Pink Floyd’s The Endless River has emerged as a tribute to Richard Wright, the band’s late co-founding keyboardist. But it’s didn’t start out that way. In fact, a key figure in the album’s genesis argues that The Endless River would never have been completed without Nick Mason’s presence.
The album, released this week via Columbia, grew out of sessions for 1994’s The Division Bell, Pink Floyd’s most recent studio effort. Back then, the remaining trio of band members — led by David Gilmour — gathered for a series of loose jam sessions, as they used to back in the 1970s. The most developed songs ended up on the proper album, with the rest of the music left over for what, at one point, might have become an all-instrumental companion disc. Andy Jackson, Pink Floyd’s long-time engineer, even put together a rough draft of such a release — dubbed The Big Spliff — before it was set aside to prepare for a looming world tour.
Fast forward two decades, past Wright’s cancer-related death, and Gilmour returned to the tapes. Initially, there was no clear plan for what might become of them, though it’s easy to see how some or all of the raw takes would have made an intriguing addition to Pink Floyd’s recent 20th anniversary edition reissue of The Division Bell.
In time, as Gilmour seemed to warm to the idea of fashioning the leftovers into a stand-alone release, producers Phil Manzanera and Youth were brought in. But the project never really clicked, Jackson tells Rock Cellar, until Nick Mason joined the proceedings to update, overdub and add to his original rhythm tracks.
“It was just one of those things that, right from the get-go, when Nick started playing, straightaway it sounded like Pink Floyd,” Jackson says. “There’s been a lot of talk about the significance of Rick and kind of how he was underestimated. Rightly so. But I think the same is true of Nick. If anybody else had played drums on this stuff, it wouldn’t have sounded right. Nick’s just got a way of playing that really works with this stuff. The moment that he started playing on this, we were all just looking at each other thinking how great it was going to be.”
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