| Keep Talking | |
| Cover: | Pink Floyd - "Keep Talking" (Promotional single).jpg |
| Type: | single |
| Artist: | Pink Floyd |
| Album: | The Division Bell |
| B-Side: | "Take It Back" |
| Recorded: | 1993 at Astoria (London, United Kingdom) |
| Genre: | |
| Length: | 4:55 (single edit) 6:10 (album version) 5:56 ( version) |
| Label: | EMI (Europe) Columbia (US) |
| Prev Title: | One Slip |
| Prev Year: | 1988 |
| Next Title: | Lost for Words |
| Next Year: | 1994 |
"Keep Talking" is a song from Pink Floyd's 1994 album, The Division Bell.
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.[1] [2] This same commercial was sampled again in "Talkin' Hawkin'" from Pink Floyd's next studio album, The Endless River.[3] 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.”[4] The song also makes some use of the talk box guitar effect.
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 United States, and is not a measure of record sales), staying atop for six weeks.
The song was included on the 2001 compilation, .[5]
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.
| Chart (1994) | Peak position | |
|---|---|---|
| Canada[6] | 8 | |
| US Billboard Album Rock Tracks[7] | 1 |
| Region | Date | Format | Label | Catalog no. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States[9] | March 12, 1994 | CD-R (Modern rock/Alternative radio) | Columbia Records | CSK 6228 |
| United Kingdom[10] | March 28, 1994 | CD-R (Contemporary hit radio, BBC Radio 1 rotation) | EMI | PINK 1 |
| October 10, 1994 | CDEMDJ 342 |