David Gilmour: the most talented member of Pink Floyd
For a brief moment in 1973, there was a strong case to be made that Pink Floyd were the best band in the world. Don’t get me wrong, this was a year that saw some of music’s finest releases hit the shelves; Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, and Wings’ Band on the Run were but a few to change the course of history. But when Dark Side of the Moon was released, it was a collective of musicians at the peak of their powers, celebrating a lightning-in-a-bottle period of creativity.
It was an explosion that finally sparked after years of burning embers. The band had toyed with their experimentalist ways to varied effect, exposing their vision but quickly losing it in a muddled mess of incoherence. However, after Dark Side of the Moon dropped, they had aligned their creative crosshairs to make a truly unique product of brilliance.
During a decade of behavioural opulence, to have genius in your back pocket is relatively dangerous. With the profound effects of the narcotics circulating in the 1970s wearing off from overuse, the only thing left to get high on was your ego, and there was little in those days to prevent that.
Look, there’s no denying Roger Waters was absolutely integral to the success of the band’s abstract opus, for he was perennially at the edge of sonic normality, looking to push the band into a brave new future. But to be quite frank, what has followed from the bass player every year after is an overly arrogant pursuit of repeated brilliance combined with a behaviour that aims to showcase the uncompromising polymath but actually reads as the delusional narcissist.
Now, this article isn’t about who had the greatest personality in Pink Floyd, but I will say David Gilmour’s prowess is debated far less because of his affability. As years have gone by, he’s grown into the gentile godfather of classic rock, sometimes found online providing short and understated tutorials for some of the most influential guitar solos in the history of music.
I hang my argument for Gilmour’s position as the greatest Pink Floyd member on his humility, which is what he ultimately injected musically into the band. Prior to his introduction, the band teetered on the edge of experimental greatness with Syd Barrett but lacked that melodic delicacy to edify the songs. But when Gilmour joined and subsequently led the band’s writing, he fine-tuned their melody writing while allowing it to soar through the celestial landscapes of high-brow experimentation. He was as imaginatively adept as anyone in the era of psychedelic rock, yet rooted every sonic move in a sense of emotion that humanised the band’s work to become some of the most profound of all time.
As Nick Cave himself put it, there’s something about Gilmour’s playing of “instruments that touches me in a very deep place”. Even on perhaps his calling card solo, ‘Comfortably Numb’, a sprawling exercise of virtuoso playing that would ignite the narcissistic tendencies in the best of players, is dumbed down by a muted physical performance to let the profundity of the notes hit centre stage. He was the soulful beating heart and psychedelic vehicle for a band that, without him, struggled to connect.
