Don’t count on a Pink Floyd reunion
Guitarist David Gilmour says he’s content to tackle the road without his former bandmates
As I walk into the vast, empty rehearsal space, a familiar bass line rolls out and a spooky electric guitar chord shimmers in the air. An 11-piece backing band is at the far side of the room. In the middle stands a white-haired man, guitar in hands, an expression of intense focus on his face.
“Money, get away,” sings David Gilmour. “Get a good job with more pay and you’re OK ...” I stand transfixed, a privileged audience of one, as the legendary guitar hero performs a scintillating version of Pink Floyd classic Money and follows with a spinetingling take on Floyd’s Us and Them. Then it all rumbles to a halt in a strangely anticlimactic silence. “It’s getting there,” says Gilmour.
The band has been rehearsing five days a week for a month, in preparation for a tour that arrives in the U.K. next week for three sold-out dates at the Royal Albert Hall next week. His only Canadian stop is in Toronto March 31 and April 1.
At 69, Gilmour has the composed presence of a veteran who finds himself quietly amused to be at the front once again. “I think a guitar solo is how my emotion is most freely released, because verbal articulation isn’t my strongest communication strength,” he says.
Gilmour has been playing since he was nine. “I was quite shy, closed in. It’s a classic isn’t it, your psychiatrist will tell you, that’s how I release it, through music.” He has an elegant vocal style, smooth and precise with a quality of dreamy yearning. “I love singing. I have spent as much of my life trying to improve my singing as I have practising guitar.” But it is his extraordinary playing with its expressive, melodic, slow-burn style for which he is celebrated.
“It’s a magical thing, the guitar,” he says. “It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can’t do.”
His playing has changed over the years. When Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1967, he was influenced by the experimental psychedelic daring of Floyd’s tragic original frontman Syd Barrett (who Gilmour replaced). “I still want to explore, but I’m not as brave as I was then. I play safer now,” says Gilmour. “In those early days you had to go through a lot of bad stuff to get to the good. Now I want it all to be good.”
His new album, Rattle That Lock, is the strongest of his four solo efforts, combining the epic vistas of Floyd with the emotional intimacy of 2006’s On an Island. Never a prolific lyricist, he has again collaborated with his wife, novelist Polly Samson.
Last year, Gilmour and Floyd drummer Nick Mason released Endless River, a largely instrumental and apparently final Pink Floyd album assembled from sessions with late keyboard player Rick Wright. Gilmour accepts that it doesn’t have “the grand theme” of Floyd’s finest work. “Yes, it is lacking, but who cares?” he says with a shrug. “There were some lovely pieces that hadn’t been finished and I thought it would be a nice little farewell gift to cheer some people up.”
Although the classic lineup made an appearance at Live 8 in 2005 and Gilmour has occasionally got together on stage with old colleague, bassist and sometime antagonist Roger Waters, he has no interest in a reunion.
“Rick’s dead. Roger and I don’t particularly get along. We still talk. It’s better than it has been. But it wouldn’t work.”
Life for Gilmour has a much wider scope than his career. “I am not dominated by music every second of every day, which I was in my 20s and 30s. There are children (eight from his two marriages), Polly is writing. I can’t relate now to the dedication and religious fervour of youth. But something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day, as Joni Mitchell would say.”
Get a good job with more pay and you’re OK?
“I feel very lucky. And I feel some guilt at the extraordinary disparities, the great unfairness of life. I’d love to see what happens in the future. But I’m not going to be around for it.”
Gilmour laughs, only half joking when he concludes: “I’m a has-been. I’m a relic of history.”