It’s well over a year since the release of the last Pink Floyd epic, and it’s going to be at least another year before the next one so it is little surprise that David Gilmour (Harvest SHVL 817) has slipped into the bestsellers. This is the first Floyd solo album (apart from the Syd Barrett recordings after he left the band), and it fills a massive gap. Since it is an unusual release, Gilmour has treated it in an unusual way.



The band doesn’t normally give interviews (“we don’t need the promotion that much”) but he reckons that a solo effort is different (“I’d hate it not to sell just because I was too lazy”), and so there he was, lazily curled across a sofa in his manager’s offices giving a rare insight into life with an outfit rich enough to do exactly what it pleases.

His album is good, but without the emotional peaks of the Floyd at its best. His ever-distinctive guitar style is used on melodic, even mesmeric themes that sound as if they are always about to develop one step further, but never quite do. Still, Gilmour has mastered keyboards reasonably well (though he agrees he spent a long time recording those sections). And his former colleagues Rick Wills and Willie Wilson (with whom he played in a band back home in Cambridge, before he joined the Floyd) help out with no-nonsense bass and drums. The result is far more worthwhile than the solo indulgences that sometimes come from members of famous groups.

Pink Floyd (L-R: Rick Wright, Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters), 1973. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Gilmour did it “just for fun – after years in a band you feel you should try something on your own. And it was nice not to have to compromise. I mean I believe the whole process of compromise is vital for a group, but it was nice not to have everything vetted.” Being in control meant that Gilmour could send off one song to Roy Harper so he could add lyrics, and ship his band down to the South of France for the recording (“well, it’s good for the tax man”).

Control also means that Gilmour can resist any attempts to make him perform his new music live. “Everyone’s trying to hustle me, but I haven’t come round to that yet. I’ve devoted as much time to this as I feel like doing at the moment, I want a holiday, and then I’d like to do some work with the Floyd.”

It’s ten years now since he joined the Floyd as guitarist, amidst predictions that the band was finished with the departure of Syd Barrett. His attitude to the band was a slightly odd one – rather as if he had taken a year’s sabbatical away from his marriage. “I haven’t really been in touch with them since we finished touring last July. Rick has been doing a solo album. I’m not sure if Roger has been doing one –I’ve only seen him twice. But he’s certainly been writing hard on Floyd material.”

The band will eventually get together again at the end of the summer. “It takes a bit of time to get to know each other again. You walk into a room, say ‘hello,’ and all sit down and be very quiet for a while. It’s a little strange.” Normally the Floyds work in “democratic huddles,” developing ideas, while the bass player, Roger Waters, evolves the themes behind the concept albums. He, it seems, is the most equal among equals. “None of the rest of us has written many lyrics. And the man who writes the lyrics has the say in what goes down.”

Next time round, it seems, Waters will be even more in charge than usual. “He’s got a lot of it written already but I’ve been told nothing about it so far. He’s had a year to think about it, but I don’t know if he’ll just present it us, or if it will need extra music so we can bully each other into getting a slice of the publishing.”



As he prepares for an eventual reunion with one of the world’s greatest bands, the ultimate psychedelic underground heroes of the sixties turned vast scale electronic showmen (and masterly, emotional musicians), Gilmour has remarkably little to say on his view of the Floyd, or indeed his view popular music.

The trend towards reviving psychedelia – there’s a current attempt to make it the Next Big Thing – filled him merely with mild amusement. “I heard there was an attempt to make Love-Ins come back. I’d enjoy that on a tongue in-cheek level but I couldn’t take it seriously. I can’t believe it’s being done for genuine artistic reasons. But then I don’t take most pop music very seriously.”

David Gilmour’s So far away, 1978.

YouTube.

As for the Floyd, he claimed “we don’t represent anything as such. Roger is sitting around giving his ideas of what the world is about. I like what we say – though I don’t always think he says it very well. I agree with the ideas and I like making the music, but I don’t see it as any positive stance. It’s all about making music you can communicate to people with.”

He agrees that it has had its rewards. “I didn’t know what to do with leisure time, but now I’m quite good at it.” Apart from involvement in the Floyd’s office, studio, and equipment hire-company in Islington, he talks in bemused fashion about “having to go to board meetings, and meetings with investment companies. You either give money to the tax-man or stick it into businesses. There’s all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally think about, but it’s got to go somewhere. So there’s things like a hire-car company, an electronics company, and a slice of the last Monty Python film...”

With quite so much going for them, how then could the Floyd’s songs give such a pessimistic view of the world, and how could Welcome to the Machine give such a bleak view of the record industry? “I largely share Roger’s view, but he’d probably call it realism. I think it’s accurate. As for the record industry, it is like that.” He stops to consider. “but the record companies are very nice to us. They can’t dictate to us when we should do anything.”