The 1979 Pink Floyd song that defeated David Gilmour: “Couldn’t play it properly”
Most artists want to challenge themselves whenever they walk into the studio. It tends to get boring if every tune sounds the same as the last one, and if that means switching something up in the mixing process or playing something that you’re not sure you can pull off, it makes the results that much sweeter when everything comes together.
That said, there can be the odd song that defeats artists, too, and David Gilmour admitted that he could never play the guitar breaks of ‘Is There Anybody Out There’ from The Wall.
The admission serves as a reminder that even the most celebrated musicians have limitations. Mastery of one style does not automatically translate to every technique, and Gilmour was never afraid to acknowledge when another player could better serve the song.
If Pink Floyd needed a guitar solo, though, they couldn’t have done much better than Gilmour in the rock sphere. He had been one of the leading forces behind their move after Syd Barrett left the fold, and his riffs on tracks like ‘Money’ and ‘Time’ are as crucial to the songwriting as anything Roger Waters was writing at the time.
His playing gave Pink Floyd an emotional dimension that often balanced Waters’ conceptual ambitions. While the lyrics provided the narrative framework, Gilmour’s guitar frequently supplied the feeling that connected listeners to the story.
By the time they got to work on a project like The Wall, the band hierarchy had operated differently. Since Waters had come up with the concept for the record, half of the album felt like he was using the group as a bunch of backing musicians who couldn’t stray away from anything that he hadn’t written for them.
That’s fine as long as there’s a good story behind everything, but Gilmour did manage to walk away with some of the best tracks on the album. As much as this is Waters’ story, hearing Gilmour’s solo on ‘Comfortably Numb’ is the entire reason why the track has any emotion, and other songs like ‘Young Lust’ are among the best straight-ahead rock tracks that they’ve ever made.
‘Is There Anybody Out There’ is a bit of a different beast by comparison. At this point, the listener is looking deep into Pink’s mind as he looks outside the wall to see if he can make contact with the outside world again. The acoustic guitar line that they picked may have been absolutely beautiful, but Gilmour was more than willing to hand over his guitar duties to someone else to get the job done.
Recalling in 1992, Gilmour said that the main reason he didn’t play on the track was because he didn’t have the discipline to play the fingerpicking lines, saying, “There were quite a few [session musicians] on there. There’s a guy playing the Spanish guitar on ‘Is There Anybody Out There’; I could play it with a leather pick but couldn’t play it properly fingerstyle.”
While Gilmour could have played the part with a pick, there’s a lot of desperation in hearing just the fingerstyle that works better for the track. That style usually evokes an exotic tone whenever people play it, but in the context of the story, it just further emphasises how far gone Pink is from reality, almost as if he’s stuck in a mental black hole and drifting through space.
If anything, this lonely guitar makes ‘Comfortably Numb’ feel all the more triumphant by comparison. When listening to someone who is that far gone inside their head, hearing Gilmour’s solo sounds like bringing him back to life.
That contrast highlights one of the album’s greatest strengths. By moving between moments of fragility and explosive emotion, Pink Floyd created a listening experience that mirrors the character’s gradual collapse and fleeting moments of clarity.
