Hear Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Play Bass Solo on ‘Yet Another Movie’ Demo

In anticipation of their upcoming reissue of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd have dug up their original demo for the album’s “Yet Another Movie.”

Gilmour plays rumbling, mumbling fretless bass on the instrumental recording, soloing around long beds of synthesized strings and quietly arpeggiated keyboard notes. The drums are slow and pensive. The tape hiss contributes to the atmosphere of the demo, since it obscures some of the action, allowing Gilmour’s bass to surface here as if it were coming up for air. When the band hit the studio with co-producer Bob Ezrin for the album version, Gilmour was singing oblique, impressionistic lyrics about people feeling disillusionment and drummer Nick Mason was in charge of the propulsive rhythms. The track became a staple of their stadium tours in the years that followed the record’s release.

“I thought, this week, that we would put up the original demo, written by Pat Leonard and myself, for what was to become ‘Yet Another Movie’ on the A Momentary Lapse of Reason album,” frontman David Gilmour wrote on the band’s Twitter page. “Pat Leonard and I met up at Astoria in September 1986 a couple of days after I had played on a Bryan Ferry track that he was producing. We had a glass or two of wine and jammed for hours. For some reason that I can no longer remember, I had chosen the fretless bass as my instrument of the day. It turned into a beautiful song.”

The band announced its Momentary Lapse reissue earlier this month by releasing a remixed version of the single “Learning to Fly.” The remix features new drum recordings by Mason and highlights more contributions from keyboardist Rick Wright, scaling back some of the original LP’s ostentatious Eighties production.