“Outside my usual scope”: The Pink Floyd and solo songs David Gilmour called his best guitar playing
Any fans of Pink Floyd will likely understand that enjoying their legacy isn’t the same as any other band. For starters, their extensive discography feels almost overwhelming at times, as does their quest for ever-searching for the biggest and most expansive explosion of artistic grandeur. Although David Gilmour and Roger Waters rarely got on at the best of times, Pink Floyd never felt anything other than a complicated, singular entity with a tapestry of material that never gets old.
Despite the countless disagreements and tensions, the one thing perhaps more stringent than the group’s burgeoning desire to call it off was their incessant desire to establish new standards of excellence, never stopping or allowing complacency to get in the way. Even when it seemed they had reached the pinnacle of their appeal, they kept going, searching for new undiscovered spaces, filling them with kaleidoscopic visions that drew from past, present, and future.
This is likely why, when asked about his own personal favourites, Gilmour emanated the same sense of overwhelm many fans do when asked the very same question. “There’s lots of them,” he said, before naming ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’ as “standout tracks”. Incidentally, ‘Wish You Were Here’ also shares a place in Waters’ heart, enough for it to be the only Gilmour collaboration he played during his solo sets after the band.
But what about Gilmour’s favourite guitar parts? When questioned about his favourite guitar solos, Gilmour chose songs that showcased his affinity for stepping outside of his comfort zone and exercising tropes he wouldn’t have necessarily felt were within his remit. These included the solos on ‘Comfortably Numb’ and ‘Dogs’ from Animals, alongside the criminally overlooked riff throughout Gilmour’s solo song, ‘Raise My Rent’.
“Both solos on ‘Comfortably Numb’ are pretty good,” he said in 1993’s Guitar Classics VI yearbook. “The solos on ‘Dogs’ from the Animals album I kept on because they’re different and slightly outside my usual scope. I like what I did on the instrumental ‘Raise My Rent’ from the first solo album. That was sort of an excuse to go on a 12-bar blues.” According to Gilmour, a good guitar instrumental can sometimes surpass lyrical compositions, which, when done well, can be “very provocative and emotional.”
Aside from the others he mentions, this is also what makes ‘Raise My Rent’ so immediate in its beauty and ability to provoke an intense emotional reaction. It’s almost as though it could have been placed anywhere else in Pink Floyd’s discography, with an instrumentally charming concoction that tells its own story without having to be burdened by any decisive lyricism directing the way. This is also what makes Gilmour a standout guitarist—his ability to say it all without saying anything at all.
However, even the others with lyrics seem to achieve the same feat. In his solo work and within Pink Floyd, the strive for greater musical exploration was almost always compounded by the beauty of the underlying arrangements and how they built their own worlds with sound dynamics and experimentation. Even when there are words, these stories already hold immensely charming foundations, holding stories and emotions that aren’t always easy to pin down.
