Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell is a lesson in the unfortunate power of nostalgia

In We’re No. 1, The A.V. Club examines an album that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts to get to the heart of what it means to be popular in pop music, and how that concept has changed over the years. In this installment, we cover Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell which went to No. 1 on April 23, 1994, where it stayed for four weeks.
“Is this still really Pink Floyd?” is the opening line from Rolling Stone’s original review of Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, an album that rocketed to No. 1 in the U.K. and the U.S. while going double-platinum the year it was released. The sales numbers are clear: There was still an appetite for a Pink Floyd album—an observation bolstered by the fact that the album later went triple-platinum in 1999—even if Roger Waters was no longer a member of the band, and the remaining members collaborated with a number of outside musicians to create the album. More than just a representation of the purchasing power of baby boomers, the commercial success of The Division Bell was an early indicator that actively marketing and selling nostalgia would soon become the most profitable way forward for a struggling music business.
By the time Pink Floyd was in the process of recording The Division Bell, it had been eight years since bassist and songwriter Waters had left the band. The remaining members had previously released the underwhelming A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in 1987, an album that was a David Gilmour solo album released under the Pink Floyd banner. There’s a lot of dull guitar atmospherics and droning tones. Couple that with Gilmour’s less acerbic and evocative lyricism, and the result is the first album in a storied career that doesn’t feel like a Pink Floyd album. Even 1983’s The Final Cut, which is often cited as Waters’ de facto solo album—a record that Gilmour has, as quoted in Nicholas Schaffner’s A Saucerful Of Secrets, described as having “too much filler, [and] meandering rubbish in between songs”—has a sonic and thematic energy that’s reminiscent of the best of Pink Floyd.