How The Beatles shaped Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour: “They were fantastic”
It exhibits the significance of The Beatles in that they inspired every prominent musician of their generation in one way or another. One group who have made no bones about the impact of the Liverpudlian quartet on them is Pink Floyd, with guitarist David Gilmour particularly enamoured by their work.
Demonstrating the extent of Pink Floyd’s love for The Beatles is the account of drummer Nick Mason, who described John Lennon and his band as “God-like figures to us”. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal in 2011, he recalled a moment when his band were in close proximity to the Fab Four when recording their 1967 debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, at London’s Abbey Road Studios. At the same time, The Beatles were also in the building, laying down ‘Lovely Rita’, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“We were recording in Abbey Road, the temple of greatness, and they were recording ‘Lovely Rita’,” Mason said. “They were God-like figures to us. They all seemed extremely nice, but they were in a strata so far beyond us that they were out of our league.”
Outlining the great impact of The Beatles on the band, Pink Floyd’s former chief songwriter and bassist Roger Waters once commented: “I learned a lot from all of that protest music when I was a very young teenager. But I learned from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and George Harrison that it was okay for us to write about our lives and what we felt — and to express ourselves. … That we could be free artists and that there was a value in that freedom. And there was.”
Analysing how The Beatles transformed music, Mason said Sgt. Pepper’s “absolutely changed the face” of the industry and enabled bands such as Pink Floyd to have more creative “freedom”. He said: “Sgt. Pepper’s was the album that absolutely changed the face of the record industry. Up until then, it was all about singles. Sgt. Pepper’s was the first album that actually outsold singles, and that enabled bands like us to have more studio time and more freedom to do what we wanted.”
Whilst every member of Pink Floyd has their own stories of what The Beatles means to them, David Gilmour has effused the most about their efforts. Ironically, he wasn’t even in the band that fateful day at Abbey Road Studios.
Speaking BBC Radio 2’s Tracks Of My Years in 2006, Gilmour listed some of his favourite songs of all time, with The Beatles’ ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ one of them. There, the guitarist explained his “mad” fandom of The Beatles: “I was an absolute mad Beatles fan. ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ is, I think, John Lennon’s first moment of being influenced by Bob Dylan. It’s very much in the Bob Dylan vein. So it’s just one example of hundreds of things I could choose. Anything by The Beatles, really. Fantastic song”.
Following this, during a discussion with Mojo in 2015, Gilmour praised The Beatles once more and said they were the group he wishes he’d been in: “I really wish I had been in the Beatles; (They) taught me how to play guitar; I learnt everything. The bass parts, the lead, the rhythm, everything. They were fantastic.”
In categorically asserting that The Beatles taught Gilmour to “play” the guitar and learn every aspect of it, there can be no denying that the Liverpudlians changed everything for the future Pink Floyd hero. Adding to this, in the summer of 1965, Gilmour and original Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett busked around France and Spain playing Beatles covers, pushing the pair further toward a music career by cutting their teeth playing their songs.
Due to the gravity of Gilmour’s musical efforts with Pink Floyd, he has played live with former Beatles member Paul McCartney on numerous occasions. He’s also appeared on some of his songs, including providing the solo on the 1984 hit ‘No More Lonely Nights’.
Elsewhere, in 2000, Gilmour participated in an MSN webcast, and here he shared more information about how The Beatles shaped him. Only three months prior, he had performed with Paul McCartney at his ‘Live at the Cavern Club’ show, which inspired some fans to supply questions about The Beatles.
Gilmour was asked whether he sees any parallels between his band and The Beatles, including through the songwriting partnership of Lennon and McCartney. “You make that comparison with a number of different bands,” Gilmour responded. “I’m a huge fan of the Beatles, but I don’t know what parallels are between us except we were both pretty good at what we did.”
“I think we always try to explore and push boundaries with the music that we made,” he continued, “And maybe there’s not enough of that nowadays, and I think some of the themes that were explored will never be out of date.”
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