The one note David Gilmour says he needs to always play right
Not everything that David Gilmour ever played needed to be thought about in great detail for too long.
As much as Pink Floyd revelled in using the studio as an instrument most of the time, it was anyone’s guess whether they were going to sound that way live or if they would take things in a totally different direction when they started jamming. But while Gilmour did have a certain flow that he liked to get into whenever he played, he knew that his fans would be disappointed if he didn’t stay true to some classics.
But when Gilmour first joined, there was no sense in him trying to outright copy what the band had been doing on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He simply didn’t have the same kind of charisma that Syd Barrett had, and when you look at him desperately trying to act whimsical singing a few of his tunes, it’s no wonder that the group eventually stopped playing most of his material once he left the band.
It was a sad way to lose one of their friends, but that did give Gilmour the opportunity to stretch things out a bit more. Not everything had to be tied to the band’s space-rock theme, but once they started talking about real issues with the world following ‘Echoes’, it was almost expected for them to have a more set structure to their shows than the psychedelic freakouts that they were used to from back in the day.
And while Gilmour helped steer the band for the past few decades, we have Roger Waters to thank for giving everything a bit more structure. He had already begun taking the reins as one of the group’s main songwriters, but by bringing structure to the stage like the light show and the amazing visuals, the band needed to be a bit more cohesive than simply throwing together riffs and hoping for the best.
It’s never a bad thing to have that kind of structure, but it’s not like everyone was happy when the structure became too much on The Wall. Waters had run out of patience with the band realising his idea, and even though Gilmour’s contributions like ‘Run Like Hell’ and ‘Young Lust’ made for some of the best moments on the record, it wasn’t like he was happy about every part of the process.
Although ‘Comfortably Numb’ did at least give Gilmour and Waters one last brilliant collaboration, Gilmour was forever tied to play the notes of the outro solo perfectly for the rest of his life, saying, “I can’t always [play like the recorded version]. But in the beginning of the end solo of ‘Comfortably Numb’, there’s that note on the seventh fret of the G string – a big harmonic. I always try to start that solo with that sound and play that first line. It seems daft not to!”
No artist should feel like they’re chained to what they did on record, but this is one of the few cases where Gilmour is absolutely right to keep faithful to the studio version. The whole outro practically serves as Pink’s descent into a drug-induced haze, and those opening notes of the solo are serving as the musical version of him screaming out in pain before finally getting into his stage clothes while doped out of his mind.
The rest of the solo might sound slightly different every time, but all of them at least do the job at telling the story of Pink’s point of no return through music. This is the portion of the rock opera where things were about to get bleak, but while Gilmour could have done any number of things during that break, not playing that opening bend of the solo would have been like Richard Wright not playing that opening *PING* that kicks off ‘Echoes’.
