The Pink Floyd era David Gilmour called awfully bad: “Incredibly undisciplined”
It’s usually not the best look for an artist to start talking trash about their own band. Even if there are some parts of their catalogue that are best left in the past, it always feels strange having to bring up pieces of history that are seen as either trainwrecks or moments where nothing lined up properly. Although David Gilmour wasn’t in the trenches with Pink Floyd when they started, he readily admitted that the group were far from great when he first joined the band.
Of course, that’s because they were practically an entirely different group. Before all of the inflatable pigs came out and Hipgnosis brought us the prism design that everyone associates with the group now, the Syd Barrett era of the band felt like it was ripped out of a particularly space-themed episode of The Twilight Zone.
Instead of singing about the dangers of the world, Barrett was more inclined to write fanciful tales about different fictional characters that he would make up on a whim. The 1960s sure hadn’t seen anything like what they were doing, but in the midst of the psychedelic scene, the group came close to getting lost in the shuffle.
Despite the success of ‘See Emily Play’, it felt like Barrett was slowly heading towards a brick wall, and no one could stop him. After suffering a near-mental collapse at various points onstage, it became clear that Barrett was in no shape to perform with the group anymore, which meant getting Gilmour in as a decent substitute.
While Gilmour was still a fine addition to the lineup, he believed the group was confused about what it wanted to be at that point, telling Rolling Stone, “It was an open page. My initial ambition was just to get the band into some sort of shape. It seems ridiculous now, but I thought the band was awfully bad at the time when I joined. The gigs I’d seen with Syd were incredibly undisciplined. The leader figure was falling apart, and so was the band.”
Even when Gilmour joined, it wasn’t like in the movies where every one of their problems was solved. Gilmour never claimed to have the answer to the group’s prayers, so a lot of A Saucerful of Secrets involved them toying with what the future of their sound was supposed to be, whether that was going down the avant-garde rabbit hole or trying their best to capture that whimsical spirit again.
Once they moved out of Barrett’s shadow, Gilmour may have been one of the only saving graces of the group for a while. As Roger Waters continued to get a grasp on what he wanted out of his songs, Gilmour’s one-off tracks like ‘Fat Old Sun’ from Atom Heart Mother is still one of the most unsung Floyd classics in their catalogue.
That’s when he wasn’t using his guitar to speak half the time. When looking through the group’s back pages, even half of A Saucerful of Secrets saw Gilmour slowly inching towards the guitar hero that he would soon become, almost like he was laying out the carpet for a song like ‘Comfortably Numb’ in the future. Regardless of the band’s quality at the time, the ground was being set for what was sure to be a prog rock giant.
