09/09/2026
A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON: THE ALBUM THAT HAD TO PROVE PINK FLOYD COULD CONTINUE
ON THIS DATE (39 YEARS AGO)
September 8, 1987 – Pink Floyd: A Momentary Lapse of Reason is released in the U.S.
ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ ★★★★
When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985, he believed the band was effectively finished. David Gilmour saw it differently.
Gilmour later recalled telling Waters that Pink Floyd would carry on without him. Waters’ response was emphatic: “You’ll never fu***ng do it.”
A Momentary Lapse of Reason was the answer.
It was an uneasy beginning. Gilmour had originally been assembling musicians and material that could have become his third solo album, and even during the early sessions there was no firm commitment that the project would carry the Pink Floyd name. By late 1986, however, he had decided that Pink Floyd would continue.
That decision triggered something considerably larger than an argument over music. Waters challenged Gilmour and Nick Mason over their right to use the Pink Floyd name, and legal disputes continued while the album was being made.
Richard Wright returned as well, although not yet as a formal member. Because of the terms surrounding his earlier departure, he was hired as a paid musician, reportedly earning a weekly salary, and his actual contributions were limited because many of the keyboard parts had already been recorded.
Mason’s role was also smaller than listeners might have expected from a Pink Floyd album. Feeling out of practice, he was replaced on several tracks by session drummers including Carmine Appice and Jim Keltner, while drum machines and new digital technology became a significant part of the record’s sound.
The result was undeniably different from the Pink Floyd of the 1970s.
Gilmour wanted it that way.
He believed that during the later Waters years the balance between music and lyrics had shifted too far toward the words. Albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, he argued, had worked because neither element overwhelmed the other, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason was his attempt to restore something closer to that balance.
“Learning to Fly” became the clearest expression of the new Floyd. Inspired partly by Gilmour’s enthusiasm for flying lessons, it combines his guitar and vocal with Jon Carin’s original chord sequence, lyrics co-written with Anthony Moore and Bob Ezrin, and even a recording of Mason communicating during an aircraft takeoff.
The song topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and reached #70 on the Hot 100.
“On the Turning Away” also reached #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart, pairing one of Gilmour’s most direct melodies with lyrics addressing social indifference. “The Dogs of War” moved into darker political territory, while “One Slip” and “Terminal Frost” emphasized the polished, technology-heavy production that firmly places the album in 1987.
Then there is “Sorrow.”
Its enormous opening guitar sound was created by playing Gilmour’s guitar through the public-address system at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena and recording the result. At nearly nine minutes, it provides the album with the kind of scale and atmosphere listeners still associated with Pink Floyd.
Much of A Momentary Lapse of Reason was recorded aboard Gilmour’s converted houseboat studio, Astoria, moored on the Thames. Engineer Andy Jackson and producer Bob Ezrin worked with Gilmour using digital recording, MIDI synchronization and an Apple Macintosh alongside more traditional analog equipment.
The album reached #3 in both the United States and Britain and ultimately went multi-platinum in America. More importantly, the tour that followed removed any uncertainty about whether audiences would accept Pink Floyd without Waters.
The Momentary Lapse tour eventually stretched to approximately 200 performances and drew more than four million people. Waters’ competing solo tour was sometimes playing nearby, and the increasingly bitter dispute even extended to the familiar Pink Floyd inflatable pig before the legal battle was finally settled out of court in December 1987.
Waters remained dismissive of the album, calling it “a quite clever forgery,” although he later acknowledged that it contained some melodies and chord sequences he liked. Even Gilmour would later revisit the record: for the 2019 Later Years edition, parts were remixed and Mason recorded new drums while previously recorded Wright contributions were restored in an attempt to create more of a genuine three-member Floyd balance.
But whatever one thinks of the album musically, its importance in Pink Floyd history is difficult to miss.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason had to do something none of their earlier albums had been required to do.
It had to prove that Pink Floyd still existed.
And millions of listeners decided that it did.
__________
COVER
Storm Thorgerson returned to design a Pink Floyd studio cover for the first time since Animals.
Inspired partly by the “visions of an empty bed” lyric from “Yet Another Movie,” Thorgerson expanded the idea dramatically, placing hundreds of actual hospital beds across Saunton Sands in North Devon. The effect was created physically rather than through photographic trickery, with the beds hauled to the beach and arranged for the shoot.
The image also contains references to other songs, including the hang glider associated with “Learning to Fly.”
For the inner gatefold, David Bailey photographed Gilmour and Mason together. It was the first time since Meddle in 1971 that a Pink Floyd album package had included a contemporary group portrait — an especially pointed visual statement when the identity of Pink Floyd itself was being publicly disputed.
__________
CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS — EXCERPTS
Q acknowledged just how much the album belonged to Gilmour, but also concluded that it “does sound like a Pink Floyd album.”
Sounds heard the intended connection to the band’s earlier work, describing the record as “back over the wall to where diamonds are crazy, moons have dark sides, and mothers have atom hearts.”
Others were considerably less convinced. Robert Christgau argued that with Waters gone the group had “noticeably fewer ideas,” while Roger Waters himself dismissed the record as “a quite clever forgery.”
TRACKS:
Side one
"Signs of Life" (Gilmour, Ezrin) – 4:24
"Learning to Fly" (Gilmour, Moore, Ezrin, Carin) – 4:53
"The Dogs of War" (Gilmour, Moore) – 6:05
"One Slip" (Gilmour, Manzanera) – 5:10
"On the Turning Away" (Gilmour, Moore) – 5:42
Side two
"Yet Another Movie / Round and Around" – 7:28
"A New Machine (Part 1)" (Gilmour) – 1:46
"Terminal Frost" (Gilmour) – 6:17
"A New Machine (Part 2)" (Gilmour) – 0:38
"Sorrow" (Gilmour) – 8:46
