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In 2014 Prog explored the history of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, which had been released 20 years previously. We included a potted history of the track High Hopes, regarded by many as the best song on the record.
Shortly before the summer of 1993, Pink Floyd – joined by Guy Pratt and fellow touring Floyd musicians, guitarist Tim Renwick, percussionist Gary Wallis and keyboard player Jon Carin – entered Olympic Studios in West London, and recorded a handful of new songs. In autumn, they reconvened on David Gilmour’s houseboat Astoria and began developing the pieces further.
Gilmour then faced the hurdle of writing words. Unlike Roger Waters, he wasn’t a confident lyricist. Ex-Slapp Happy songwriter Anthony Moore – who’d co-written on A Momentary Lapse Of Reason – and former Dream Academy singer-songwriter Nick Laird-Clowes would both contribute to The Division Bell. But it was Gilmour’s then girlfriend, journalist and author Polly Samson, who’d end up co-creating the lion’s share of the lyrics.
“I started writing things and looking to her for an opinion, and gradually, as a writer herself and an intelligent person, she started putting her oar in and I encouraged her,” Gilmour said. He spent the days working on the music on the Astoria, before going home to write with his soon-to-be wife. “There was,” he said, “a whole invisible side to the process.”
Not everyone was comfortable with the situation. “It wasn’t easy at first,” admitted prodicer Bob Ezrin. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have this new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But whatever David was thinking at the time, she helped him find a way to say it.”
Between them the couple wrote the album’s strongest song, High Hopes. “It pulled the whole album together,” said Ezrin. “It also gave us an idea around which to hang some of the broader concepts.”
It was partly inspired by Gilmour’s childhood and adolescence in Cambridge. Its beautiful lap steel guitar solo evoked Shine On You Crazy Diamond, while composer Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement flashed back to the strings and woodwind he’d used on Comfortably Numb.
Naming High Hopes the 11th best song of the 1990s, Classic Rock noted: “Most clearly with the opening lines ‘Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young/In a world of magnets and miracles’ and the closing lines ‘The grass was greener/The light was brighter/The taste was sweeter/The nights of wonder…’ the lyrics look back nostalgically to childhood wonder and innocence, before the realities of life conspire to break the spell.
“Interestingly, the final couplet (‘The endless river, forever and ever’) revisits a line in Floyd’s 1967 single See Emily Play (‘Float on a river/Forever and ever.’) The dark clouds dissipate with the arrival of the closing section, when Gilmour delivers a wonderful slide-guitar solo that’s arguably among the best he’s recorded.”
By the end of 1993 the album was complete and the band began casting around for titles. Nick Mason favoured Down To Earth; others preferred Pow-Wow. In the end Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and friend of the band, spotted the words ‘the division bell’ in the lyrics to High Hopes, and suggested that instead.
The song’s themes of nostalgia and reflection were reprised in the Gilmour/Samson/Laird-Clowes composition Poles Apart. Its first verse was apparently inspired by Syd Barrett; its second by Waters. What Ezrin called “the broader concept” of The Division Bell was communication and the difficulties thereof: between friends, wives and lovers, and former bandmates.
