Surprise Album Pink Floyd Has Released A Double-Cd Live Set From Last Year’s Record-Setting Tour

When they set out to tour the world in 1994, the members of Pink Floyd didn’t expect to record another live album.

They had documented their 1987-88 tour with “The Delicate Sound of Thunder.” Now they’ve released “Pulse,” a souvenir of last year’s recordsetting tour. “We never thought we’d do one again this soon,” says singer-guitarist David Gilmour.

“Pulse” was sparked by the group’s decision to begin performing its landmark album, “The Dark Side of The Moon,” in its entirety for the first time since 1975.

It started with Pink Floyd’s second of two shows last August at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome and continued for the rest of the tour.

“That Detroit show was a real high, emotional moment,” Gilmour remembers. “It was such a good feeling that we thought we’d like to have a copy of it and other people would want to have a copy of it, too.”

And as long as they were doing that, says drummer Nick Mason, “we thought it was silly not to at least let people have the whole lot.”

There are few rock ‘n’ roll albums more famous than “Dark Side.”

Since its 1973 release, it has sold more than 28 million albums worldwide, making it the third largest seller of all time. It also set a longevity record for spending 15 years on Billboard Magazine’s album charts.

The result is “Pulse,” a lavishly packaged twoCD, two-cassette and four-LP souvenir of Pink Floyd’s last show, with “Dark Side” as its centerpiece and 14 other songs, ranging from the frantic, sci-fi psychedelia of 1967’s “Astronomy Domine” to songs from the British band’s ‘94 studio album, “The Division Bell.”

The album’s release was launched by a laser show Tuesday night at the Empire State Building in New York. An accompanying home video will be released Tuesday.

Beyond the music, “Pulse” is marked by a unique visual gimmick - a blinking red LED light along the side of the package.

Gilmour says the light was the idea of Storm Thorgerson, Pink Floyd’s longtime album designer.

“We wanted to have a live element of the package as well as the music,” Gilmour, 48, explains.

So “Pulse” serves as a multisensory document of the tour, but it captures something more subtle and also more vital. Even more than “The Division Bell,” “Pulse” chronicles the new Pink Floyd, a group that survived a nasty intraband schism during the mid-‘80s and emerged with a new focus and confidence.

Back then, Pink Floyd, which formed in London in 1966, had become the domain of singer-bassist Roger Waters, whose terse command of the band’s direction alienated bandmates Gilmour, Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright. Wright, in fact, was forced out by Waters after the 1979 blockbuster “The Wall.”

Waters wound up quitting in 1985 but objected when the others resurrected the group for a 1987 album and tour. Battling Waters in the courts and in the press over the Pink Floyd name, the remaining trio used concerts more to stake their claim than to pursue a new vision.

Mason, 50, goes so far as to call the ‘87-88 tour “frightening. We weren’t sure how people would react. Would they say we were a bunch of charlatans trying to clean up, or what?”

That tour was a sold-out success, which made “The Division Bell” and the ‘94 outing more relaxed. Pink Floyd - Gilmour, Mason, Wright and eight additional musicians - didn’t exactly pursue a radical change in its sound, but it did tinker with the arrangements of some favorites, and “Pulse” contains a more propulsive take of “Learning to Fly” and a funkier underpinning for the epic “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

The group also felt freer to alter its show, tossing different songs on and off of the set list and changing the order each night - no small feat considering the high-tech demands of its concerts, which are filled with lasers, films, pyrotechnics and complex, computerized light programs.

“We asked the lighting people if it made any problems for them,” Gilmour says. “They told us that as long as they knew a half-hour before the show, they’d be fine. So we did something different every night to keep ourselves on the ball and interested and having fun.”

“Pulse” will have to serve as the world’s latest Pink Floyd fix until Gilmour, Mason and Wright get together to make more new music - and who knows when that might be. There were seven years between “The Division Bell” and 1987’s “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” and while there are some leftover ideas from the former, there have been no moves to start writing yet.

“We’ve been too busy with family life and putting together the live album and video to even think about the future,” Gilmour says. “But we’ll get there one of these days.”