How Delicate Sound of Thunder captured Pink Floyd’s post-Waters reinvention and why it was the first live album to include a Momentary Lapse track

The 1988 live album Delicate Sound of Thunder wasn’t just a tour document—it was the band’s statement that they could survive without Roger Waters. After a bitter split, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright (now back as a full member) hit the road for the Momentary Lapse of Reason tour, and the double-LP captured that awkward but triumphant moment: a band still playing “Comfortably Numb” and “Money” but also proving they had new legs with tracks like “Learning to Fly.” It was the first Pink Floyd live album to feature a song from the 1987 A Momentary Lapse of Reason because that album was the reason for the tour—the band needed to show the world that the new material belonged in the same canon as the ’70s epics.

Before this, every live Floyd release (from *Ummagum