The “powerful” Pink Floyd album David Gilmour calls his favourite
David Gilmour amassed a wealth of music during his time with Pink Floyd.
Enlisted by the group in 1967 as guitarist and co-lead vocalist at a time when the writing was on the wall for frontman Syd Barrett, the presence of Gilmour went a long way in alleviating the strain of Barrett’s departure in April 1968.
Gilmour initiated a formidable songwriting partnership with bassist and co-vocalist Roger Waters, and together with the rest of the band – keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason – they set about moving into the future. They shed the skin of the explicitly psychedelic realm of their first chapter and eventually found themselves in a more cerebral and profound area. Whilst ostensibly, this would come to be known as prog-rock, it’s a testament to the quartet that it’s best described simply as “Pink Floyd”.
This segue from their first chapter into the one that culminated with concept album masterpieces, such as 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The group tested many different things to refine their sound and achieve the world-beating success they did in the 1970s. Naturally, this came with several artistic misfires; however, by the time 1971’s Meddle emerged, Pink Floyd had found their footing and were ready to move into their most consequential period.
That sense of trial and error is often overlooked when looking back at Pink Floyd’s catalogue. For all the grandeur and cohesion of their later work, getting there required a willingness to experiment, fail, and rebuild their identity piece by piece. Meddle feels like the moment where those experiments finally began to coalesce into something purposeful rather than exploratory.
It’s also where the balance of power within the band started to take a clearer shape. While every member still contributed to the overall sound, the seeds of the Waters-Gilmour dynamic that would define their classic era were becoming more pronounced. The band were no longer just reacting to the loss of Barrett, they were actively carving out a new vision, one that would soon elevate them into an entirely different league.
Featuring songs such as the sonic behemoth that is ‘Echoes’ and the indie progenitor ‘Fearless’, Meddle remains one of the finest moments in the extensive story of Pink Floyd. When speaking to B. Pinnell in an Australian radio interview in 1988, Gilmour named the 1971 album as one of his “favourites” by the group and knew that it would do “a lot better than anything we’d done before”.
He also explained that it was the start of the road that led to heights such as The Dark Side of the Moon.
Gilmour said: “Meddle is amongst my favourites. Meddle, I mean, that, to me, is the start of the path forward for PF really, and Dark Side of the Moon is the next, sort of, stage on from that where we actually really got it right, and we, we got the record right and we got the cover right and the whole package, you know, the whole thing was very good, you know, recording the songs, the lyrics, the idea.”
Concluding his account, the guitarist explained: “The whole thing was a very powerful package, you know, we knew before we finished it that that it was definitely going to do a lot better than anything we’d done before. I mean we didn’t think that it would do that well, but, um, we definitely knew that it would do considerably better than anything we’d done before”.
Listen to Meddle in full below.
