The one guitarist David Gilmour wanted to trade places with: “I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy”
Anyone like David Gilmour would be more than appreciative of the role that they have in rock and roll history.
Not many people are able to reach that level of rock stardom, and yet Gilmour has always been graceful with his fame and never once seemed to let his ego show all that much. Even if he had the power to become a literal musical god in front of our eyes whenever he played ‘Comfortably Numb’, there were still people that he had yet to check off his musical bucket list.
But his approach to rock and roll was never going to be anyone’s first choice when putting a band together. Gilmour was practically a substitute when he first joined once Syd Barrett started to become less and less reliable, and while there were pieces of his material that managed to work well on A Saucerful of Secrets, he had a lot of learning to do before he developed a sound that was entirely his own.
Because before joining the band, Gilmour was capable of making a lot of different sounds on his guitar. There would be the odd tune where he would let his blues chops show a little bit more, but he also had a healthy respect for the more unconventional rock and roll tunes that would go into his arsenal. Once he hit on tracks like ‘Echoes’, he was on the right track for what Pink Floyd was always meant to be.
Then again, that blues angle never fully went away. If you listen to any of Gilmour’s iconic solos, it’s all still in that blues box that every beginner guitarist learns, and while not every lick has to be the fastest in the world, hearing him squeeze every ounce of emotion that he can out of a certain bend is what makes songs like ‘Time’ feel so powerful once the solo comes screaming in.
If Gilmour could trade places with one musician, he would have definitely chose to have Eric Clapton’s career, saying, “I have to confess to a certain sort of jealousy of Eric Clapton’s position, where he has his wealth of material, and he’s such a consummate blues player that he’s got a wealth of other people’s material that he can play that’s not so well known. He can take out a new band every time. That would be a nice position to be in. But I’m not in that position.”
Granted, it’s not like Clapton’s career was everything it was cracked up to be, either. He had his ups and downs when working with Cream, and although his solo career has a wealth of fantastic material to draw from, ‘Slowhand’ would have traded the world to not go through his years as a junkie or get to talk with his son Connor again.
At the same time, are we sure that Gilmour hasn’t surpassed Clapton in lots of ways? That may have sounded blasphemous if it were said in the 1970s, but while Clapton was considered a ‘God’, Gilmour at least deserves a mention as a slightly lesser deity as well, especially given how much work he put in to make each of his solos a masterpiece. Clapton could fly off the handle and come up with magic, but the clinical nature of getting every note right on ‘Money’ helps tell a story much better than the average blues break.
So even if Gilmour tried to swap roles with Clapton for a little while, there are certain pieces of both of their styles that the other simply can’t do. That doesn’t make either of them lesser guitar players, though. All they did was carve out their own voice on the instrument, and while Gilmour could be a masterful guitar impressionist, anyone who has ever tried to go for one of those Gilmour-style bends are forever going to be living in his shadow.
