The only artist left on David Gilmour’s dream collaboration wishlist
You could forgive David Gilmour for never wanting to collaborate with anyone again.
While he might be a leading part of one of the greatest bands of all time, writing perhaps one of the greatest albums of all time in The Dark Side of the Moon, he certainly had to suffer to achieve it. He initially joined Pink Floyd when Syd Barrett’s frenzied creativity was spiralling into madness, and he, along with his new bandmates, had to confront the difficult experience of watching his deterioration.
He battled on with Pink Floyd to write their seminal experimental album as well as the follow-up, Wish You Were Here, which provided some closure to the Barrett saga. But while Gilmour mourned the loss of one friend, he began a feud with another that would last decades thereafter.
The yin and yang tension that made Gilmour and Roger Waters such a formidable creative duo in the heady stages of Pink Floyd’s pomp was drifting into unhealthiness. No longer was Waters the necessary opposite to Gilmour, but his outright nemesis, who made every aspect of his creative and personal life a living nightmare.
The great guitarist explained, “That moment of being in a band, when you’re young, when you can shout at each other and fall out, but still be back at it, because your common destiny is still there… Yeah, I’m set in my ways now. It would be harder to do that today. It’s harder to be equal.”
Gilmour’s collaborative experiences have left him burned, and now he lives comfortably in a retirement that is only interrupted by the odd solo gig. In fact, the one time he was recently seen sharing the stage with someone, it was his own daughter, which shows just how specific he is when it comes to the terms of his returns. So when it came down to picking a dream bandmate, Gilmour was left pretty stunned. He scratched his head and surveyed the musical landscape with hesitancy, as he wondered if any of the prospective geniuses he could work with were worth the hassle. For he knew first-hand that the more acute the talent, the more likely they were to rub him up the wrong way.
“Multi-guitar sort of challenge records aren’t really my thing, so I don’t know,” he started, but then he plucked out the name of one musician who could give him one more chance, “Leonard Cohen, but he’s not a great guitar player… not bad”.
Gilmour has realised that any collaboration needs to come with boundaries. He lost them in the worst days with Waters, where the two would ultimately jostle for attention as the band’s leader. Whereas Gilmour and Cohen should be able to co-exist while occupying different parts of the song.
Gilmour, as the guitar virtuoso, can lay down the arrangements while the master poet Cohen can take them somewhere else, where together they can write what might be the perfect song and do so without the drama.
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