Last Ripples Of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Endless River’ Ends With Record Vinyl Sales
After almost five decades of popularity in the music world, Pink Floyd is officially saying goodbye to the industry — but not without an unexpected number of vinyl record sales as a send off. Pink Floyd recently had a 35th anniversary for their album The Wall and released their final album in November.
Rolling Stone Magazine reviewed Pink Floyd’s The Endless River and said the album was leftover remnants of their recordings of Division Bell 20 years before. Performing for many years after the departure of Roger Waters after The Final Cut was recorded in 1983, this album is the last with remaining members David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright.
Wright died of cancer in 2008, yet he left behind enough material to weave together an album of 18 songs total. David Gilmour says about the latest Pink Floyd album,
“The music for Louder Than Words is from those final sessions [of The Division Bell], the three of us playing together on the houseboat Astoria with Rick’s idiosyncratic keyboards reminding me now that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. At the start of the album I asked Polly Sampson to write the lyrics. She felt that what I played her didn’t need words, that hearing us play was more interesting. In the end she wrote just this one, which expresses, beautifully I think, the way the three of us, me, Nick and Rick have something when we play together, that has a magic that is louder than words.”
http://youtu.be/41O2PmucBn4
Rolling Stone went on to note that The Endless River held, “echoes of the past” from their first albums recorded almost 50 years ago. For example, Pink Floyd’s recent song “Autumn ’68” is from a 1968 recording at the Royal Albert Hall. Rolling Stone ended the review of Pink Floyd’s album by saying,
“It is not a grand statement, it is the gentle fadeout on the career of one of rock’s greatest bands.”
While the album The Endless River was intended as the final chapter in the Pink Floyd legacy, there are two other news stories that have spawned because of the album’s popularity. Namely, NBC News noted that Pink Floyd has caused the Latin language to make a comeback online. In their report, NBC News states that the interest comes from Pink Floyd cover band, Fint Floyd. Fint Floyd translated and performed the landmark Pink Floyd album “Dark Side of the Moon” in Latin. About it, Fint Floyd’s band manager, Nicola De Cristoforo says,
“The idea came from the band’s guitarist, who wrote a thesis at university in which she compared the texts of philosophers like Seneca and Horatius with the lyrics of Dark Side of the Moon. … We love Latin and want to show that it can still be contemporary, and is as melodic as English.”
Elsewhere, some of the last splashes of Pink Floyd are coming from the record number of vinyl sales The Endless River produced. Billboard Magazine covered the vinyl record sales produced by the last album by Pink Floyd and quoted Official Charts chief executive, Martin Talbot, about a month after the album was released. Talbot said,
“The Endless River managed to score more first week vinyl sales in the UK than any album since 1997. Additionally, Pink Floyd’s contribution to the latter day deluge of vinyl has pushed the UK’s total vinyl sales past the million unit mark for the first time since 1996. … The Endless River sold a total of 150,000 copies here in its first week of release, which was enough to land them at number three on the Billboard 200 chart. We’re assuming at least a few thousand of those were vinyl sales.”
[All images in this article are from the referenced links.]
