‘Fat Old Sun’: The Pink Floyd track David Gilmour had issues with
Standing in front of a crowd to sing a song is not always the most comfortable experience for any musician. It’s one thing to be working away at songs in your bedroom or rehearsal space, but if it’s something that’s coming from your soul, most people would rather jump off a bridge than have to face an army of people waiting to be wowed. David Gilmour was never really focusing on becoming the biggest frontman in the world, but the first time he actually settled into the role nicely came when playing on ‘Fat Old Sun’ from Atom Heart Mother.
When Gilmour was first asked to join, though, chances are he would have been content to just stay at the side of the stage and not move a muscle aside from just playing lead guitar. Syd Barrett had started to fall prey to his own mind, and while Roger Waters picked up the reins quite nicely, there were only so many places that his voice could go without having it sound overly squawky.
So that’s really the first problem. Gilmour had all the means to make all of his ideas, but would it have been right to just shoehorn himself into this new band with two leaders at the forefront of it? It’s not an easy decision to make, but they made it somehow look easy when working on Atom Heart Mother.
Despite Gilmour and Waters’s disinterest in the end result, the majority of the album is about them finding their voices apart from Barrett. Ummagumma was bound to be a mess no matter what they were working with, but hearing Gilmour write this little ditty about sitting in the sunshine and trying to find a moment’s peace was one of the more universal topics the group ever wrote about.
Although his harmonies with Richard Wright are the real bread and butter of the group, Gilmour singing by himself actually suits this tune much better. There are pieces that are disjointed in the title track suite, but hearing him just strumming an acoustic guitar is so simple that Ray Davies or Paul McCartney could have come up with it in their prime.
Gilmour was still mortified to take on the lead vocal, but the moment he actually heard himself on vinyl, he started to fall into the role of the frontman a lot better, telling Uncut, “It’s that old thing where most people listen to their voice on a recording for the first time, or people who haven’t done it very often, and they think it sounds horrible. I was like that. When did it change? Around ‘Fat Old Sun’.”
And for all of the massive concepts that Waters had in his arsenal, his redux version of Dark Side of the Moon proves that Gilmour’s vocals are irreplaceable in Pink Floyd. Even if he was reluctant to take on the frontman role, his calm tone is what helps anchor down tracks like ‘Time’ and ‘Money’ perfectly.
Pink Floyd were still in the process of healing on Atom Heart Mother, but ‘Fat Old Sun’ was a reminder that things were still looking up. They hadn’t perfected their sweeping epics yet, but it wouldn’t be long until ‘Echoes’ came out and set everything in motion.
