PINK Floyd didn’t end with The Final Cut.

The 1983 album was the band’s 12th studio album and the last they would release with main songwriter Roger Waters still as a member.

The years that followed would be marked by turmoil, a lawsuit with Waters, battles over song rights, doubts as to whether the band could legally continue to exist without him, and amongst it all the release of some very good albums.

“What was going to happen was up in the air for a long time while Roger decided whether or not he was going to f*** off into the ether or not,” Gilmour says.”

The band’s post-Waters output is now being revisited with the release of a major retrospective boxset, entitled The Later Years 1987-2019. Ahead of the release, Gilmour has released a four-part podcast series entitled The Lost Art of Conversation, which sees him discussing the band’s later years with BBC 6 Music’s Matt Everitt.

Gilmour had previously spoken with Everitt in 2016, ahead of the release of his Live at Pompeii album. On this latest interview Gilmour sounds relaxed and talks candidly about his reaction to Waters’ departure and the band’s attitude at the time.

“We were in the middle of a major lawsuit and between every little bit I was on the phone to lawyers,” says legendary lead guitarist and Hove resident Gilmour. “That stuff was just eating away at me, at us, at that time.”

Each episode of the four-part podcast series deals with a different element of Pink Floyd’s creative output from 1987 onwards. The first episode deals with the band’s time in the studio.

In it, Gilmour speaks tentatively of the band’s reaction to the loss of Waters in 1985, following the release of The Final Cut.

“The Roger and me thing? I would think of myself as more of a melodic type and Roger is more of an aggressive wordsmith.

“Different sides of us came together to create what we became.”

However, he avoids speaking directly about the band’s or his own relationship with Waters himself during the lengthy lawsuit, which saw the Pink Floyd’s former unofficial leader trying to confine the band to the annals of rock history.

“Roger’s departure had damaged people. I talked about it at the time, but it’s very tricky to…” he says before trailing off. “Anyway.”

In the years leading up to his departure Waters had started to take an increasingly dominant role in the recording process, as can be heard on albums like Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979).

“Through our time together the process became more one person writing a song, turning up with it and everyone working on to how to fit what they do and learn parts for that song,” Gilmour reveals.

“But the process of the jamming at Brit Row Studios (which were owned by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason) allowed us to think that things could grow from a more organic place.”

This was a period in which Pink Floyd re-embraced the trends of the time and released some of their most experimental music.

“In the Eighties there was a mass of new technology and we were keen to make a record that was of its time. We embraced a lot of this new technology with massive enthusiasm and of course that is a fashion,” he says. “And fashions go out of fashion.

“In the years after A Momentary Lapse of Reason there were moments when I thought we hadn’t followed the timeless template that we perhaps should have done.”

“I think we wanted to go back.”

And go back they have now gone. The retrospective boxset includes a revised version of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, which was the first album the band released following Waters’ departure.

The remastered version includes new drum parts by Nick Mason, and greater use of the late Richard Wright’s keyboard playing to create a richer sound that has been described as a “revelation”.

One thing that Gilmour discusses in detail on the podcast is the increasingly prominent role that his now-wife Polly Samson had within the band.

“One of the things that had changed in my life was that I had met my later wife-to-be Polly Samson.” Gilmour says. “She became quite a large part of it.”

“She of course wanted me to write lyrics and bullied me by asking me questions about my childhood – how did this happen? You should write about this.”

“And of course, I then persuaded her to take part and she’s just very very good at it. She helped me enormously and became the primary lyricist on that album (The Division Bell).”

The interview reveals that Samson’s impact on the album extended as far as coming up with the title.

“Polly just came up with the phrase, if my memory serves me well. And then we looked it up to see exactly what it meant.”

The title refers to the bell rung in Parliament to signal to members of the chamber that a vote is taking place, or to signal the start or end of Parliamentary proceedings.

“Later on, when we were hunting for a title for the album, we spoke to our friend (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author) Douglas Adams about it.

He went through the lyrics and he picked on that in the middle of that song and said ‘There you are, there’s your title. You should use that.’”

Gilmour and Samson are still together and are now living in Hove. In 2015, they bought a historic bath house on Hove seafront with a view to renovating the building.

Surveyors put a stop to this plan by declaring the building beyond repair. The pair then demolished the original building and have started construction work on their home on the site.

The project has garnered approval from residents in the area, particularly as Gilmour and Samson bought the property from a developer who was hoping to build a multi-storey block of flats on the site of the historic Hove building.

The enduring popularity of Pink Floyd and David Gilmour continues unabated with the band often cited as one of the most influential in history.

Earlier this year, Gilmour made headlines by auctioning off more than 120 guitars, including some of his most famous ones, raising more than £17 million for environmental groups such as Clean Earth.

A 1969 black Fender Stratocaster, which Gilmour used on albums such as The Wall, Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon, sold for a record £3.1 million.