Pink Floyd may have abundance of unreleased material which was cut from double album

Pink Floyd may have more archival tapes and unreleased songs in the vault, some of it having been cut from their double album.

The David Gilmour and Roger Waters-featuring group were prolific in the 1970s, releasing masterpieces like The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Inevitably, some songs were destined for the scrap pile or did not make the cut when it came to releasing the album to the public. Those songs appear to have been salvaged, however, and remain complete but unreleased, according to various members of the Pink Floyd troupe. The Wall, the group’s 1979 double album, reportedly has several songs which were completed but did not make it onto the final release.

Gilmour confirmed the album was “so big” that there were many songs to be cut, while engineer James Guthrie suggested there was much more material for the album, about “three albums worth”. Whether these songs see the light of day is yet to be seen, but various Pink Floyd members and sound engineers associated with The Wall‘s production have confirmed more material exists.

Gilmour said: “The idea of The Wall was so big and there was such a lot of stuff that Roger wanted to get across lyrically that there was no other way to do it, really. As it was, we had to struggle to get it on a double album.

“The only problem we had was reducing it down from a triple-album to a double-album – the length of songs and all that. Toward the end, we were actually cutting chunks out of songs to fit the time. It’s a long double-album.”

Engineer Guthrie added: “Roger, David, Nick, Rick and I had been living with Roger’s original demo recording of The Wall during the summer of 1978.

“We began work in the studio that October and, as Roger had written about three albums’ worth of material. The first order of the day was to determine how best to tell his story in a more manageable, double-album format.”

It is believed “at least 10%” of The Wall has been cut and remains missing. The eight and a half minutes of music were cut from the album before its release, and it appears the music has yet to resurface. What did make it onto the album was “chopped to bits” according to Gilmour.

He said: “The whole side three bit with the orchestra all got shortened radically. Other songs – Run Like Hell was chopped to bits, really. Whole chunks. One was concentrating then on vinyl. It wouldn’t matter so much today, but with vinyl, there was a finite limit of about twenty-one minutes a side.

“Every extra minute, you lose a dB, one dB of level when it’s being played on the radio. Not so much here, where they compress the shit out of it, but also [the] signal-to-noise level gets worse and over 25 minutes you’re beginning to suffer quite distinctly. So, our objective was to get it short enough to be able to get it onto two albums, and some things suffered for that.”