I n January 2007, a few months after the conclusion of the On an Island tour, David Gilmour and members of his road band, including Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright, convened in a drafty barn on his U.K. property to try out some new song ideas. “I hadn’t thought this all the way through,” Gilmour says. “It was fuckin’ freezing in there. But we spent 15 minutes working on this tiny, little riff I wrote on the guitar. They all joined in one by one.”
The sketch of a song was little more than a memory for Gilmour over the past 17 years, even though it marked one of the final times he played with Wright, who died of lung cancer in September 2008. But when he started amassing new songs a couple years ago, his mind drifted back to that tape. Working alongside Polly Samson, his wife and longtime lyricist, and producer Charlie Andrew, he fleshed out the song into the title track of his new LP Luck and Strange, due out Sept. 6.
“That song started developing a depth that I’d forgotten about,” Gilmour says. “The playing on it is unmistakably Richard. He was a true, lovely, creative person, and people like that are hard to find.”
The death of Wright coupled with Gilmour’s complete estrangement from Roger Waters means that Pink Floyd are likely to forever remain a memory from the increasingly distant past. But unlike Nick Mason, whose touring group Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets plays nothing but vintage tunes from the pre-Dark Side of the Moon era, Gilmour is looking only forward.
He spoke with Rolling Stone via Zoom from his home studio in the southern English countryside, surrounded by keyboards, and priceless vintage guitars. The conversation touched on everything from the creation of Luck and Strange to recording songs with his daughter Romany, his upcoming tour where he’ll reluctantly play a smattering of Seventies Floyd songs, his eternal war with Waters, the possibility of selling the band’s catalog, and why the thought of a Pink Floyd biopic hasn’t even crossed his mind.
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You’ve been fairly inactive these past eight years. At the end of the most recent tour in 2016, did any part of you think you might be retired?
No, I don’t think I ever thought that, really. It just takes a while to recharge. I’m not one of these people that wants to be out on the road constantly. I’ve got a lovely family. I’ve got some lovely green fields to walk around in. I thought that I was always going to do something again, but quite what and when, who knows? The whole lockdown thing got in the way, really. I suppose I could say it helped focus the mind, because we were trapped.
At the height of the lockdown, you started doing those family webcasts to promote Polly’s novel, A Theatre for Dreamers. But they became a great way for fans to get to know your entire family, and hear them sing.
Those events helped focus the mind, and that’s when we started trying to put things together. We were trapped. That’s why we called it the Von Trapped Experience, a joke on the old Sound of Music thing. It got us into thinking what fun it could be making some music together. It certainly started pretty much with Leonard Cohen covers, but that was lovely in itself, because my daughter Romany’s voice and mine just seemed to merge very well, and all these things have moved forward into where we went from that point.
As the lockdown started to end, how did your mind start shifting to making a new record?
We actually locked ourselves down, almost completely, for basically two years. We were very, very nervous about getting out and getting Covid. We didn’t succeed in not getting Covid of course, but all the discussions that went on about this Sword of Damocles that’s hanging over our heads during that time went into this album. We were also talking about getting older. Polly’s such a good writer and thinker about these things, and she gets into people’s heads. Those were the sorts of things that pushed us into working together again.
And I had some pieces of music that I had previously worked on, and I was writing new pieces of music. Things were going quite slow for a little while. But then we went and stayed in a small house in North London, where we would do five-day working weeks. I had a room with a little mini studio built in it, and Polly had a writing room, and basically we just really, really worked, and started getting this thing to take shape in its demo form from ’22, ’23. And then we got to that point where we could put the team together, and get studios booked.
Many of the lyrics reference aging and mortality. Were those themes there from the very start?
It was there from the start. All those issues were the sort of issues and topics we had been talking about, her and me, and sometimes with the wider family. As we went through lockdown, we were talking about, “God, this virus could practically wipe the world out,” and it set us thinking about all the various things that were coming down and hanging over our heads.
You brought in Charlie Andrew to produce the record. How did he change the way you usually work?
Well, he’s a younger person. He comes from a different era, and a different whole background. He certainly didn’t know very much about baby boomer stuff that had come quite a long time before him. And he was in the middle of his whole scene, which is all sorts of other people like alt-J that he worked with, and Marika Hackman, and loads of other music that I was blind to. And he was kind of blind to mine.
How did you find him?
I was hunting through my mind for someone that I could collaborate with in that way. And no one that I could think of seemed to be quite the perfect choice. Polly, who is an ace researcher, went online and looked up people. She had me listen to the music that these people had been involved with in one way or another. And Charlie Andrew and his work stood out from everything. We rang him up, and he seemed very keen to do the album. That has been an absolutely thrilling experience, because he’s a bit of a tyrant. He really pushes us to get things done. And if you haven’t got it at first, you try again.
On the other end of the age spectrum, Steve Gadd plays on the album too.
I had already booked Steve Gadd for a week before Christmas, before I had a producer in place. But because Steve Gadd is the legend that he is, Charlie was very pleased with that. But in the meantime, we went into the studio with a couple of other younger musicians as well. Adam Betts on the drums, Tom Herbert playing bass, this lovely guy, Rob Gentry playing keyboards. They and Charlie pushed me to my limits, and it moved forward in a brilliant way.
You cover “Between Two Points” by the Montgolfier Brothers. Most people aren’t familiar with that song. What drew you to it?
That song is on a couple of playlists on my phone, and it keeps coming up on our car journeys. And one day I thought I might just muck about with it in the studio and see what happened. I quickly realized the lyric was a vulnerable type of lyric that would suit an old warhorse like me. And Romany, Polly and I both, more or less at the same moment, thought, “Let’s get Romany to give it a try.”
She must have heard the song once or twice in her life on our playlists, but she didn’t really know it at all. I just gave her the lyrics on a piece of paper and stuck her in front of her mic. She’s a true pro with the microphone, has been since she was three. And basically the vocal that you hear on that track is her first take all the way. I mean, obviously there’s a tiny bit of repair and stuff going on, but basically that’s what it is.
On “Luck and Strange,” Polly is clearly writing about the impact of your generation.
The sentiment of that song is the idea that us baby boomers, the post-war generation, and we thought that the wars were over. We thought we were moving into sort of a golden age. Our prime minister back in those days, Harold Macmillan, his famous phrase was, “You’ve never had it so good.” It was so wonderful to live through…and the experience of people who were in all these rock bands, being able to do the touring, it was a beautiful, lovely thing. Is that moment that we’ve been living through the norm, or is that moment a moment, and that moment is gone or going? And I’m tending to look at the world, as is Polly, with the more jaundiced eye that maybe we are moving back into a darker time. What do they call it, post-truth? I don’t know.
Is “The Piper’s Call” a callback in any way to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first Pink Floyd record?
No. It’s a different piper I think. You can’t stay away from things just because they’re there. This is more Piper of Hamelin, I suppose. It’s a song about that “carpe diem attitude” and the spoils of fame, I think that’s probably directed at me, and all the temptations and fun of the rock & roll lifestyle that we all lived through, and where those are things to beware of getting too deeply involved in.
The song “Sings” really sounds like an intimate conversation between you and Polly.
I think that’s exactly right. A couple of them are slightly odd since they sound like I’ve written them and I’m saying them to her, but she’s written them and she’s saying them to herself. There’s a bit of the song where you can hear my son, who is now 29, saying “Sing, Daddy sing,” when he was an infant. It was recorded on a mini disc player in 1997. We floated that in towards the end. I love that song.
“Scattered” was written by you, Polly, and your son Charlie. How did that happen?
I wrote a lyric first and my lyric was a bit…you could say scattered. I seemed to have three topics going on in parallel, and Polly thought we should focus on one direction, and we thought we’d ask our boy Charlie to have a go. He came up with a sort of King Canute-like thing, the person trying to hold back the tide, which leads you into all sorts of strange trains of thought. Polly came in and helped with brilliance and expertise to get it finished.
On the EPK, you said this is the best record you’ve made since Dark Side of the Moon. What makes you feel that way?
It’s a flip statement, really. I mean, it’s not like Dark Side the Moon is even my favorite album. I think I prefer Wish You Were Here. Anyway, it feels to me like it’s the best thing I’ve done in more or less my living memory, because some of those things feel like they were someone else, back in those eons ago. I was in my 30s when Roger left our little pop group and I’m 78.
Must feel like a lifetime ago.
It seems so totally irrelevant to me now.
How far along are the tour preparations?
I have the band ready. Mostly the musicians who have been playing on the record are part of the new band. [Bassist] Guy Pratt is in the new band, of course. And [keyboardist] Greg Phillinganes is in it too, who did the last half of my 2015/16 tour. And I have Louise Marshall, one of the singers from the last time. But the other two singers I have this time are the Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie Webb, who toured extensively with Leonard Cohen. They’re English girls from not far away from where I live actually. And I have been able to persuade Romany to come and do a lead vocal on a few shows. I haven’t really worked out quite which ones she’ll be able to do. She’s at university studying in London, and so I don’t know that she’ll be able to do it all.
You said earlier this year that you had an “unwillingness to revisit the Pink Floyd of the Seventies” of this tour. Is that still your mindset, no Seventies Floyd?
One has to wake up to reality once in a while. I think I will be doing one or two things from that time, but it just seems so long ago. I know people love them, and I love playing them. I’ll be doing “Wish You Were Here,” of course I will. And some of the things that started with me anyway.
You’ve never played a solo gig in your life where you didn’t play “Comfortably Numb.” Will that be in the setlist?
Yeah, quite likely. Quite likely.
How about songs like “Breathe,” “Time,” and “Money?”
I don’t think I’ll be doing “Money.” If that’s your reason for coming…
Are you going to play the entire new record?
Not in one piece. I haven’t really worked it out yet. We haven’t started rehearsals. I’ve started working on set lists and how I want the show to progress, but it’s not set in stone yet.
You said earlier this year that your last band started feeling like a Pink Floyd tribute act. What made you feel that way?
I changed one or two people during the middle of my last tour, because I was feeling the weight a bit, a little bit more, and I wanted them to carry more of the weight. I wanted to be sort of floating on a cushion of air above all these people who are doing the hard work. And so I can just concentrate on singing and playing my bit. And also, not sticking quite so slavishly to the original records. I wanted people to feel a little bit more freedom, and make the music actually alive.
It’s a very tricky thing to do, because the people coming to see the shows pretty much want all the songs to be identical to the way they are on the record. And the musicians obviously want to stray from that. I want to stray from that. It’s a little juggling act, where you have to try and stick with keeping all the important stuff and having a bit more freedom to go sideways.
Nick Mason has spent the last few years playing shows with his band Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets. Have you seen them yet?
I haven’t seen it myself, no. I love the fact that he’s doing it. I don’t know what to say about that really, exactly. I tend to think that they will be coming from it different compared to the way we did it at the time. I’m all for him doing it. I think it’s great, and he’s having a great time, and that’s absolutely the way it should be.
I need to ask you about the other guy now. Back in 2010, you and Roger were on decent enough terms that you played a charity show together. You then guested at his Wall show in London. How did things go from there to the current impasse where you clearly aren’t on speaking terms?
Well, it’s something I’ll talk about one day, but I’m not going to talk about that right now. It’s boring. It’s over. As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s, and I’m a pretty old chap now, and the relevance of it is not there. I don’t really know his work since. So I don’t have anything to say on the topic.
When you and Polly sent out those Tweets last year, you must have known it was going to create an uproar. [On Feb. 6, 2023, Samson Tweeted out: “Sadly Roger Waters, you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.” Gilmour shared the Tweet and added, “Every word demonstrably true.]
People talk about the battle, but to me it’s a one-way thing that’s been going on since he left with different levels of intensity, and Polly felt she had to say her piece. I agreed with her piece and said so. Again, that’s all. I don’t really have anything extra to add to this, any other lights to shine on that.
There have been a lot of reports about the Pink Floyd catalog being sold. Is that still a possibility?
Is it something that is still in discussion, yeah.
Do you want to do it?
To be rid of the decision making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going is my dream. If things were different… and I am not interested in that from a financial standpoint. I’m only interested in it from getting out of the mud bath that it has been for quite a while.
I’m sure it’s challenging to get three “yes” votes for anything at this point.
Well, that’s not actually the way it’s worked. It works on a veto system. You could say it’s three people saying yes, but one person saying no.
You and Nick revived the Pink Floyd name in 2022 when you made “Hey, Hey, Rise Up!” for Ukraine. Can you imagine bringing Pink Floyd back in the future for a one-off like that?
It’s a strange old world we live in, and on there are things that crop up in life that you feel you have to do something about, and have to do something about now. And you might as well use what you’ve earned through your life to benefit causes that you believe in. So I never say never.
Do you ever think about writing a memoir?
People have asked me to, but it hasn’t so far tempted me. Maybe when I get a bit older I’ll think about them.
There have been a flood of rock biopics recently. Can you imagine a Pink Floyd biopic where a young actor plays you?
I’ve not actually given that a second’s thought. No, I don’t know about that. No one has really suggested it. If someone wanted to do one about Pink Floyd, I can’t quite imagine how they’d do it, but I don’t know what I’d say at that moment if it cropped up, but it hasn’t.
You’re playing Madison Square Garden the night of the presidential election in America. Do you think the vibe in the room will be a little weird?
Well, I wish I had known about the election night date before I booked those days in, and I think I’d have taken a day off on that day. Hey, but you Yanks have got to do what you’ve got to do. And that election is your business. And we’ve just had one here. I suppose, I like the idea of governments being run by grownups, and in Britain I think we’ve slightly moved in that direction, and we’ll see how you get on over there.
Do you think this could be your last tour?
Well, it could be, obviously.
Do you think it will be?
I’ll tell you after the tour.
Let’s end by talking about “Yes, I Have Ghosts.” It’s a bonus song on the new album that really sums things up. You sing “Yes, I have ghosts, not all of them dead/And they dance by the moon/Millstones white as the sheet on my bed.”
That’s a song that Polly and I wrote, which was directly influenced by and concerned with the story of her book that came out in 2020, A Theater for Dreamers. As I said earlier, we were going to do some shows around the country where we were going to do one or two Leonard Cohen covers, because he was a part of that story. And we wrote that song really to put it into those shows and have an extra piece of music for that. But it’s not been out on an album yet. And we both really like it. So we thought that could be one of the sort of extra things that we put on this album.
It’s amazing to think that you’ve been creating music with Polly for over 30 years now. It’s lasted a lot longer than your partnership with that other guy.
Polly and I have been working together on these things for 32 years. In fact, it’s our 30th wedding anniversary next week.
Congratulations.
Thank you. And as you correctly point out, it’s much longer than we spent with that other guy.
And things are in a much better place with her than with him.
I couldn’t agree more. 1000 percent.