The 2001 album David Gilmour crowned as Pink Floyd’s “perfect primer”
David Gilmour tended to look at Pink Floyd in a much different way than most of his bandmates.
Roger Waters was much more interested in the stories that he was telling all across the band’s discography, but in Gilmour’s eyes, the only way to get the best out of every musician is to stretch their playing abilities rather than shoehorning in whatever narrative that Waters wanted to put into every one of their songs. He was willing to play the game to an extent, but he felt that some albums did a better job at condensing down everything that made the band interesting in their prime.
Because as much as their output was made during the vinyl era, Gilmour didn’t feel the need to be confined to the limitations of the album, either. Every one of their records was made to tell a story from Dark Side of the Moon onward, but if you were to start with Meddle and ignore everything else that came before, you’re missing a crucial part of what the band were all about in their early days.
They hadn’t yet figured out what they wanted to be without Syd Barrett, but when you listen to a lot of the pre-Dark Side material, it’s still interesting for what it is. If anything, Live at Pompeii is the moment where the band practically turned into the version of themselves that they were always meant to be, and that involved them chopping up their albums and playing a virtual greatest hits setlist of their epics.
Waters never liked the idea of making a compilation of their hits, but Gilmour knew that there was merit to getting all of their classic material in one place. The Waters-less era of the group didn’t try to be confined to a storyline every time they played, and after they bowed out gracefully with The Division Bell, making a record like their Echoes compilation was the perfect way to close the door on their classic material.
Is it perfect? Well, no. Not at all, actually. For one thing, Dark Side of the Moon was meant to be played in its entirety, and when you listen to the way that some of the classic tracks abruptly cut off on this compilation does make the whole thing feel a little disjointed. But to have everyone hear tunes that they might not have given the time of day to from the Barrett era was a lot more interesting, especially hearing a tune like ‘Astronomy Domine’ for the first time.
So while the end product is more than a little bit disjointed, Gilmour felt that it had some of the greatest tunes that Floyd ever made, saying, “I was delighted with the whole package. It’s pretty near the perfect Pink Floyd primer. I mostly put it all together and got my way 99% of the time. It’s a very good career overview.” It is a good crash course, but you could imagine what Waters thought about his bandmates chopping up their old material.
He was already not a fan of some of the band’s later records like The Division Bell, but to see some of that material alongside classics like ‘Money’ was bound to be a stumbling block for him. But at this point, Gilmour wasn’t going to spend every waking hour of his career trying to make nice and do everything that Waters thought was appropriate for the band whenever they made a record.
They had moved on from Waters being in the band, and while Gilmour remained thankful for the music that they all made together, there was no shame in making a compilation that showed everyone what the band was capable of. Not everyone was going to pick up Dark Side of the Moon in the modern age, so it worked to have something like ‘Money’ as a standalone song on one of their records.
