[4] The second Pink Floyd album recorded without the founding member Roger Waters, The Division Bell was written mostly by the guitarist and singer, David Gilmour, and the keyboardist, Richard Wright.

The production team included longtime Pink Floyd collaborators such as the producer Bob Ezrin, the engineer Andy Jackson, the saxophonist Dick Parry and the bassist Guy Pratt.

In January 1993, guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright began improvising new material in sessions at the remodelled Britannia Row Studios.

With engineer Andy Jackson and co-producer Bob Ezrin, production moved to Gilmour's houseboat and recording studio, Astoria.

[15] The keyboardist Jon Carin, the percussionist Gary Wallis, backing vocalists including Sam Brown and the Momentary Lapse tour singer Durga McBroom were brought in before recording began.

Ezrin worked on the drum sounds, and the Pink Floyd collaborator Michael Kamen provided the string arrangements, which were recorded at Abbey Road Studio Two by Steve McLaughlin.

[16] Dick Parry played saxophone on his first Pink Floyd album for almost 20 years, on "Wearing the Inside Out", and Chris Thomas created the final mix.

[17] With the aid of Gilmour's guitar technician, Phil Taylor, Carin located some of Pink Floyd's older keyboards from storage, including a Farfisa organ.

Durga McBroom supplied backing vocals alongside Sam Brown, Carol Kenyon, Jackie Sheridan, and Rebecca Leigh-White.

On "Take It Back", he used a Gibson J-200 guitar through a Zoom effects unit, played with an EBow, an electronic device which produces sounds similar to a bow.

[nb 2] Jackson edited unused material from the Division Bell sessions, described by Mason as ambient music, into an hour-long composition tentatively titled The Big Spliff,[22] but Pink Floyd did not release it.

[14] In the Studio radio host Redbeard suggested that the album offers "the very real possibility of transcending it all, through shivering moments of grace".

"[25] Produced a few years after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, "A Great Day for Freedom" juxtaposes the general euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the subsequent wars and ethnic cleansing, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.

To avoid competing against other album releases, as had happened with A Momentary Lapse, Pink Floyd set a deadline of April 1994, at which point they would begin a new tour.

At a dinner one night, writer Douglas Adams, spurred by the promise of a payment to his favourite charity, the Environmental Investigation Agency, suggested The Division Bell, a term which appears in "High Hopes".

[38] An alternate version of the cover photo, featuring two 7.5-metre (25 ft) stone sculptures by Aden Hynes,[nb 4] was used on the compact cassette release and the tour brochure.

[39] On 10 January 1994 a press reception to announce The Division Bell and the tour was held at a former US Naval Air Station in North Carolina, in the US.

[40] During the Division Bell tour, an anonymous person using the name Publius posted on an internet newsgroup, inviting fans to solve a riddle supposedly concealed in the album.

During a televised concert at Earls Court, London, in October 1994, the word "enigma" was projected in large letters on to the backdrop of the stage.

[41][42] According to Mason, the prize was to be "a crop of trees planted in a clear-cut area of forest or something to that effect ... a touchy-feely sort of gift that was more of a philanthropic thing than something you could hang on the wall".

Backing musicians included Sam Brown, Jon Carin, Claudia Fontaine, Durga McBroom, Dick Parry, Guy Pratt, Tim Renwick, and Gary Wallis.

As the tour reached Europe in late July, Waters declined an invitation to join the band, and later expressed his annoyance that Pink Floyd songs were being performed again in large venues.

[54] Though regarded by long-time Pink Floyd fans as a return to form,[57] The Division Bell received mixed reviews from music critics.

Tom Sinclair of Entertainment Weekly wrote that "avarice is the only conceivable explanation for this glib, vacuous cipher of an album, which is notable primarily for its stomach-turning merger of progressive-rock pomposity and New Age noodling".

"[64] Among British reviewers, David Bennun of Melody Maker praised the opening instrumental "Cluster One" as "magnificent" and "a track to rank with the most fragrant of modern ambient", but found the rest of the album dreary, despite finding "hints" throughout that Gilmour understood the band's strengths.

[68] In 2011, The Division Bell was ranked at number 93 in Q's readers poll of the "250 Best Albums of the Last 25 Years"; the magazine wrote that the record "reconfigured the magisterial prog-rock of the mid-'70s for the late-20th century" and made for a welcome "lap of honour".

The opening triptych of songs is a hugely impressive return to something very close to the eternal essence of Pink Floyd, and much of the rest retains a quiet power and a meditative quality that betrays a genuine sense of unity.