Saturday Morning Records: #18 — Pink Floyd’s “The Division Bell”

A new series for paying subscribers — celebrating favourite albums for the weekend

On a recent trip to Auckland I bought The Division Bell on vinyl. It’s 30 years old. It’s really the last proper Pink Floyd album. Though the anoraks reading (cute that I think the audience for this might include anyone else besides) will say that the last “proper” Pink Floyd album was The Wall or Animals or Wish You Were Here. And one particularly salivary individual is waiting to type that, “erm, actually, the last ‘proper’ as you call it Pink Floyd album was actually The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, because Floyd is Syd”. But, yeah, anyway, The Division Bell is the last of the Floyd albums as conceived by a member of the band. There were live records, remixes, compilations, box sets, and offcuts only to follow.

And I remember, vividly, taking a day off school — actually faking a cough, affecting a scratchy voice — so to get The Division Bell on CD on the day of release. I’ve always defended the David Gilmour Years. I like the Roger Waters stuff. I love Syd. I listen to all of the solo albums by all of them. I go pretty deep with Floyd. But I have an incredible soft spot for A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and at one stage that was the case with The Division Bell too, but I let that go a bit along the way. So this was how I was going to reconnect…

Currently, inspired by the writing of my book, The Richard Poems, I’ve been on one of the biggest Floyd kicks of my life. I can’t stop playing the albums, watching the concert footage, and reading about the band. I mean, it will stop. I’ll find a new fixation again soon — returning to the scene of earlier research-crime no doubt. But for now it’s Floyd. And so The Division Bell record was kept in the shrink-wrap until I made it through the discography.

Finally, the great unveiling…