“My mistake”: The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour sorely regrets
After decades of immense success, creative triumphs, and internal strife, it’s no surprise that David Gilmour eventually grew weary of Pink Floyd. While the band brought him vast wealth and artistic satisfaction, years of feuding with Roger Waters, internal tensions, and the challenges of decision-making within one of the world’s biggest groups took their toll. At 78, Gilmour had endured enough, making it the right time to step back and return to a quieter life—at least as much as someone of his stature could.
In September, Gilmour released his first solo album in nine years, Luck and Strange. Featuring a musician who’s fully aware of his place in the world but moving his cerebral sound with the times, it is yet another demonstration that Pink Floyd only accounts for a portion of his creative being. To be still releasing music of such quality and resonance at 78, and with such an immense back catalogue behind him, speaks volumes about the artist that is David Gilmour. So many people of his age are quite happy being cantankerous fuddy-duddies, melting in front of the television, but not he.
The album’s release came amid a period of what you might call emancipation for Gilmour. In one interview that month, he revealed that it was a dream to be rid of the decision-making and arguments involved with Pink Floyd and to sell their back catalogue once and for all. This wasn’t a financial thing at all; he just wanted to get “out of the mud bath” that it had become, he maintained. The following month, it was announced that the band had agreed to sell their back catalogue to Sony for $400 million.
That must have prompted an incredibly liberating sensation for Gilmour, knowing he was to be free of the mess of Pink Floyd. Yes, he can never fully escape it, but he’d undoubtedly released himself from the clutches of industry machinations as much as he could. Furthermore, after Luck and Strange arrived and his comments about wanting to sell the rights to Pink Floyd’s music were published, he also made another damning revelation about a chapter of the band’s career. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in November, Gilmour conceded with his sorely regrets the group’s final album, 2014’s The Endless River.
Although Gilmour has always been openly frank about the positives and negatives of Pink Floyd, decrying Atom Heart Mother as “shit” in one instance while expressing praise for Wish You Were Here in another; he made it clear that he thinks little about Endless River, the mostly lauded ambient finale of the band.
Notably, The Endless River is based on the recordings made during the sessions for the previous effort, The Division Bell. Recorded across 1993 and 1994 at London’s Britannia Row Studios and on Gilmour’s Astoria boat studio, later, Andy Jackson compiled the leftover material into an hour-long ambient composition he titled The Big Spliff, but the band didn’t release it. Tragically, keyboardist Richard Wright died of cancer in 2008, and in 2013, remaining Pink Floyd members Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason committed to making a new album, re-recording parts, adding new ones and using modern studio technology to bring The Big Spliff to life.
The problem was that much of this assortment of material had already made its way onto bootlegs. Gilmour then detailed his misgivings about what he called “my mistake” of an album: “A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them. My mistake, I suppose, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record. It should have been clear what it was — it was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell. But, you know, it’s never too late to get caught in one of these traps again.”
While The Endless River was seen as an apt way to end Pink Floyd, it was the final nail in the coffin for David Gilmour. He knew he had to get out. Perhaps owing to the complexities of the music industry, it only took him ten years.
