The tragic story behind David Gilmour’s ‘Faces of Stone’
Pink Floyd leader David Gilmour has always had a knack for writing incisive songs about human matters. In addition to the undoubted musical prowess the Cambridge native possesses, his ability to draw on real-life topics has made some of his most accomplished compositions incredibly profound.
Whilst this is true for his work in Pink Floyd, it is in Gilmour’s solo career that he has been able to explore himself in a more unfettered way than in the prog-rock band. While there are numerous examples, ‘Faces in Stone’ from 2015’s Rattle That Lock stands out above the rest. Fuelled by a tragic picture of his mother suffering from dementia and the idea that the end of one life is the beginning of another, it remains one of his most piercing offerings.
Speaking to the BBC for Wider Horizons in 2015, Gilmour recalled the bittersweet story that fuelled ‘Faces of Stone’. To start off, he explained how every so often, an idea will push itself to the forefront of his mind and influence him to write either a lyric or a song about it.
Gilmour said: “Every once in a while, an idea will force its way to the surface of my mind that I will try to write a lyric, a song about, but I’ve got no way of predicting where that’s going to go in the future. I keep thinking that there is a little door and a little key that I could open, and I will suddenly find a way that would make it slightly simpler for me to move those things forward and to find them because there’s plenty to write about, but, I haven’t yet really pinned that down.”
Following this, the interviewer asked what prompted him to write the lyrics for ‘Faces of Stone’. Looking back on one particular memory of his mother when she was deep in the throes of dementia, he said: “‘Faces of Stone’ was prompted by a memory of a day walking in Ladbroke Gardens with my mother when she was suffering from dementia, and as we were walking through the trees, under the trees, and saying, ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely’, she said she could see pictures that weren’t there hanging in the trees. That was the moment that sparked it off, and I had a line that went ‘Faces of stone that watched from the dark / As the wind swirled around and you took my arm in the park’.”
Gilmour concluded: “So, it’s basically about my mother’s decline and, you know, the ending of one life and the beginning of another because Romany was born nine months before my mother died, so there was a short period where they were both alive together. And she came back to our house and held Romany in her arms as a tiny baby, and I have a picture of that, and so the moment in the park, which is a mental picture, and the picture that I have of her holding Romany in her arms sort of sparked a little thing which became that lyric.”
Listen to ‘Faces of Stone’ below.
