“It should have been clear what it was – it was never intended to be the follow-up to ‘The Division Bell’.”
David Gilmour said that he had been “bullied” by the record label into releasing Pink Floyd’s final album “The Endless River”, and explained the decision to sell the rights to the iconic prog rock band’s music.
Released in 2014, “The Endless River” proved to be the British prog institution’s fifteenth and final studio release and the third Pink Floyd studio album not to feature Roger Waters. Predominantly composed of instrumental pieces captured during the recording of its 1994 predecessor “The Division Bell” with additional material recorded in the early 2010s, the album was met with mixed reviews due to what was perceived as a lack of focus or overarching vision.
Gilmour, who broke free of the “expectations” set by his Pink Floyd past with a new solo album titled “Luck and Strange”, told LA Times in a new interview that “The Endless River” had not been meant as a standalone release.
“When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together called ‘The Big Spliff’ – a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams that was out there on bootlegs. A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them.”
“My mistake, I suppose, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record. It should have been clear what it was – it was never intended to be the follow-up to ‘The Division Bell’. But, you know, it’s never too late to get caught in one of these traps again.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gilmour reflected on the decision to sell Pink Floyd’s catalog for $400 million to Sony. He said:
“I’m an old person. I’ve spent the last 40-odd years trying to fight the good fight against the forces of indolence and greed to do the best with our stuff that you can do. And I’ve given that fight up now.”
“The arguments and fighting and idiocies that have been going on for the last 40 years between these four disparate groups of people and their managers and whatever — it’s lovely to say goodbye to.”
