After you achieve dizzying heights, people tend to show you way too much respect, says Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour
BY his own admission, David Gilmour is a reluctant solo artist.
The man who brought such a distinctive, fluid and elegant guitar sound to Pink Floyd — not to mention clear, soulful vocals — is all about the group dynamic.
David loves nothing more than to write songs with his partner in life and music, novelist Polly Samson.
Or to get his children involved in his creative processes.
Or to gather accomplished musicians around him to help him realise his creative ambitions.
Yet he’s discovered that being rock royalty, revered across the globe for his part in records such as The Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, is a lofty and sometimes lonely place.
“After you achieve these dizzying heights, people tend to show you way too much deference,” he admits. “It becomes hard to retrieve the setup you had when you were young.
“In the earlier stages of Pink Floyd, we could be as rude and insulting to each other about our personalities and our music as we wanted — and yet everything would be all right in the end.
I was thrust into being band leader of Pink Floyd and, later, into being a solo artist, but I feel a more collaborative approach is better for me.
“No one ever stomped off permanently — until that bloke did.”
By “that bloke”, Gilmour is referring to Roger Waters who quit Pink Floyd in 1985, creating a rift more deep than the Gallagher brothers could ever dream of.
At that pivotal moment in his career, Gilmour found himself shouldering huge responsibility — whether he liked it or not.
“I was thrust into being band leader of Pink Floyd and, later, into being a solo artist,” he says. “But I feel a more collaborative approach is better for me.”
This insight helps explain why the 78-year-old is thrilled with his fifth studio album, Luck And Strange, released this week nine years after his previous effort, Rattle That Lock.
‘Refreshingly blunt’
For Gilmour personally, it represents his most satisfying meeting of musical minds since The Dark Side Of The Moon.
“There’s a wholeness to it that I can’t pin down,” he tells me via video call from his cavernous barn studio in deepest Sussex where much of Luck And Strange was recorded.
“It goes all the way through without any concept album bulls**t.
“Polly and I listen to it all the time, mostly on car journeys, and we haven’t tired of it. That, I can tell you, is unusual!”
An irony not lost on Gilmour is that both Luck And Strange and The Dark Side Of The Moon span 43 minutes, fitting neatly on to two sides of vinyl and never outstaying their welcome.
Crucial to the new record was the introduction of a co-producer “blissfully unaware” of his charge’s intimidating history.
Gilmour says: “About 18 months ago, Polly and I went off to a building in London where we would spend five-day working weeks.
“Polly was in one room [writing lyrics] and I was in a tiny bedroom that doubled up as a little studio.
“By late summer last year, songs were starting to take shape and we needed to get a producer on board.
“I looked at all the people I knew but I’d got to a point in life where I wanted to move things forward in a different way.”
At Polly’s suggestion, Gilmour listened to music produced by Charlie Andrew, best known for his work with Mercury Prize-winning Alt-J and fiercely original singer-songwriter Marika Hackman — and he liked what he heard.
Gilmour continues: “So I made contact with Charlie and he came down to the house. He had total lack of knowledge of Pink Floyd and the side of the music industry that I come from.”
As a married couple, we discuss our fears and our joys. She knows my preoccupations, it’s a great skill that she can inhabit my head
Once hired, “Charlie was refreshingly blunt with some of his opinions. He was brilliant’’.
The producer brought in new faces while Gilmour drafted in long-time associate, bassist Guy Pratt, and ace American session drummer Steve Gadd.
Another vital addition was Will Gardner, whose orchestra and choir arrangements give the album rich depth of sound without being overblown.
“He’s a genius — with a very unusual mind!” exclaims Gilmour.
He reserves special praise for his “lovely wife” Polly, his chief lyricist for the past 30 years.
“As a married couple, we discuss our fears and our joys. She knows my preoccupations,” he says.
“It’s a great skill that she can inhabit my head.
“But her input is not limited to the lyrics. She has solid opinions on every aspect of what we do and is not scared to voice them.”
‘I’m feeling liberated’
Unusually for Gilmour, one of his new recordings is a cover — and that’s where another of his key collaborators comes in.
The youngest of his and Polly’s four children, 22-year-old daughter Romany, lends it gorgeous lead vocals, the perfect foil for Dad’s guitar.
The song, Between Two Points, is by obscure Nineties dream pop duo, The Montgolfier Brothers.
Gilmour picks up the story: “It first came to our attention on a playlist years ago, in the days when people gave each other cassettes.
“Polly and I really loved that song. Then, a few months ago, it accidentally came on in our kitchen and she said, ‘That’s great. We should give it a try’.
“I replied, ‘Well, we don’t really do covers’, but then I thought, ‘I’m feeling liberated. I can do what I want’.”
Gilmour prepared a backing track but as he stood in front of a mic, lyrics in hand, he realised something was wrong.
“I knew it just wasn’t me,” he confesses. “I’m an old bloke and this was a very vulnerable lyric. So I twisted Romany’s arm.”
Gilmour explains further: “When I asked her to give it a go, she said she had an essay to write and a train to catch.
“It was a Sunday, I guess, and she wanted to get back to London for her uni course the next day. She was quite tetchy about the whole idea.
“But I just said, ‘Hop in here [the studio], take this piece of paper, sing these words’, which she eventually did.
“That first take is 90 per cent of the vocal on the record. Listening to it the following day, I couldn’t believe it. Wow!”
Romany also plays that most graceful of instruments, the harp, on the same track and on the exquisite instrumental passage which precedes it, Vita Brevis [Latin for life is short].
If that isn’t enough, she duets with Dad on folky bonus track, Yes, I Have Ghosts, written and first performed during the pandemic, AND she provides backing vocals on several songs.
Following on from the Gilmours’ lockdown livestreams as the Von Trapped Family, Luck And Strange is a family affair in other ways, too.
On closing song Scattered, son Charlie contributes telling lines including this thought-provoking one: “Time is a tide that disobeys me.”
“That line is genius,” says Gilmour, adding that the song addresses one of his familiar themes, mortality.
“You can’t ignore it, it’s advancing upon us,” he says. “I have to say it’s a topic that I’ve been on about for 30 or 40 years — but it’s certainly come to a head on this album.”
We move on to the elegiac Sings which features an old recording of Gilmour’s son Joe, who was two at the time, chanting, “Sing Daddy sing”.
“He’s about six foot now and 29 years old,” says Dad, before explaining, “I wrote and composed what became the chorus for Sings in 1997. I was in the sitting room, strumming a guitar and playing a little chord sequence on to an old MiniDisc.
“Joe was in the room and, like children sometimes do, he was just singing. We found it very charming and affecting.”
If Luck And Strange represents a parting from old ways for Gilmour, the inimitable sound of his guitar playing is still present, correct — and essential.
‘It takes you over’
When he was recording Between Two Points, for instance, he experienced that spine-tingling feeling of being at one with his instrument.
“When you’re inhabited by it, if only for a few minutes, it takes you over,” he says. “It’s like dumping the whole idea of the brain.
“And why my guitar playing doesn’t sound like anyone else’s — and I admit it doesn’t — I’ve no idea.”
He was a one-off with a very singular style. Rick had heart and soul.
David on late Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright
Gilmour adds that his late Pink Floyd colleague Richard “Rick” Wright’s keyboard playing “doesn’t sound like anyone else’s either”.
“How we got to be in a band together, God knows!”
Look closely at the credits for the Luck And Strange title track and you’ll spot Wright, even though he passed away in 2008.
Gilmour says: “It’s a strange admission that I’m using pieces recorded over 20 years ago.
“At the end of the On An Island tour in 2006, I thought we were playing so well together that I got the core band together in this barn — Rick, Guy and drummer Steve DiStanislao.
“Foolishly, I’d not really thought of the weather. You can see air, creeping through all the holes [Gilmour moves his screen to show me] and it was effing freezing. I had this little riff and we jammed for 15 minutes. That is the track which became Luck And Strange. All the verses, the introduction, the ending are on that original take — no rehearsal, no thought beforehand.”
Gilmour takes a moment to remember Wright: “He was a one-off with a very singular style. Rick had heart and soul.
“We didn’t always see eye to eye but he was a valuable partner.”
The song featuring Wright, Luck And Strange, harks back to the “golden age” of the Sixties when there was an explosion of creativity in music, art and literature — the decade when the Pink Floyd journey began.
Having been born “almost exactly nine months to the day after VE Day”, baby boomer Gilmour says he had “a lovely time” despite the Cold War backdrop with events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Joining the band and having that whole life with it was wonderful,” he says.
“It’s always amazing to me that Pink Floyd didn’t fizzle out the way others do. In some way, it has kept going to the present day.”
‘A poetic talent’
In 2024, Gilmour senses “darker, bleaker times” than the days of his youth.
“In this modern world, it’s unfortunate that one man can have an inordinate amount of power over his fellow human beings. It cannot be anything but wrong,” he says in clear reference to Putin.
“And who knows whether another golden age will come?”
Next, I draw Gilmour’s attention to The Piper’s Call, a song written on that simplest of stringed instruments, the ukulele. It features prominently in the finished take.
“It’s not my first instrument but sometimes, when you’re off balance, you find something different,” he says.
As for the lyrics, he says they are Polly’s comment on the excessive lifestyles led by certain people in the rock world — “the dangers of too much success and too much power”.
One early casualty of that lifestyle was Pink Floyd’s original singer and guitarist Syd Barrett, who was edged out of the band in 1968, shortly after Gilmour joined, because of his erratic behaviour.
“It must have been a mental thing with our Syd,” says Gilmour. “It was exacerbated by his willingness to more than dabble in some of the drugs of the day, though not the heroins.
“They say acid is not good for someone with a fragile mind. He also was keen on sleeping pills but he was a true poetic talent.”
It’s clear from talking to Gilmour that his new album serves as a time for reflection and also for pushing on to new horizons.
Next up is an autumn tour including six dates at London’s Royal Albert Hall but the follow-up to Luck And Strange might well be with us sooner rather than later.
“Polly and I plan to get straight on with some new work,” says Gilmour. “The first opportunity we’ll get will be the new year.”
LUCK AND STRANGE
David Gilmour
★★★★☆
SIMPLE PIANO IS KEY
DAVID GILMOUR begins Luck And Strange with an instrumental for piano and guitar called The Black Cat.
You may be surprised to hear that he wrote it on the piano, not the instrument he’s famous for.
“I’m a truly rotten piano player but at the same time, I’ve written quite a lot of songs on the piano . . . High Hopes (from The Division Bell), In Any Tongue, A Boat Lies Waiting (both from Rattle That Lock).
“They’re mostly two fingers on the left, two fingers on the right – very, very simple.”