David Gilmour on the struggles of Live 8 pressure: “I didn’t want to be nervous and tense”
Nothing that David Gilmour ever played with Pink Floyd was meant to be off the cuff.
The amount of moving parts that went into any one of their shows would have been too much for any other musician to take, and yet Gilmpour managed to make the whole thing look easy, even when having to perform on top of a massive wall in the middle of their 1980s shows. He was willing to do everything he could to make sure that everything went off without a hitch, but there were some shows that he needed to have as perfect as possible before he even stepped out on that stage.
Granted, that’s not how Gilmour started out making music. If he had had his way, the band would have been celebrated for the sounds that they created, but Roger Waters knew that was never going to fly. Even though Syd Barrett may have been the mastermind behind all of the trippy visuals they had done back in the day, the fact is that the audience would have been incredibly bored if they had gone out there and just played their music to the crowd. They needed something more, and that’s when Waters’s ideas came out in full force.
No one who saw Floyd back in the day was leaving without telling everyone about the massive light shows that they saw or the gigantic flying pigs that would hover over the audience halfway through the show. The staging needed to reflect the music, and given how Gilmour used a pig with testicles and even simulated the plane crash in ‘On the Run’ after Waters left, it’s not like he didn’t know how to lean into it a little bit more.
He did have a keen eye for showmanship, but it was always going to be a bit bittersweet when Waters wasn’t there by his side. While the bassist might not have been the best personality outside of the band, the music they created together was absolutely perfect for the time. There might not have been a real need for them to reunite, but when the option came up to play Live 8, Gilmour needed to have every single thing in order before Waters even entertained the idea of getting onstage.
After all their legal battles, it was going to be hard to put all their differences aside, but Gilmour was willing to let go of the little things. He was still going to dictate what they played that night, but even if they were only onstage for a few minutes, fans were shellshocked by what they saw when the opening strains of ‘Breathe’ started and Gilmour and Waters cutting loose at the end of ‘Comfortably Numb’.
In the footage, Waters is looking like he’s having the time of his life, but Gilmour remembered being a lot more clinical in his playing, saying, “We did three days of rehearsing together. But I did over two weeks on my own. I made a CD of the set and had it at my home studio. I’d blast it out through speakers, play guitar and sing along to it three or four times a day every day for a good couple of weeks. I wanted to be very ‘on it’. I didn’t want to be nervous and tense about not being 100 per cent certain that I knew exactly what I was doing every second.”
You don’t necessarily feel Gilmour’s nerves when you look back at the footage, but it’s not like he was trying to outdo himself back in his prime when playing the solo in ‘Numb’, either. It’s a perfectly serviceable version of the tune, and as they stretch the whole thing out to a jam, you can hear bits and pieces of the band that helped create masterpieces like ‘Echoes’ all those years ago.
And when Gilmour is coaxed into a curtain call with the rest of the band, you could tell that he could finally breathe after being on that stage for so long. This is a gig that had some of the greatest showstopping musicians of the time, and yet here was Gilmour and the rest of the band showing everyone that it was possible to hold everyone’s attention with pure musical brilliance.
