The River Rolls:
Understanding A Momentary Lapse of Reason

by Dave Ward

Pink Floyd’s 1987 release, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, is among the least examined, most misunderstood albums in the entire Pink Floyd canon.

Many Floyd fans still dismiss the album out-of-hand, primarily because Roger Waters disapproves of it. This quick dismissal is often validated by other criticisms: That the lyrics are poorly written, that there is no concept behind it, that it lacks the “tooth” of previous Floyd albums, or that it was an insincere effort to imitate the past glories Pink Floyd had already achieved.

A Momentary Lapse of Reason deserves to be judged, for good or bad, by the actual content of the album. To test the traditional criticisms of the album, let’s take a closer look at the lyrics—and the artwork as well—from A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

The album opens with sound effects. Of course, it’s neither the first nor last time nonmusical sound effects opened a Pink Floyd album. For examples, Meddle opens with howling winds, Dark Side of the Moon opens with a heartbeat, The Final Cut opens with radio sound effects, and The Division Bell opens with radio telescope sounds.

A Momentary Lapse opens with the sound of rowing on a river: paddle splashing, the oars creaking. At 1:15 into the song, we hear Nick Mason recite some words:

When the childlike view of the world went,
Nothing replaced it...

I do not like being asked to...

Other people replaced it—
Someone who knows.

The film which accompanies “Signs of Life” in concert offers possible further clues. A man rows a boat on a river. The camera angle sometimes sinks below the surface of the water, showing the green murkiness which lies beneath.

Rivers, and bodies of water in general, are a virtually universal symbol of the unconscious aspects of the mind: artistic creativity, latent emotions, and impulses within us that motivate us without our notice or control.

Barrett himself used drowning in water as a symbol of his own internal turmoil in “Astronomy Domine.” In those lyrics, “the blue you once knew” references the blue skies which he would no longer see—the blue sky itself being a metaphor for happiness and contentment. Barrett describes an underwater struggle, a struggle which is of himself against himself.

This same struggle was depicted by the post-Barrett Floyd in a film which accompanied live performances of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” That film, a blatant allegory for Barrett’s story, depicted Barrett plunging into a deep pool and fighting himself underwater.

It’s entirely possible that the film for “Signs of Life”—made by Storm Thorgerson, who also made the “Shine On” film—is intended to suggest Barrett again.

Yet, as compelling as it is to apply a Barrett reference to these few words from “Signs of Life,” we have to acknowledge that there is simply too little here to be at all certain of the reference or meaning. It could just as well be about many other things.

The second song on A Momentary Lapse of Reason is “Learning to Fly.” The lyrics are the most refined on the album, more focussed than “Yet Another Movie” and less redundant than “Sorrow.”

“‘Learning to Fly’ is about breaking free and the actual mechanics of learning to fly an airplane,” Gilmour said in the December 1987 issue of Only Music. It is widely understood that on another level this flight is a metaphor for spirituality and independence.

This is brought into focus by the story video for the song. Drawing from a Native American tale, the video depicts a young man who, with the encouragement of a Native American elder shaman, leaps from a cliff and is transformed into an American Bald Eagle.

But flight and spiritual independence is not the only meaning. The lyrics also deal with persistence and perseverance. The subject of the song sees that “ice is forming on the tips of my wings.” Any aerophile knows that ice on the wings of an aircraft is potentially deadly, and is something pilots must constantly fight. The ice here is serving as a metaphor for anything which holds a person back, particularly their own inner doubts and fears which can cause hesitation or stalling.

Despite the ice, the pilot still flies “above the planet on a wing and a prayer.” Seemingly the pilot overcomes the ice and flies anyway, achieving “suspended animation, a state of bliss.”

Where “Learning to Fly” is a song of encouragement and victory, “Dogs of War” moves directly into Roger Waters’ own territory: scathing anti-corporate, antiwar lyrics with hints of socialism.

“Dog of War” could, in some ways, be compared to “Dogs” from the Animals album. In both songs, corrupt back room wheeler-dealers are portrayed as vicious dogs who kill in order to gain more power.

In “Dogs” the corrupt individuals are specifically business men. The lyrics suggest that they are out to gain power and money regardless of the cost inflicted on others who are weaker than they. Waters also covers the eventual twofold demise of the dogs: first he suggests that they will get old and fat, and finally die of cancer, then later in “Sheep” he says that the powerless will rise up and overthrow the dogs.

But in “Dogs of War” Gilmour is commenting on war-for-money and the mercenary practices which became particularly common in the mid-1980s. The “dogs” Gilmour addresses are politicians and mercenaries. Gilmour’s dogs are not going to die as Waters’ dogs. In this case, “whatever may change, you know the dogs remain.”

The politicians make “invisible transfers and long distance calls,” arranging for mercenaries to remove their political opponents. The “laughter in marble halls” is that of dealing between the apparently chummy politicians and mercenaries.

It is widely believed that in 1984 President Ronald Reagan of the United States, with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, hired mercenaries and drug smugglers to ensure that contras in Nicaragua could keep receiving arms from the US, despite Congress outlawing CIA-supplied arms in that year. There have been other allegations of dealings between US politicians and mercenaries in the mid-1980s, such as suggestions that mercenaries were trained for a planned commando raid inside the Soviet Union.

It seems certain that “Dogs of War” is a reference to the Reagan-era covert war dealings with Nicaraguan contras and others.

The next song, “One Slip,” is one of the very few Pink Floyd songs which addresses sexual relationships. If nothing else convinces Roger Waters fans that A Momentary Lapse has merits, Gilmour should at least get credit for handling the topic of relationships in a challenging, uncomfortably honest manner which elevates “One Slip” far above almost all other relationship songs in rock ‘n’ roll.

“One Slip” is not ultimately about sex or love, but about unintended consequences. In the song, a man spots a woman across the room. Their eyes meet, and soon they are both giving in to sexual impulses. A pregnancy results, as is subtly implied with the words “soon the seeds were sown” and “the year grew late,” as well as by the sound effects at the beginning of the song which are a metaphor for sperm trying and then contacting the ovum.

The “momentary lapse of reason” is a reckless sexual indulgence, without protection, which “binds a life to a life” via the unplanned child. We know that “neither one wanted to remain alone” as the pregnancy progressed, which implies that if the pregnancy was unplanned, at least the man involved was ready to take responsibility.

Although popular when the album was new, “On the Turning Away” may be a bit more lyrically facile than anything else on the album. The song is essentially a simple political commentary urging compassion and a return to humanity and consideration for others around us who are in need.

“‘Turning Away’ is about the political situations in the world,” Gilmour said in the December 1987 issue of Only Music. “We have these rather right-wing conservative governments that don’t seem to care about many things other than looking after themselves.”

It’s a theme which has been addressed countless times, from “We Are the World” to Rush’s “Closer to the Heart.” Gilmour hasn’t done anything particularly new here. Phrases like “using words you will find are strange/ mesmerized as they light the flame” seem unfocussed and disposable, adding nothing in particular to the song except nice-sounding combinations of words.

And yet, it has to be said in the song’s favor that “On the Turning Away” still manages to come off as more mature and sophisticated than either “We Are the World” or “Closer to the Heart,” or indeed most other songs urging brotherly compassion. (Although to be fair to Rush, Neil Peart was only about 20 years old when he penned those lyrics, whereas Gilmour was double that age upon writing “On the Turning Away.”)

“Yet Another Movie” is the most unfocused, vague lyric on the album, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. The lyrics depict little emotional incidents and images as if viewed on a screen, perhaps from a detached perspective—a stark contrast to the emotional connections urged by the previous song.

“It’s a more surrealistic effort than anything I’ve attempted before,” Gilmour said in the December 1987 Only Music. “Surreal” is an apt term for the song, where images jump quickly from a running man, to a crying child, to deceived women, to the sun, and and empty bed—all that in just one of the six verses!

“I don’t even know what all of it means myself!” Gilmour has admitted.

I’m not convinced that there really is a meaning in “Yet Another Movie,” nor that there should be a meaning. The song appears to be simply a collection of succinct lyrical snapshots, like glimpses of scenes while flipping quickly through television channels. There doesn’t seem to be any one consistent theme within the verses. It could be that the song is simply poetry for the sake of poetry, with meaning being entirely irrelevant to the purpose of this particular effort.

“Round and Around,” the instrumental coda to “Yet Another Movie,” is impossible to analyze as it has no lyrics. It probably is simply a nice instrumental with no message or meaning intended. The only suggestions we have come from the title and a small woodblock engraving which illustrates the song in the A Momentary Lapse of Reason songbook. The tiny picture depicts an astronaut with a Gemini-era spacesuit tethered for a space walk in orbit. Taken with the title, space flight and orbit is implied. But there is no ground for reading much into that. The track is best enjoyed as the unusual 5/4 meter instrumental it is.

“A New Machine, Parts 1 and 2” are often misinterpreted by fans who are eager to read comments about Roger Waters or the band itself into the lyrics. It has been previously suggested that the lyrics may related to Nick Mason’s lack of confidence when he first rejoined Gilmour. The lyrics have also been misinterpreted as saying that the band Pink Floyd is a machine.

In fact, the simple lyrics to “A New Machine, Parts 1 and 2” delve into one of the richest areas of myth and metaphor: the metaphor of The Wasteland.

In his poems “The Wasteland” and the more succinct “The Hollow Men,” T.S. Eliot used deserts and detached eyes as images representing an empty, unfulfilling life. The same idea has been touched on in countless myths, legends, and poems: loss of power over one’s own life, impotency to control one’s own destiny, and losing touch with your passions and your bliss. The theme runs in a sharp contrast against the joy and freedom of self-direction covered in “Learning to Fly” earlier in the album.

“A New Machine” depicts the subject as trapped within the limitations of a body, seeming to look forward to death and escape. This is not unlike the Buddhist and Hindu belief that life is all sorrow, and the ultimate goal is to escape that cycle of suffering. However, the Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, and that escape is finally achieved by mastering moral and spiritual goals. “A New Machine” depicts the longing for escape, but not any particular method.

In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot uses references to the eyes of “hollow men” to repeatedly express fear of death, unwillingness to confront others’ suffering, and to bring attention to the cold detachment in which he felt people are living, with little compassion or connection to each other.

Gilmour similarly states, “I have always looked out from behind these eyes,” suggesting that the subject is actually within or behind the physical body, and the body is not who he (or she) is. Where Eliot uses eyes to describe the detachment between people, Gilmour uses eyes to emphasize one’s detachment from one’s own self, a sort of spiritual vacancy.

Where Eliot describes a fear of death and unwillingness to confront it, Gilmour’s subject looks forward to the day of death, as if the real “self” will be freed when the body is shed.

It’s possible to speculate a comparison between “A New Machine” and the later Floyd song “What Do You Want From Me.” As in the latter song, “A New Machine” could potentially be interpreted as a protest against the demands of his fans and the music industry who would apparently like Gilmour to simply keep churning out songs and touring, at the expense of his own personal life and other things that may be important to his own happiness.

“Terminal Frost” is the third and final instrumental on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, and is also the longest instrumental of the album. As with “Round and Around,” there is no significant content by which to discern any particular meaning or message behind the song. The title alone is not enough. Even the photograph accompanying the song in the song book fails to suggest any meaning clearly. It is probably best enjoyed for what it is: an excellent instrumental, atypical of anything Pink Floyd had ever done before.

The final song of the album is “Sorrow.” Although it is in some ways lyrically redundant, it is the pinnacle of the underlying imagery which pervades the entire album.

“Sorrow” addresses a longing for past glories. The setting of the song appears to be a post-apocalyptic world, but this is unclear. It could as well be set in the present, with its reference to air pollution and oil spills. “‘Sorrow’ is a bit of a lost paradise,” Gilmour said in Only Music, December 1987.

At its heart, “Sorrow” is another step into T.S. Eliot’s imagery. Eliot uses an arid wasteland as a metaphor for spiritual death and joylessness. Gilmour’s wasteland has plenty of water in the form of rivers and seas, but the air and water are polluted. The subject of the song is clearly hopeless, being “chained forever to a world that’s departed.”

Near the end of “The Hollow Men,” Eliot describes a “shadow” which comes between the intentions behind an action and the actual result. In this and other works, Eliot often addressed impotency in one’s own life, an inability to turn ambition into achievement. Likewise, in “Sorrow” Gilmour describes the subject’s similar paralysis, with curdling blood, trembling knee, weakening hand, and faltering step.

And what of an underlying theme in the album? A Momentary Lapse of Reason is not a concept story-album in that the songs do not collectively form a plot to tell a single story. However, the imagery of water—particularly rivers—appears in almost every lyric.

The album opens with a boat being rowed during “Signs of Life.” In “Learning to Fly” the runway is likened to a river, and there is a minor reference to the subject’s “watering eye.” The Storm Thorgerson photograph illustrating “One Slip” depicts a man and woman underwater swimming toward a submerged bed. “Yet Another Movie” refers to an empty bed (which for the cover became a pun on “river bed”) as well as “the babbling that I brook” and another mention of tears. “Sorrow” is full of multiple mentions of rivers, to the point of being a bit redundant. Even in “Dogs of War” the dogs are seen running through the water on a beach.

“Originally we wondered whether we ought to be looking for a concept album and if things should be linked together,” Mason said in the December 1987 Only Music. The band made some effort to find a common topic, but couldn’t construct anything satisfactory.

Gilmour later told Rolling Stone magazine in its 19 November 1987 issue, “We thought, ‘Sod this, we don’t have to make a concept album. If we work on making everything great, then maybe it will show itself to have some sort of linear form later.”

“We decided the atmosphere was the most important thing,” Bob Ezrin told Rolling Stone. “The concept really just had to be a feeling that was pervasive.”

Gilmour’s studio where much of A Momentary Lapse was written and recorded is located aboard the houseboat The Astoria, which is moored on the River Thames. As the wrote and recorded, the water was ever-present just outside the boat’s small windows. That river found its way into many songs throughout the album.

“The river became the motif,” Ezrin told Rolling Stone. “It came up in all the songs. The river imposed itself.”

Storm Thorgerson was well aware of the river’s influence on the album. In turn, he strengthened that concept which unified the songs into a whole. Thorgerson filled the visual elements with additional water references: boats being rowed on a river, dogs running through the surf, swimmers approaching an underwater bed... and of course, hundreds of empty beds along a shoreline.

Fans have been too eager to misunderstand and dismiss A Momentary Lapse, seeing little meaning, and trying to force artificial references to Roger Waters where there are none. Pink Floyd would address their former bandmate Waters in several songs on their next studio album, The Division Bell, but there is not a single reference to Roger Waters on A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

In retrospect, it is only the absence of a more firm concept which makes the album slightly odd in the Pink Floyd discography. Every album since Dark Side of the Moon has had a firm concept, A Momentary Lapse being the sole exception. (Some would argue that The Division Bell also has no firm concept, but in the case of that album, there is some grounds for debate.)

Despite the swift dismissal A Momentary Lapse has been granted by fans of Roger Waters and fans of Waters’ influence over the band, there is really little ground for dismissing the album out-of-hand. There is nothing to suggest any of the songs are anything less than heartfelt. The lyrics, though not perfect, are rich with multiple layers of meaning and timeless literary themes. The album is not without fault, but it is certainly not the fraud or failure which many claim it to be. It’s a far more quirky album than we might tend to remember, and that is a good thing.

Looking back on A Momentary Lapse of Reason nearly 14 years after its initial release, it becomes clearer what the album was: David Gilmour and Nick Mason hoisting the Pink Floyd banner without Roger Waters for the first time, testing the winds and trying to find their footing.

A Momentary Lapse was to the post-Waters Floyd precisely what A Saucerful of Secrets was to the post-Waters Floyd: a very strong first effort from a band who had just lost their creative catalyst and was experimenting in order to find out how to strike out on their own.

In hindsight, A Momentary Lapse appears to be not only a success in terms of sales and concert attendance, but also a great artistic victory. It certainly deserves a fresh look, and a renewal of acceptance from all Pink Floyd fans.

Dave Ward is a contributor to Spare Bricks