“Such a nightmare”: The Pink Floyd era David Gilmour wanted to forget
Any great rock and roll band normally has their periods of ups and downs to look back on. Although the good times are often well worth the journey, there are often those few songs or album cycles that artists never want to go on again once they’ve finished them up. Even though Pink Floyd’s greatest material can be broken up into different chapters of their career, David Gilmour thought that the period from The Wall up until Roger Waters leaving was absolutely torturous.
At the same time, Gilmour wasn’t as enthralled with the music that they made when they were still discovering themselves. No band is just able to carry on after someone like Syd Barrett leaves, and while A Saucerful of Secrets put them on equal footing with their old sound, it was clear that it was going to be a long road before they were ready for primetime.
Once they started using that emotional turmoil as fuel, though, records like Dark Side of the Moon became some of the most towering achievements in rock history. You’d think that this would be time to celebrate, but when Waters got the first taste of massive fame, he started to get even more miserable than before.
In that respect, The Wall feels less like a conceptual rock opera and more like a therapy session in some spots, as Waters talks about his own struggles with not knowing his father and having a borderline breakdown halfway through the track ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’. That’s all well and good if it’s in service to a great album, but if Waters was a dictator on this record, The Final Cut was practically a reason for him to use the rest of the band as backup musicians.
And it’s not like Gilmour was ready to go along with the program. He at least had a handful of iconic moments on tracks like ‘Comfortably Numb,’ but the minute The Final Cut began, his guitar features became much more muted, and his singing was mostly pushed into the background, save for a few tracks.
Although Gilmour is still proud of some of the material worked on during those sessions, he did admit wishing he could forget the whole thing, saying, “The whole period of the post-The Wall period and The Final Cut period are all such a nightmare in my mind that I tended to block all of that out of my thought process.”
Considering how Waters would eventually sue the group for ownership of the name once he left, Gilmour walked away with the rights and at least gave him a line in the sand for that period of the group. And while you say what you want about projects like The Division Bell, Gilmour at least sounded like he was having more fun working on that than anything that Waters was involved with.
Because that’s really what was missing from Floyd’s discography when Waters left. Their music may have dealt with complex and uncomfortable topics, but it was at least coming from a genuine place, and by The Final Cut, each song sounded like they were made at gunpoint rather than being a labour of love.
