The one song David Gilmour never bothered to listen to
When any musician has been around for as long as David Gilmour has, even some of the most beautiful songs start to blend together.
It’s easy enough for someone to go into the studio with the best intentions, but it has to be a bit difficult when you have a track record that includes albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here when trying to make another masterpiece. And while Gilmour does have his fair share of milestones as a guitar player, there are a few songs that he felt weren’t worth revisiting after too many years.
You have to remember that when Gilmour joined the group, it wasn’t like he was ready to become a guitar god by any stretch. He was doing this as a favour to a friend when Syd Barrett started to lose his way in Pink Floyd, but listening to A Saucerful of Secrets, he clearly had a little bit more learning to do before he was fully ready to become a legend, especially with his bluesy fills not quite gelling with the rest of the band.
Roger Waters’s songwriting was certainly progressing on tunes like ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, but the core ethos of Floyd was never about any one person. Their strength always came from them working together, which explains why some of their greatest works tended to have contributions from every single person, whether that was the team effort that went into ‘Echoes’ or really anything that turned up on their live shows at the Pompeii amphitheatre.
So when you split everyone up into factions, that’s normally when things go awry. After all, The Wall is one of the most jagged masterpieces of their discography because of Waters taking the reins a little too much, and while The Final Cut feels like a neutered version of the bassist’s vision, A Momentary Lapse of Reason never had the same kind of power since Gilmour took hold of the entire thing.
But before they had one person dictating everything they did, Ummagumma was the first time they had a full-on bad idea on record. The live side of the record was interesting enough, but when they decided to split up and have each member play on one side of the record by themselves, it was bound to be a disaster. There are some interesting moments like Richard Wright’s keyboard pieces, but Gilmour admitted that he didn’t really know what he was doing when looking back on ‘The Narrow Way’.
He was still new to songwriting, and despite having a great foundation to start with, he felt the song existed more as an experiment than anything else, saying, “We’d decided to make the damn album, and each of us to do a piece of music on our own… It was just desperation really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself. I’d never written anything before, I just went into a studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together. I haven’t heard it in years. I’ve no idea what it’s like.”
Admittedly, it does sound like him trying to figure out what to do in the studio for over half the runtime, but it’s impressive enough to know that he played all the instruments on the final product as well. And even a few years after this record, he would show himself to be a capable songwriter in some capacity, eventually penning beautiful tunes like ‘Fat Old Sun’ for Atom Heart Mother.
But the fact that Gilmour never revisited ‘The Narrow Way’ has more to do with how he views the album than anything else. It was a necessary evil for them to move on from Barrett’s shadow, but that didn’t mean that they had to have the best memories of putting together avant-garde style pieces.
