david gilmour on an island tour

David Gilmour on His New LP ‘Luck and Strange,’ and Plans for Upcoming Tour

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

I n January 2007, a few months after the conclusion of the On an Island tour, David Gilmour and members of his road band, including Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, convened in a drafty barn on his U.K. property to try out some new song ideas. “I hadn’t thought this all the way through,” Gilmour says. “It was fuckin’ freezing in there. But we spent 15 minutes working on this tiny, little riff I wrote on the guitar. They all joined in one by one.”

The sketch of a song was little more than a memory for Gilmour over the past 17 years, even though it marked one of the final times he played with Wright, who died of lung cancer in September 2008. But when he started amassing new songs a couple years ago, his mind drifted back to that tape. Working alongside Polly Samson, his wife and longtime lyricist, and producer Charlie Andrew, he fleshed out the song into the title track of his new LP Luck and Strange , due out Sept. 6.

The death of Wright coupled with Gilmour’s complete estrangement from Roger Waters means that Pink Floyd are likely to forever remain a memory from the increasingly distant past. But unlike Nick Mason, whose touring group Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets plays nothing but vintage tunes from the pre- Dark Side of the Moo n era, Gilmour is looking only forward.

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You’ve been fairly inactive these past eight years. At the end of the most recent tour in 2016, did any part of you think you might be retired? No, I don’t think I ever thought that, really. It just takes a while to recharge. I’m not one of these people that wants to be out on the road constantly. I’ve got a lovely family. I’ve got some lovely green fields to walk around in. I thought that I was always going to do something again, but quite what and when, who knows? The whole lockdown thing got in the way, really. I suppose I could say it helped focus the mind, because we were trapped.

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And I had some pieces of music that I had previously worked on, and I was writing new pieces of music. Things were going quite slow for a little while. But then we went and stayed in a small house in North London, where we would do five-day working weeks. I had a room with a little mini studio built in it, and Polly had a writing room, and basically we just really, really worked, and started getting this thing to take shape in its demo form from ’22, ’23. And then we got to that point where we could put the team together, and get studios booked. Many of the lyrics reference aging and mortality. Were those themes there from the very start? It was there from the start. All those issues were the sort of issues and topics we had been talking about, her and me, and sometimes with the wider family. As we went through lockdown, we were talking about, “God, this virus could practically wipe the world out,” and it set us thinking about all the various things that were coming down and hanging over our heads.

You brought in Charlie Andrew to produce the record. How did he change the way you usually work? Well, he’s a younger person. He comes from a different era, and a different whole background. He certainly didn’t know very much about baby boomer stuff that had come quite a long time before him. And he was in the middle of his whole scene, which is all sorts of other people like alt-J that he worked with, and Marika Hackman, and loads of other music that I was blind to. And he was kind of blind to mine.

You cover “Between Two Points” by the Montgolfier Brothers. Most people aren’t familiar with that song. What drew you to it? That song is on a couple of playlists on my phone, and it keeps coming up on our car journeys. And one day I thought I might just muck about with it in the studio and see what happened. I quickly realized the lyric was a vulnerable type of lyric that would suit an old warhorse like me. And Romany, Polly and I both, more or less at the same moment, thought, “Let’s get Romany to give it a try.”

She must have heard the song once or twice in her life on our playlists, but she didn’t really know it at all. I just gave her the lyrics on a piece of paper and stuck her in front of her mic. She’s a true pro with the microphone, has been since she was three. And basically the vocal that you hear on that track is her first take all the way. I mean, obviously there’s a tiny bit of repair and stuff going on, but basically that’s what it is.

On “Luck and Strange,” Polly is clearly writing about the impact of your generation. The sentiment of that song is the idea that us baby boomers, the post-war generation, and we thought that the wars were over. We thought we were moving into sort of a golden age. Our prime minister back in those days, Harold Macmillan, his famous phrase was, “You’ve never had it so good.” It was so wonderful to live through…and the experience of people who were in all these rock bands, being able to do the touring, it was a beautiful, lovely thing. Is that moment that we’ve been living through the norm, or is that moment a moment, and that moment is gone or going? And I’m tending to look at the world, as is Polly, with the more jaundiced eye that maybe we are moving back into a darker time. What do they call it, post-truth? I don’t know.

Is “The Piper’s Call” a callback in any way to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn , the first Pink Floyd record? No. It’s a different piper I think. You can’t stay away from things just because they’re there. This is more Piper of Hamelin, I suppose. It’s a song about that “carpe diem attitude” and the spoils of fame, I think that’s probably directed at me, and all the temptations and fun of the rock & roll lifestyle that we all lived through, and where those are things to beware of getting too deeply involved in. The song “Sings” really sounds like an intimate conversation between you and Polly. I think that’s exactly right. A couple of them are slightly odd since they sound like I’ve written them and I’m saying them to her, but she’s written them and she’s saying them to herself. There’s a bit of the song where you can hear my son, who is now 29, saying “Sing, Daddy sing,” when he was an infant. It was recorded on a mini disc player in 1997. We floated that in towards the end. I love that song. “Scattered” was written by you, Polly, and your son Charlie. How did that happen? I wrote a lyric first and my lyric was a bit…you could say scattered. I seemed to have three topics going on in parallel, and Polly thought we should focus on one direction, and we thought we’d ask our boy Charlie to have a go. He came up with a sort of King Canute-like thing, the person trying to hold back the tide, which leads you into all sorts of strange trains of thought. Polly came in and helped with brilliance and expertise to get it finished.

You said earlier this year that you had an “unwillingness to revisit the Pink Floyd of the Seventies” of this tour. Is that still your mindset, no Seventies Floyd? One has to wake up to reality once in a while. I think I will be doing one or two things from that time, but it just seems so long ago. I know people love them, and I love playing them. I’ll be doing “Wish You Were Here,” of course I will. And some of the things that started with me anyway. You’ve never played a solo gig in your life where you didn’t play “Comfortably Numb.” Will that be in the setlist? Yeah, quite likely. Quite likely. How about songs like “Breathe,” “Time,” and “Money?” I don’t think I’ll be doing “Money.” If that’s your reason for coming… Are you going to play the entire new record? Not in one piece. I haven’t really worked it out yet. We haven’t started rehearsals. I’ve started working on set lists and how I want the show to progress, but it’s not set in stone yet.

You said earlier this year that your last band started feeling like a Pink Floyd tribute act. What made you feel that way? I changed one or two people during the middle of my last tour, because I was feeling the weight a bit, a little bit more, and I wanted them to carry more of the weight. I wanted to be sort of floating on a cushion of air above all these people who are doing the hard work. And so I can just concentrate on singing and playing my bit. And also, not sticking quite so slavishly to the original records. I wanted people to feel a little bit more freedom, and make the music actually alive.

It’s a very tricky thing to do, because the people coming to see the shows pretty much want all the songs to be identical to the way they are on the record. And the musicians obviously want to stray from that. I want to stray from that. It’s a little juggling act, where you have to try and stick with keeping all the important stuff and having a bit more freedom to go sideways.

Nick Mason has spent the last few years playing shows with his band Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. Have you seen them yet? I haven’t seen it myself, no. I love the fact that he’s doing it. I don’t know what to say about that really, exactly. I tend to think that they will be coming from it different compared to the way we did it at the time. I’m all for him doing it. I think it’s great, and he’s having a great time, and that’s absolutely the way it should be.

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Do you think this could be your last tour? Well, it could be, obviously. Do you think it will be? I’ll tell you after the tour.

Let’s end by talking about “Yes, I Have Ghosts.” It’s a bonus song on the new album that really sums things up. You sing “Yes, I have ghosts, not all of them dead/And they dance by the moon/Millstones white as the sheet on my bed.” That’s a song that Polly and I wrote, which was directly influenced by and concerned with the story of her book that came out in 2020, A Theater for Dreamers . As I said earlier, we were going to do some shows around the country where we were going to do one or two Leonard Cohen covers, because he was a part of that story. And we wrote that song really to put it into those shows and have an extra piece of music for that. But it’s not been out on an album yet. And we both really like it. So we thought that could be one of the sort of extra things that we put on this album. It’s amazing to think that you’ve been creating music with Polly for over 30 years now. It’s lasted a lot longer than your partnership with that other guy. Polly and I have been working together on these things for 32 years. In fact, it’s our 30th wedding anniversary next week. Congratulations. Thank you. And as you correctly point out, it’s much longer than we spent with that other guy. And things are in a much better place with her than with him. I couldn’t agree more. 1000 percent.

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David Gilmour’s On an Island Tour

Just a few hours before David Gilmour hits the stage in one of the most anticipated shows to come to the United States this spring, front of house engineer

By David John Farinella

Just a few hours before David Gilmour hits the stage in one of the most anticipated shows to come to the United States this spring, front of house engineer Colin Norfield and monitor engineer John Roden are sitting in the plush seats of the Paramount Theater (Oakland, Calif.) and laughing.

Any other audio duo might be a tad nervous before a show of this stature, but Norfield and Roden have been around the block; Norfield mixed the last Pink Floyd tour 12 years ago. They also know they have a team of seasoned veterans, both onstage and in support positions, and they have already worked one of the hardest shows of the tour.

“We rehearsed the band for a week and then we did David’s birthday party — a private gig in front of his peers. It was a bit brave of him and it was a bit brave for us,” Roden recalls while pointing to Norfield, “because we were off the stage side by side.”

“I couldn’t hear anything,” Norfield adds with his own laugh, “and I spent the night leaning over the console.”

After the birthday gig at Porchester Hall in London, the cast and crew of the On An Island tour made their way from Germany to France and Italy before North American dates in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles. Gilmour’s touring band includes keyboardist/singer Richard Wright (who sang the lead on Pink Floyd’s first single “Arnold Layne,” which was performed for the first time since 1969), guitarist (and Gilmour’s co-producer) Phil Manzanera, bassist Guy Pratt, keyboardist Jon Carin and drummer Steve DiStanislao.

The jump across the pond was made a bit easier by the fact that they carried the same gear in the States as they did overseas. “We are both running [DiGiCo] D5s,” Roden reports. “Colin has the same [Turbosound] Aspect P.A. and I’ve got the same Turbo wedges [TFM-420s and TFM-450s]. Of course, the amps are different and the power is different, but in theory, it’s the same gig. At the end of the day, it was the most sensible option, because at least there is some consistency to what the musicians see and hear coming off of the back of the cabinets.”

At FOH, Norfield is using a D5 and outboard gear that includes a TC Electronic M6000, TC’s D-Two and three Yamaha SPX990s. “That’s about it,” he says. “My view of all gigs is simplicity, because the simpler you make it, the more you can concentrate on mixing and not messing around with other stuff.”

Indeed, other than standard delays and reverbs that come from the players themselves, the only time that Norfield played up an effected track was when Gilmour sang “Coming Back to Life” and a delay was used in the first chorus. He doesn’t believe it’s his job to alter the band’s sound to his ear. “Everything comes from the band, and to mess around with it too much would change the thing it’s about. The dynamics are coming from the band, and I deal with it as it comes. I just put it in its right place, but the actual essence comes from the band. It would be wrong for me to try and change that.”

The Turbosound Aspect system was selected before rehearsals started. “David told me he didn’t really like line array systems, so my options were really cut down because that’s all there was out there,” Norfield says. “We used a Turbosound Flashlight/Floodlight combination on the last tour, and we went down and did an A/B comparison with the new stuff. It’s nice. The high end is lovely and the top is very sweet. It’s working very well.”

FOH engineer Colin Norfield at the D5

photo: Steve Jennings

Norfield went conventional while miking the band, putting a Shure Beta SM91 and Beta 52 on kick, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, an SM57 on snare, and Beta 98s on the Roto Toms; hi-hats are miked with an SM81, with AKG 414s on overheads. Shure KSM-32s are on guitar cabinets (for Gilmour and Manzanera). The bass inputs are direct, and the pair of Leslie cabinets (both Wright and Carin each use one) are miked with a 421 on the bottom of the Leslie and a 57 on the top. The sax microphone is also a Sennheiser 421. All of the vocal mics are Neumann KSM-105s.

Norfield has a stock of dbx 166 compressor/limiters, dbx 160As and Drawmer DS-201 noise gates, but they are used sparingly. “The more open the better,” he says. “I’m pretty well known for open mixing and I try not to do too much. There’s not much compression, because everyone is singing — nobody’s really screaming.”

Roden selected a D5 on monitors because he looked at the tour and realized, “big input, no room. I think we’re both using the digital formats because of the limitations we’ve been given. It would not have been my first choice. If we were doing stadiums or arenas, I would probably have been using a couple of Midas H-3000s, but we just don’t have the space.”

The power of the D5 also gives a number of options, yet Roden points out he’s mixing in a very analog way. “I’m not using any of the preset scenes. The basic thing is exactly the same on each song, but because of way they play, Rick [Wright] might get excited one night and you’ll get loads of level off the Leslie, and one night he might not be quite so excited. You can put yourself in the ballpark, but it’s not a machine playing. They are human beings and they make mistakes and we make mistakes and hopefully they make more than we do,” he says with a laugh.

There was no talk of using personal monitors on Gilmour. “What I do for David is very simple: vocal, acoustic guitar, a couple of cues here and there,” says Roden. “When he plays the guitar, he puts himself in a spot that’s sweet for him, where he can hear everything he needs to hear, and plays — letting the band do all the work. He finds that sweet spot.” The only person using a personal monitor — and only in one ear — is the drummer.

Monitor engineer John Roden

Of course, the use of wedges has caused Norfield some worry at FOH. “I did mention my concerns at rehearsal about volume at some of the venues, but after that it’s up to me to deal with it,” he explains.

As the clock ticks closer to showtime, Roden and Norfield think about the impact of this tour as well as Gilmour’s catalog of songs on the fans. “When we were in Toronto, there was a woman who cried through every Pink Floyd song that David played,” Roden remembers.

“People go right back to where they were when they heard these songs,” Norfield adds. “When ‘Wish You Were Here’ comes on, people go back 30 years. They aren’t here anymore.”

David John Farinella is a San Francisco — based writer.

David Gilmour

June 1, 2006

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How David Gilmour Found Happiness With ‘On an Island’

By the late '90s, David Gilmour had earned the sort of financial stability that affords an artist enough freedom to take as long as they like between projects. He took full advantage, allowing his solo career to lay fallow for more than 20 years while only sporadically pursuing Pink Floyd as a part-time occupation.

In fact, Gilmour didn't get around to releasing his third solo album, On an Island , until March 2006 — decades after his most recent solo effort, 1984's About Face , and more than 10 years after after Pink Floyd's The Division Bell . The lengthy downtime was driven by a number of factors, including Gilmour's growing thirst for life away from the spotlight — and the creative and personal struggles he endured with his former Pink Floyd partner Roger Waters .

"The first one was just a quick blast. [...] It was really off the top of our heads. It was fun – comparatively, compared to Pink Floyd," Gilmour told Record Collector . "The last solo album in 1984 was at a time when we knew Roger wasn't going to be part of anything we did, but before he'd officially left. He had us trapped in limbo. I was putting my toe in the water. Then he left and I was unencumbered and carried on doing Pink Floyd. There didn't seem to be any reason to do a solo project."

Gilmour resumed his solo recording activity in 2001, collecting song fragments in his private recording studio on board the houseboat Astoria. "It's lovely to be here, you know," he later said of the studio, which he purchased in 1986 and used for The Division Bell and its Pink Floyd predecessor, 1987's A Momentary Lapse of Reason . "To have the water gently drifting past us and all that, and I like to have windows. You know I've spent rather too much time in studios and most of them don't have windows, and I can't stand being in places that don't have windows."

That gently drifting feeling couldn't help but seep into On an Island . Although Gilmour had never been known for favoring uptempo material, the songs he penned for the new album were among his most contemplative. The album's slow, introspective tone was further enhanced by orchestral arrangements courtesy of Polish film composer Zbigniew Prisoner. Working once again with his wife Polly Samson, who'd also contributed lyrics to The Division Bell , Gilmour turned to his past for the album's mood, if not the details.

"On On an Island I’ve gone back to my youth," Gilmour told Classic Rock magazine. "During that time, I was experiencing emotional isolation because my parents were more concerned with themselves than with their children. They were the kind of people who sent their little boys to summer camp while they went off to France or Italy on holiday. The moments of feeling totally isolated have now passed. As father of four young children, you hardly have any time for that."

Watch David Gilmour's 'On an Island' Video

After assembling the basic building blocks for On an Island , Gilmour reached out to his friend and neighbor, Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, for assistance with co-production. Manzanera's input helped speed the process along, but only so much. Eventually, both men became convinced they needed a third person's input, and they drafted veteran producer Chris Thomas to serve as the third member of the records behind-the-boards triumvirate. Along the way, Manzanera and Thomas prodded Gilmour to send the project in directions he might not have taken on his own.

"The album was initially not only very acoustic, but also very orchestral," Manzanera told Sound on Sound . "I didn't think it was a brilliant idea to have so much orchestra, so it was diluted in the end. And finally, David's electric guitar solos were all done in ... the last month of recording. He left the electric stuff to the last moment, and I wasn't sure he wasn't going to do it at all. So, I was very pleased that we managed to get him back onto the electric guitar, and he put some great things on."

In addition to production help, Gilmour enlisted guest performers who added to the array of instrumental tracks he'd already recorded during the demo process. Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright contributed to a pair of songs, lending Hammond organ to the title track and vocals to "The Blue," and former Squeeze keyboardist Jools Holland also numbered among those making On an Island cameos. David Crosby and Graham Nash also added harmony vocals to the title track.

The end result, while among the quieter and more deliberately paced albums in a catalog largely devoted to avoiding stereotypical rock 'n' roll flash, clearly resonated with fans who'd waited years for new music. The record shot to No. 1 in the U.K., giving Gilmour his first chart-topper at home as a solo artist, and peaked at No. 6 in the U.S.. That added a suitably sweet postscript to a set of songs that, as many listeners noted, found Gilmour settling into a sense of contentment that few might have expected decades before.

"You know, that is my life," Gilmour said with a shrug . "Down the years, along with everyone else, I have despised songs about happiness. But, to me, this works."  

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On an Island 2006

Read more: settings and setups

On an Island is David’s third solo album and like the first album, it feature many references to his musical roots and inspirations. It’s an honest and fairly laidback album allowing David’s tone and playing to shine without too much trickery.

The Black Strat is once again David’s main guitar but he also using a wide range of different instruments including acoustic slide guitars and saxophone.

Pete Cornish All Tubes MKI pedal board and additional effects recording sessions

Pedal board effects listed as in chain Demeter Compulator Pete Cornish G-2 Electro Harmonix Big Muff (Ram’s Head) Pete Cornish SS-2 Chandler Tube Driver Pete Cornish Tape Echo Simulator Pete Cornish Custom Stereo Chorus (modified Boss CE-2)

Additional units

Digitech WH-1 Whammy pedal E-Bow (A Pocket Full of Stones recording sessions) Tremolo effect (Take a Breath recording sessions) Ernie Ball volume pedals MXR Digital Delay System model II 2x Digitech IPS 33B harmonizer Peterson Conn Strobo tuner

Note: David is seen having several single stomp boxes laying around in the different studios while recording the album. It is likely that he used different effects or single pedals when required on the initial demo sessions and later recording sessions than what is listed above.

Pete Cornish All Tubes MKI pedal board

The pedal board dates from 1999 and was requested by David to be used for future guest appearances etc. The board featured Cornish custom tube preamps between each effect to ensure minimum signal loss. It could also perform in both stereo and mono.

Additionally the board was designed not to allow two distortion pedals to be engaged at once, only distortion+overdrive. The board was brought on a backup on the On an Island 2006 tour and later used for 2010 guest appearances.

Guitars and amps recording sessions

Fender Stratocaster The Black Strat – 1969 black alder body with black pickguard, Fender 1983 57 reissue maple neck and Fender 1971 neck and bridge pickups and a Seymour Duncan custom SSL-1 bridge pickup. Gibson Les Paul Gold Top – 1956 model with Gibson P-90 pickups and Bigsby tremolo system. Gretsch Duo Jet – 1950s model with Bigsby tremolo system. Fender Telecaster – Take a Breath recording sessions. Gibson early 1940s EH-150 lap steel Martin D-35 acoustic steel string guitar Martin 1945 D-18 acoustic steel string guitar Taylor Junior model acoustic steel string guitar – This Heaven recording sessions. Weissenborn acoustic slide guitar – Open Em chord tuning (E B E G B E) for Then I Close My Eyes and Smile. Cumbus guitar – Tuned as a guitar.

Hiwatt DR103 All Purpose 100W heads – with Mullard 4xEL34s power tubes and 4xECC83s pre-amp tubes. Modified for linked normal and brilliance inputs. Fender 1956 tweed Twin 40w combo – 2×12? Eminence speakers and 4x12AX7, 2xGT6L6 and 2x5U4 (rectifier) tubes. Hiwatt 1970s SA212 50W combo – 2×12? Fane Crescendo speakers and 2xEL34 and 4x12AX7 tubes. Modified to allow a normal and brilliant input combination. WEM Super Starfinder 200 cabinets – with 4×12? Fane Crescendo speakers. Alessandro Bluetick 20w head with 2×12? cabinet – Abbey Road recording sessions. Marshall 1960s model head

David is also seen stacking a huge variety of guitars and amps for the sessions and might have used different setups on both the initial demo sessions and recording sessions than what is listed here.

Guitar and amp setups

David used Herco Flex 75, D’Andrea custom 354s (white), Fender 354 (tortoise) and Fender 351 (medium) pics. All electric guitars were strung with GHS Boomers (custom set 0.10-0.48) and acoustics with Ernie Ball Lightwound strings.

David’s main setup for the sessions was a Fender Tweed mic’ed with a Shure SM57 slightly off center about 4 inches away and a Coles 4040 ribbon straight at the center of the cone (The Shure was mixed slightly higher). All instruments were connected with Evidence Audio speaker cables.

Acknowledgements and credits On an Island (album 2006), Remember That Night (concert film 2007), EMI EPK presentation, davidgilmour.com, demeteramps.com, tonefromheaven.com, Sound on Sound Magazine (2006) and The Black Strat A History of David Gilmour’s black Fender Stratocaster by Phil Taylor. Thanks to Rafal Zychal, Martin Campbell, John Roscoe and Tony Farinella for help with research.

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David Gilmour, 'On an Island'

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"high hopes".

"On an Island"

"Take a Breath"

"Comfortably Numb"

David Gilmour is definitely most well known for his part in Pink Floyd. Gilmour had been friends with Roger 'Syd' Barrett since they met as children in Cambridge. Syd joined Pink Floyd with Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, but the other band members asked Gilmour to supplement the band when Syd was sidelined by severe mental illness. Gilmour guitar was integral on such releases as Dark Side of the Moon and A Momentary Lapse of Reason .

Gilmour was born in 1946 in Cambridge. His father was a professor at Cambridge and his mother was a teacher. Gilmour released his first solo album in 1978 in the midst of his Pink Floyd career and another in 1984. He has also collaborated with many other artists including Kate Bush, Paul McCartney, and Pete Townshend.

His latest release is a new solo album, On an Island . Its March release date was accompanied by an international tour of both the United Kingdom and the United States.

This segment originally aired on May 6, 2006.

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David Gilmour on His New LP ‘Luck and Strange,’ and Plans for Upcoming Tour

The guitarist changed his mind about performing Seventies Pink Floyd songs after initially ruling them out. “One has to wake up to reality once in a while,” he says

Anton Corbijn

In January 2007, a few months after the conclusion of the  On an Island  tour,  David Gilmour  and members of his road band, including  Pink Floyd  keyboardist Richard Wright, convened in a drafty barn on his U.K. property to try out some new song ideas. “I hadn’t thought this all the way through,” Gilmour says. “It was fuckin’ freezing in there. But we spent 15 minutes working on this tiny, little riff I wrote on the guitar. They all joined in one by one.”

The sketch of a song was little more than a memory for Gilmour over the past 17 years, even though it marked one of the final times he played with Wright, who died of lung cancer in September 2008. But when he started amassing new songs a couple years ago, his mind drifted back to that tape. Working alongside Polly Samson, his wife and longtime lyricist, and producer Charlie Andrew, he fleshed out the song into the title track of his new LP  Luck and Strange , due out Sept. 6.

“That song started developing a depth that I’d forgotten about,” Gilmour says. “The playing on it is unmistakably Richard. He was a true, lovely, creative person, and people like that are hard to find.”

The  death of Wright  coupled with Gilmour’s complete estrangement from Roger Waters means that Pink Floyd are likely to forever remain a memory from the increasingly distant past. But unlike Nick Mason, whose touring group Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets plays nothing but vintage tunes from the pre- Dark Side of the Moo n era, Gilmour is looking only forward.

He spoke with  Rolling Stone  via Zoom from his home studio in the southern English countryside, surrounded by keyboards, and priceless vintage guitars. The conversation touched on everything from the creation of  Luck and Strange  to recording songs with his daughter Romany, his upcoming tour where he’ll  reluctantly play  a smattering of Seventies Floyd songs, his eternal war with Waters, the possibility of selling the band’s catalog, and why the thought of a Pink Floyd biopic hasn’t even crossed his mind.

You’ve been fairly inactive these past eight years. At the end of the most recent tour in 2016, did any part of you think you might be retired? No, I don’t think I ever thought that, really. It just takes a while to recharge. I’m not one of these people that wants to be out on the road constantly. I’ve got a lovely family. I’ve got some lovely green fields to walk around in. I thought that I was always going to do something again, but quite what and when, who knows? The whole lockdown thing got in the way, really. I suppose I could say it helped focus the mind, because we were trapped.

At the height of the lockdown, you started doing those family webcasts to promote Polly’s novel,  A Theatre for Dreamers . But they became a great way for fans to get to know your entire family, and hear them sing. Those events helped focus the mind, and that’s when we started trying to put things together. We were trapped. That’s why we called it the Von Trapped Experience, a joke on the old  Sound of Music  thing. It got us into thinking what fun it could be making some music together. It certainly started pretty much with Leonard Cohen covers, but that was lovely in itself, because my daughter Romany’s voice and mine just seemed to merge very well, and all these things have moved forward into where we went from that point.

As the lockdown started to end, how did your mind start shifting to making a new record? We actually locked ourselves down, almost completely, for basically two years. We were very, very nervous about getting out and getting Covid. We didn’t succeed in not getting Covid of course, but all the discussions that went on about this Sword of Damocles that’s hanging over our heads during that time went into this album. We were also talking about getting older. Polly’s such a good writer and thinker about these things, and she gets into people’s heads. Those were the sorts of things that pushed us into working together again.

And I had some pieces of music that I had previously worked on, and I was writing new pieces of music. Things were going quite slow for a little while. But then we went and stayed in a small house in North London, where we would do five-day working weeks. I had a room with a little mini studio built in it, and Polly had a writing room, and basically we just really, really worked, and started getting this thing to take shape in its demo form from ’22, ’23. And then we got to that point where we could put the team together, and get studios booked. Many of the lyrics reference aging and mortality. Were those themes there from the very start? It was there from the start. All those issues were the sort of issues and topics we had been talking about, her and me, and sometimes with the wider family. As we went through lockdown, we were talking about, “God, this virus could practically wipe the world out,” and it set us thinking about all the various things that were coming down and hanging over our heads.

You brought in Charlie Andrew to produce the record. How did he change the way you usually work? Well, he’s a younger person. He comes from a different era, and a different whole background. He certainly didn’t know very much about baby boomer stuff that had come quite a long time before him. And he was in the middle of his whole scene, which is all sorts of other people like alt-J that he worked with, and Marika Hackman, and loads of other music that I was blind to. And he was kind of blind to mine.

How did you find him? I was hunting through my mind for someone that I could collaborate with in that way. And no one that I could think of seemed to be quite the perfect choice. Polly, who is an ace researcher, went online and looked up people. She had me listen to the music that these people had been involved with in one way or another. And Charlie Andrew and his work stood out from everything. We rang him up, and he seemed very keen to do the album. That has been an absolutely thrilling experience, because he’s a bit of a tyrant. He really pushes us to get things done. And if you haven’t got it at first, you try again. On the other end of the age spectrum, Steve Gadd plays on the album too. I had already booked Steve Gadd for a week before Christmas, before I had a producer in place. But because Steve Gadd is the legend that he is, Charlie was very pleased with that. But in the meantime, we went into the studio with a couple of other younger musicians as well. Adam Betts on the drums, Tom Herbert playing bass, this lovely guy, Rob Gentry playing keyboards. They and Charlie pushed me to my limits, and it moved forward in a brilliant way.

You cover “Between Two Points” by the Montgolfier Brothers. Most people aren’t familiar with that song. What drew you to it? That song is on a couple of playlists on my phone, and it keeps coming up on our car journeys. And one day I thought I might just muck about with it in the studio and see what happened. I quickly realized the lyric was a vulnerable type of lyric that would suit an old warhorse like me. And Romany, Polly and I both, more or less at the same moment, thought, “Let’s get Romany to give it a try.”

She must have heard the song once or twice in her life on our playlists, but she didn’t really know it at all. I just gave her the lyrics on a piece of paper and stuck her in front of her mic. She’s a true pro with the microphone, has been since she was three. And basically the vocal that you hear on that track is her first take all the way. I mean, obviously there’s a tiny bit of repair and stuff going on, but basically that’s what it is.

On “Luck and Strange,” Polly is clearly writing about the impact of your generation. The sentiment of that song is the idea that us baby boomers, the post-war generation, and we thought that the wars were over. We thought we were moving into sort of a golden age. Our prime minister back in those days, Harold Macmillan, his famous phrase was, “You’ve never had it so good.” It was so wonderful to live through…and the experience of people who were in all these rock bands, being able to do the touring, it was a beautiful, lovely thing. Is that moment that we’ve been living through the norm, or is that moment a moment, and that moment is gone or going? And I’m tending to look at the world, as is Polly, with the more jaundiced eye that maybe we are moving back into a darker time. What do they call it, post-truth? I don’t know.

Is “The Piper’s Call” a callback in any way to  The Piper at the Gates of Dawn , the first Pink Floyd record? No. It’s a different piper I think. You can’t stay away from things just because they’re there. This is more Piper of Hamelin, I suppose. It’s a song about that “carpe diem attitude” and the spoils of fame, I think that’s probably directed at me, and all the temptations and fun of the rock & roll lifestyle that we all lived through, and where those are things to beware of getting too deeply involved in. The song “Sings” really sounds like an intimate conversation between you and Polly. I think that’s exactly right. A couple of them are slightly odd since they sound like I’ve written them and I’m saying them to her, but she’s written them and she’s saying them to herself. There’s a bit of the song where you can hear my son, who is now 29, saying “Sing, Daddy sing,” when he was an infant. It was recorded on a mini disc player in 1997. We floated that in towards the end. I love that song. “Scattered” was written by you, Polly, and your son Charlie. How did that happen? I wrote a lyric first and my lyric was a bit…you could say scattered. I seemed to have three topics going on in parallel, and Polly thought we should focus on one direction, and we thought we’d ask our boy Charlie to have a go. He came up with a sort of King Canute-like thing, the person trying to hold back the tide, which leads you into all sorts of strange trains of thought. Polly came in and helped with brilliance and expertise to get it finished.

On the EPK, you said this is the best record you’ve made since  Dark Side of the Moon . What makes you feel that way? It’s a flip statement, really. I mean, it’s not like  Dark Side the Moon  is even my favorite album. I think I prefer  Wish You Were Here . Anyway, it feels to me like it’s the best thing I’ve done in more or less my living memory, because some of those things feel like they were someone else, back in those eons ago. I was in my 30s when Roger left our little pop group and I’m 78. Must feel like a lifetime ago. It seems so totally irrelevant to me now. How far along are the tour preparations? I have the band ready. Mostly the musicians who have been playing on the record are part of the new band. [Bassist] Guy Pratt is in the new band, of course. And [keyboardist] Greg Phillinganes is in it too, who did the last half of my 2015/16 tour. And I have Louise Marshall, one of the singers from the last time. But the other two singers I have this time are the Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie Webb, who toured extensively with Leonard Cohen. They’re English girls from not far away from where I live actually. And I have been able to persuade Romany to come and do a lead vocal on a few shows. I haven’t really worked out quite which ones she’ll be able to do. She’s at university studying in London, and so I don’t know that she’ll be able to do it all.

You said earlier this year that you had an “unwillingness to revisit the Pink Floyd of the Seventies” of this tour. Is that still your mindset, no Seventies Floyd? One has to wake up to reality once in a while. I think I will be doing one or two things from that time, but it just seems so long ago. I know people love them, and I love playing them. I’ll be doing “Wish You Were Here,” of course I will. And some of the things that started with me anyway. You’ve never played a solo gig in your life where you didn’t play “Comfortably Numb.” Will that be in the setlist? Yeah, quite likely. Quite likely. How about songs like “Breathe,” “Time,” and “Money?” I don’t think I’ll be doing “Money.” If that’s your reason for coming… Are you going to play the entire new record? Not in one piece. I haven’t really worked it out yet. We haven’t started rehearsals. I’ve started working on set lists and how I want the show to progress, but it’s not set in stone yet.

You said earlier this year that your last band started feeling like a Pink Floyd tribute act. What made you feel that way? I changed one or two people during the middle of my last tour, because I was feeling the weight a bit, a little bit more, and I wanted them to carry more of the weight. I wanted to be sort of floating on a cushion of air above all these people who are doing the hard work. And so I can just concentrate on singing and playing my bit. And also, not sticking quite so slavishly to the original records. I wanted people to feel a little bit more freedom, and make the music actually alive.

It’s a very tricky thing to do, because the people coming to see the shows pretty much want all the songs to be identical to the way they are on the record. And the musicians obviously want to stray from that. I want to stray from that. It’s a little juggling act, where you have to try and stick with keeping all the important stuff and having a bit more freedom to go sideways.

Nick Mason has spent the last few years playing shows with his band Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. Have you seen them yet? I haven’t seen it myself, no. I love the fact that he’s doing it. I don’t know what to say about that really, exactly. I tend to think that they will be coming from it different compared to the way we did it at the time. I’m all for him doing it. I think it’s great, and he’s having a great time, and that’s absolutely the way it should be.

I need to ask you about the other guy now. Back in 2010, you and Roger were on decent enough terms that you played a charity show together. You then guested at his  Wall  show in London. How did things go from there to the current impasse where you clearly aren’t on speaking terms? Well, it’s something I’ll talk about one day, but I’m not going to talk about that right now. It’s boring. It’s over. As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s, and I’m a pretty old chap now, and the relevance of it is not there. I don’t really know his work since. So I don’t have anything to say on the topic. When you and Polly sent out those Tweets last year, you must have known it was going to create an uproar. [On Feb. 6, 2023,  Samson Tweeted out:  “Sadly Roger Waters, you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”  Gilmour shared the Tweet and added , “Every word demonstrably true.] People talk about the battle, but to me it’s a one-way thing that’s been going on since he left with different levels of intensity, and Polly felt she had to say her piece. I agreed with her piece and said so. Again, that’s all. I don’t really have anything extra to add to this, any other lights to shine on that. There have been a lot of reports about the Pink Floyd catalog being sold. Is that still a possibility? Is it something that is still in discussion, yeah. Do you want to do it? To be rid of the decision making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going is my dream. If things were different… and I am not interested in that from a financial standpoint. I’m only interested in it from getting out of the mud bath that it has been for quite a while. I’m sure it’s challenging to get three “yes” votes for anything at this point. Well, that’s not actually the way it’s worked. It works on a veto system. You could say it’s three people saying yes, but one person saying no.

You and Nick revived the Pink Floyd name in 2022 when you made “Hey, Hey, Rise Up!” for Ukraine. Can you imagine bringing Pink Floyd back in the future for a one-off like that? It’s a strange old world we live in, and on there are things that crop up in life that you feel you have to do something about, and have to do something about now. And you might as well use what you’ve earned through your life to benefit causes that you believe in. So I never say never. Do you ever think about writing a memoir? People have asked me to, but it hasn’t so far tempted me. Maybe when I get a bit older I’ll think about them. There have been a flood of rock biopics recently. Can you imagine a Pink Floyd biopic where a young actor plays you? I’ve not actually given that a second’s thought. No, I don’t know about that. No one has really suggested it. If someone wanted to do one about Pink Floyd, I can’t quite imagine how they’d do it, but I don’t know what I’d say at that moment if it cropped up, but it hasn’t. You’re playing Madison Square Garden the night of the presidential election in America. Do you think the vibe in the room will be a little weird? Well, I wish I had known about the election night date before I booked those days in, and I think I’d have taken a day off on that day. Hey, but you Yanks have got to do what you’ve got to do. And that election is your business. And we’ve just had one here. I suppose, I like the idea of governments being run by grownups, and in Britain I think we’ve slightly moved in that direction, and we’ll see how you get on over there.

Do you think this could be your last tour? Well, it could be, obviously. Do you think it will be? I’ll tell you after the tour.

Let’s end by talking about “Yes, I Have Ghosts.” It’s a bonus song on the new album that really sums things up. You sing “Yes, I have ghosts, not all of them dead/And they dance by the moon/Millstones white as the sheet on my bed.” That’s a song that Polly and I wrote, which was directly influenced by and concerned with the story of her book that came out in 2020,  A Theater for Dreamers . As I said earlier, we were going to do some shows around the country where we were going to do one or two Leonard Cohen covers, because he was a part of that story. And we wrote that song really to put it into those shows and have an extra piece of music for that. But it’s not been out on an album yet. And we both really like it. So we thought that could be one of the sort of extra things that we put on this album. It’s amazing to think that you’ve been creating music with Polly for over 30 years now. It’s lasted a lot longer than your partnership with that other guy. Polly and I have been working together on these things for 32 years. In fact, it’s our 30th wedding anniversary next week. Congratulations. Thank you. And as you correctly point out, it’s much longer than we spent with that other guy. And things are in a much better place with her than with him. I couldn’t agree more. 1000 percent.

From Rolling Stone US.

• david gilmour

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David Gilmour changes his mind about playing Pink Floyd songs on tour

Pink Floyd ’s David Gilmour is set to launch a solo tour this fall in support of his upcoming solo album,  Luck and Strange , and it seems he’s changed his mind about whether he plans to play any  Pink Floyd songs on the trek.

Gilmour previously suggested in an interview he didn’t want to “revisit the Pink Floyd of the ’70s” on the tour, but it sounds like that’s no longer the case.  

“One has to wake up to reality once in a while,” he tells Rolling Stone . “I think I will be doing one or two things from that time, but it just seems so long ago.”

He adds, “I know people love them, and I love playing them. I’ll be doing ‘Wish You Were Here,’ of course I will. And some of the things that started with me anyway.”  

Gilmour also noted it’s “quite likely” the set will include “Comfortably Numb,” but probably not “Money” “if that’s your reason for coming.”

Gilmour also seems to be backtracking on previous comments he made suggesting Luck and Strange was the best album he’s made since Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic The Dark Side of The Moon .

“It’s a flip statement, really,” he says. “I mean, it’s not like  Dark Side the Moon  is even my favorite album. I think I prefer  Wish You Were Here .”

He adds, “Anyway, it feels to me like it’s the best thing I’ve done in more or less my living memory, because some of those things feel like they were someone else, back in those eons ago.”

Gilmour will release Luck and Strange on Sept. 6. He’ll launch his solo tour on Sept. 27 in Rome, Italy, with U.S. dates kicking off Oct. 25 in Los Angeles. A complete list of dates can be found at davidgilmour.com .

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David Gilmour changes his mind about playing Pink Floyd songs on tour

Pink Floyd ’s David Gilmour is set to launch a solo tour this fall in support of his upcoming solo album,  Luck and Strange , and it seems he’s changed his mind about whether he plans to play any  Pink Floyd songs on the trek.

Gilmour previously suggested in an interview he didn’t want to “revisit the Pink Floyd of the ’70s” on the tour, but it sounds like that’s no longer the case.  

“One has to wake up to reality once in a while,” he tells Rolling Stone . “I think I will be doing one or two things from that time, but it just seems so long ago.”

He adds, “I know people love them, and I love playing them. I’ll be doing ‘Wish You Were Here,’ of course I will. And some of the things that started with me anyway.”  

Gilmour also noted it’s “quite likely” the set will include “Comfortably Numb,” but probably not “Money” “if that’s your reason for coming.”

Gilmour also seems to be backtracking on previous comments he made suggesting Luck and Strange was the best album he’s made since Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic The Dark Side of The Moon .

“It’s a flip statement, really,” he says. “I mean, it’s not like  Dark Side the Moon  is even my favorite album. I think I prefer  Wish You Were Here .”

He adds, “Anyway, it feels to me like it’s the best thing I’ve done in more or less my living memory, because some of those things feel like they were someone else, back in those eons ago.”

Gilmour will release Luck and Strange on Sept. 6. He’ll launch his solo tour on Sept. 27 in Rome, Italy, with U.S. dates kicking off Oct. 25 in Los Angeles. A complete list of dates can be found at davidgilmour.com .

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

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