Classic Album Cover Art - Pink Floyd Division Bell

Pink Floyd: ‘The Division Bell’ The Division Bell is the final studio album by Pink Floyd, released in 1994 (March 30 in the UK and April 5 in the US), and also was the second album without original bassist Roger Waters. It was recorded at a number of studios, including guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour's houseboat studio called The Astoria. The album went to #1 in the UK and debuted at the top of the U.S. Billboard 200 album charts in April 1994, spending four weeks as the top album in the country. The Division Bell was certified Gold, Platinum, and Double Platinum in the U.S. in June 1994 and Triple Platinum in January 1999.

The cover artwork, by long-time Pink Floyd collaborator Storm Thorgerson, shows two metal head sculptures sculpted by John Robertson, each over three metres tall and weighing 1500 kilograms. They were placed in a field and photographed under all weather and lighting conditions over a two-week period, sometimes even using visual effects such as lights between them. Ely Cathedral is visible in the background, as are lights (actually car headlights on poles), shown through the sculptures' mouths. The sculptures are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The cover photograph is slightly different on each format, and between the United States Columbia and British EMI releases. The Braille writing on the EMI CD jewel case spells Pink Floyd.

Recording:

“We started off by going into Nick's studio, Britannia Row studio in London, in January 1993 with myself, Nick [Mason], and Rick [Wright], and Guy [Pratt], the bass player from our last tour. And we just jammed away at anything for two weeks, just playing anything that we had in our heads or that we made up on the spot. And then we took all that over to Astoria and started listening to all the tapes and working stuff out. We found that we had 65 pieces of music, which we worked on all of to a certain extent, and then we started adding these things. We had a couple of sessions which we called 'The Big Listen' where we listened to all these 65, and all the people involved with it voted on each track, on each piece of music as to how popular it was with them. And so we then arranged these 65 pieces of music in order of popularity amongst the band, and then we dumped 40 of them, and worked on the top 25, which in fact became the top 27 because a couple more got added in. And so the process went on from there with us working away on all these pieces of music and gradually either merging pieces together or scrapping them until we finally were down to about twelve to fifteen things that we all kind of liked. And in the end one or two of them went by the way, and we were left with eleven on the album, I think. ” -David Gilmour, Questions and Answers with David Gilmour.

Notes:

Pink Floyd took their album on tour in 1994 where most of the songs were played, but never all on the same night. "Keep Talking", "Take It Back" and "High Hopes" were a staple of the performances and were present every night, and "Coming Back to Life" nearly so; others like "Poles Apart", "What Do You Want From Me" and "A Great Day For Freedom" flip-flopped every night.

Additional album artwork. Two additional 7.5 metres tall stone head sculptures were made by Aden Hynes and photographed in the same manner; although they do not appear in the CD artwork, they appeared on the cassette cover, and can be seen in the tour brochure and elsewhere.

The artwork inside the lyric booklet revolves around a similar theme, except the heads are made up of various other objects, such as newspapers ("A Great Day for Freedom"), coloured glass ("Poles Apart"), and boxing gloves ("Lost for Words"). Pages two and three portray a picture from La Silla observatory.

The album was received mostly poorly by professional critics despite its strong sales. Jerry McCully of Amazon.com said of the album in his editorial review that "The Division Bell is not a great Pink Floyd album, but an all-too-fallible simulation".

Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly echoed McCully's sentiment, giving the album a grade of "D" and saying that "avarice is the only conceivable explanation for this glib, vacuous cipher of an album, which is notable primarily for its stomach-turning merger of progressive-rock pomposity and New Age noodling".

Tom Graves of Rolling Stone criticized lead guitarist David Gilmour's performance on the album, stating that his guitar solos "were once the band's centerpieces, as articulate, melodic and well-defined as any in rock, [but] he now has settled into rambling, indistinct asides that are as forgettable as they used to be indelible", adding that "only on 'What Do You Want from Me' does Gilmour sound like he cares.”