“That would be terrible”: the one genre David Gilmour refused to play
The whole point of a progressive band like Pink Floyd was to have no rules whenever they walked into the studio.
They knew the mechanics of what made a decent pop song work, but there were also more options for them to work with than following in the footsteps of whatever was on the radio at the time. David Gilmour didn’t bother trying to make music that the masses of Madonna fans needed to hear, and he especially knew Floyd wasn’t going to be after taking the reins of the band.
But when looking at Gilmour’s first steps as the leader of the group, he was clearly still finding his feet after Roger Waters left. Waters was the one who had a unique vision for what every album they made should have been, but Gilmour wasn’t going to cower to him dictating every single thing they played whenever he started working on records like The Final Cut and having the gall to fire Richard Wright midway through The Wall.
Then again, A Momentary Lapse of Reason did at least show some of the wounds that the band had from losing one of their foundational members. If they could carry on without Syd Barrett, they could do so without Waters, too, but even if the record still sounds like Pink Floyd, it does sound like a really dated version of the band when listening to the big songs from the record. They were clearly experimenting with new technology, and not all of them seemed to work out in their favour every time they played.
The whole thing does sound like a David Gilmour solo album in many respects, which it essentially is since Nick Mason doesn’t perform on some of the tunes, but we were hopefully spared the idea of them taking a few pages from the hip-hop sphere. It’s not like rap wasn’t a serious style of music by that time, but when Bob Ezrin started throwing out ideas, Gilmour needed to stay far away from that genre for as long as he could.
It was bad enough that the album sounded a bit like every other keyboard-heavy rock and roll band, but Ezrin remembered getting shut down real quick when asking about Gilmour potentially spitting fire, saying, “I’m an early adopter [of rap]… [I] brought some in when we were doing A Momentary Lapse of Reason… going, ‘Boy, I think this stuff with a rock beat would be awesome.’ He said, ‘Oh my God, that would be terrible.’ He couldn’t believe it. He hated the idea.”
And considering the rest of the music that’s on this album, it’s nice to know that there was at least some judgment in what was going to be on the record. I can’t for the life of me think what Gilmour would have sounded like trying to make a spoken-word version of one of his songs, but considering that Waters eventually did have a lot of those sections in his solo material, it’s probably for the best that Gilmour didn’t try it when he did.
Granted, it’s not like a rapper on one of these songs wouldn’t have worked, but you would have to have picked the right person to work on it. The seeds of alternative hip-hop were already blossoming around this time, and while the jury’s out over whether they would have jumped on board with this kind of thing, it would have made a lot more sense to get one of the guys from A Tribe Called Quest than to worry about what it would have sounded like, throwing Gilmour in completely blind.
We’ll never know what that version of Floyd would have sounded like, but if there’s one thing you can say about A Momentary Lapse of Reason, it was that it set them on the course for where they would be going for the next few years. Life without Waters wasn’t going to be easy, but it was going to be a lot less painful trying to shoehorn their parts in around his ideas all the time.
