Original subtitles

I'll just start with a nice easy one. Yeah.

Who is David Gilmour?

God, that's easy.

I wish I knew. I have no idea.

Someone who spent his life driven by music more than anything else, I would

say.

David John Gilmour was born on Wednesday 6 March 1946 in Cambridge, England, the

third child of Sylvia and Douglas Gilmour.

At the age of 21, he joined the band Pink Floyd, who subsequently went on to

sell over 250 million albums.

His playing style and trademark guitar sound is known the world over, and in

2011,

Rolling Stone magazine ranked him one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

His latest solo album, Rattle That Lock, recently entered the UK charts at number

one.

And now, for the first time in nine years, he's embarked on a tour that's

seen him perform sold-out shows in amphitheatres and grand halls across

Europe and at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

This unlikely location on the Thames is where David Gilmour records and mixes

all his music.

And this is the... This is the... This is it.

This is the boat.

And where did you first glimpse this, then? I was being driven by someone, and

I stopped over there on the road somewhere, and there was less foliage

then, and I could see all that glass and stuff, and I said, stop for a minute,

and peered over the wall up there and thought, wow, that's fantastic.

The very next week, I was sitting in the dentist's waiting room, picked up A

Country Life.

and there it was for sale i rang up the agent came straight down here and so you

split your time between here and the house in sussex and brighton yeah this

one has got the great technology for proper mixing it's got a mixing desk of

neve flying faders where all the faders are motorized so this is the most high

-tech this is the most high-tech and i would have to come here to mix we look

at it and it looks oh yeah really well it's beautiful

That's it being built.

Mahogany. Crittles gun metal windows.

It's quite lavish. Yeah.

When we started thinking about doing the momentary lapse of reason album, I'd

just found and bought this place.

Nothing had been soundproofed. There was no double glazing. So the whole band

would be... The whole band would be in this room. The drums would be in this

corner, which has got some sort of padding behind it up there to help

absorb the drum sound a bit.

And the rest of us would be in here. Our guitar amps wouldn't be in here. They'd

be in the other rooms out there, in those little bedrooms and stuff.

So we'd be in here, we'd be hearing what we're doing on headphones.

But they'd be recording a Hammond organ, Leslie in that room, a guitar in that

room. The bass would be going straight to tape without a amp.

So, yeah, we made pretty much all of them momentary laps of Reason in here.

Most of... Pretty much all of the Division Bell in here, in this room.

And these tracks sound enormous, you know.

You can't quite imagine they come out of a tiny little space like this.

Control room's in here.

Well, who wouldn't want to make music in this room, I have to say. It's

fantastic, isn't it?

What's your first memories, then?

Gosh.

I have one sort of snapshot memory of me...

when I apparently left my nursery school at about the age of three, which was in

Hompton College, where my mother had been doing teacher's training and trying

to walk home three miles to the other end of Cambridge, down Hills Road.

That's my first snapshot memory I can think of.

So what kind of a family life was it? Your father was a professor, an

academic. My father was a university lecturer at Cambridge.

lecturing in zoology and genetics.

My mother had been at Teachers Training College, but she never really went into

teaching. Later, she became a film editor at the BBC, working on Junior

Points of View.

You went to boarding school when you were five years old? Yes.

My dad went to a university in Madison, Wisconsin, for six months.

and we were popped into a boarding school in Buckinghamshire. And it was me

at five, my sister maybe just approaching seven, and my brother, who

was four.

And we were put in there for a year. My parents only spent one term, six

months, in fact, in America, and then came back and lived in Cambridge, but

they didn't see fit to take us out for Christmas or for the next two terms.

while they remembered what life was like without children.

And when are the first experiences of music, when did that first begin to

resonate in your life as a kid?

I mean, we had the radio on all the time and records on all the time. My parents

had a very early stereo hi-fi system in the house. They loved lots of...

Music, they loved show music, On the Town, West Side Story, when that came

out. And my mother played a bit of piano. And my father loved singing, you

know, in the house, in the bath.

There was a lot of musical noise going on constantly.

But the first big sort of éclat sort of moment was

Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock, which came out when I was ten.

We're going to rock around the clock tonight.

That was brilliant.

And shortly after that, Elvis Presley with Heartbreak Hotel.

You still listen to it and you think, what a

brilliant record. I mean, it is...

There's so little going on, hardly any drums, if any, just a bass and a piano

and a guitar and a voice, but he was absolutely magnetic.

And this is home, in the Sussex countryside.

Hello, Mr Cull.

It's David Gilmour's musical laboratory.

So, explain to me what happens here.

Well, this, as you can see, this is a music room.

This has been developing, you could call it, over 21 years we've been here.

The last album on an island and a lot of the stuff for this new album, Rattle

That Lock, were started in here.

uh with me doing everything so what you do when you're starting to build the

track you start obviously you've got your guitars you know plenty of them

yeah and then drums if you need to your sax if you need to you you also play all

these instruments the mandolin you play i mean what i'm really bad at quite a

lot of instruments yes good that's useful

David is continually jotting musical ideas, whether it's on an iPhone, mini

disc, and then he will say, oh, I've got the, you know, I've got some stuff.

I say, oh, great, yeah. Well, you know, about 150 or 200.

Oh, no.

This song today came from several pieces of music.

I just found that sound on this Kurtzweil. Is that how it all started?

That's how one part of it started, and I played that onto the

iPhone, and Phil found that, and then he found the bit of me strumming the

guitar, which is a completely separate bit.

So that one became the beginning, which has got me and Polly singing like a

choir on it. Oh, really? Let's hear that.

I'd listen through over a period of weeks or whatever, and then I try and

see if there's any sort of bits that would work with other bits. Not all of

those are terribly successful, and maybe some of them scare him.

But there's been a few that survived.

So this is a bit that I recorded on my iPhone.

I was in a studio and had an electric guitar plugged in.

didn't want to turn the gear on and get everything running i just thought this

is a nice thing i'll remember it so i turned my phone on to uh to remember it

and um phil found this bit just like this and he stuck it together with the

other thing then you know when you add all the instruments on

i mean i found

it very hard to try and replicate that exactly as it is with

something about the rhythm of it and stuff.

So we just used the original one.

This is Polly, Polly Sampson.

She's learning guitar.

Level seven, apparently.

She's an acclaimed author in her own right, and she's David's partner in more

ways than one.

I agree.

Polly, my lovely wife, she is at the heart of everything we do. Don't know

where to begin with Polly. She's my sort of partner in life, and she writes most

of the lyrics for my songs.

Along with being...

a writer and a lyricist, she is a sounding board for all the stuff I do. I

will play her things and she will voice her opinion and she'll be very astute in

spotting things that maybe I haven't noticed musically. And has been doing

that since we did the Division Bell album.

Beyond the horizon Of the place we lived when we were young

In a world of magnets and miracles.

Were you a Floyd fan yourself?

When I was 12, my brother had, I think it was Dark Side of the

Moon and Wish You Were Here.

But they didn't have a band name on them.

So I can remember I used to play them, but I didn't know who they were by.

So I don't think I ever wrote Pink Floyd on my pencil case.

I wrote David Bowie on my pencil case.

When you met David for the first time, you didn't think, oh, this is David

Gilmour from Pink Floyd.

He was a man with lots of children, I think, is what I thought.

The first time I met him, he had four children and I had one child.

And I think it was our children who kind of played with each other.

And so we kind of ended up at this nice day, lunch in the countryside, sort of

sitting near each other because our children were trying to climb the same

tree.

David is not someone who is loquacious, but he is very emotionally engaged, but

he doesn't necessarily display that. So do you think that you're there partly to

interpret what's going on in David's head? Yes, I think so, and that does

feel like a huge responsibility.

But then, I mean, the whole of marriage is a bit like that, isn't it? I mean,

particularly, you know, with a partner.

who is quite silent.

I mean, you know, he plays guitar a lot, and I often think that if ever we were

going to have an argument, the best way we could do it would be for me to use

words of him to answer in guitar, because he's very eloquent and

emotionally eloquent with a guitar.

So, yes, a lot of it is trying to just get under his skin and sort of feel what

he's feeling.

OK, so here's a track recorded ten years ago.

for the girl in the yellow dress it says it's got a guide vocal on here

was

the

process always the music first was he kind of humming to you in bed or what no

it's always music first um and he nowadays he puts tracks on my ipod

and i just walk up and down playing all the tracks and eventually you know one

or two start to suggest things to me

That would be what Polly would have on her headphones and would be listening to

when she wrote the lyrics. So that's really interesting because, you know,

you sort of feel it's almost got the words on it. Yeah.

His scats really do sound like someone singing in tongues. I mean, it's as

though the words are just sort of under the surface and it's quite interpretive

at that point.

Most people imagine that people writing lyrics will be sitting down at a table

and crossing things out and writing things down. Do you write anything down?

It's the same for my fiction. I think that the work is done while I walk.

By the time I get back to the house, it's like...

It's practically like typing, because while walking, I've kind of worked out

what it is. But I have a notebook.

So, I mean, this will be full of things that are not all to do with lyrics,

but... Yeah, this was... This was the start of today, I think. It looks

to me like a wide sargasso sea of shit.

Yes, I had written a wide sargasso sea of shit.

I think it became something else in the song, but...

I think it was a missing line and I thought I'll get to that line later and

so I think I had written in the song a wide sargasso sea of shit.

I wish I'd learnt the piano properly when I was young, that I'd learnt to

read music and could do all that stuff. Still can't read music.

So you just kind of know that your children will be grateful for having

learnt piano when they're adults, but they certainly aren't when they're

young. It's just a chore.

So they've all had piano lessons until they were bored to tears and

begged us to be allowed to stop.

Now they are moving forward, learning things by themselves.

It's terrific.

They are thoroughly enjoying it. Gabriel's piano playing, since he

stopped having lessons, has gone from strength to strength and is, in fact,

playing on one of the songs on the album, purely because he's the right

person to be doing that job.

Romney's picked up the ukulele entirely on her own and play a number of chords

and will happily sing, and I think she's got a really nice...

with a bit of huskiness to it.

Nice low register voice, lovely.

Joe is into science and mathematics and is excited by those things and has got a

fantastic direct linear mind that looks to see if there's a better way of doing

things, which will stand him in very good stead.

They don't want to be musicians, and I don't know if they'll change, and I

wouldn't dream of influencing that in any way.

you know gabriel wants to be a set designer maybe an actor as well romney

definitely wants to be an actor

I used this on Breathe and on Great Gig in the Sky on Dark Side of the Moon,

this one.

This machine?

This actual one, yeah, and I've used it ever since occasionally.

When was your first guitar?

Were you yet in your teens or not? My next-door neighbour had a guitar.

I was given a guitar. He was completely non-musical. I borrowed it and played it

for a while.

How old were you?

Probably 12, 13, and I think I gave it to him back a couple of times and then I

borrowed it again. I thought, never mind. He never asked me back.

You still have it. Basically, yeah.

My parents moved to America permanently when I was 18 or 19.

And they lived in Greenwich Village from 1965 onwards. So, you know, they could

see the end of Bleecker Street out of their window.

So, I mean, I got Bob Dylan's first record for my 16th birthday, which they

sent me from Greenwich Village.

Before then, they'd sent me Pete Seeger's Guitar Tutor record, which is

the only... My only actual instruction was with the Pete Seeger Guitar Tutor

record. For most of us, playing a guitar can be...

About as simple as walking.

Of course, remember, it took us all a couple of years to learn how to walk. It

was an LP with a big book with all the chord shapes that you might need. It

started out with a pitch pipe playing the six notes of a guitar. So the most

important thing was to learn how to tune it.

There, now we're in business.

The second band was teaching you how to play a D chord, which is three fingers

on the guitar, which you then strum.

He sang some words so you could do a song instantly with just one chord.

I gave my love a cherry that has no

stone.

I gave my love a chicken that has

no bone.

So from the beginning of learning the guitar, I was learning singing as well.

and then singing is just as important to me that's your vinyl

collection is it there's vinyl over there well it's mine and polly's mixed

together in a sort of obsolete pile of tea chests and shelves

loads of stuff here going way way back that's the 1959 newport

folk festival which i was given on my 16th birthday by my parents who were in

America at the time, along with Bob Dylan's first record, which I think I've

got somewhere, but I can't find it anymore.

So I've had these since my 16th birthday, as you can see by my youthful,

possessive writing on the back. Yes. And I was very into folk music. Pete

Seegers, Leon Bibb, some great people. And then you can go straight on to

something like the Shangri-Las, you know, girl group in the 60s, early 60s,

produced by a guy called George Shadow Morton.

who's um who painted oral pictures i mean remember walking in the sun past

present and future they are they're like movies

so

is that where you got your your interest in sort of extra natural sounds or or

even unnatural it's the idea of creating a picture or something like a movie with

the with the story that's being told that I love.

Who were the guitarists who you kind of got... Well, you talked about Pete

Seeger, obviously. Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, I was very keen on at a very

early age. 12-string, he played mostly.

Brilliant.

You

know,

later, Hendrix, of course, clapped and...

Joni Mitchell's guitar playing, her use of different guitar tunings was a big

influence. There's a man who's been out sailing in a decade full of dreams and

he takes her to his schooner and he treats her like a queen, bearing beads

from California.

Another side of Bob. Yeah.

The first Dylan album, just called Bob Dylan, was recorded in December 61, and

I got it in March 62, which was probably about a week after it came out in the

States. That's pretty quick going.

It's definitely long before it came out over here.

When I went into the sixth form at school, the teacher, the music teacher,

had given up doing music lessons by then for the sixth form. He just said to

people, bring in a record, we'll play it and we'll talk about it.

And so I brought Bob Dylan's first record in. I absolutely loved it.

Played it, silence.

I was the only one who liked it.

I went to see him at the Festival Hall.

At one point, he lost a harmonica. He said, has anyone got a harmonica in C?

and half the audience came rushing to the front line with harmonicas.

Everyone went through that way.

We're going this way.

Just whatever whatever Family is everything and

You have to devote time and yourself To raising children

if that's what you elect to do in your life

So, yeah, I'm

loving my life with my family raising these children and when I was a young

man

Ambition, you know, the desire to be together with these other guys in a pop

group. You're very, very driven and ambitious, otherwise you won't get

anywhere. And I certainly was, and I'm sure there's still vestiges of that sort

of ambition still around, but I'm not as ambitious as I was.

I've had that.

It's been fantastic.

I put just as much work and effort into making a record, but I can prioritise my

time better.

Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat.

Early in the morning, because Thursday is the morning, and puts all

his postman's in his bag.

Late on I mean and it was immediately clear what that song needed to be about.

There isn't a day when one isn't affected by war.

When I'm singing this sort of vocal and I try not to constrain myself and if if

consonants feel like coming out they do I'm completely meaningless, you know and

When you say meaningless you mean that you've not given them any kind of status

at all, but they are Something there's something in there. I suppose you could

say trying to get out and Polly is so brilliant at Picking them out, but you

can hear

consonants that she's taken that were there and Put a proper word to anyway.

We'll have a quick

Yes

So what's that? What's it like that first time that you hear not the skirt,

but yeah, that's the words that's the incredibly Wonderful moment.

It's really exciting and that that is, you know, it tends to be just the two of

us and you know, I sort of give him the sheet of paper and he sticks it up and

and sings it and That's it. Yeah that I think that is the most enjoyable of a

moment of the whole thing

This man gave me my first guitar and was also one of the first people to play in

this venue.

Please welcome Mr David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.

Some of my earliest memories are staying at his and Holly's house in the

countryside. And we'd kind of stay there for whole summers.

And I guess I was too young initially to kind of understand.

who Pink Floyd were or who he was. I guess he was just a friend of my parents

with a nice house.

Isn't it crazy?

He was the first person that told me I had a nice voice, which I

probably didn't appreciate at the time, but looking back, that was pretty cool.

We have a very young fan base initially I was a bit worried that all these 16

year olds would have no idea Who he was but as soon as he walks on stage I just

have this very vivid memory of this 16 year old boy in the front row like tears

streaming down his face with happiness When we were actually

learning the song I went on YouTube to kind of look up a live version see how

He'd done it live in the past and the first thing that came up was him and my

dad playing it at the Royal Festival Hall and it had something like 20

million views and it suddenly all felt quite familial and circular in some way

that my dad had done it and now I was doing it.

Pretty much everyone on my dad's side in the

family is a musician.

He's a guitarist called Neil McColl, and his parents were Ewan McColl, the folk

singer, and Peggy Seeger, also a folk singer.

And her brother was Pete Seeger.

And strangely, I think David actually learned to play guitar initially by

listening to these instructional records that Pete Seeger had made.

So, yeah, it's all connected in some strange way, I think.

So here we are, rehearsal room.

So there's a lot of stuff here.

Well, this is basically pretty much what we have on stage.

We all have our full sort of stage kit.

Are you going to take all these on tour when you go?

Yes, all these things come with me.

OK, OK, let's... John, would you play it off the thing? Because I can't really

remember what I should be doing.

Start, just play it again.

Try and remember these fucking chords.

I'm forgetting the words all the time. I'm forgetting what I'm supposed to be

playing all the time.

Gradually, as you relax into it, you get more and more close to what you're

doing. But I'm constantly listening to what everyone else is doing, trying to

say, remember to say this at the end, or I just stop and redo it.

And I have all the lyrics here, all of these I need to know by the time we get

going.

I have Shine On You Crazy Diamond.

I have a bit of a mental block about that. So that is here.

And that sits on the floor during every show, with the start of the line, so I

get the right lines in the right order, because for some reason I can remember

50 songs, word perfect, all the way through, and I have a rotten memory.

Got that on the F? One, two, three, four.

Much better without me playing, okay

Rattle That Lock came out of the work that I'd done for the last book I wrote,

which was a novel called The Kindness, because the main character in the novel

is a student of Milton.

I knew that I wanted to write a song about the need to protest, and I

suddenly remembered Book Two of Paradise Lost and Satan's heroic journey to go

and challenge God, and I thought, well, actually, that would work really well.

Within that is everything I want to say, and I ran back and picked up the book,

and there it was, and it was a huge, huge help.

not exactly a call to arms but it's encouraging people to stand up for

themselves and shake it about a bit

okay

let's do today just to cheer ourselves up then

we can off

Do we stay up?

Way back when you were living in Cambridge, that's when you met Sid

Barrett, isn't it?

Well, there was an art school for kids in Homerton College, and they ran for, I

guess...

five-year-olds and above, or six-year-olds and above, they ran art

classes on a Saturday morning.

And I went to that until the age of 11. And apparently, I didn't know it at the

time because I didn't know them. Both Sid and Roger were in the same class, in

the same room as me, for probably three or four years.

But I got to know Sid when I was about 14 or 15, which is three or four years

after that.

We both went to the Cambridge Tech. I was there doing A-level languages.

and Sid was doing arts and we would meet up in the art school every lunchtime.

What was Sid like at that time and that age?

Sid was just... had a real, real magnetic personality and a spring in his

step and a glint in his eye and was very, very sharp and very, very funny.

Everyone wanted to be friends with Sid, me included.

By then, musically, did you have any sense what your destiny was, what you

wanted to do with your life? By the time it got to taking my A-levels, I think I

had pretty much decided what I wanted to do.

And I thought that if I passed my A-levels, there'd be no

way out and I'd have to go off to university and the moment for my rock

and roll career might pass.

So I stopped going to the exams.

You just stopped, did you? Yeah, in the middle of the A-levels.

For fear that you might pass?

Yeah, essentially.

I've heard people

saying, you know, that they got into popular music because of the girls, you

know, the drugs, all the rest of it.

I, having thought about that, I think that it was definitely the music that

was the absolute sort of main priority for why I got into it.

And when was the first move into performance?

I suppose when I was 17 or 18, I started and joined a band or two, you know,

that you sort of flit in the door and out of the door very quickly.

with one or two bands, and the early one was called Newcomers.

Then after that, I met some other people who wanted to do something a bit more

ambitious, and we formed what became Jokerswild.

We did a lot of harmony music, Beach Boys, The Four Seasons, and we did your

regular R&B, the Stones numbers, Beatles numbers, and there were five of us and

we could all sing.

How did you keep pace with what was happening if you were doing all these

covers? It was competitive covering, you know.

A new Beatles record, for example, would come out and we'd rush down to Miller's

music store and we'd gather together in one of the little booths. And they used

to have those stand-up booths where you could fit three people in like that

listening to a single. But they also, at Miller's, had bigger room booths, which

are about six foot by six foot, and you could get four or five people in and you

could listen to a whole LP.

And we would listen to a whole brand-new Beatles LP, and we'd be writing the

words down and making notes on the chords and stuff as it went through, and

we'd try to get them to play it to us again. And if the serving girls were in

a good mood or you smiled at them nicely, they might play it a second

time. And then while you're setting up for a gig that night...

you'd rehearse one or two of the ones that seemed easiest and you'd got to

know well and then you could announce you know over your pa and this is one on

a song called such and such from the new beatles album which is out today and you

and it was you know it would be massively exciting exciting

to play a really bad rendition with all the wrong words and all the wrong

chords, but all you could have managed to pick up in one, maybe two listens.

Can we hear some of Jerk as well? Have you got any...? You can hear a bit of my

embarrassment. This is me singing a cover of a... ..of a song by Manfred

Mann.

oh yeah four seasons substantially on this three by then

focusing

on this popular stuff dissecting it and working out how all the harmonies work

how all the instrumentation was done and how it was produced.

This is my musical education, really.

My parents came to shows. I mean, they, you know, would drive me to things, you

know, in the early days when I couldn't get myself to places they would take me.

Sometimes they even towed a cart full of equipment on a trailer to gigs.

And they became big fans, you know.

Couldn't get away from him later on.

So there was Joker's Wild and then, of course, there was Pink Floyd.

Joker's Wild had done a few gigs on the same bill with the early version of Pink

Floyd. We'd played in a couple of art colleges in London and a couple of gigs

in Cambridge and we played in a marquee in...

Shelter just outside Cambridge and it was the bills Joker's Wild Pink Floyd

and Paul Simon So what next after I packed up with Joker's Wild

I started moving between London and Cambridge a lot and Some people I ran

into in London and offered me a job With a band in the nightclub in Santa Chen in

France Then we just hung around in France for the best part of the next

year And then, you lucky chap, you got to work with Brigitte Bardot.

Yes. I went in and sang a couple of songs on a film, for a film soundtrack,

which was called Two Weeks In September, which starred Mike Sarn and Brigitte

Bardot. I've never heard them since.

I hope you haven't found them.

I think we may have done.

In my small country Working all day Until the

night They had no worries

I don't think they're dancing to this track at all. They're dancing it a

different way.

More questions.

I just, you know, turned up in a studio in Paris and sang the words they put in

front of me and went home.

How did joining Floyd happen?

Because it was really to do partly with Sid's sort of inconsistency or whatever

you want to call it.

Well, Sid, you know, I knew the guys from The Pink Floyd.

pretty well i called sid and he invited me to go along to a recording session

they were recording see emily play but

he was very strange his you know the light had gone

out of his eyes he's monosyllabic and yeah it was it was very shocking

So how did this transition, how did it happen?

I went to see them playing at a party at the Royal College of Arts, just next

door to the Albert Hall.

And at that party, which must have been November maybe, Nick came up to me and

said, whispered in my ear quietly, if at some point soon, you know, we

asked you to join, what would you say?

And I said, well, I'd probably say yes.

We did five gigs together as a five-piece, which was pretty strange, I

can tell you. And then one day we were going to play, I think it was at

Southampton University, with T-Rex and people, Tyrannosaurus Rex then, on the

bill. And someone said, right, shall we go and pick up Sid? And someone else

said, nah.

And we didn't, and that was the end of that.

In that sort of wonderful, callous way that you have when you're...

young and ambitious were you as bad as the others i'm sure i was just as bad as

the others yes

we

became gradually more and more successful there was five years really

from when i joined to when dark side came out which was then the sort of

stratospheric leap happened and loved, you know, the so-called

glamour of the life that I had taken on. My father less so,

only because it could have emasculated him a little bit.

A serious scientist doing brilliant work, but not earning anything like as

much as his guitar-strumming son.

And the thrill my mother got out of that couldn't have been...

That nice for him at times, I mean.

Can we run back and drop in a bit?

Yeah, you can if you like. Just turn it down a bit. I mean, I didn't really make

a specific mistake, but...

And that working relationship at that time between you and Roger and Rick and

everyone, how was that at that period?

It was a sort of a microcosm of what went on later, you know. We all found

our place in the hierarchy.

and and made it work for ourselves you know um you call it a hierarchy well it

is i mean these things always have a hierarchy i think um is roger at the top

me next then rick then nick in terms of who did the most commanding bossing

things around but i felt that in my position i was sort of more the leader

of the musical side of things and roger was definitely

in terms of the lyric and the driving force sort of way it was.

We have some pretty good arguments from time to time, yes.

You managed to get over them?

Yeah, we're pretty durable.

I never had that moment of thinking, no, I really am a part of this fully. I

always thought that I was the new boy, and they enjoyed that.

They enjoyed playing on that.

Yes, I mean, but, you know, in that sort of jokey way that you do, you know, they

would always tease me for being the nude boy, even when I'd been in it for 20

years, you know.

And what about the next stage, you know, post Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You

Were Here? What happened after that?

Well, you know, that's ancient history.

All that old ancient Floyd history, the arguments, the fights and...

Well, you can get over it.

We did get on pretty well as work people, as work associates,

if you want to call it that, throughout those years. But there were changes, you

know. Everyone's little problems and dissatisfactions all

started coming more and more to the fore.

Boring. Let's move on to something else.

In September 2009, David Gilmour's friend and musical partner, Rick Wright

of Pink Floyd, sadly passed away after a long illness.

Let's do A Boat Lies Waiting.

The

first

song to be written was A Boat Lies Waiting.

It was a beautiful piece of music. It was instantly sort of suggestive of

something to do with the sea.

And I went for a walk with it in my headphones and then I walked back and

David was walking towards me and I said, just come and sit on the beach with me.

I just want to talk to you about this piece of music. And I said, so David,

just try to put into words for me what you think it's about.

And he sort of stared off into the distance and then he looked at me and

said, well...

think it's about mortality and what what had just been happening was he'd been

trying to find other keyboard players and he'd you know come back having tried

a few out and say it's just not the same it's just and i think he realized you

know really after rick died just what it was he'd lost and so that then sort of

mixed with this idea of the sea and rick spent most of his life on a boat sailing

the atlantic and so the song became a song about david missing rick this is

the original recording

This is Gabriel making an appearance.

So that dates this track to 1997, cos that's Gabriel as a baby and he was born

in 97.

What made you put that in? Did you add that later? No. That was here. That I

did on a minidisc on the piano in the house. Yeah. And you can hear people

wandering around and crockery being washed up.

And you've left all that on the track?

Yeah. Yeah, it's all on.

Silence,

I hear you, and the boat lies waiting.

On the last album, On An Island, I...

I managed to get David Crosby and Graham Nash to sing on a couple of tracks from

that. So I thought it would be great to get them in again and to recreate their

sound with me because we seem to fit quite well together.

And that big harmony thing is something I've always really loved.

Something I never knew In silence

I hear

The first solo album that I did in 1978 wasn't what I was going to be then

subsequently doing as my career. It was something to

Fill in a bit of loose end time and to just have some fun all of mushrooms

That

was

to Take a simpler approach just go with a couple of old friends and just play

some songs And have a bit of fun and see what happened

I mean, these things were really off the cuff. They would just sit down, play

around for a bit and say, all right, record.

But the last thing I did was what became Comfortably Numb.

We didn't have time to work on it anymore, and it was still around when we

got to starting The Wall the next year.

So this is the original recording?

Yeah.

I'm just the same as all the rest

I'm not the worst, I'm not

the best God, I'd forgotten I'd written words, even, of some sort

Run out of...

There's nothing to live and nothing to die for

There is no future no past to cry

for I'm just dust floating away

on the wind

Actually, I wrote Comfortably Numb on that guitar.

On this guitar?

Almost an honour.

Do you think that your solo songs draw on a more emotional side of yourself?

It's hard to say. I don't know.

Oh, yeah.

Wait.

Somewhere around here.

His emotional centre is...musical.

It isn't... You know, most of us express our, you know, anger, love, hate, you

know, whatever it is, we express it in words.

And David really, really doesn't, but he does express it musically.

And I don't know whether, you know, what came first.

You know, did the language part of his brain not evolve because the musical

part of his brain was so busy, or was he just born?

with a brain that worked in that way it's really hard to know but it's

certainly true that emotion for him is expressed musically every once in a

while an idea will force its way to the surface of my mind that i

will try to write a lyric a song about but i've got no way of predicting where

that's going to go in the future i keep thinking

That there is a little door and a little key that would That I could open and I

will suddenly Find a way that would make it slightly simpler for me to move those

things forward and to find them Because there's plenty to write about but I

haven't yet really pinned that down You

wrote the lyrics for faces of stone yourself didn't you yeah What prompted

it? Faces of Stone was prompted by a memory of a day walking in Ladbroke

Gardens with my mother when she was suffering from dementia.

And she, as we were walking through the trees, under the trees in there, she was

saying, wasn't it lovely?

She could see pictures that weren't there, hanging in the trees.

that was the a moment that sparked it off and i had a line that went faces of

stone and that watched from the dark as the wind swirled around

and you took my arm in the park so it's basically about my mother's decline um

and you know the ending of one life in the beginning of another because um

romany was born nine months before my mother died so there was a short period

where they were both alive together and um she came back to our

house and held romany in her arms as a tiny baby um and i have a picture of

that and so the moment in the park which is a mental picture and the picture that

i have of her holding romany around sort of sparked a little thing which became

that lyric so this is some of the um what became faces of stone

Well, this has got the original vocal that I did on my iPhone late one night,

which is where the lyric spark came from.

your Hollywood smile shone a light on

the past but it was the future that

you held so tight to your heart

I suppose when you write a song about something specific that has got some

emotional content over that one, Faces of Stone, that is related to my mother

and her declining years, yeah, there's an emotional thing in there.

I mean, our relationship was very difficult and tricky and

it's... It's good at the moment, right now, to be putting that back into a

slightly different perspective.

Trying to find the affection that was there.

I must have loved her, but a lot of the time it didn't feel like I did.

Do you miss her?

Do I miss my mother?

No.

No, I don't miss her, I don't think, no.

It wasn't a closely knit emotional type family. And when my mother wanted

to be closer when she was getting old, I found it difficult to deal with. I just

wanted to get off, get off, leave me alone.

Now is not the time to be trying to do this. The time to be doing that stuff

was when I was five.

It's just days away from his first live show and David and the band are catching

up rehearsing new songs and old

And tell me about playing live, because you haven't played live for a while. Do

you enjoy the experience of playing?

Yes, yes, it's terrific.

It's almost like a completely different thing, though, to recording in the

studio, where you slave away a hermit, like, for years and years, perfecting

little things.

This, you have to do the work in this rehearsal room, getting it as good as

you can get it, but then you bash it out, and mistakes don't matter, you

know, as long as you get...

the right overall feel and excitement and emotional depth to what you're

doing. The performance is a great part of it.

There's a lot that he has to do to be the front man on the show.

It's a big job, being David Gilmour.

And here we are in Croatia.

I've never played in Croatia before.

Never been here, but the Romans got everywhere.

Beautiful, isn't it? It is.

How did you find this place?

Well, I set my team off onto finding beautiful places, you know.

I just think it's fantastic for people's memories of an event to be something

special, not be just another sports arena or stadium, you know.

They're going to go away again afterwards, assuming I do a reasonably

good show.

They're going to go away and they're going to remember it, partly because of

the place and the setting they were in.

And then from here you go...

Here we're off to Italy, then off to France, and then off to Germany. And

then we'll be back to London, where we'll do some more days at the Albert

Hall. And then we'll have a little break.

And after this school term is over, we'll head to South America.

The school term sort of comes in the middle of it, because you've got to be

in London for the school term. I want to be around and not be too absent.

I've had my moment, you know.

of doing all those things and letting my career come first but um i'm established

i think aren't i yeah there are some performers for whom the crowd is

incredibly important but i sense that it's not just about the excitement of

the crowd it's more about the the moment and the music is that it is and well we

try very hard to get the music really

heartfelt when we do it, but you can never get above sort of 70% or something

without an audience.

Whatever you do in rehearsal, there's a whole massive lift of gear when there's

an audience.

And for everyone, for me, definitely.

It's likely to be slightly less perfect, but more fun.

Now come on, guard the meat.

Don't eat the meat.

No, I'll guard it in my stomach very well.

There's potato salad over here.

I'm a control freak. I I confess I can't do anything about it. I try to stop but

I Just am that person who?

Does want to man the barbecue and does want to do like the fire and do all

those things Do

you have any regrets can you get through life without

regrets I believe you can I got

Tons of regrets.

Tons of regrets. I mean, all that silly song.

I've got a few, but then again, too few to mention.

I've got many regrets.

But you get on, don't you?

There are things I could have done better, things I should have done

better.

What is your favourite musical memory?

Oh, God.

There are just... far far too many i mean um i did play at a les paul tribute

once in new york in the 80s i think it was and i was playing a blues number and

bb king sort of wandered into the room and stood on the side and at the end of

the song he came up to me and said um hey boy you sure you wasn't born in

mississippi

Then you can stop

She knows how to seize her moment I go