Originally printed in the Sunday Times on March 5th, 2006, and included on this site purely for archiving purposes.
Pop: He don’t need no band reunions
With a new album due, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour tells Paul Sexton he’s staying solo
It begins as a soundscape from some dreamy, distant shore: far-off
harmonies, a barely heard saxophone and synthesizer fills, circling
like seagulls. Then, precisely two minutes and 15 seconds in, David
Gilmour powers up one of the most distinctive weapons in the rock
toolbox, his Fender Stratocaster. Just for a moment, it’s almost Shine
on You Crazy Diamond, all over again.
Gilmour turns 60 tomorrow, and marks the occasion by releasing a new
solo album. Without the slightest pandering to past glories, it is
likely to get Pink Floyd diehards very excited indeed.
It has taken Gilmour a decade to complete the album, since the tour
that followed the final studio release of the post-Roger Waters Floyd
administration, The Division Bell. On an Island is characteristically
refined and quite unafraid to be itself. That means wearing fulfilment
on its sleeve, and not hiding from its creator’s history. “It has
naturally become what it’s become,” he says, as we chat in the studio
adjoining the Sussex farmhouse he shares with his wife and lyrical
collaborator, Polly Samson. The album is co-produced by the vastly
experienced Phil Manzanera and Chris Thomas, with contributions from
David Crosby and Graham Nash, Jools Holland, Georgie Fame and Floyd’s
Richard Wright.
However subconscious, there is no mistaking a certain Floydian signature.
“I am the guitar player and creator of a large part of the sound of
Pink Floyd, and the main vocalist, so I can’t get away from it,” says
Gilmour. Instead, he embraces it, and while the album will be warmly
welcomed by many without prior knowledge of Gilmour’s resumé, it is
infused with an ambience of his former group — as well as plenty of
guitar from a man who, as the erstwhile Floyd producer Bob Ezrin once
remarked, could make a ukulele sound like a Stradivarius. He doesn’t
bristle when I say that, after much deliberation over how to describe
the mood it exudes, I’ve landed on “contentment”.
“Well, I’ll take that,” he replies. “Life is never that easy, but
obviously a lot easier for some, and I count myself among those. I
definitely would say I’m at the most content that I’ve ever been.”
For someone with a reputation for keeping his inner self hidden from
the public gaze, this is positively confessional. He says that talking
to the media is “not my strongest point”, but Gilmour is engaging
company, and now noticeably more open in discussing Samson, with whom
he has four children, aged 16, 10, 8 and 4. He admits that his
protective instincts have previously left her role in his work somewhat
underappreciated.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had any intention of covering up anything to
do with our professional partnership,” he says. “I suppose you could
say, around The Division Bell, I felt more guarded. I wasn’t as
generous with the credit I should have given her at the time.”
Samson contributes most of the lyrics to the new record, and it is
Gilmour himself who strikes the comparison I may have hesitated to
draw. “I’ve had some practice at singing other people’s lyrics,” he
says with a smile. “I was a mouthpiece for a lot of Roger’s stuff, but
he was not writing stuff for me to sing, or he wasn’t trying to put
himself in my head. They were his words. Polly’s are just as much her
words. But, some of the time anyway, she’s trying to get inside my head
and to feel what I might be trying to say. I am frustratingly difficult
to pin down on what I may have had in mind for a piece of music,
because it doesn’t often come to me verbally. Obviously, Polly’s here
and listens to everything I do every day. For a while, the songs don’t
necessarily have a voice on them at all, they’re just pieces of music.
On the ones she likes, she’s liable to say, ‘Could I have a try at that
one?’” A notable example is Smile, the most adhesive melody on the
album, to which Samson added wistful words around the theme of home
thoughts from abroad. “That was a demo I’d never recorded properly. It
took us ages to track down which actual bit of music it was. One day, I
was strumming and she said, ‘It’s that one, stop!’” Gilmour draws
greater satisfaction from his own abilities than was once the case. “I
love my singing voice,” he tells me, with unexpected conviction. “There
was a point, in the first couple of years in Pink Floyd, when I’d been
trying to sing like other people. Then you develop your own style. For
a long time, I listened to myself and thought, ‘My playing isn’t as
good as Hendrix.’ Or, ‘I’m not singing as well as Paul McCartney.’ But
there was quite a sudden moment when I started liking my own voice and
guitar playing, and that’s when the style develops.”
We touch on the last time Gilmour put his own name to an album, with
1984’s About Face. Even as he describes the political bindweed that was
suffocating the creativity of those involved at the time, you grasp a
little more about why he has every right to seem contented these days.
“That was the phony war for us. Roger had left in all but name, and
he’d sit in the back of the studio and piss us off. We’d just got
through this terrible period of The Wall film and The Final Cut album.
Nightmare.”
By then, the internecine bile within the Floyd ranks had built to the
point where no antacid could help. Much of it would fester for two
decades, until that unlikely reunion last July. Suddenly, Pink Floyd
breathed anew, just for one day, in the name of Live 8.
Even in the build-up to the release of On an Island, Gilmour felt
compelled to issue a statement refuting all rumours of another reunion.
Unlike Waters, he did not spend the Hyde Park performance smiling his
head off, but he looks back on it as a vital piece of marriage
counselling. Or divorce counselling, to be more accurate.
“There’ve been a lot of years with a lot of vitriol, and if that can be
put in the past tense, and left there, that will be a good thing. If
the four of us can talk about anything, we need to talk about it and
stop some of the bitching. It would help the world to seem a slightly
more grown-up place to me.
“We’ve had a great history in Pink Floyd. We’ve done great work, in the
era with Roger and in the era post-Roger. I couldn’t be more proud of
that, but life is now different. You say you sense contentment, and I
sense contentment, and a partnership with Polly and the team of people
I’ve been working with. I have no desire to go back. I just couldn’t
see that we could actually get into a studio and make a record
together. We’ve all come too far, and we’re all too set in our ways. I
couldn’t see that would increase my contentment.”
He reaches 60 with perspective. “It is the old cliché. I still feel 30.
Not physically: you get older, and time moving faster seems to be
horribly true. We packed a whole career into two or three years, and
now it takes me 10 years to make one bloody record,” he laughs.
For someone who experienced all that stadium rock could offer, modest
is the new huge. “Right now, I just like to be smaller,” he says,
collecting our coffee cups and heading back to the house. “I’d love the
album to sell bucketloads, but I would like for it all to be a little
less... important.”
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