Pink Floyd The Endless River

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Yucateco
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by Yucateco »

theaussiefloydian wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 11:20 pm
azza200 wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 6:32 pm and the holy grail footage is in Roger's vault The Wall live footage.
Why he refuses to release that I'll never understand. Sure it's pretty rough by their descriptions, but that clip of "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" that's been floating about looks pretty good to me.
It might have something to do with the projections. The happiest days clip looks fantastic but there are no films on Mr. Screeen or on the wall. I recall reading somewhere that this is what causes the problems, as they are flickering a lot and are not of good quality on the filmed material.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by theaussiefloydian »

Yucateco wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 8:47 am It might have something to do with the projections. I recall reading somewhere that this is what causes the problems, as they are flickering a lot and are not of good quality on the filmed material.
That would be a bit strange though - for flickering to be a serious issue the film in the cameras and the film in the projectors would have to be running at different FPS, and I'd assume they'd both be at the UK standard of 25 FPS. Though maybe shutter speed and stuff like that made it a problem... but I'm not certain how that would be. If the projections look crap because they're washed out because of the exposure the camera was running at, that would make total sense to me, in which case they could compromise by cutting to the projection film a la the Delicate Sound of Thunder film. That would be by no means a perfect fix, but it might help.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by battra »

theaussiefloydian wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 11:20 pm
azza200 wrote: Tue May 18, 2021 6:32 pm and the holy grail footage is in Roger's vault The Wall live footage.
Why he refuses to release that I'll never understand. Sure it's pretty rough by their descriptions, but that clip of "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" that's been floating about looks pretty good to me.
I would wager it's pettiness.

He owns The Wall.

They don't help him so he won't help them.

But who's really hurt by this?

Us.

It's Us and Them....
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by ZiggyZipgun »

battra wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 11:02 pm I would wager it's pettiness.

He owns The Wall.
He owns the studio recording. He tried to prevent Is There Anybody Out There? from being released, and failed. He did take the opportunity to start touring again, so there's that.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by penguinzzz »

ZiggyZipgun wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:11 am
battra wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 11:02 pm I would wager it's pettiness.

He owns The Wall.
He owns the studio recording. He tried to prevent Is There Anybody Out There? from being released, and failed. He did take the opportunity to start touring again, so there's that.
Did he actively try to 'prevent' it? I know there were arguments over the details.

Also please remind me how this was connected to him touring?
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by ZiggyZipgun »

penguinzzz wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:30 pm Did he actively try to 'prevent' it? I know there were arguments over the details.

Also please remind me how this was connected to him touring?
He did - he said that an audio or film recording couldn't possible compare to the experience of being in the audience, and it should never be released. However, once it started moving forward without him, he decided to launch his first tour in 12 years, despite all of his previous public whining about Pink Floyd touring with old material. The release was delayed several times, mostly thanks to him, but there was a lot of press about it (and "Pink Floyd") in the months before Roger announced his tour.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

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Also in an interview around the time of the release of Is There Anybody Out There David said he would of released the footage of the concerts at the same time as the live album.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by battra »

ZiggyZipgun wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 12:11 am
battra wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 11:02 pm I would wager it's pettiness.

He owns The Wall.
He owns the studio recording. He tried to prevent Is There Anybody Out There? from being released, and failed. He did take the opportunity to start touring again, so there's that.
He said he allowed it to be released.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by penguinzzz »

ZiggyZipgun wrote: Thu May 20, 2021 1:17 pm He did - he said that an audio or film recording couldn't possible compare to the experience of being in the audience, and it should never be released.
In specific reference to 'Is There Anybody Out There?' - where was this said?
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by ZiggyZipgun »

penguinzzz wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 1:18 am In specific reference to 'Is There Anybody Out There?' - where was this said?
I'm sorry - I'm still doing research for my Waters à la Bowie dissertation. I'll have to circle back to this one.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by penguinzzz »

ZiggyZipgun wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 2:22 am
penguinzzz wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 1:18 am In specific reference to 'Is There Anybody Out There?' - where was this said?
I'm sorry - I'm still doing research for my Waters à la Bowie dissertation. I'll have to circle back to this one.
I'll be waiting...
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by ZiggyZipgun »

penguinzzz wrote: Fri May 21, 2021 5:34 pm I'll be waiting...
I actually have been searching for the quote, but most of the transcribed RW/PF interviews are from the mid-'90s and earlier, or pick up in the early 2000s - there's quite a gap in late '90s. Couple that with the fact that almost any combination of search terms that we'd use to find articles pertaining to the release of Is There Anybody Out There? will bring up everything else that was ever said about The Wall between 1980 and 2010. I have a box of Floyd-related guitar and music magazines from that time, and there's a very good chance it's in there. I haven't opened it since I moved four years ago. ](*,)
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by RWBYraikou888 »

Although it was a rather last-minute creation, The Endless River serves to be Pink Floyd’s swan song with how it calls back to their most noteworthy and influential albums. Most already know that the album predominantly consists of songs that were developed for The Division Bell, but ultimately ended up being cut out of the final product because of time constraints, allowing for Richard Wright to have one last contribution posthumously. However, I’ve noticed something in the back of my head that I haven’t found a clear answer to up until this point. How many songs total on The Endless River were taken from the production process of The Division Bell, and how many were completely original pieces made specifically for the new album? I haven’t seen much discussion of this topic in the past, so I feel like this should be amended as soon as possible for the sake of clarity and disclosure.

One thing that’s important to note is that the songs carried over from The Division Bell aren’t one-to-one with how they were originally recorded, as while Gilmour’s guitar pieces and Wright’s piano pieces are kept completely intact, the drums provided by Nick Mason are completely original, recorded in the 2010s when The Endless River was set to release rather than back in the 90s when the instrumental pieces were initially recorded. The album’s co-producers also have a bit of a varied history with Pink Floyd, as while Phil Manzanera had first worked with Pink Floyd on A Momentary Lapse of Reason in the 80s, while Andy Jackson has been around since the band’s golden years in the 70s, Youth of Orb fame had only recently gotten ties with the band, working with Gilmour on one of his solo projects in the early 2010s, so input from Youth could potentially not apply to songs that were recorded back in the 90s. The only song on The Endless River that contains vocals is “Louder Than Words”, which Gilmour had his wife, Polly Samson, write as one last swan song to Pink Floyd after “High Hopes” on the album prior attempted a similar concept, with “Louder Than Words” stemming from observations based on experiences that happened about 11 years after The Division Bell was initially released. There was a lot of downtime between The Division Bell and The Endless River, which would potentially allow for many songs to be first conceptualized after the former was released to the public, but some songs need to be looked into a bit more to narrow down when the songs were first developed, assuming all of them but “Louder Than Words” weren’t all conceptualized back during The Division Bell’s development.

When The Endless River was first coming out, Nick Mason said that, “After two weeks, we had taped an extraordinary collection of riffs, patterns and musical doodles, some rather similar, some nearly identifiable as old songs of ours, some clearly subliminal reinventions of well-known songs.” By this logic, most of The Endless River was created off of two weeks’ worth of unused content that had been lingering about in the backburner for about 19 years, and according to Gilmour, he and Mason needed to sift through 20 hours of unused content to determine which material would be considered best suitable for The Endless River, thus inferring that even more content was scrapped from The Division Bell that never became used. This bit of info makes narrowing down which individual tracks were selected all the more difficult, as any song has the potential to be new, or one of the 20 hours worth of music made for The Division Bell, which collectively makes up 53 minutes of an album on The Endless River. One song worth mentioning is “Talkin’ Hawkin’”, which is a continuation of the song “Keep Talking” on The Division Bell, based on Gilmour’s experience with viewing an ad featuring Stephen Hawking discussing the evolution of human communications. It’s a bit difficult to discern if this song was originally meant for The Division Bell, as “Keep Talking” already has a follow-up song on that album with “Lost For Words”, both of which transition into “High Hopes”, the album’s final track. “Talkin’ Hawkin’” samples a different speech of Stephen Hawking’s, which opens up a more extensive timeframe to put into action, let alone with the knowledge that Nick Mason provided additional compositions for each song on the album that weren’t there when they were first recorded. Something else to consider is the possibility that some songs may have been titled exclusively with The Endless River in mind, including the likes of “It’s What We Do”, hinting at the album’s nature of being a mass homage to the history of Pink Floyd itself. Songs like those could have the possibility of being developed for the album specifically, rather than a carryover from The Division Bell, but aside from “Louder Than Words”, which has vocal confirmation of being made specifically for it, there’s little way of telling if this is actually the case.

The album art could perhaps provide a bit of insight into the topic, as for the most part, Pink Floyd albums starting with Atom Heart Mother have some sort of connection with the album’s content, such as the cow on Atom Heart Mother representing the album’s naturalistic sound design, the power plant and pig on Animals representing the album’s critique on capitalism and how pigs are at the top of the cycling chain, and the seemingly random colors on The Final Cut actually being medals for soldiers in WWII. The album cover, designed by Ahmed Emad Eldin and UK design agency Stylorouge, is pretty self-explanatory, displaying a person rowing a boat atop a river of clouds, which mainly comes from the themes present in “Louder Than Words”, being how even though Pink Floyd’s tenure may not be built to last, their legacy spreads out endlessly that they’ll never truly end up going away. That said, some songs could potentially have names which tie back to the album cover itself, including “Ebb and Flow”, which may describe how much effort it takes to stay stable during one full trip through Pink Floyd’s music catalogue, and “Surfacing”, which could probably be a take on how the boat rider in the cover art may be keeping his boat afloat amidst all of the rocky bumps along the voyage. That said, all of this is mere hypothesis, and there’s also the conflicting possibility that these names were given to previously-unreleased songs from The Division Bell in post-production rather than being created simultaneously, but with that said, there’s nothing that indicates that this isn’t the case, either, so it could sway either way without any definitive evidence to back either assessment up.

As it stands, the only song that has outright been confirmed to be completely original to The Endless River is “Louder Than Words”, but without any sort of word detailing which songs were and weren’t carryovers, there’s still room for speculation. Based on everything that’s been said, there’s the possibility for at least four more songs to have been completely original to The Endless River, being “It’s What We Do”, “Ebb and Flow”, “Talkin’ Hawkin’”, and “Surfacing”, making a grand total of 5 out of the 18 songs on album being completely original. However, all of this is speculation at the end of the day without any official word on the topic, and for what it’s worth, it’s best to take this subject with a grain of salt at the end of the day.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

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RWBYraikou888 wrote: Thu Nov 04, 2021 8:32 pmAs it stands, the only song that has outright been confirmed to be completely original to The Endless River is “Louder Than Words”, but without any sort of word detailing which songs were and weren’t carryovers, there’s still room for speculation. Based on everything that’s been said, there’s the possibility for at least four more songs to have been completely original to The Endless River, being “It’s What We Do”, “Ebb and Flow”, “Talkin’ Hawkin’”, and “Surfacing”, making a grand total of 5 out of the 18 songs on album being completely original. However, all of this is speculation at the end of the day without any official word on the topic, and for what it’s worth, it’s best to take this subject with a grain of salt at the end of the day.
I think you'll find a lot to like in this thread: https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums ... ost-227262

A large part of the music comes from the initial TDB preparation / jamming session. Some of the finished results are Frankenstein monsters like "Skins" and "Unsung", others simply took an existing base ("Louder than Words", which was described as a pretty much finished song that just didn't have any lyrics, or "Sum", which was fleshed out with drums and guitar), but a lot of them have been around in some form. "Anisina", for example, exists as a demo from 1993, simply called "Untitled" or "Hymn". "Calling" was in the Colours of Infinity soundtrack. But I think virtually all the titles are new. Look no further than the demos that came out on the Later Years set: They have working titles like "Rick's Theme" and "Slippery Guitar". I doubt any of the titles on TER was already used in the 90s.

Would the band have included the Stephen Hawking speech twice if The Division Bell had been a double album? I doubt it. But being released twenty years later, it was a nice conceptual link.
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Re: Pink Floyd The Endless River

Post by ZiggyZipgun »

Something you didn't really touch on is the album credits, which are unusually detailed for a Pink Floyd album.

Rick Wright does not appear on "Anisina", since that's a piano piece that Gilmour came up with. It is very reminiscent of "Us and Them", which is likely why they never used it, but it's also interesting how much David was influenced by Rick.

Rick of course appears on "Autumn '68"...but in a recording from rehearsals at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969.

Rick also does not appear on "Calling". The odd thing about this track is that it was used as the intro and general theme music for the documentary The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty and Power of Fractals, narrated by Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Childhood's End", and many more. The show was released in 1995, but the music was likely recorded earlier. The soundtrack is credited solely to David Gilmour, so it's also odd that The Endless River then credits Anthony Moore with co-writing and playing keyboards on "Calling". Gilmour recorded several soundtracks in the early '90s, including La Carrera Panamericana, recorded with Pink Floyd in November '91, Ruby Takes a Trip! in '92, and The Art of Tripping in '93. Anthony Moore of course co-wrote "Learning to Fly", "The Dogs of War", and "On the Turning Away", and also wrote the lyrics for "Wearing the Inside Out" and nearly all of Broken China, but isn't credited as a musician on any of those releases apart from "computer programming and arrangements" on Broken China.

"Eyes to Pearls" may also be on the Colours of Infinity soundtrack; I haven't watched it recently.

Gilmour did re-record a lot of guitar parts for the album, and used a 2010 custom baritone Telecaster on "It's What We Do".

Wikipedia mainly references Mason's Inside Out to explain the material generated during the Division Bell sessions:
"After about two weeks, the band had around 65 pieces of music... The band voted on each track, and whittled the material down to about 27 pieces. Eliminating some tracks, and merging others, they arrived at about 11 songs. Song selection was based upon a system of points, whereby all three members would award marks out of ten to each candidate song, a system skewed by Wright awarding his songs ten points each and the others none." Engineer Andy Jackson edited some of the unused material into "The Big Spliff", but he didn't necessarily limit himself to the 16 pieces that didn't make it onto The Division Bell, and could have borrowed from the additional 22 that were ruled out early on.

I highly doubt any of the pieces not selected for The Division Bell had any particular structure, concept, or title. Nick said that when they started going back through the material, they Googled to find the average length of a movement in classical music, and based on that, they tried to arrange it into 12- to 13-minute suites.

Also, I believe the first week of jamming in '93 was just the three of them, plus Bob Ezrin; Guy Pratt came in during the second or third week. Pratt provided the bass for "On Noodle Street" and "Talkin' Hawkin'"...in 2013; "Allons-y" and "Louder Than Words" feature Ezrin on bass, while "Skins" and "Eyes to Pearls" feature Andy Jackson (and all other bass parts were played Gilmour). This could at least suggest that the tracks with Ezrin were farther along way back then.

The Stephen Hawking speech on Endless River is actually everything from the British Telecom commercial that wasn't used on Division Bell; they're different portions of the same speech:
https://youtu.be/xOq5gwWeC3Q