“I really wanted to hit the little ****er”: The one artist David Gilmour considered too good
No music exists for the sole purpose of making someone angry. It might not be to someone’s taste or have a few moments that aren’t as listenable as everything else, but no one goes into a record with the sole purpose of making their audience want to throw things at them if they so much as walk in their general direction in public. While David Gilmour may not take issue if someone didn’t care for a particular Pink Floyd song, he did know that some musicians made him absolutely furious, and it had almost nothing to do with the actual music.
Because when looking at the level of rockstar musicianship, Gilmour exists in a class by himself. He never tried to be one of the most dexterous shredders in the business when he started out, but across one of Pink Floyd’s classic albums, his guitar sound was about channelling some sort of emotion, whether that was hearing it cry out in pain on a song like ‘Time’ or showing both the dark and the light sides of his playing when working on tracks like ‘Comfortably Numb’.
But being one of the biggest artists in the world doesn’t mean one can’t improve. Popularity is rarely equal to musical talent, and while Gilmour was looking to push himself every time he made a record, some of his competition was already wiping the floor with him as far back as the late 1960s.
Look at any novice guitar record from around the same time, and there’s a good chance that you’ll find some record with a more capable guitarist than Gilmour. No one would have been able to match what someone like Jimi Hendrix was doing at the time, and even though Gilmour had the same bluesy background as someone like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, there was no way that he would be putting himself in the same conversation with them.
For all of the great music that Gilmour could make on his own, he had a certain jealousy when seeing someone like Steve Winwood work. He had already established himself in the Spencer Davis Group, but outside of playing the piano, the guitar chops that Winwood had behind the scenes were too much talent for one man as far as Gilmour was concerned.
Despite loving everything that he had done, Gilmour knew that Winwood was almost too good for words, saying, “I’ve always loved Stevie Winwood. I used to go see The Spencer Davis Group when I was 18, and he was about 16. He used to play a really great guitar as well as great piano – I really wanted to hit the little ****er he was so good!”
But it’s not always about the ability to fly off the handle. Both Gilmour and Winwood knew their individual strengths and had enough self-restraint to reign things in when needed like when Gilmour laid back into the groove when working on ‘Echoes’ or Winwood working with George Harrison to create the perfectly tasteful solo in the middle of the song ‘Love Comes to Everyone’.
If anything, that anger that Gilmour had for Winwood’s playing is one of the healthiest forms of musical competition there is. It might hurt to see someone making the kind of musical leaps that you hoped to make, but that’s all the more reason to keep practising and woodshedding your craft until you’re big enough to make something even more spectacular.
