The 1971 Pink Floyd song David Gilmour adores but refuses to play
There are a vast number of reasons as to why artists choose to retire songs from their sets, and few are more emotionally-motivated than one decision by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.
If you go to see Gilmour in concert, as much as you can begrudgingly accept to hear plenty of songs from his newest release, there’s also an expectation that he’ll perform a variety of Pink Floyd classics, which warrant the entry fee.
As much as Gilmour has reinvented himself musically on many occasions throughout his solo career, he will always remain intrinsically tied to Pink Floyd. His relationship with Roger Waters has been nonexistent for decades, yet their personal hatred doesn’t mean Gilmour can’t look back with immense pride from a musical perspective at what they created.
Together, they captured something magical that continues to live on and inspire. However, they didn’t miraculously become one of the defining forces in rock history without putting in the hard yards and sacrificing themselves for the sake of their art.
While there are a million things that made Pink Floyd special, it was their instinct for experimentalism and crafting compositions which broke the mould that was the most significant. They let their peers spend their time chasing the next hit single, tailoring their sound to suit the radio requirements, while Pink Floyd cared exclusively about albums.
For them, all the songs needed to match up contextually to create a body of work that was more than the sum of its parts. A fine example of this admirable trait, which made Pink Floyd great, is ‘Echoes’ from 1971’s Meddle. With a running time of 23 minutes, Pink Floyd displays their most exceptional attributes throughout the track, providing the first glimpse of the sonic trajectory that would come to define them.
The undisputed highlight of ‘Echoes’ is the beautiful duelling between Gilmour and keyboardist Richard Wright. Due to their special bond and Wright’s irreplaceable contribution, it sits in a league of its own for ‘Gilmour’, even though you’ll never hear him play it in a concert again.
During Gilmour’s online Von Trapped series of videos in 2021, he spoke about his love of ‘Echoes’ when asked about his favourite Pink Floyd song. “‘Echoes’, I would think,” he snappily responded, before elaborating, “‘Echoes’ was terrific fun to play, particularly on my last solo tour with Rick Wright, a duet thing between him and me. Couldn’t and shouldn’t be played again now he’s dead.”
Gilmour has stayed true to his word regarding ‘Echoes’, which he last performed in 2006, two years before Wright’s sad death. Since then, he has continuously toured on a regular basis, which sees him play a number of Pink Floyd favourites such as ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Wish You Were’; ‘Echoes‘ remains off limits.
Although realistically, Gilmour could hire a session musician to fill in for Wright, it would be bereft of the chemistry that made ‘Echoes’ special in the first place.
According to Gilmour, the song was crucial to the band’s development and made Meddle what it was. Looking back upon the album with Guitar World in 1993, he said, “Well, I think ‘Echoes’ is the masterwork of the album – the one where we were all discovering what Pink Floyd is about. ‘One Of These Days’ is a little subsidiary piece that came out of the work on ‘Echoes’.”
He continued: “I always loved it. It’s seminal, I suppose, yeah. A lot shorter, in any case – better for radio play. Meddle is really the album where all four of us were finding our feet – the way we wanted Pink Floyd to be. Much more than on Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother.”
Not only is ‘Echoes’ a stand-out track from Pink Floyd’s repertoire, which put them on the path to creating rock history with The Dark Side Of The Moon, but it’s also a poignant reminder of the irreplaceable bond he shared with his late friend.
While Gilmour could perform ‘Echoes’ and deliver a tribute to Wright every time he steps on stage, in this case, the most moving homage is to allow the song to rest in the past with dignity.
