The one voice that moved David Gilmour to tears: “The most powerful piece”
Throughout every era of Pink Floyd, David Gilmour was never meant to be the most sentimental musician in the world.
The Syd Barrett years had already shown people that they could get a little bit freaky, but even when making their landmark records like Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, the emotions often came from how the band fed off each other rather than anything overtly sappy. That said, Gilmour knew when the right voice could stab him in the heart with only a few words.
Then again, Gilmour’s taste in singers was all over the map compared to the average music fan. He had a healthy respect for people like Eagles in his downtime, but even when making some of the most accomplished music of any other rock and roll band, he could always fall back on the singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Neil Young to satisfy him whenever he picked up one of their records.
And while his own singing voice was never on the same level as a Freddie Mercury or anything, you could hear every single emotion whenever he sang. There was the existential paranoia of ‘Time’, the weary sadness in ‘Wish You Were Here’, and even the overt frustration of a song like ‘Young Lust’ or ‘Run Like Hell’, but sometimes it’s more about what is being said rather than how it’s sung.
Roger Waters was far from a great singer, but the way he could spin a perfect lyric is the reason why those songs still work to this day. So when that secret ingredient is suddenly taken out of the equation, the band were always going to be a shadow of what they once were. A Momentary Lapse of Reason already showed them to be a little bit too trendy for the times, but The Division Bell did at least give them a way to close the door on their career with a bit more grace than their peers.
And while Polly Samson’s involvement with the lyrics is far from popular among Floyd fans, it’s not like she doesn’t have a few good points, either. ‘What Do You Want From Me’ might be not-so-subtle jabs at Waters, but ‘High Hopes’ at least gave them a chance to make their swan song and the communication between the remaining band members. But halfway through the record, Gilmour knew a song like ‘Keep Talking’ needed someone like Dr Stephen Hawking to really feel complete.
Despite Dr Hawking losing his ability to speak by this time, Gilmour felt that no other voice could move him the way that he did when he heard him in a commercial, saying, “This advertisement nearly made me weep. This was the most powerful piece of television advertising that I’ve ever seen in my life, and I thought it was fascinating. And I contacted the company that made it and asked if I could borrow the voice track from it, this voice-over track from it, which I did, which is this voice synthesizer thing, and applied it to one of the pieces of music we already had, and I fiddled around with it for months.”
Given that the entire album is centred around the themes of miscommunication, though, getting Hawking to act as the connective tissue on this song is perfect. Since this also comes right before songs like ‘Coming Back to Life’, that theme of communication being the one thing uniting us all is as good as nearly anything that Waters would have come up with on albums like Amused to Death.
But beyond being a great addition to the track, Hawking was practically chanting the mantra that Pink Floyd would use to see themselves through their remaining years. They might have known that their connection with Waters was long gone, but if they were going to survive as a group, the best way was to follow Hawking’s advice and make sure that they kept talking for as long as they could.
