The 1969 Pink Floyd track David Gilmour called pure “desperation”
Though associated with the prog-rock movement due to their cerebral and complex compositions, Pink Floyd always stood apart from their cape-clad counterparts. Unlike many of their prominent peers in the genre, they were notably grounded, with David Gilmour, Roger Waters, and the rest of the band unafraid to acknowledge their artistic limitations.
Most people remember Pink Floyd for two chapters.
The first was their earliest stage, when they broke out of London’s UFO Club by putting a unique and experimental twist on the psychedelic rock zeitgeist. Led by their original frontman, Syd Barrett, during this brief but widely influential period, their spacey, dynamic songs contained lyrics that were much more out there than Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s. This relationship formed a two-pronged sonic assault that mirrored the LSD-influenced madness engulfing the counterculture.
The second and most important chapter of Pink Floyd’s career commenced with 1971’s seminal Meddle, the album with which they found the sound that would make them world beaters, culminating with 1979’s The Wall. During this period, they mastered the concept album and took their music to new and refined heights, as evidenced by their chef d’oeuvre, The Dark Side of the Moon. In addition to their profound compositional choices, band leader Waters would take a starkly different tact to Barrett and conceive lyrics steeped in real life, including mental health struggles, ageing and consumerism.
What many people forget is that between these two pivotal moments, Pink Floyd spent a significant period refining their sound after Barrett’s departure in 1968 and charting a new artistic course. This era of experimentation is marked more by misfires than triumphs, as the band learned about themselves and their limits. Ever the pragmatist, Gilmour has openly criticised the band’s two albums preceding Meddle: 1969’s Ummagumma and the following year’s Atom Heart Mother.
That period remains one of the most fascinating chapters in Pink Floyd’s history precisely because there was no obvious blueprint for success. Barrett had been the group’s chief songwriter and creative catalyst, leaving the remaining members to discover not only who would lead the band but what Pink Floyd should actually sound like.
Rather than settling on a replacement for Barrett, Waters, Gilmour, Richard Wright and Nick Mason each pulled in different directions, producing records that often felt more like collections of ideas than unified artistic statements. While critics have long debated their quality, those albums capture a band searching for an identity that could survive without its founder.
It is Atom Heart Mother that draws the ire of Gilmour most, with him openly describing it as the group’s lowest creative ebb and, perhaps most surprisingly, given his cerebral nature, pure “shit”.
However, he and his longtime rival Waters have both been highly dismissive of Ummagumma. The record holds no happy memories, given what had happened to Barrett before it, and they faced mounting label pressure to release a follow-up to their flop third album, More. At the time, people were wondering if Pink Floyd could continue without their old frontman, and following its release, this widespread belief was bolstered. Both Gilmour and Waters are in agreement that it was a disaster.
When speaking to Guitar Heroes in 1983, Gilmour looked back on his first major composition for Pink Floyd, ‘The Narrow Way’, from Ummagumma. While fans might not love it, the three-part suite was a show of real grit from the songwriter, who performed it entirely himself. Unsurprisingly, the uber-realistic guitarist isn’t impressed with the track, noting that its primary motivation was “just desperation”.
Gilmour explained: “Well, we’d decided to make the damn album, and each of us to do a piece of music on our own…it was just desperation really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself. I’d never written anything before, I just went into a studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together. I haven’t heard it in years. I’ve no idea what it’s like”.
That honesty became one of Gilmour’s defining qualities as both a musician and an interviewee. Unlike many rock stars who instinctively defend every release in their catalogue, he has never been afraid to admit when Pink Floyd fell short of their own standards. In many ways, that self-awareness was one of the band’s greatest strengths.
Though Gilmour was critical of ‘The Narrow Way’, his role as a tough taskmaster helped the band positively address their missteps and refine their sound. Despite their disdain for Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, both albums were crucial steps in their evolution. Each contributed significantly to their growth and left a lasting impact on the cultural landscape.
