“I wish I could”: The one guitarist David Gilmour couldn’t copy
While David Gilmour had been close friends with Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters since they were schoolboys, he wasn’t welcomed to join the band until the dawning of Barrett’s mental decline and eventual estrangement in 1967. His bittersweet inauguration into the psychedelic group was just as fraught as his exit.
As the second guitarist, Gilmour’s initial role was to support Barrett’s waning contributions as an understudy of sorts. He earned merit within the group for his astonishing ability to emulate Barrett’s style after such a short period. He had grown up playing along to records, but Barrett’s unique ways were a different matter. All the same, he managed to master them and even add greater virtuosity to go along with the singular of the ailing Syd’s strumming.
When Barrett was finally expelled from Pink Floyd at the end of ‘67, Gilmour could happily play Barrett’s compositions from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and contributed material of a similar style to complete the follow-up album, A Saucerful of Secrets.
Over the late 1960s, Pink Floyd’s sound developed from Barrett’s whimsical psychedelic rock of Alice in Wonderland escapism to a more refined and spacious sound that would foreshadow the prog-rock and space-rock trends of the 1970s. This sound was in no small part attributable to Gilmour’s unique and constantly developing guitar style.
Gilmour, like many of his peers of the 1960s, was first drawn to the electric guitar thanks to the blues. Over the years, he kept an open mind and allowed virtuosos of all different styles and genres to colour his imagination. Drawing from a healthy pool of influence, he could devise his own characteristic style, recognised for its sonorous gravity and pitch-perfect lead excursions, which valued precision over speed.
“I was a blues fan, but I was an all-around music fan,” Gilmour revealed in a 1985 interview with Guitar Classics. “For me, it was Leadbelly through BB King and later Eric Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Jeff Beck, Eddie Van Halen and anyone you care to mention. Mark Knopfler has a lovely, refreshing guitar style. He brought back something that seemed to have gone astray in guitar playing.”
During the interview, Gilmour was asked whether he had ever tried to emulate other guitarists or songs in his compositions. “I was trying to learn 12-string acoustic guitar like Leadbelly at the same time, I was trying to learn lead guitar like Hank Marvin and later Clapton,” he replied. “All of those different things had their moments and filtered through my learning process.”
In fact, he thinks that’s the most vital instruction for any young guitarist. As he openly and plainly put it, “I copied – don’t be afraid to copy – and eventually something that I suppose that I would call my own appeared.” And when it appeared, it was soon lauded as one of the most original sounds in classic rock history.
So, naturally, in his older years, he rested on his laurels a little more. “These days I don’t listen to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I’ve got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea,” he explained. “I’m sure that I’m still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well.”
The latter, however, presented a rare challenge he could not surpass. “I can’t play like Eddie Van Halen, I wish I could,” the Pink Floyd guitarist admitted later in the conversation. “So I sat down to try some of those ideas and I can’t do it. I don’t know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more. I play every day but I don’t consciously practice scales or anything in particular.”
Gilmour’s playing is all about space, whereas Eddie Van Halen can never find enough space to squeeze another note in. That dexterity is a facet that Gilmour concedes he simply couldn’t match.
