David Gilmour says Pink Floyd’s last album was a ‘mistake’ he was ‘bullied’ into making

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David Gilmour believes one Pink Floyd album was a “mistake” which he was “bullied” into making.

The veteran guitarist says The Endless River, an album released in 2014, was a release he wanted no part in making. Gilmour says the album was mainly comprised of ambient work he, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright had made while recording The Division Bell. Their 1994 release would be the final album the trio recorded with one another, and the second Pink Floyd album to be without bassist Roger Waters. The Endless River is seemingly a final goodbye from the band, with Pink Floyd‘s album released in 2014. A new song, Hey Hey Rise Up, would release in 2022, and is unrelated to The Endless River. The album, made up of the ambient recordings, was of no interest to Gilmour. He claimed the record label had insisted on releasing them, and so they were.

It’s something Gilmour is apparently not best pleased by, telling the Los Angeles Times the label had wanted an official version of the fan-favourite bootlegs which had been shared around since the release of The Division Bell.

Gilmour said: “I’ll tell you: 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 [from the sessions for 1994’s ‘The Division Bell’] 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.”

Pink Floyd would reach an agreement with Sony Music in 2024 to sell their back catalogue. It’s a deal which Gilmour is seemingly uninterested in, as he gave “no” as his answer to being asked whether he had worries of projects like The Endless River releasing in the future.

He said: “It’s history — it’s all past. This stuff is for future generations. 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. I’ve got my advance — because, you know, it’s not fresh new money or anything like that. It’s an advance against what I would have earned over the next few years anyway.

“But the arguments and fighting and idiocies that have been going on for the last forty years between these four disparate groups of people and their managers and whatever — it’s lovely to say goodbye to. And I haven’t sold the publishing rights.”