“Every bit of it”: David Gilmour discusses the perfect pop song
A band like Pink Floyd was never concerned with being the greatest singles band in the world. The progressive rock sphere had adopted the album as their medium of choice, and there was no way that the DJs were going to get them to pair down their lavish concepts on Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. Roger Waters may have been at the helm of every conceptual piece they made, but David Gilmour knew a classic pop tune when he heard one.
By the time the psychedelic movement started, though, Pink Floyd was the last band that anyone was looking for when it came to accessible music. ‘See Emily Play’ was a nice piece of fanciful fluff, but now that Syd Barrett was gone, there was no real point in making the same song when they would come off as leeching off of the goodwill of their former frontman.
That meant a lot of fumbling around in the dark, but Gilmour did have a radio-friendly side when he wanted. Discounting the dated version of pop tunes that he made in the 1980s on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, his first attempts at proper tunes like ‘Fat Old Sun’ had the same kind of folksy pop angle that artists like Bob Dylan had been working with when he decided to go electric, only this time with a more tuneful melody behind it.
Then again, not even Pink Floyd would have been here without Elvis Presley kicking down the door first. Presley would probably have wanted nothing to do with a band like Floyd that played with different time signatures, but when he opened his mouth, there was some magic in his vocal cords when he started the first few bars of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
‘Hound Dog’ was a good basis for rock and roll to work off of, but listening to the raw recording that Presley captured on his signature ballad, he put raw emotion down on tape. Outside of being one of his finest vocal performances, hearing the natural echo of the room when he’s playing is one of the most vulnerable recordings that he had ever made as well, putting that signature vocal hiccup into his delivery to make it sound like he’s crying out in loneliness to his old flame.
When talking about the tune, Gilmour felt that what Davies captured in this song was practically flawless, saying, “‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is a sound that, as a recording, it’s like three instruments or something. It’s just so perfect, every bit of it. It couldn’t be more alive and give you the atmosphere more than the feeling of that. There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere that I haven’t learned yet.”
Granted, it’s not like Gilmour didn’t learn a few things from that minimalist structure. Although Pink Floyd’s music is known for its lavish orchestrations, the beginning of ‘Wish You Were Here’ captures that same melancholy feeling with only a few instruments, with Presley’s signature voice being replaced with his acoustic lead guitar fills that drive their way through the tune.
But there is still a lesson in ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that so many young artists take for granted. They can spend their whole lives trying to find the right guitar to play or what effects to put on the mic, but there’s no running away from a song where a singer performs without any kind of studio trickery.
