David Gilmour on the guitarist who “brought something back” to music
No musician wants to be a carbon copy of what’s come before. There will always be records for them to fall back on, but the goal of any great artist is to take the building blocks of what they have been listening to and transform them into something that sounds different for the next generation. While David Gilmour certainly pushed his guitar forward when working with Pink Floyd, he felt that this guitarist brought taste back to the instrument throughout the 1980s.
At the same time, the MTV generation was one of the best times to be a budding guitarist. Even though the dominant names at the time were people like Michael Jackson, Eddie Van Halen had kicked down the door for what guitarists could look like in music videos. That said, a new generation of guitar heroes also meant getting a lot of diminishing returns.
While Van Halen’s rise to fame was a godsend for guitar players, there were a lot of musicians who took every wrong lesson from them. Compared to people who structured their solos, many hair bands coming out of California seemed to internalise the idea of shredding and worrying about the song later, which led to records that sounded more like exercises than proper tunes.
That was never what Mark Knopfler was about, though. Before the MTV generation was even kicking into high gear, he wanted to make the guitar the perfect tool for Dire Straits, usually playing solos that never sacrificed a great guitar break for the sake of playing a flashy lick.
And even when they drifted towards MTV, their success worked much better than anyone could have predicted. A band made up of the most normal people to grace the station wasn’t going to be the best fit, but as long as they had the tunes to back them up, tracks like ‘Money for Nothing’ and ‘Walk of Life’ didn’t seem that out of place sitting next to Madonna and David Bowie on the charts.
Although Gilmour was far more concerned with steering Pink Floyd through the post-Roger Waters years, even he had to admit that Knopfler helped revive the kind of guitar playing that he loved, saying, “Mark Knopfler has a lovely, refreshing guitar style. He brought back something that seemed to have gone astray in guitar playing.”
If you look back on the kind of guitar heroes that Gilmour looked up to, though, it makes a lot of sense why Knopfler would be carrying on their playing style. Gilmour favoured people who let their music do the talking, and compared to the blues guitarists of old like BB King, Knopfler always wanted to paint a picture with every note he played rather than using the 16 bars that he was allotted to assault his instrument.
Despite Gilmour’s track record for long sweeping solos, Knopfler may have had him beat throughout the 1980s. A Momentary Lapse of Reason is usually looked at as a dark period for Floyd at the best of times, but when hearing what Gilmour started playing on The Division Bell, it sounded like even he couldn’t resist throwing in some of Knopfler’s tricks when it came time to jam again.
