Label Columbia | ||
Released 12 March 1994 (1994-03-12) Recorded 1993 at
Astoria
(London, United Kingdom) Length 4:55 (single edit)
6:08 (album version)
5:57 (Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd version) Writer(s) David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Polly Samson, Producer(s) Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour | ||
"Keep Talking" is a song from Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell.
Contents
Recording
Written by David Gilmour, Richard Wright and Polly Samson, it was sung by Gilmour and also features samples of Stephen Hawking's electronic voice, taken from a BT television advertisement (this same commercial would be sampled again in "Talkin' Hawkin'" from Pink Floyd's next and final studio album, The Endless River). Gilmour chose to use the speech after crying to the commercial, which he described as "the most powerful piece of television advertising that I’ve ever seen in my life.” The song also makes some use of the talk box guitar effect.
Release
The song was the first single to be released from the album in the United States in March 1994. It was the group's third #1 hit on the Album Rock Tracks chart (a chart published by Billboard magazine which measures radio play in the USA, and is not a measure of record sales), staying atop for six weeks.
The song was included on the 2001 compilation, Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd.
Live
The song was performed every night during the 1994 The Division Bell Tour and live versions, taken from different shows, were included in both the album Pulse and the video of the same name.
The song was sampled by Wiz Khalifa on the title track of his 2009 mixtape Burn After Rolling.
Quotes
It's more of a wish [that all problems can be solved through discussion, as 'Keep Talking' suggests] than a belief. [laughs]
Well, I guess I experiment more than I think I do. I had a Zoom [effects box] in my control room one day and I was mucking about with something. Suddenly, I thought I should stick the E-bow on the strings and see what would happen. It sounded great, so we started writing a little duet for the E-bowed acoustic guitar [a Gibson J-200] and a keyboard. We never finished the piece, but Jon Carin [keyboardist] decided to sample the E-bowed guitar part. We kept the sample and ended up using it as a loop on "Take It Back", and again on "Keep Talking".
Stephen Hawking 1994: "For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination: we learned to talk".
"It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking".