The 1987 song that restored David Gilmour’s faith in Pink Floyd: “Taking to their wings”
Any band that exists for as long as Pink Floyd is bound to go through a host of changes and eras. But few bands have ever been quite as conflict-ridden as the pioneering progressive outfit. In fact, you could argue that conflict was a key component of their evolution.
Going right back to their earliest emergence in 1965, there was rarely a harmonious moment within the Pink Floyd camp. Originally, it was the psychedelic visionary Syd Barrett who was identified as the band leader, but it didn’t take overly long for the rest of the group to edge him out of the line-up, helped along by the songwriter’s increasingly debilitating dependence on mind-altering substances. When he was deposed by Roger Waters, though, the inter-band feuds only seemed to intensify.
Namely, Waters seemed to be perpetually butting heads with David Gilmour. These clashes arose with such furious intensity that the feud is still ongoing to this very day. Nevertheless, that warring period within the band produced their all-time greatest works, with records like The Dark Side of the Moon breaking them into the musical mainstream as one of the most innovative, visionary groups of the 1970s. Still, a band can only last for so long when its members all hate each other.
By the mid-1980s, Waters had reached the end of his tether, deciding he could save himself a lot of headaches if he just left Pink Floyd. He did just that in 1985, immediately launching unsuccessful legal action to try and prevent Gilmour and the rest of the group from continuing to use its name.
Once the dust had finally settled, though, Gilmour was left with the inevitable task of keeping Pink Floyd afloat, and one of the first singles released from that bold new era, after years of diminishing returns, was appropriately titled ‘Learning To Fly’.
The band had been on the rocks, and there were moments when Gilmour must have wondered whether it was worth continuing. But the inspired song struck him at the perfect time. “‘Learning to Fly’, from the spiritual aspect of it, is about Pink Floyd taking to their wings again, as well as me taking to my wings again, and all sorts of things,” Gilmour said of the track during a 1995 interview.
“And learning to fly, of course, physically. So there’s a number of levels to that.”
Marking a rebirth of the band in both a musical and spiritual sense, the single was the first to be released from A Momentary Lapse of Reason, the Gilmour-led LP that truly established the new, post-Waters period in Pink Floyd history. Although neither the single nor the full album did much to match the magic of the band’s previous albums, and even Gilmour himself has been less than glowing in his retrospective view of the project, it did at least keep Floyd moving forward.
Like him or loathe him, Roger Waters’ songwriting and leadership were crucial to the most successful period of Pink Floyd, and so his loss was a colossal hurdle to overcome – the kind of hurdle that would have completely derailed most run-of-the-mill bands.
In that sense, it was inevitable that ‘Learning To Fly’ would be a rather transitional effort, befitting of its song title. Alas, as the focal point of the period, there was enough sincere depth to the song that Gilmour fondly reflected on the confidence it gave him to push on. After years of vicious arguments and ongoing feuds, in the mind of David Gilmour, Pink Floyd were finally back on form.
