, but Waters didn’t want to wait.  In essence, The Final Cut was Roger Waters’ first solo album.  It didn’t sound like a Pink Floyd album at all.

Both David Gilmour and Roger Waters put out solo records in 1984 [About Face and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, respectively].  Kurt Loder reviewed both albums for Rolling Stone magazine.  He concluded About Face showed that Gilmour had the patent on the Pink Floyd sound.  Gilmour and Mason decided to make more music under the Pink Floyd banner.  They even brought back Rick Wright to drive that point home.  Although both Mason’s and Wright’s names appeared in the album credits for A Momentary Lapse of Reason, neither played very much on the record.  The album was essentially a David Gilmour solo album as there were lots of outside studio musicians on the album.  Like The Final Cut, A Momentary Lapse of Reason didn’t sound like a Pink Floyd album.  But since Gilmour was still in Pink Floyd and Waters was not, Gilmour had another opportunity to make a Pink Floyd album that sounded like Pink Floyd.  With The Division Bell, released eighteen years ago this week, Gilmour succeeded in making that album.  The Division Bell turned out to be the last Pink Floyd studio album [the live album PULSE came out the in 1995]. 

Cluster One – The Division Bell begins with this Gilmour/Wright piano/guitar duet.  Unlike Signs of Life from A Momentary Lapse of Reason, this isn’t an overture.  Cluster One just goes on its own merry way until…

What Do You Want From Me – This song from Gilmour/Wright shows something one rarely finds in David Gilmour’s recorded work – anger, mixed in with a heavy dose of frustration.  Gilmour asks his listening public what they want from him – should he sing until he can’t sing anymore, should he play until his hands bleed?  Should he play in the rain for them?  The guitar work is some of the nastiest on the album, reminiscent of another song from a different time [Have a Cigar from Wish You Were Here].  Where Have a Cigar was a jaundiced look at the music business and all that is wrong with it from Roger Waters, David Gilmour has an equally jaundiced view of his audience, at least in this instance anyway.  Rick Wright’s keyboards makes one think this is a Wish You Were Here outtake.  It definitely has that WYWH sound.

Poles Apart – I don’t know why, but I don’t like this one – I never did.  It annoys me.

Marooned – Another instrumental which won a Grammy.®  Gilmour communicates with bats on his lap steel.

A Great Day For Freedom – Whenever one hears a David Gilmour or Pink Floyd song with a reference to a “wall” one is tempted to think “A-ha!  This one is directed at Roger Waters.”  Sorry folks, but the wall in question here was the Berlin Wall.  On the day the wall came down they threw the locks onto the ground, and with glasses high we raised a cry for freedom had arrived…  But as the celebration of freedom goes on in Berlin, conflict is brewing anew in another land – Yugoslavia.  Now life devalues day by day as friends and neighbors turned away, and there’s a change that even with regret cannot be undone… Now frontiers shift like desert sands as nations while wash their bloodied hands, of loyalty, of history in shades of grey… Gilmour sang this at the Solidarity celebration in Gdansk, Poland in 2006.

Wearing the Inside Out – For the first time since Dark Side of the Moon, Rick Wright sings on a Pink Floyd album.  He describes himself as a burned out shell of his former self that crawled into a state of self-imposed isolation.  But he’s better now; he’s able to speak for the first time in many years.  This is perhaps the emotional core of The Division Bell.  There’s some very bluesy playing from Gilmour.  Dick Perry returns to play sax on a Pink Floyd album for the first time since Wish You Were Here.

Take It Back – A new guitar sound for a Pink Floyd album – the E-bow.  After four songs at a very laid back tempo, the Floyd pick up the pace with this one.  I saw the video for the song which suggests it’s about the environment.  But how does one account for the following line - So I spy on her, I lie to her, I make promises I cannot keep.  To me it’s more about the pushing the boundaries within a relationship.  Consider the following - Her love rains on me easy as the breeze, I listen to her breathing it sounds like the waves on the sea, I was thinkin' all about her, burning with rage and desire.  So I chalk this up as another ode to the future Mrs. Gilmour.

Coming Back to Life – Where were you when I was burned and broken?  Where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless?  Because the things you say and the things you do surround me…Was this directed at the woman who eventually became Gilmour’s second wife?  Had he met her while she was with someone else?  Was he biding his time while she was waiting for someone else?  While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words dying to believe in what you heard… This song is like a companion piece to Wearing the Inside Out. Both songs have that theme of coming from being an emotional cripple to becoming a functional human being once more.  The guitar tone here is clean without any distortion at all.  There’s a long guitar introduction, then the singing bit, concluded by a lot of guitar playing, all of it superb.  If there is one complaint I have about this song, it’s that there is “too much cowbell.” J  The story has a happy ending – Gilmour got the girl.

Keep Talking – At the time of The Division Bell’s release, it had been seven years since the previous Floyd album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.  So when I heard this Gilmour/Wright gem on the radio [I still listened to radio then before it turned to complete shit…], to my ears it sounded more Floydian than anything since The Wall.  “About damn time” I thought…This sounded like Pink Floyd the band, not Pink Floyd the brand name.  What was missing from previous efforts?  The answer is simple – Rick Wright.  He provides the atmospherics throughout the song that gives it the Floydian feel.  In addition to Gilmour’s stellar guitar playing, we’re also treated to a solo from Rick Wright [the first since Run Like Hell].  Rick is also playing the Hammond B-3 throughout.  When The Division Bell came out, David Gilmour was asked if there was a concept for the album.  His response was there was no real concept, but there was an underlying them about the inability to communicate with others.  This exchange between Gilmour and the female singers underlines this point:

Gilmour: I think I should speak now…

Female voices:  Why won’t you talk to me?

Gilmour:  I can’t seem to speak now…

Female voices:   You never talk to me!

Gilmour:  My words won’t come out right…

Female voices:  What are you thinking?

Gilmour:  I feel like I’m drowning…

Female voices:  What are you feeling?

Gilmour:  I’m feeling weak now…

Female voices:  Why won’t you talk to me?

Gilmour:  But I can’t show my weakness…

Female Voices:  You never talk to me!

Gilmour:  I sometimes wonder…

Female Voices:  What are you thinking?

Gilmour:  Where do we go from here?

Female Voices:  What are you feeling?

Then there’s the disembodied “voice” of Stephen Hawking – It doesn’t have to be like this…All we need to do is make sure we keep talking… Note the last two words – the title of the song.

In the last verse, Gilmour breaks out the talk box for the first time since Animals and mimics the female voices [he mocks them, actually…].  Every time they sing a line, he comes back with a guitar line that sounds, with the help of the talk box, like they’re nagging him.

Lost for Words – This song is mostly acoustic with touches of electric for coloring.  When I heard these words I was certain they were addressed to Roger Waters.  I’ve read that they are not, but consider what they say - So I opened my door to my enemies, and I asked “could we wipe the slate clean?”/But they tell me to “please go fuck myself,” you know you just can’t win…  What follows the final lyric is a superb solo on the acoustic from Gilmour, which is reminiscent of another WYWH song [the title song]. The song fades into ringing church bells and bird sounds that lead into…

High Hopes – A single church bell rings; a piano plays a simple opening theme. This, the last song on the last Pink Floyd album, shows Gilmour looking back on his childhood in Cambridge.  There and then it was a “world of magnets and miracles,” where the imagination had no boundaries.  The grass was greener, the light was brighter, with friends surrounded, the nights of wonder…  Unless you had a very unhappy childhood, who doesn’t think that one’s childhood was idyllic, that they were the best of times when everything smelled better, tasted sweeter, sounded better, felt better, when the nights were wondrous?  He brings himself back to his present circumstance in adulthood, where things maybe aren’t quite as rosy as one would hope - Encumbered forever by desire and ambition, there’s a hunger that’s still unsatisfied/Our  weary eyes still stray to the horizon, though down this road we’ve been so many times… After the singing is over Gilmour turns to the lap steel and plays what I think is his emotional guitar solo…ever.  Michael Kamen [RIP] provided a superb orchestral arrangement that, combined with the lap steel, draws you in and compels you to feel.  This song’s greatness cannot be overstated.  I never tire of listening to it.

So there you have it - Pink Floyd’s final opus.  I don’t think anybody knew it at the time [maybe Gilmour did, but he didn’t tell anybody], but events between now and then have made it so.  Rick Wright passed away in 2006.  David Gilmour has stated in public on numerous occasions that he’s done with Pink Floyd.  There was the one-off reunion at Live 8 in 2005, but that’s all it was – a one-off.  Gilmour and Waters have since buried the hatchet and are at least friendly to one another.  That story has a happy ending, but Rock Wright’s passing makes that happy ending bittersweet.  As for The Division Bell, it isn’t a great album, but it is a damn good one.  That’s enough for me.  With 20/20 hindsight, one can see a logical progression from this to David Gilmour’s solo career and what came next with On an Island.

Tony's Guitarist Picks - David Gilmour

In retrospect, the last blog I wrote about Duane Allman was [in my view] extremely long-winded.  Today I will keep it much shorter.  The object of today’s exercise is David Gilmour, the man with the humungous Fender who is responsible for all the guitar noise from Pink Floyd.

It was the week between the last day of high school and graduation.  I decided to expand my musical horizons beyond the Beatles, so I bought four albums – two by the Doors [Morrison Hotel, LA Woman] and two by Pink Floyd [The Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall]. What struck me about Pink Floyd besides all the cool sound effects was the guitar playing of David Gilmour.  I noticed that he didn’t get very many songwriting credits while Roger Waters was in the band, but I did notice that fact didn’t stop David Gilmour from shining brightly.  Gilmour sang well [much better than Roger Waters], he played lots of different guitars, and he played them with an economy unheard of in most bands, especially the metal bands.  I thought he played a lot like George Harrison in that he always seemed to choose his notes wisely, the notes that he chose always seemed perfect for any song he played, and he was never in any hurry to say what he wanted to say musically.  In short, Pink Floyd was a very cool-sounding band.  After the Floyd reportedly went their separate ways after The Final Cut [1982], both Roger Waters and David Gilmour put out solo albums [The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and About Face, respectively].  What caught my ear was how much Gilmour’s album sounded like Pink Floyd, and how much Roger Waters’ album did not sound like Pink Floyd. That little tidbit didn’t escape Kurt Loder either when he reviewed The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking for Rolling Stone.  I believe his comments were along the lines that Gilmour had the patent on Pink Floyd’s sound, and that About Face had taken on a new luster in comparison with Roger’s work.  But I’m not here to trash Roger Waters.  Roger may have had all the songs, but without Gilmour to give them shape and form I didn’t think they were as good as what he produced when he was the guiding hand of Pink Floyd.  David Gilmour really was [and still is] “the guitar and voice of Pink Floyd.”  And as such, he also became my favorite guitar player.  What makes David Gilmour such a standout?  Let me count the ways…

The acoustic – Given all of their electronic wizardry, Pink Floyd doesn’t come to mind as a group that would play what David Crosby calls “wooden music.”  Given the opportunity, Gilmour can unplug with the best of them.  Wish You Were Here is the obvious example of Pink Floyd going “unplugged.”  Fat Old Sun from Atom Heart Mother is another good example.  He uses the acoustic as a soloing instrument on songs like Lost For Words [from The Division Bell] and Near the End [from About Face].  He’s used it as a rhythm instrument – the rhythm track for Dogs [Animals, 1977] is acoustic.  He’ll play half a song on an acoustic before abruptly switching to an electric for solo work like On the Turning Away [A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987].  He did a live DVD where he unplugged for Shine On You Crazy Diamond.  I wasn’t sure how he’d pull that off, but he did so effortlessly.  Another good usage of the acoustic is found on Murder [About Face].  His use of a capo [on the second fret, I think…] makes the song sound like Norwegian Wood [both songs are in the same key].  That’s appropriate since the subject of Murder is John Lennon.

The “Nashville” tuning - This tuning on an acoustic guitar substitutes the wound E, A, and D strings with lighter gauge strings of the pairs of a twelve-string guitar.  The guitar sounds like it’s an octave higher.  Gilmour replaced the lower E string with a second six-string high E.  I first heard this tuning utilized by Keith Richards on the Stones Wild Horses [Sticky Fingers, 1971].  Keith’s usage made Wild Horses sound more like a country song [hence the name of the tuning], but Gilmour’s use lends a shimmering, ethereal quality to whatever song he thinks needs such a quality.  Gilmour first used it on I Can’t Breathe Anymore [David Gilmour, 1978].  He also used it for Hey You, Mother and Comfortably Numb.

The lap steel – Sometimes Gilmour used the lap steel for coloring [Breathe, Hey You, The Great Gig in the Sky, Comfortably Numb], other times he used it for soloing [Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part VI, High Hopes], and one time [the only one I can think of] he used it for taking over a song [One of These Days].  Until I heard One of These Days [Meddle, 1971] I had no idea you could play very loud power chords on a lap steel.

Speed kills – David Gilmour can wring more emotion out of four notes than Yngve Malmsteen or any other shredder [ahem…Steve Vai or Joe Satriani] can with one hundred.  Why four notes?  Shine On You Crazy Diamond.  Those four notes that start Part II [3:56] of this song were all that Roger Waters needed for inspiration to write about Syd Barrett.  How else can one make those long string bends that he gets on Part I of the same song?  You can’t get there by playing lightning fast.  Since Gilmour plays slowly compared to many guitarists, he can inject a lot of melody into his playing.  You can practically sing his solos [I’m listening to Mother as I write this…].

The solos – David Gilmour’s soloing prowess is legendary.  His solos are not terribly complex.  It’s the age-old argument of “speed vs. feeling.”  David Gilmour has feeling in abundance.  For him, soling is a fun thing to do.  He told a BBC interviewer once that he can’t imagine what it’s like being in the audience and listening to it.  He went on to say that soloing “is the best way that some of us express ourselves.”  He has a bunch of great ones [in no particular order]:  Young Lust, Mother, Hey You, Wish You Were Here, SOYCD, Dogs, Time, Money, High Hopes, Have a Cigar, The Final Cut, On the Turning Away, Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2, Echoes, Comfortably Numb.  Those are just the ones off the top of my head.

I remember one particular moment when I thought Gilmour’s playing coerced a “wow!” out of me.  It was at a midnight movie showing of Pink Floyd: The Wall.  Movies shown in a theater are fairly loud, but on this night it seemed especially loud [maybe because I wasn’t sober? who knows?].  The moment happened on the second song, The Thin Ice.  The song itself is quiet, the piano sounding almost like someone is playing “Chopsticks” until suddenly there’s a drum break and there’s Gilmour’s guitar.  The sound was ominous, sinister, and HUGE.  It was a definite “whoa!” moment.  It definitely set the tone for what came later.  There’s a certain quality to Gilmour’s soloing that makes one drop what he’s doing and pay attention to the music.  Comfortably Numb does that for me.  I’ve heard that song hundreds of times, but whenever I hear the solos [especially the second one] I have to stop what I’m doing [unless I’m driving], crank up the volume and enjoy.

The rhythm – Overlooked in Gilmour’s playing is his rhythm prowess.  One needs to look no further than Have a Cigar [Wish You Were Here, 1975] where Gilmour injects a shot of rhythm and blues after the bleak Welcome to the Machine.  Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 [The Wall, 1979] is another example of rhythm playing at its most un-Floydian.  His rhythm guitar sounds almost like Chic.  Then there’s the aforementioned Dogs.  His acoustic rhythm playing sounds like a scythe cutting through the fog.

Know when to support, know when to lead – Gilmour knows when to play, and more importantly [I think, anyway…] when not to play.  When Dick Parry plays his sax solo in SOYCD Part V, Gilmour plays a nice arpeggio figure in the back.  He also does the arpeggio thing on Dark Side of the Moon’s Us and Them.  No guitar solo is required for this song, but his playing on top of Rick Wright’s song sets the appropriate mood.  As good a support player that he is, he also knows when to step to the forefront.  Hey You [The Wall, 1979] is Roger Waters’ song, but it has Gilmour’s stamp all over it.  He throws in practically everything in his guitar arsenal into the song.  The intro is played on an acoustic guitar in the “Nashville tuning.”  He sang the verses before the guitar solo, he played the fretless bass as well as all the guitar solos and acoustic overdubs.  Plus, he’s got the lap steel on there that you can hear right after he finishes the guitar solo.  Everything you want to know about David Gilmour’s talent as a guitar player and arranger can be found in Hey You.

Have guitar, will travel – In addition to his work with the Floyd and his own solo work, Gilmour lends his talents to other people as a session player.  He’s worked with the likes of Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney, Supertramp and Kate Bush.  His latest contribution outside his own work came with The Orb.  Such was the nature and extent of his contribution to their work, their latest album [Metallic Spheres] was credited “The Orb featuring David Gilmour.”  My favorite bit that he did for someone else was to provide the lead guitar for Pete Townshend’s song Give Blood [White City: A Novel, 1985]. 

Careful With That Axe, Eugene – Gilmour’s axe of choice on the electric side is a Fender Stratocaster.  I have seen him use other guitars though.  For his solo on Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 he used a Les Paul.  He uses a Fender Esquire with the heavy E string tuned down to D for playing Run Like Hell.  I saw him use a white Fender Telecaster for Astronomy Domine.  For Sorrow [A Momentary Lapse of Reason, 1987] he broke out a headless Steinberger to get a tone from Hell.  For some of his solo work he has taken to playing a Gretsch Duo-Jet.  He uses it to great effect on Where We Start [On an Island, 2006].  It’s a very nice sounding guitar – I want one!  For acoustic work he’ll use a Taylor 712 CE acoustic steel string, a Martin D-28 acoustic steel string, a Jose Vilaplana acoustic nylon string, and an Ovation Custom Legend 1619-4 acoustic steel string with high strung unwound strings.  They all sound very good in his hands.

I won’t go into what amps or other gear he uses.  There is a website called Gilmourish [http://www.gilmourish.com/] that provides an exhaustive look at how David Gilmour gets the sounds that he does.  It claims to be the largest David Gilmour gear source on the net.  And having looked through the site, I believe them.  If you’re a gearhead, and especially a David Gilmour gearhead, this site is your one-stop shopping to get your gear fix.  It’s a very good site.

Not much else needs to be said about David Gilmour the guitar player.  Carol and I had the pleasure of seeing him in person twice, both times on Pink Floyd’s last tour in 1994.  The sound was crystal clear, the laser lights were very cool, the films shown on the round screen behind the stage complemented the music well.  Throw in a giant mirror ball and a couple of inflatable pigs for good measure and you’ve got yourself a very good show.  With Rick Wright’s death a few years ago, Pink Floyd is now history.  David Gilmour has seen it all and done it all.  He doesn’t have to work if he doesn’t want to.  I understand that he’s working on another record these days.  If so, it will be mine!