“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.
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Bright Sparks - Undertakers, band managers and museum workers by day, pop-charged rockers by night, The Hot Damn! are a gang you'd want to join.
Gill Montgomery has come straight from the mortuary. Her mortuary, to be precise. Some rockers wait tables, others teach music or pick up temp work. The Hot Damn! frontwoman looks after dead people.“It’s interesting,” she muses, of her day job running a funeral home in South East London. “It’s very hands-on. I think you’re either for it or you’re not.”
Motörhead
“Once we'd cracked the formula of how to work together on Overkill,\" said Eddie Clarke, that's when we really started to take off.” And it was all thanks to Phil Taylor's new drum kit.
LET'S DANCE
Dialling back on the aggressive approach that has helped bring Idles this far, and putting swing to the stomp, their new album is intended to make you shake a leg rather than a fist
Steve Hackett
The former Genesis guitarist’s latest themed’ tour enables him to visit the best of both worlds”.
Monster Magnet
“It's all-energy. It's rock excitement, psychedelic glory and space-rock hooks.” Sounds good to us!
MADE FRIENDS.INFLUENCED PEOPLE
In the 90s they were high flyers, then the fall hit them hard. Having picked themselves up, Terrorvision are back with their first new album in more than a decade, and it’s full of top tunes.
DON'T FENCE US IN
Embracing their roots on record for the first time, Don't call us southern” band The Cold Stares’ seventh album is both a love letter to Kentucky and a Call for unity in volatile times.
"I JUST WANTED TO BE RESPECTED FOR BEING IN A KICKASS BAND."
1976 was a pivotal year for Thin Lizzy. Guitarist Scott Gorham, one half of the band's classic twin-guitar sound, takes a trip down memory lane to the year that was...
Jerry Cantrell
The Alice In Chains guitarist on his forthcoming album and its guests, songwriting, AT, algorithm bots, AIC’s legacy...
THROUGH THICK AND THIN
In 1976, Thin Lizzy were touring Jailbreak in the US and were breaking big. Then disaster struck. Band manager Chris O'Donnell details the roller-coaster year in which they were cruelly robbed of their American dream.