The song that still gives David Gilmour the biggest thrill: “A guitar buildup that I love”
One of the great tragedies of the music industry is that artists often grow to despise their own work, either through being forced to perform it night after night for years on end or because one track might overshadow another.
Seemingly, though, this is a quandary that has never troubled Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.
There are many words you can use to describe Pink Floyd: revolutionary, seminal, and iconic, being only a handful of examples. One word which does not fit into the history of the group, however, is ‘peaceful’. From the very outset of their existence back in the mid-1960s, under the leadership of psychedelic visionary Syd Barrett, the band were constantly plagued by in-fighting and intra-band clashes, typically stemming from the butting of heads between Barrett’s eventual replacement, David Gilmour, and Roger Waters.
Vicious arguments and extended ego battles have spelt the end of many an iconic band over the decades, but bizarrely, Pink Floyd were able to produce some of the most innovative, beloved records of the 20th century, all while being at each other’s throats. With the deluge of insults and vitriol that were shared between Waters and Gilmour, though, you might assume that neither songwriter looks back upon that perceived ‘golden age’ of the band with much adoration.
At least in the case of David Gilmour, though, you would be dead wrong. Adept at separating the art from the constantly warring artists, Gilmour is seemingly able to appreciate the musical mastery of the band during that 1970s period without ever wishing to reunite with Waters or revisit the intense arguments going on behind the scenes at that time.
One particular track, which – no matter how shrouded it becomes in memories of spats with his fellow songwriters – has never lost its appeal for Gilmour is the 1971 masterpiece ‘Echoes’, from Floyd’s often underrated record Meddle. At over 23 minutes in length and incorporating a vast range of different sounds and influences, there’s certainly enough within the song to prevent it from ever growing stale.
“‘Echoes’ has a guitar buildup that I love,” he told Guitar Player back in 2003, highlighting the epic track among those that he has never grown tired of. “It’s a creation of dozens of different parts. That sort of textural thing often thrills me more than a particular solo I may have played.” Multiple decades on, it seems as though the complexities of the song have yet to lose their lustre for the guitarist.
“I get a charge out of thinking, how the hell did I actually do that? You get this out-of-body experience,” he continued. “You’re not quite sure if it was you who did it.” With that out-of-body experience also comes the opportunity to add new layers of intrigue to ‘Echoes’, making it a shifting, ever-evolving art piece rather than simply a ‘greatest hits’ track to wheel out at every encore.
What’s more, the treacherous in-band politics which surrounded the song back in 1971 have probably been overshadowed by the otherworldly success which arrived in the wake of ‘Echoes’.
On the timeline of Pink Floyd, the song marked a kind of bridge between their experimental origins and the kind of commercial smashes they would land upon a few years later, and that momentous moment in the band’s history is still capable of swelling David Gilmour’s heart, it would seem.
