David Gilmour on why he felt “restricted” by Pink Floyd
Even before the major rift that split Pink Floyd, David Gilmour was refreshingly honest about the band’s makeup, acknowledging both its strengths and its flaws. He often expressed doubts about certain songs and spoke openly about his complicated relationship with Roger Waters, who left the fold after 1983’s The Final Cut. Gilmour’s straightforward comments sliced through any pretence, clear and sharp as a freshly honed blade.
While Gilmour and Waters might have had an acrimonious split that produced enough vitriol to remain until the present, ironically, the two have always been closely aligned in how they view the story of Pink Floyd. Though 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon is widely hailed as the quartet’s masterpiece, a cerebral concept album exploring ageing, mental health issues and other distinctly human matters with immense lucidity, according to Waters, it was the record that finished the group off “once and for all”.
It might initially seem strange that Waters should cast such a solemn shadow over the band’s masterpiece, but his point was salient. To be successful is the ultimate aim of every group, he somewhat cynically asserted, but more importantly, he maintained that once you reach the very summit of commercial triumph, it’s all downhill from there commercially and artistically. This comment was lodged in 1987 after he had left the band, and they had followed up the 1973 record with the widely successful Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall.
When speaking to Musician in 1992, Gilmour reflected on the strenuous nature of immense fame when discussing his second solo album, 1984’s About Face. With the lyrics of the tracks ‘All Lovers are Deranged’ and ‘Love on the Air’ penned by The Who driving force Pete Townshend, the incumbent Pink Floyd leader compared their situations within the respective outfits and solo projects. In doing so, he opened up about how the scale of the ‘Money’ group “restricted” him.
Gilmour posited that Townshend also felt constraints on how his creativity played out within the confines of The Who, but democratically noted that artists in bands always feel somewhat inhibited in whatever they attempt. This is because of the personalities that exist within such a unit and the defined roles that form over such a long period of time of being in one.
He explained: “I know he’s felt uncomfortable about certain things – things he could express in solo stuff. For me, the restriction was the scale of what Pink Floyd had become more than anything. It’s nice to get out and do something on a slightly different scale, go out and do theatres, which is not really a possibility with Pink Floyd until we get a lot less popular.”
Gilmour maintained that he liked “the grand scale of Pink Floyd”; it just carried a different responsibility from the one he had when operating as a solo artist, with the change being a “nice” one.
At the suggestion that the group’s first effort without Waters, 1987’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason, was essentially a solo album, the guitarist drew a distinction between how he approaches the band and his own work, even in light of drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright being practically absent during the making of. Interestingly, Gilmour has since been critical of the record.
Although he admitted the lines were blurred between solo albums and not, Gilmour’s approach was for it was different, with the “thought process” being a place where this discrepancy was clear. Ever the realist, though, he noted that About Face might have sold more units if he’d steered it in a more Pink Floyd-leaning direction rather than the ‘Big Music’ zeitgeist he tapped into.
