“Dreadful”: The era of Pink Floyd David Gilmour considered poor quality
By the time Pink Floyd hit Dark Side of the Moon, it felt like anything was possible in rock and roll. Although the Summer of Love was gone, the innovations during that decade left everything wide open for people to start thinking about rock in different ways, whether that was making hard rock, inventing heavy metal, or crafting songs made up of elongated jams that went on for minutes on end. Though David Gilmour was proud to represent progression in rock and roll music, he felt that one era of his development left nothing but garbage in its wake.
If you look at what Gilmour’s primary guitar influences were in the beginning, being one of the biggest prog musicians would automatically cross your mind. Despite having a certain vision for his playing, many of his early lessons came from everything from folk music like Pete Seeger to some of the heavy blues artists like Jeff Beck.
But when those tasty licks got paired with Roger Waters’s conceptual approach to music, there was hardly anyone who could touch them. Waters had always made songs that felt stoic and cold compared to the rest of the rock scene, but once Gilmour brought in his guitar playing and sense of melody, the songs transformed into music that might actually make people think.
No one gets there by merely being good, though, and Floyd’s beginnings with Syd Barrett cast a dark shadow on them once their frontman left. Gilmour had been brought in as a potential stand-in for Barrett, but once it became clear that he had begun to lose his mind, the guitarist was appointed as a full-time member. And so began the era of them fumbling around to find out where to go.
With the rest of the rock scene lost after The Beatles’ breakup, Pink Floyd were also trying to find out where the hell to go without their frontman. They were a rudderless ship, and compared to the psychedelic visions they created in the late 1960s, the early 1970s is when Gilmour felt everything hit a solid brick wall.
Aside from their own experiments like Atom Heart Mother, Gilmour looked back on most of the music made during the early 1970s as a musically confused time, saying, “It was a joyful time, although a lot of what we did on record was crap! It was a time when everyone wanted to break out of the confines of the three-minute pop format. Floyd were particularly good at it. We were good live, but couldn’t translate that onto record. I hear something like that long piece on Atom Heart Mother, and it’s quite dreadful!”
It’s also hard to judge it based on what other spellbinding releases were coming out. Since most of the biggest names in the genre were now coming from the glam rock movement like David Bowie or T Rex, that left albums like Ummagumma to be quickly forgotten, almost like the band were trying on different musical outfits to see what fit right.
Considering how confused they were, the fact that they hit on Dark Side of the Moon right out of the gate was honestly a miracle in some respects. They had begun finetuning what they thought prog rock could be, but once they found a grip on their sound, they had the entire rock world at their feet.
