“AH, THAT SOUNDS MORE LIKE FLOYD…”
Andy Jackson and Aubrey Powell unpack some of The Later Years’ audio and visual treasures
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON
ANDY JACKSON: “Momentary Lapse was an oddity. It was just approached in a very different way that removed a lot of the organic stuff that happened between them. A lot of that has returned now, with us putting Rick’s playing back on. On tour he’d play a lot of Hammond, which isn’t on the record, and we’d put it back on and think, ‘Ah, that sounds a lot more like Floyd.’ Most of the drums have been done again with Nick, and we used a more classic
Pink Floyd approach to the drum sound and to the playing. ‘Sorrow’ was a weird hybrid – the drums were electronic pads, so it has a sort of machine feel to it. We changed the sounds to be more organic, but David liked it played on the pads. Rick’s been put on there, though, and we changed the bass, so it is a rather different beast to the original.”
UNRELEASED JAMS
JACKSON: “There are a handful of leftovers, which all came from the Division Bell sessions. It’s just a selection of them knocking around some ideas and demos. There’s no thought of, ‘Oh, let’s try and get a master out of this.’ They’re just trying something out and I’m recording so we can listen to it. So it’s got a relaxed looseness to it at times that’s really fun. The early demo of ‘High Hopes’ is a bit different, there’s a jam of what turned into ‘Marooned’, and ‘Nervana’, which turned up as an extra on The Endless River.”
DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER
AUBREY POWELL: “We discovered 310 film cans of 35mm film, the original Delicate Sound footage. As I realised later, it was a very ramshackle shoot. Very few of the cameras had time-code slates, so they were all out of sync, none of them were shooting at the same speed. Out of that came the original laserdisc and VHS, which didn’t do the concert justice in any way at all. It wasn’t the director’s fault. It was just that, 30 years ago, trying to shoot a live concert on 35mm film was incredibly difficult, because the communication system wasn’t there like it is now. So we digitised all the rushes and started a 14-month process of editing the film together from scratch.”
“ARNOLD LAYNE”, LIVE AT THE BARBICAN, LONDON, MAY 10, 2007
JACKSON: “This is the last time they ever played together, the three of them. It’s a perfect bookend, being the first Pink Floyd single, the beginning and end contained in one song. So it’s got a romantic significance, if you like.”