A Momentary Lapse of Reason - Recording

Recording

You can't go back ... You have to find a new way of working, of operating and getting on with it. We didn't make this remotely like we've made any other Floyd record. It was different systems, everything.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason, as it would later be named, was recorded in several different studios, chief among them Gilmour's houseboat Astoria. The boat was moored on the Thames, and the river setting (according to Ezrin) eventually "imposed itself" in all the songs. "Working there was just magical, so inspirational; kids sculling down the river, geese flying by ..." Andy Jackson (a colleague of Floyd cohort James Guthrie) was brought in to engineer the recordings. In a series of discontinuous sessions between November 1986 and February 1987, Gilmour's band of musicians worked on new material, which in a marked change from previous Floyd albums was recorded with a 24-track analogue machine, and overdubbed onto a 32-track Mitsubishi digital recorder. This trend of using new technologies was continued with the use of MIDI synchronisation, aided by an Apple Macintosh computer.

After agreeing to rework the material that Ralbovsky had found so objectionable, Gilmour employed extra session musicians including Carmine Appice and Jim Keltner. Both drummers, they later replaced Mason on most of the album's songs; Mason was concerned that he was too out of practice to perform on the album, and instead busied himself with its sound effects. Some of the album's drum parts were also performed by drum machines. Gilmour was contacted by Wright's new wife, Franka, who asked if Wright could contribute to the new album. Gilmour considered the request; the keyboardist had left the band in 1979, and there were certain legal obstacles to his re-admittance, but after a meeting in Hampstead he was brought back in. Gilmour later admitted in an interview with author Karl Dallas that Wright's presence "would make us stronger legally and musically". He was therefore employed as a paid musician, on a weekly wage of $11,000, but his contributions were minimal. Most of the new keyboard parts had already been recorded, and so from February 1987 he played some background reinforcement on a Hammond organ, and a Fender Rhodes piano, along with several vocal harmonies. The keyboardist also performed a solo in "On the Turning Away", which was discarded, according to Wright "not because they didn't like it ... they just thought it didn't fit." Gilmour later said: "Both Nick and Rick were catatonic in terms of their playing ability at the beginning. Neither of them played on this at all really. In my view, they'd been destroyed by Roger", a comment which clearly angered Mason, who reflected: "I'd deny that I was catatonic. I'd expect that from the opposition, it's less attractive from one's allies. At some point, he made some sort of apology." Mason did, however, concede that Gilmour was nervous about how the album would be perceived.

"Learning to Fly", with its lyrics of "circling sky, Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I", was inspired by Gilmour's flying lessons, which occasionally conflicted with his studio duties. The track also contains a recording of Mason's voice, made during takeoff. The band experimented with audio samples, and Ezrin recorded the sound of Gilmour's boatman (Langley Iddens) rowing across the Thames. Iddens' presence at the sessions was made vital when on one occasion, Astoria began to lean over in response to the rapidly rising river, which was pushing the boat against the pier on which it was moored. "Dogs of War", which Gilmour says was about "physical and political mercenaries", was influenced by an accident during recording. A sampler began playing a sample of laughter, which Gilmour thought sounded like a dog's bark. "Terminal Frost" was one of Gilmour's older demos, which for some time he considered adding lyrics to, but eventually decided to leave as an instrumental. Conversely, the lyrics for "Sorrow" were written before the music. The song's opening guitar solo was recorded in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. A 24-track mobile studio piped Gilmour's Fender through a public address system, which was recorded in surround sound.

Despite the tranquil setting offered by Astoria, the sessions were often interrupted by the escalating row between Waters and Pink Floyd over who had the rights to the Pink Floyd name. O'Rourke, believing that his contract with Waters had been terminated illegally, sued the bassist for £25,000 of back-commission. In a late 1986 board meeting of Pink Floyd Music Ltd (since 1973, Pink Floyd's clearing house for all financial transactions), Waters learnt that a new bank account had been opened to deal exclusively with all monies related to "the new Pink Floyd project". He immediately applied to the High Court to prevent the Pink Floyd name from ever being used again, but his lawyers discovered that the partnership had never been formally confirmed. Waters returned to the High Court in an attempt to gain a veto over further use of the band's name. Gilmour's team responded by issuing a non-confrontational press release affirming that Pink Floyd would continue to exist; however, the guitarist later told a Sunday Times reporter: "Roger is a dog in the manger and I'm going to fight him, no one else has claimed Pink Floyd was entirely them. Anybody who does is extremely arrogant." Waters twice visited Astoria, and with his wife had a meeting in August 1986 with Ezrin (the producer later suggested that he was being "checked out"). As Waters was still a shareholder and director of Pink Floyd music, he was able to block any decisions made by his former band-mates. Recording moved to Mayfair Studios in February 1987, and from February to March—under the terms of an agreement with Ezrin to record close to his home—to A&M Studios in Los Angeles: "It was fantastic because ... the lawyers couldn't call in the middle of recording unless they were calling in the middle of the night." The bitterness of the row between Waters and Pink Floyd was covered in a November 1987 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which became its best-selling issue of that year. The legal disputes were, however, finally resolved by the end of 1987.