The guitar solo David Gilmour said made no sense: “It’s mind-boggling”
It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what David Gilmour was doing in Pink Floyd most of the time.
There had been more than a few times where their music went into some strange places, but for the average guitarist, it’s easy to look at the kind of scales that he was playing and figure out where he was going whenever he launched into a song like ‘Time’. IT all came back to the blues, but every other member of the band was interested in moving beyond the structures that rock and roll put around them.
Roger Waters did have a bluesy foundation to work off of, but no one was saying that an album like Dark Side of the Moon was a blues-rock project. Waters had an expansive idea for what music could be, and even though ‘Echoes’ was a step in the right direction whenever they worked it out, it’s not like anyone could fully grasp what was going on once they launched into the avant-garde section halfway through the song.
And let’s not forget what Richard Wright brought to the table. While many fans in Waters’s camp elected to jump ship and claim that the band was never going to be the same, Wright was far more important on the musical side of things than Waters was half the time. The band didn’t have the concepts without their bassist, but the strange harmonies that turned up on tracks like ‘Breathe’ or the fantastic movements on ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ were all Wright’s handiwork.
They weren’t against pushing the needle forward, but Syd Barrett was one of the few people who went a little too far whenever he played. He was already encountering struggles within his own mind, but if you listen to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it was impossible to figure out the strange harmonies and chord sequences that turned up in ‘Astronomy Domine’ or the fanciful tales on ‘Bike’ and ‘The Gnome’.
So if his ideas were already difficult to process when he was still in the band, his solo material was bound to be another story entirely. While his solo catalogue does have its fair share of fans, a lot of the ideas on there feel like they would have been able to get fleshed out had he had the ability to work through them. Gilmour would have done everything he could to help out his friend, but the backwards guitar solo that turned up on ‘Dominoes’ was either a work of genius or absolute madness.
And while the song is one of the standouts from the record, Gilmour would have been the first to say that he had no idea how the solo sounded that way, saying, “Somehow he could define what was going on. It was a really difficult thing to do. Beats cease to have any impact. Immediately it seemed to fit perfectly, and that’s the one that’s on the record and we never seemed to do it again. It’s mind-boggling. It’s hard for anyone to understand but he did it.”
But that was always part of the genius behind Barrett’s playing. Not everything he did was too weird for mass consumption by any stretch, but when he pushed himself in exactly the right direction, his artsy take on rock and roll was the kind of thing that wouldn’t have felt out of place on one of David Bowie’s more psychedelic outings.
Because, really, ‘The Starman’ and his ilk were always going to be carrying on the tradition that Barrett started. He wasn’t the easiest musician to understand, and a lot of his other records like The Madcap Laughs are certainly an acquired taste, but when he shined, that crazy diamond could be utterly blinding.
