Polly Samson has written lyrics for her husband, David Gilmour, for 20 years. They tell Helen Brown why it works so well – whatever Pink Floyd might think

‘Getting the wife to write the lyrics? How tragic!”

Roger Waters’s verdict on Pink Floyd’s 1994 album, The Division Bell, was exactly what Polly Samson had been dreading since her husband, David Gilmour, had convinced her to take credit for her contribution.

The couple can laugh about it now. As Samson says, Waters would never be able to get away with his sexist jibe in 2016. But the memory still makes her curl into a protective ball: “At the time, it felt awful. It stung.” The Division Bell was only the second album Gilmour had made with the band after Waters’s acrimonious departure in 1985.

The daughter of two writers, Samson was working as a journalist when she met Gilmour. “I had never felt nervous about writing,” she says. “But I did feel nervous about being known to be writing lyrics. I was a 30-year-old woman, writing for a band of blokes in their mid-40s. It felt like sticking my head above a very particular parapet.”

Samson, whose mother is half Chinese, was “really frightened” she’d find herself on the receiving end of the “misogynist, Orientalist bull----” meted out to Yoko Ono. “Today I’d love to be compared to her. She’s an inspiration: a woman in her 80s, still making great art. She shouldered all that s--- for something she didn’t do. We all know she didn’t break up the Beatles. It’s ridiculous.”