The 1969 Pink Floyd song David Gilmour never wanted to hear again: “We were at a loose end”
David Gilmour lived to experiment whenever he worked with Pink Floyd.
None of the band members signed up to make the same bog-standard rock and roll throughout their career, and half of the fun was hearing what new avenues they would go down on each one of their records. But long before they had the lavish concepts behind all of their songs, Gilmour was still woodshedding after being thrown into the deep end of the band the minute that Syd Barrett left the group.
It might sound strange now, but there was a period when Gilmour was being treated like a fill-in guitarist for a split second. The original plan was to have every member of the band work around Barrett as he sorted his mind out the same way that Brian Wilson had done, but the more that people were focusing on his decline, the more they seemed to realise that Gilmour was going to need to be there on a more permanent basis.
And when you have a guy that can sing like that, why would you not want him on your roster? He had one of the greatest guitar tones of all time, and when you listen to his voice, he was almost painting a picture of everything that Roger Waters was writing whenever he worked on Dark Side of the Moon. But Waters’s skills as a lyricist didn’t quite show themselves until they had the right idea to work with on ‘Echoes’.
That was one of their most ambitious projects to date, and when looking through every single one of their albums before that, it’s like night and day seeing them go through one of the biggest songs of their career and make the whole thing look easy. But they wouldn’t have reached that level had they not gone through the headache of fumbling around in the dark, looking for where to go next. Barrett didn’t leave a road map of where to go when he left, so it was best for them to start figuring it out on their own.
Some of their records would have a few surprises on them, like their soundtrack to Obscured By Clouds, but by and large, a lot of their records before this felt like them trying their hand at writing songs on their own. Waters did have a handle on making some fantastic material like ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and Gilmour was no slouch on ‘Fat Old Sun’, but having the guitarist thrown into the deep end on Ummagumma wasn’t really his idea of a good time by any stretch.
The entire studio side of their double record is one of the strangest runs of songs that they have ever made, and while ‘The Narrow Way’ is interesting to hear Gilmour play every single note on his side of the record, it isn’t all that exciting for him to go back to, saying, “I have never listened to my song, ‘The Narrow Way’, since then. I experienced a feeling of alarm when Roger suggested we do a bit each. We were at a loose end and didn’t know what the fuck else to do. I was aiming for melody.”
For what it’s worth, the album is at least an entertaining idea, and the band were getting a couple of decent reviews for the live material, but it was clear that this version of the band was getting phased out. They didn’t want to make experiments for the hell of it anymore, and the next few albums would show them needing a lot more purpose than what they eventually settled on on Ummagumma.
There are still some interesting experiments, but even then, any fairweather Floyd fan needs to proceed with extreme caution when listening to the second disc of this record. It can be interesting for a few minutes, but when you remember that this is the same band that would eventually make Wish You Were Here, it becomes almost laughable hearing them make a record like this.
