The producer David Gilmour needed to stop working with: “He was also quite frustrating”
The entire rise of Pink Floyd wasn’t exactly conventional when David Gilmour joined.
The band were already reeling from Syd Barrett slowly losing his way, and when you look through a lot of those early records, you can tell that Gilmour is hesitant to really step on anyone’s toes when he was playing his guitar solos. It was all about trying to make the best songs that they could while Barrett was still around, but even after the frontman had to be let go, there were some changes that the band needed to make if they were going to carry on in any capacity.
But if we’re being completely honest here, there’s a good chance that Barrett’s departure may have been one of the reasons why they succeeded the way they did. I’m sure every single member of the band would have preferred to have their friend back with them when they started making classics like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, but it’s hard to separate a lot of those songs from the harsh reality that they were facing when Barrett left the fold.
And even when they started working on their own, it’s not like they nailed it right out of the gate, either. It took them a long time before they started to get somewhere on a record like Meddle, and while that doesn’t mean every single one of their other records is terrible by any stretch, you could tell that they were slowly finding their sound when working on Ummagumma or Atom Heart Mother.
Since Gilmour wasn’t a songwriter at this point, it was also a lot more difficult for him to pick up the pieces when Barrett left. He was a hired gun in a way when he first joined, but if he couldn’t write the same kind of biting lyrics that Roger Waters could, he could at least have control over how the music would sound. He wanted to take the band into different directions, but it felt like their producer was holding them back from the minute they started working on their more extravagant ideas.
It’s not like Norman Smith didn’t have a solid track record, though. He had spent years working to engineer some of The Beatles’ first albums, and while no one would have called someone working on Rubber Soul a bad producer, Gilmour felt that he was trying to take the band in a direction that they weren’t comfortable with. They wanted to stretch out, and that meant having to let go of Smith after one too many times they were silenced.
Gilmour was grateful for working with Smith for a while, but he felt that the band needed to switch gears if they were going to survive, saying, “We were phasing Norman out, through that period of time. He was doing, you know–at the beginning he was very good, he taught us a lot of things, certainly taught me a lot of things. But he was also quite frustrating at times, he would always want to even things out, make them more homogenous. A certain point came when we felt we had got all we could get from him and he was only hindering in certain places.”
And considering how A Saucerful of Secrets ended up sounding, you can really hear what Gilmour is talking about. None of the songs sound downright horrible, but the mix is what is getting in the way more often than not. Their experimental songs weren’t quite suited to that style of production, and when they eventually took them onstage, it was like night and day whenever they played tracks like the title song live.
The band weren’t trying to slam Smith by any means, but they were simply at a different stage in life by this point. They had given themselves more space to work around in, and even if Barrett’s vision of the band was catered to a psychedelic version of pop, things were about to get a lot more fluid when they started making modern epics like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’.
