The song that made David Gilmour keep Pink Floyd alive: “A good turning point”
The real magic behind Pink Floyd always came down to the chemistry behind every member of the band.
Even though they might not have got along through every iteration of the band, it was a lot easier for them to let the petty arguments go for the sake of the music every single time they fired up one of their classics. But for a musician as integral to the band as Roger Waters was, it was going to be difficult for David Gilmour to even think about keeping the band rolling without one of their founding members.
Because, really, Gilmour was never meant to join Floyd in a perfect world. He was a great force within the group throughout their career, but since he was brought in as a substitute half the time when Syd Barrett couldn’t function in a live setting, he was far more interested in writing music rather than throwing in whatever lyrics he wanted. That was Waters’s job, and for a brief while, he seemed like one of the greatest lyricists the band could have asked for throughout the 1970s.
The Dark Side of the Moon was the first moment where they released a stone-cold classic, but the rest of their career afterwards was about them working on building that momentum. Wish You Were Here definitely wasn’t the happiest record for any of them to make, but they understood that they wanted to make an album that commented on the music business while also paying tribute to the Crazy Diamond that helped get the ball rolling for them all the way back in the late 1960s.
But after The Wall and The Final Cut saw Waters become more of a dictator than anything else, his decision to leave wasn’t about to slow Gilmour down. He had no desire to stop the train from running, but when Waters sued for the rights to use the name, and Gilmour won, he had an even greater weight on his shoulders. He had to be the frontman and the main songwriter, which is a big job for someone still new to songwriting.
He hadn’t spent his entire time in Floyd writing every single tune, and while his tracks like ‘Fat Old Sun’ and ‘Young Lust’ made for the best moments on their respective albums, how was he supposed to fly solo, especially with Richard Wright barely crawling his way back into the fray when they started recording? It was never going to be easy, but ‘Sorrow’ was the first time that he really began to think that his experiment was actually going to pay off.
Compared to every other song that took him ages, the fact that ‘Sorrow’ came to Gilmour so quickly was what gave him the drive to keep the band going, saying, “I wrote five verses one evening, they just flowed out from there. It was one of those great serendipitous moments you later release have been really valuable. I wrote the words first and I wrote the music afterwards. I guess that was a good turning point. I felt we were on a good roll with this thing that was going to work.”
While the rest of A Momentary Lapse of Reason benefited from having a lot more songwriters helping Gilmour through the process, it never stops sounding like a Floyd album throughout its runtime. It’s probably for the best that Gilmour ditched the idea of rapping on the record, but it’s not like ‘Learning to Fly’ or ‘On the Turning Away’ didn’t have the same sense of empathy that Waters was so good at.
Waters could say all he wanted to about how this version of Floyd was a pale imitation of the original, but Gilmour had no intention of straying too far away from the formula. Sure, Waters’s lyrics weren’t going to be there anymore, but if the band could have moved on without Barrett at their inception, what was stopping Gilmour from carrying on making music in his own way?
