Credit: Anton_Corbijn

The songwriter David Gilmour could never write like: “I’m afraid”

Sun 3 May 2026 15:30, UK

David Gilmour didn’t pride himself on being one of the most technical virtuosos in the world.

Part of the appeal of Pink Floyd may have been about progressing rock and roll forward, but the lion’s share of their best songs were about using the building blocks of rock music and taking everything in a bold new direction. And even when he was working with Roger Waters’s brilliant lyrics and Richard Wright’s musical mind, Gilmour felt that other guitarists were well outside of his skillset.

Then again, it’s not a surprise that Gilmour took the lyrical approach to many of his greatest tunes. He was a blues player at heart, and some of the biggest names in the genre are usually the ones who look at the guitar as another voice in the band. It’s about getting the most out of every single note he plays, and Gilmour has practically found a way to make the guitar cry whenever he plays tunes like ‘Comfortably Numb’.

But the one thing that’s neglected far too often is Gilmour’s voice. He doesn’t necessarily have the most flexible voice in the world or anything, but whenever you think of any classic Pink Floyd tune, Gilmour was usually the lead singer. Not to take anything away from Waters, but it’s not like his voice was exactly the best instrument they could have been working with, even if he had some great moments in their catalogue.

Gilmour was the perfect person to deliver those kinds of tunes, but the idea of inhabiting a song and being able to make it perfect came a lot harder to him. The version of Floyd with him at the helm was more of a group effort, and no matter how hard he tried, someone like Bob Dylan was always going to be out of reach to a certain degree.

Let’s put it this way: If Pink Floyd were a movie, Gilmour would be the one focusing on the cinematography, and Waters would be focusing on the story. While the music that Gilmour made on his own was breathtaking on its own, you needed someone to put the breath into everything, and Gilmour marvelled at what someone like Dylan could do. All of his songs had dense messages that felt like news headlines every time he played them, and Gilmour felt that there was no way that he could ever reach that level.

His gift was in playing guitar, and having the kind of lyrical mind Dylan had was something that he could have never matched, saying, “I have nothing against any musician wanting to use their voice as a musician expounding their philosophical or political views. Bob Dylan’s early very hardcore political songs are what I grew up with. But I admit I’m not really vocal enough and clear enough. I’m afraid, I live my life lives in shades of grey.”

There is certainly a political angle in the way that Waters wrote a lot of his songs both before and after Floyd, but Gilmour was more into overarching ideas. Even when making the song ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ later in his career, it’s not like exactly a mistake that he had a sample do a lot of the heavy lifting on the song. He wasn’t great with words, and despite Polly Sampson making a handful of great lines for their tunes, Gilmour wanted to be free to make tunes that focused on the music first.

That may have been a bit of a wake-up call for someone like Waters, trying his best to make the best story that he could, but Gilmour is proof that sometimes it works to have great music without having to rely on the perfect line. His music could still have depth even with the writing going down a touch, but that didn’t mean that he stopped giving the same amount of passion to everything he did.