Joker’s Wild and the album David Gilmour labelled a “vanity project”
Not every major album by an artist is meant to be some kind of magnum opus. Sometimes, people want to spend their time having fun in the studio and seeing what happens when jamming with their friends. Half the time, those albums work because you can feel the rest of the band having fun as they’re recording. Although David Gilmour helped expand what jamming could mean with Pink Floyd, he admitted that there was hardly any real quality behind a particular pre-Floyd piece.
But before Gilmour came into the picture, Floyd was always going to be a bit limited compared to his trademark guitar playing. Syd Barrett certainly had a unique playing style all his own, but listening to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it’s easy to see his style going on to set the precedent for what punk-adjacent guitar playing was about, complete with the raucous strumming that seemed more concerned with atmosphere than hitting all the right notes.
And while Gilmour’s playing could be described as clinical by some who don’t know any better, his tone cuts through every one of Floyd’s hits perfectly. Despite most fans fawning over the final moments of ‘Comfortably Numb’ with his massive solo, the true mark of his genius actually comes earlier in the song when he plays a melody so perfect it could be the basis for an entirely new song.
Everyone has to start somewhere, though, and Joker’s Wild was Gilmour’s first opportunity to be in a consistent rock and roll outfit. And while Barrett’s style is a far cry from what would come on Dark Side of the Moon, hearing Gilmour do his best impression of The Hollies in this group doesn’t even feel like it’s coming from the same person we know today.
The whole project was conceived in the vein of The Beatles, with everyone singing, but it’s clear that the group still needed some work. Despite Gilmour’s voice being firmly intact, the band often sounds like they are all vying for the top spot rather than finding a way to gel together properly.
And looking back on the one-sided album they cut, Gilmour was slightly embarrassed to see his humble beginnings, saying, “It was a vanity project. I booked Regent Sound in Denmark Street. We all headed off to London in our van, did five songs, all having absolutely no idea what we were doing. The songs were all covers from our live set.”
But that doesn’t mean that every part of this album is a mess. Since Gilmour would become Floyd’s co-lead vocalist when he joined, it’s nice to see his musical evolution in real time now. Joker’s Wild is hardly a good showcase for his voice, but listening to his vocal tone, it’s easy to draw a line between this record, some of his first official vocals on ‘Cymbaline’ before hitting on that perfect harmony sound between him and Richard Wright on tracks like ‘Echoes’.
As far as Gilmour was concerned, he couldn’t make his living as a lesser version of The Hollies. The Summer of Love had only just begun, and after joining one of the biggest psychedelic acts in England at the time, he knew that his future was going to revolve around pushing rock and roll forward however he could.
