A Guiding Guitar: The album that David Gilmour admits he relentlessly “copied”
It could make the hairs stand up on the back of an invertebrate and cause a passing meteor to pause its trajectory in a moment of awed wistfulness—yes, there’s almost nothing like ‘Comfortably Numb’ in the canon of modern music. The solo is not just David Gilmour‘s grandest triumph, it is also the moment that symbolises his unique style with crystalised clarity.
Even the backstory plays into how natural it was for Gilmour. The Wall producer, Bob Ezrin, recalls being in the hushed studio at the moment the guitarist took aim at the latter section of the song. “The second solo in ‘Comfortably Numb’, which may be the best solo of all time,” he told Total Guitar, “is actually a first take.” Although they tried tirelessly to better it, he had nailed it in one.
It’s not just Ezrin who lauds its mastery, either. A great many musicians have hailed the anthemic finale. It’s spacious enough to build, sparse enough to shock, but full enough to overwhelm. Its key is its sense of orchestration—these are not notes thrown together to simply impress or add dynamism to a selected moment in a song, they are story unto themselves.
There is a sense that it’s Gimour’s own story, in a way. When he plays it live, there is very little disconnect between him and his guitar. He recalls playing live with his old band as though it was almost a biblical moment for him. “It was a fantastic moment, I can tell, to be standing up on there, and Roger’s just finished singing his thing, and I’m standing there, waiting,” Gilmour told Billboard.
“I’m in pitch darkness, and no one knows I’m there yet,” he added. ”And Roger’s down, and he finishes his line, I start mine, and the big back spots and everything go on, and the audience, they’re all looking straight ahead and down, and suddenly there’s all this light up there, and they all sort of—their heads all lift up, and there’s this thing up there, and the sound’s coming out and everything. Every night there’s this sort of ‘[gasp!]’ from about 15,000 people. And that’s quite something, let me tell you”.
It’s as singular as things get, but to reach such an idiosyncratic height, Gilmour first had to study The Shadows like a master’s apprentice. Their Greatest Hits album was good enough for him. “I copied – don’t be afraid to copy – and eventually something that I suppose that I would call my own appeared,” he said of how he arrived at his style—and Hank Marvin was the key source he was drawing from.
In an interview with Music Radar in 2006, Gilmour explained the profound influence Marvin had on him. “The way I play melodies is connected to things like Hank Marvin and The Shadows,“ he said. “That style of guitar playing where people can recognise a melody with some beef to it.”
With Gilmour declaring Marvin as ”the first major electric sort of guitar hero for us Brits,” the future Pink Flyod strummer, studied his icon and simply tried to emulate the sounds he heard in his greatest hits. It was an education in class that allowed Gilmour to graduate onto his own ideas, knowing full well that his chops were already in place—and perhaps that’s the secret ingredient in the searing sound of ‘Comfortably Numb’: Gimour had enough modesty not to get in the way of himself.
