NPR Music - A conversation with David Gilmour

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

The Pink Floyd guitarist and singer talks about the 50th anniversary of Wish You Were Here, a new live album and concert film for his latest solo release Luck And Strange, and more.Weekly Reset: Rowing on an autumn lake.Enjoy the show? Share it with a friend and leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

All right, it's all songs considered. I'm Robin Hilton. And if you don't already know it, these are the opening strains to Pink Floyd's 1975 album, Wish You Were Here. The album, Wish You Were Here. It's celebrating its 50th anniversary, 50, 50th, 50th, 5-0. There's a big deluxe version coming out with a bunch of demos and outtakes. There's a bunch of live recordings from that time that are all included in it. So this week, we've got Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmore in to talk all about it. it to share memories and stories from the making of the album. But this isn't just a nostalgia trip. Gilmore has a lot cooking right now.

He turns 80 years old in March, and I don't think it's a cliche or a throwaway line to say he isn't slowing down. He had a new solo album last year. He co-wrote with his wife and longtime collaborator, Polly Samson. It's called Luck and Strange. He just released a concert film from his tour for the album, and he has a live album version of it coming out called The Luck and Strange Concerts. So when David Gilmore and I sat down to talk, I was in D.C.

He was in his home studio south of London. And we started off with the new stuff, the luck and strange concerts, which opens a lot like Wish You Were Here opens, with this slowly blooming and super calming song called 5am. It is a recording of the sound outside my bedroom. window at 5 a.m. one morning. And that moved on into inspiring a piece of simple music that suited a bit of guitar playing. These things are hard to explain quite how they come to pass how that inspiration strikes you, but it's a lucky moment when they do. Yeah, I was going to ask you if you

wrote it at 5am. Are you a morning person? Yes, I am actually. I mean, I didn't write it at all. No, I was leaning out of the window with the recorder, just recording the atmosphere of the early morning, the birdsong and the other noises and atmosphere, some of which almost inaudible, but it adds to the thing. Do you play around with sampling? Do you run that into a sampler and then play around with the sounds?

No. Not really, just straight up. I don't want to mess with it. You know, just obviously there are, you know, you record an hour of that thing, and you can edit those pieces together invisibly within Pro Tools and concentrate the bits about that time that we inspired you. Well, opening the show at 5 a.m., I was just talking with a friend about the first time I saw you play in 88, how you opened with Shine on You Crazy Diamond.

part one through five. And there's something counterintuitive about it because I think most bands come out, they just want to hit with their hardest thing right out the gate. I want to create an atmosphere that is not your classic rock and roll atmosphere. I've got nothing against that.

And we get down to some of them, more rock and roll areas as the concert goes on. But I want to set people sitting back in their seats and thinking and relaxing and letting themselves move into the music. It's not all about rhythm or hard rock. Let's talk about the title cut that you perform to Luck and Strange.

The luck of being a post-war baby boomer generation. Our prime minister in the early 60s, Harold McMillan said, you've never had it so good. And that was a generally considered thought and how strange some of these things are that you can look back and consider in life. And that song was a jam track that I recorded in my barn at the farm here

with Guy praying and Rick Wright, of course, the year before he died, jamming with us and Steve Distanerslow. And it's a jam that just came a little riff that I had in my head that we played for about 20 minutes. In fact, on the album somewhere amongst the extras, there's the original jam track in its full 20 minute glory. And I've played around with that track, cut it in bits,

put in bridges and middle eights, choruses, using the original drum track. It's something you do when you got a lot of time. on your hands. I like thinking about luck and strange together because I always think of life as being very beautiful and very, very strange. Yeah. But I like invoking the idea of luck. Yeah, well, we were a lucky generation and it is very strange to look back at time from perspective, perspective of right now with the world's problems, your problems over in America, or your problem, I should say, and all the problems in Russia, Israel, and, you know, the world is a mess at the moment.

It's a scary mess. And we thought all those things were passed in the 60s and 70s. We thought we were moving towards a world of peace and prosperity and equality for all races and nations and sexes. It hasn't really borne quite the sort of fruit that we've done. we hoped. So you also included this really surprising cover song in your performance for the Luck and Strange, a song called Between Two Points. Holly and I have known that song since the 90s, late 90s, I think, when it must have come out. Beautiful, lovely lyrics by the Montgolferi brothers. Just beautiful, but they're too fragile for me. So Holly suggests we get our daughter Romani to try

and five minutes in this room where she sang it. Did the trick. There was no reason to look further. It just obviously was going to be a cracking addition to the song. I'm very happy to do the occasional cover. I mean, you have to make it your own, but you don't want to be too close to the original. Not that this is too far either.

Yeah, I have to say, I listen to the album blindly, I didn't read any credits or read much about it. I just put it on, hit play, and listen to see where it took me. And when I got to that, and I heard this woman's voice singing, I thought, oh, who is this? It just made me stop everything. Yeah.

I mean, I've been, she's been singing things with me since she was three. We do lots of children. We were lots of the songs, lots of the hits that, you know, we do backing tracks, and the children sing them. I could put her out an album and give her those one of these days. Oh, yes, please. I'd love to hear that. So she's an experienced hand in the studio, you know, say, there's the mic, put your cans on, here's a piece of paper, sing.

And that's more or less what we did with that song. 95% of the singing in that song was the first take. What does it mean for you to be on stage with your daughter? I mean, your heart must just feel like it's about to explode. Yeah, it does. It's just amazing. You know, there's a thing. It's a commonly spoken idea that voices in a family tends to blend nicely together.

The Everly brothers are good case in point. There's many, many people. And, you know, we actually, in 2020, we were doing, Pollywoods had written a book her last novel called A Theatre for Dreamers and she wanted to promote that did book launch and all those sort of things but the COVID hit us and we were locked down

and we decided to start doing some lockdown sessions or a lockdown book launch basically from our barn online which we did we called ourselves the von Trapped because we we were and we got a very good audience the first week and and week after week we seem to continue and we would read bits of book and talk about things and chat and have a glass of wine maybe

one or two too many on occasion and and i would sing a song and ronbony would join in with me you know most of the songs we started with were lendon's songs because he's actually is a character in in Polly's book. So we were doing his songs. And Roman he joined him with those, and she plays the harp. Gosh, it was quite an experience. So the idea that her voice might be something

we'd used at some point came to us. Well, we can't get to every song on this album, but I did want to talk about your performance of A Boat Lies Waiting. It's like going into a scene. Something I never. It's a song that I had written music and Polly wrote words. I guess the words are, I think they were sort of a gift to Rick Wright.

It came out in 2006 and he's actually singing on it a little bit on the record. But it's just one of those songs. That's a real emotional feel to it that I love. And the little moment in the middle of our show of a great gig in the sky and a boat while I was waiting where all the singers gather around the microphone, on the microphones, around the piano and sing those two songs. There's a killer moment for me. I have to thank Polly again for that.

Well, I know our time is limited, so I do want to ask you some about the wish you were here 50th anniversary as well. Yeah. I mean, my gosh, we could spend all day just talking about the history of the album and how it came to be, and I know a lot of those stories have been told a million times before, but They have. I would love it if possible. If you could just take me back to that time and what you remember, it's the top of 1975,

and you're coming off the incredible success of the dark side of the moon. You guys go into the studio to follow up this, followed up with this new project. Do you remember what the mood was like, how you were feeling or what you were all thinking? We had one or two start points, which is we had Shiner and a new crazy diamond. And we had two other tracks, because in late 74, I think, we convened in a rehearsal room in Kings Cross in London and worked up some material there. The two other songs became dogs and sheep on the animals' album.

And Roger didn't want to have all three of them on the album we were currently working on, which became if you were here. He suggested we split, shining on your crazy dam, into two and have it them was bookends of a whole album, which I wasn't over-keen on at the time, but I grew to love that idea. Funnily enough, the other day, I was at a book launch for Jill Furmanowski,

a famous rock and roll photographer, who's an old old friend, and it was in number three studio at Abbey Road, the launch, and it was on the day of the anniversary of the release of which you were here in the room that we recorded Wish You were here. When the thing was over, they started playing tracks from Wish You Were Here, in the room where we recorded them. That was a very, very odd, but lovely feeling.

Do you remember? I can remember sitting in that control room to number three there and starting to play the beginning of Wish You Were Here. And discipline, it remains mercifully. Yes, and now would you, Derek, this star, nonsense. No, it is a... I'm sure, no. We went out into my car in the car park outside the front door of Abbey Road with a microphone

and I just sat there with the thing on with a microphone recording the radio and you know in the old days you didn't press a button to get a new channel. You actually tune from one to the other so you'd turn a knob around clockwise or anti-clockwise and come across these strange, mad sort of sounds. That is all a live moment that just happened while I sat in my car, all of that background radio noise. Is that you clearing your throat and stuff that we hear? Almost certainly.

There was a lot of lefogy in the studio, a lot of sitting around, trying to gee ourselves up into getting back to work properly. And it took quite a long time, and that is part of what the title is, of the album and that song is about. It's the Roger's view that some of us weren't really there a lot of the time. Because I think at least my assumption was always, oh, you're saying you wish Sid was there or something.

Well, Wish You Were Here is about a much broader Wish You Were Here thing. I'm sure there's elements of Sid in it. Shine on You Crazy Diamond is more specifically about Sid. So when you entered the studio, did you have kind of a mission statement in mind for what you wanted to do apart from the framework of these songs? Like, did you think, I want this to be this? I don't want to do Dark Side again. I want it to be this thing.

Well, there were a number of thoughts about those sort of issues, about what we were trying to do and how and why. But we were in a place which is a very strange place to be. You know, the difficult second album thing springs to mind. wasn't our second album or other, I'll just think, but it's the second album after having the Knock Your Sox Off, Fulfill All Your Dreams sort of album, that Dark Side of the Moon was. And, you know, you think you've done everything at that point. You're not sure what you're doing it for.

You know, are you doing this for more fame? Do you want more money when you've... done rather well at that moment. All of those things that you dream of when you're a teenager in your first little band were realized by that album.

And you have to then think, do I really love music? Is it the fame that I really love? Or is it the money that I'm after? Or is it the other benefits that go with it? How'd you answer? I think I got to the conclusion that

I really was there for the music more than anything else. Everything else obviously comes into it. One of the most surprising moments in these outtakes and alternate versions and everything is a version of Wish You Were Here that features the French jazz violinist Stefan Grapelli. Well, he was in, again, on another occasion at the same time,

he was in there working on an album, I think, with Yehudi Menouin. Probably in the big orchestral room, number one. And I guess maybe somehow, when you're all together, in this huge sort of club that is Abbey Road recording studio people sort of wander into other studios and say hi to people, you know. I walked through the door of number two once

and John Lennon was sitting on a chair with a guitar doing this and he just turned it around and glared at me. I just quietly shut the door. Anyway, my assumption is that Stefan wanted to meet us. So someone brought him in to meet us

And we said, why don't you play on this track? He said, sure. And he grabbed his violin and played some stuff. It was pretty out there. Yeah, I was going to ask you what led you to swap it for the version that ultimately got released with your solo. And honestly, maybe my favorite part, which is you singing in unison with the guitar solo at the end of the song. The sort of a cat thing, yeah. Yeah.

It wasn't quite us. I don't know. You weren't brave enough to put it on at the time. Everything you do, you're constantly and. adding and taking away, you're throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. So, yeah, you add things and then you listen back to them, you know, then you leave them for a few weeks and come back to them and reassess them and say, maybe that doesn't quite work, you know. There's a constant process of reassessment going on when you do those things.

And what makes the final cut is how you're feeling about it at the end when you've added them subtracted for months. So many different outtakes and demos we could play here, but this anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here also has an alternate take of the song Have a Cigar. I haven't checked all of the

extras on it. I know there's a welcome to the machine on there. There is a Have a Cigar. I haven't heard it. Okay. I can play a little bit for you. Go on then. Nick's playing good. Yeah.

It's really got a groove going there. I'm just going to scoot your head here to the vocals because they're the part that's really different here. They're slower. Is that before Roy Harper was brought in? Yeah, yeah. That's Roger singing the top line. I think it's me singing the lower line. I guess.

It's a judgeing from a couple of little things that I recognize in it. I don't really remember. For some reason, and I can't remember the reason why exactly, Roger didn't want to sing it and I didn't really want to sing it and Roy was making an album in the other in another room in number two or something and we were in number three at Abu Roe

there's three big rooms there number one is like an aircraft hangar and Roy was often like us wasting his time and would come into our studio and pass comments on what we were doing and where we were going He's an old old friend. And I think he was there at a moment when all of us were arguing

or someone was saying, David, you do it. And Roger's saying, I don't want to do it. I'm not sure I want to do it. And Roy said, well, I'll do it. This is my memory, of course. There are many different. My memory is Roy piped up and said, well, I'll sing it. And we said, oh, okay.

Yeah, I think Roy's version of it's great. You mentioned Welcome to the Machine. There is an early demo of that on here as well, included on the album. It's called The Machine Song. I don't think it's all Roger's home demo. It's a long time ago. Yeah.

There's a lot of an old person's memory. Well, one of the things that was interesting is somewhere near the end is a little bit of guitar soloing. it's kind of buried in it, but it sounds like you're using the talk box, which I don't really think of appearing in your work until animals. Quite when the talk box arrived in my sort of musical vocabulary, I can't remember at all. But there's quite a bit of it on animals, which is a couple of years after this. I might well have had it around, but I guess I don't remember.

I mean, I'll have a listen to this demo again and see if I can hear it. Want me to play it? Yeah, sure. Yes, I hear it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No memory of doing it. Can't help with why it's all there not on the final one.

That sounds like it's me playing. Well, that's the thing that's so cool about hearing some of these demos and alternate takes is that you get to kind of be a fly on the wall and hear you stretching and pushing in different directions and trying different things out. One of the things that, well, there are lots of things that I think are super distinctive about the way that you play and that I've always loved. But one of the things that I really love is your use of space in your soloing. I just don't really think about it.

There's a music going on. It's hopefully lovely music and hopefully just that music that you're listening to, maybe it's something you wrote like, comfortably numb in my kids. or wish you were here, you know, where you inspire yourself what the thing that you've composed inspires you a little bit. And you just have a go. I don't pre-think things very often, not trying to work out what would be new and excitingly different.

I'm just hunting for an emotion in the moment. And, you know, I'm not that fast on the guitar, so I don't want to be going. Even if I could, I don't think I'd be wanting to go that much faster than I can. You've got a fastball ready if you need it. I've heard it. I don't know. I'm just looking for a tune, you know,

to stick a tune on top of the bed that's been made there, something that is a melody and has a melodic form and thought. Yeah, melodies always seemed really important to you. I mean, I've noticed even when you play live, like on a song, like Comfortably Numb, you mentioned, and going back to the Luck and Strange concerts, you did that song on the tour and for the new live album. It has this instantly recognizable melody that feels like it was very composed for the album,

and you are playing it live as you wrote it for the album. Well, yeah, I've got a start point for the soul of comfort me now, but that was just what came out on one particular day in 1979, south of France, and I used that as my liftoff moment. So, you know, I pretty well always do the same thing for the first half a dozen bars, Yeah. Then I'll either fall into some routines that are familiar or depending on how brave and weird I'm feeling, you know, move off into other directions a little bit from time to time and then come back. It is what I love, which is what I've spent my whole life doing.

I started out playing music in bands when I was 16, 17, and I've never started. And the writing thing gradually came on me, creating my own pieces of music until I realized, you know, I had got a knack for a nice tune once in a while. What can I do? You know, just follow where I'm led. So that's guitarist and singer David Gilmore talking about the 50th anniversary of the Pink Floyd album. Wish you were here. And about all his latest solo work, Luck and Strange, the concert film. It's out now. The live album is due.

out October 17th. The 50th anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here is not out for a while. It's not out until December 12th. But there are a handful of cuts from it out now that you can listen to. If you'd like to revisit parts of this conversation, you'll find edited highlights on our website, npr.org slash all songs. And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.