David Gilmour

0:06Pushkin.

0:10It's no exaggeration when I say David Gilmore is one of the most influential guitarists in rock history. Since joining Pink Floyd in 1967, his songwriting vocals and distinctive guitar approach have helped shaped classic albums like Metal, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason, amongst many others. In 1978, he began releasing solo work, and over the past four decades, has recorded five solo albums. His last few albums, starting with On an Island in 2006, onto Ride of That Lock in 2015, all feel of a piece, including his latest 2024's Luckin' Strange, which is also his third album to reach number one on the UK Albums Charter.

0:49As usual, his latest album features lyrics by his wife and longtime collaborator Pauly Samson, but this time also features substantial contributions from his children. One of those collaborations with Romany Gilmore is astounding, and it was jaw-dropping in live performance, which you can now see for yourself with the release of the live concert David Gilmore at the Circus Maximus, and listen with the release of the Luckin' Strange concerts now available wherever you get your music. On today's episode, I was offered 30 minutes or so on Zoom with David Gilmour. And how could you say no to a quick chat with a hero?

1:21I spoke with Gilmour about writing songs with Pauly, the experience of mastering his latest album on a houseboat, and why he can never truly recreate a guitar solo, even when playing it note for note. This is Broken Record. Real musicians, real conversations.

1:40This is an iHeart Podcast.

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3:43When I'm trying to staff shows here at Pushkin, I always turn to LinkedIn first. Not only does it help me get a sense of who's currently looking for work, but I can easily search through people's experiences to find the exact right match for what I need. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash broken. That's linkedin.com slash broken to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Here's my conversation with David Gilmore. Hi, Justin. Great to meet you. Same. Are you coming from your studio on the riverboat or from home? One of my vast collection of studios. This is just a little room in the house.

4:18Got it. When I spoke with Pete Townsend, I was from a riverboat, or from a boat of some sort as well, and so I wasn't sure. He was on a boat, was he? He was on a boat, yeah. His studio boat's just downriver from my studio boat. Have you checked it out? Yeah, I've been in it several, many times over a year. I haven't been there for a long time. It's got to be a little precarious, no? Recording on a boat or less than you would imagine? Less than you would imagine. It all works pretty well. I mean, mine is sort of moored very securely. It's got a big post at each end. And if the river level goes up, it just slides up and down the post perfectly.

4:59And the other great thing, of course, the thing that you get on a boat is that the road that's just nearby, there's no rumble. All that traffic noise, if you're floating, doesn't happen. It doesn't reverberate over to... It doesn't come through the ground, you know, like in most buildings, there's always a bit of rumble from something. Was it you got the boat and became inspired to create on it? Or was it just a novel idea you had and thought, okay, let me buy a boat and convert it? What was the, how did it come to be? I was driving down the road, being driven, in fact. I won't tell you why. And I just saw this metal and glass thing over a wall.

5:46And I got whoever was driving me to pull over. And we looked down there, and we saw this beautiful boat moored up against the bank. And I thought, that's gorgeous, lovely. And literally, the next week, I was in the dentist's waiting room and picked up a magazine, and there it was for sale in that magazine. And that was in 1986. 86, okay. And I rang up and said, can I see it? And I put in an offer the same day. That's pretty fortuitous. Initially, I didn't even know that I was going to make it into a studio. What of the new album, Luckin' Strange, was done on there? The mixing. It's got a very big, lovely control room.

6:36And we did the mixing on there. And we set up a Dolby Atmos mix room in another room at the other end of the boat. So we could be running two things at once. And so all the mixing pretty much and all the Dolby Atmos mixes were done in there. Wow. The other things, we went off to various recording studios. I have a studio myself in Brighton, which works very well. And we did some in another studio in Brighton called Salvation. And we also did a lot of the stuff, the basic tracks, with Steve Gadd and the other guys at Mark Knopfler's studio in British Grove in London. Incredible. I saw one of the shows at the Hollywood Bowl last October and it exceeded expectations.

7:25I had not seen you in the past somehow. It had deluded me and it was amazing. And your band was phenomenal. I agree. Like really incredible. And I didn't know Phil and Gaines was playing with you. That was like a joy to see. well I've known Greg since the sort of middle to late 80s when he was out on the road with Michael Jackson and I was out on the road with Pink Floyd and we got quite friendly and I've always wanted to find a time where he could join up with my band which he did actually in 2016 for a whole leg of the last leg of my 2015-16 tour and I got him back in this time a lot of people tend to not meet up with other musicians because they're on the road or or you know friendships sort of stay in some sort of stasis because you're out on the road so how did you how is it that pink floyd michael jackson wound up in concentric circles well strangely enough in 1987 michael jackson's tour and our tour was sort of following each other around, you know, and we'd be, you know, he'd be in one city and we'd be in the same city three days later and they had a day or two off in between.

8:47So we would just bump into people who were, you know, and I, I think I first met up with, with Greg in Paris when Michael and Pink Floyd were all playing there within two or three days with each other. And we just met up. What did you make of their show? brilliant show I saw that I mean I didn't see that show at that time and I saw it in the States I think probably the next year or a few months later when we met up again and Greg invited us to one of those shows so we legend Michael Jackson yeah did Greg and Richard Bright have any sort of connection both pretty incredible players I don't think I don't think they really properly met I'm not sure to be honest okay well i brought that i brought up that because we were talking about luck and strange um you know you have steve gadd on the record yeah and and so many other also incredible players on the record how do you decide who could fit for any particular song when you're going to record something um well we started off um we'd booked five days i think with steve gadd who's the best, you know, the absolute best drummer in the world.

10:06And I'd never worked with him before. I'd met him a few times, but I'd always wanted to. And I managed to get five days of his time, and he flew over to London. And I had booked Mark Knopfler's studio, and I got the other guys in there. And we had some songs we wanted to try, and we spent a very intense week working on putting down those songs with Steve, with Rob Gentry on keys, and Guy Pratt playing the bass. What songs did you do in those five days? We did Sings, Piper's Call, Dark and Velvet Nights, Scattered. What else? I mean, most of the songs, actually, we got the basic tracks down. One or two more, we did a single Spark and one other with Adam Betts on drums and Tom Herbert on bass.

11:17can't quite remember now. Tried to remember all the songs and the moments that we had in putting those tracks down. Was it that session or was it any particular session, if not that one, that sort of clarified what you were doing or clarified that, in fact, you actually had something that could become an album? We were going in there. We knew we could hang out an album. and we knew where we were going. We had Charlie Andrew as a producer, co-producing with me, and an engineer that he brought to the project called Matt Glasby, who was just brilliant, brilliant, and knew things about Pro Tools and the recording process that I didn't even imagine were possible.

12:09Yeah, and so, yeah, Charlie Andrew was pushing us forward and telling us how he saw the way things might be. And between us, yeah, we got a lot done very quickly at that point. You know, at this point, you've gone in the studio, made a lot of records. What does working with a producer bring to a project that wouldn't otherwise? You know, you want someone there to help and to push and to agree when it's something to agree with and disagree when it's something to disagree with, which is just as important. and to push the whole process forwards and frankly take a lot of the weight off, you know, the side of the process which is producing, which I have done myself as well, but it's exhausting.

13:04I mean, it's still quite exhausting when there's a producer there but he is going to address things from a slightly different angle and he's going to make you think about things and rethink about things. and he's gonna he's gonna snap his fingers and say let's go let's go you know is it hard because this is your first record with with with charlie you'd you'd done a couple or two or three with film and zara before yeah is it hard when you're working with it somebody new to find how to be disagreeable on the moments when you need to be well you know um no i've done as you say a couple with phil manzanero who's my great friend um but hey time moves on i felt we needed a new direction not direction but just a a new mind on it a new uh opinion on it and uh my co-collaborator co-writer who happens to be my wife polly did a lot of research because we We were spending a lot of time talking about which of the people that I had worked before we might work with again and thinking of who else we could go to who was new.

14:27And Polly found an album by a band called Old J, and she liked the sound. She said, listen to this. And we liked it both. And Charlie was the producer, so we had a good look at him from afar. and then asked him to come down and meet up. So that's where it all started. You know, because it could become fraught rather easily. You know, to your point, you have to agree when it makes sense and disagree when something needs to maybe move forward or something's not working or, you know, just find some sort of common ground. Is it difficult to forge a new working relationship with someone like that? or is it easy?

15:13Well, Charlie Andrew, as it has been widely said, didn't really know me or my music or Pink Floyd's music. And he comes from a different sort of era of music. And that sort of thing is invaluable. You want to be pushed and you want him to, if it's wrong to tell you so. And it's one of the dangers of having a fair amount of success that people get very frightened of disagreeing with you, with the one in my position. And one of the lovely things about Charlie is he had no such fear and just came straight out with the questions and the disagreements, if there were any. Remarkably few, actually, it has to be said.

16:08But on one or two occasions, we changed the direction of things around quite a bit. And it was all for the good. Sometimes you need to kick out the backside, you know, and need to look at things from a different angle. And he was very, very good at that. That's great. You mentioned that you collaborate quite often with your wife, who's an incredible writer. um you also had your daughter on this project and on the tour with you and she's obviously now in the movie the concert film you guys are putting out yeah tell me about that i mean the first time you guys did anything at least publicly was was the ghost song right yes i yes i've seen ghost yeah yeah well the yes i have ghost song came about because of um polly's book because she writes novels and she had written a novel based on an island in a greek island and uh when it got to um the release of that book was when covid started and we were suddenly locked down and we had some events lined up that she was going to go and do readings and q a's and all those things and they all got cancelled and chris salmon who works in this on something said why don't you just do it online?

17:31This is what people do these days. So we rigged up a little studio online, and we had a little set, a little set that we were going to take out to places, which was the front of a Greek cafe. And we put that up in a barn and plugged a microphone into a laptop like this and did the first one. And I didn't have an engineer or a sound man or a lights man or a cameraman. It was just me sort of pressing the buttons and checking that it was actually going up and then sitting back down and doing the whole thing with a couple of glasses of wine. Each week as we went on, because we kept it going for quite a while, every Thursday night and had a great time.

18:17And Polly's book was based on this Greek island in the year 1960, when there were an English and Australian and other countries contingent of artists and writers, one of whom was Leonard Cohen, who has a small role in Polly's book. So one of the things we did was to do some Leonard Cohen songs as part of these lockdown sessions. We call them the Von Trapp sessions because we were trapped. And they got quite an audience. And one of the songs we did was a new song I wrote called, with Polly, of course, Polly's Lovely Words. She did an audio book as well, which she read herself, and we thought it would be good to do a bit of music, incidental music here and there to emphasize what's going on in the book, which is not the usual way of doing an audio, but it's usually just the words that I wrote a few little bits and pieces and one of those things basically was Yes, I Have Ghosts.

19:24Oh, man. So, yeah, so Roni just came on and played her harp and sang on that song and on everything else we did. and just showed us what a great voice, how well her voice blended with mine. And that was a treat. So when we got to this album, and Ollie suggested we do this song called Between Two Points from the Montgolfier Brothers, we got Romany to sing that. And we thought she'd just come along and be a guest for the one song on some shows. But as soon as we got into rehearsals, she just kicked into gear and it became very quickly obvious that she was going to be coming on the whole tour and being part of our vocal section all of whom play instruments as well in fact funnily enough the four girls, women who were on my tour have formed their own band themselves which they call Marshall Gilmore-Webbs and they've been doing shows in London and they're great so we're hoping that'll take on some some legs when i saw that they had formed that that that group it didn't shock because when i it didn't shock me because they were like their section when they do great gig this guy is i mean it it's phenomenal and the chemistry between them is like palpable yeah yeah chemistry is great louise marshall is a just a beautiful piano player and, you know, Hattie on the heart and Romney on the heart and Homer Romney plays guitar and Charlie Webb plays guitar and ukulele and they all do percussion when required.

21:11They are a band on their own. They accompany themselves on these shows they've been doing and they've played their enormous part in all the music, all the songs that we were doing on the tour. When something's really clicking like that and you're seeing that chemistry exist within your group. Is that inspiring to you? Does that, I mean, you've been around countless people, played with so many people, but I mean, that did feel like a pretty special group you put together there that was really clicking on all cylinders. It was really fantastic. These people are really good. They feel emboldened to add their own things, you know, to be more experimental with the way that we're doing things.

21:58I mean, obviously, if I want to, I can always say after we've done something to someone, maybe we'll reign that back next time. I don't think I really had to do that at all. And Romani's enthusiasm on stage and ebullience, and she just G'd the whole band up into being a little bit more extrovert and exciting. So I can only thank her and everyone else for what they gave to me in that whole thing. Yeah. We'll be back with more from David Gilmore after the break. When you own your own business, you own every decision. Now own the card that rewards you for it. The Chase Sapphire Reserve for Business card brings the best Sapphire Reserve benefits to business owners who expect hardworking rewards.

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25:32I want to ask about the opening. I mean, to your point about pulling things back a bit, I was curious about two things as it relates to your own playing when you're doing something live, particularly this tour. You open up with 5 a.m., which is an incredible, really beautiful guitar song. When I saw you guys at the Bowl, it was the most freezing, frigid night ever. And I felt almost nervous as you guys started because I was like, I don't know if I could get my fingers working. in this sort of environment. So I guess I'm interested in both. How do you, on this, how did you on this tour gear up to open that way?

26:19And then my next question I'll ask next is, but it's how do you pull yourself back throughout a gig when you feel yourself maybe if drifting too far one direction or another or doing too much? I don't know. I mean, I have a desire to get, to set a mood before one gets into the meat of the whole thing. I just want to quieten the audience down, get them into a more pensive, and before bringing them back up into the excitement of the moments that you're going to try and get to later. It's hard to describe. and as for pulling myself back, I don't really try to pull myself back too much. I'm more trying to push myself forward.

27:10Is there an internal monologue you're having with yourself during a show? Constant, yes, about is this going the way that I want it to? Is it going to lead on into the next thing in the most perfect way? Again, tough to explain how those processes work. Yeah, I mean, is it more, I can't imagine you're able to put into words in those moments on stage exactly what might not be working or exactly what you want to happen next to lead to the next thing. But it must exist as a feeling in you, right, that you're recognizing. Yeah, it is really just a feeling and you're just moving on into the next moment and hoping that everything will stay as wonderful as it is.

27:57you know i was trying to think about as i was listening to to all your stuff again like kind of what you know not to just just to try to get a sense of like uh my bearings of like what like kind of like if there's anything close to what you do and and the closest i could get and this is not not to like butter you up or anything but you know it's like it's almost like you know the way miles davis approached music or played where it's this both you're able to craft and write these really beautiful lines but then also do a fair amount of improvising um but but but tastefully how have you honed those two skills like how do you hone both crafting beautiful melodic lines but then also going out and sometimes taking those to other places gosh you ask tricky questions and but you You know, I'm just hunting for magic and emotion, and that is the same process in the studio as it is on stage.

29:03You know, you've got all the opportunities in the world to go back and perfect things in the studio and work until you think things are as, you know, as good as you're going to get them. but that is then a decision and it's made and you've got there and then when you get onto a stage you can use that as your template but then just kind of forget about it and just go off anywhere you want to at any time and and feel free to just play i mean i've i've never what I did on this album on one track maybe two tracks actually learning one of my guitar solos on a record never done it in the past never did it with Comfortably Now or any of those things but you've got a template of how the solo's going to start and then your mind comes back to other lines you've done, might be a line on the record but not a consistent solo from beginning to end i i leave that to other people but luckily i can just leave that and be me and that is that is a great joy have you found there's a way to practice improvisation for you or do you have to work yourself to a place to be able to freely improvise or are you sort of just is that just how you you are that you're always sort of that's just how i am i mean some of the some of the solos in the studios are pretty much one take things that you just have a find the right moment and just play it and some of them are put together in all sorts of different ways sometimes you know you do one then you do another and then you find good bits on different tracks and join them all together sometimes you sing a solo sometimes i get the microphone I've seen and because your voice can leap in leaps that are unusual you might not quite get to on the guitar then you kind of learn them there's a hundred different ways and I still haven't quite worked out one proper way of getting to that but once they're done and they've embedded themselves in your brain it's a then a joy to play them live and to be able to depart from them knowing that you can find your way back into something that is both new but familiar at the same time yeah the the singing is that is quite like i guess like a jazz player you know like a oscar peterson singing along and you know you can like that's um that that is a uh interesting way of sort of imagining how to approach your instrument.

32:05Yeah. What made you want to learn Note Perfect or close to Note Perfect, a couple of the solos on this particular record if you haven't done that before? There was, I think, Between Two Points was one of the moments where I was in my studio room, a bit like this, and I plugged you to our through a little box called a Zoom. And that went straight to tape and I don't know how this works or how it happened, but I felt I was right in the zone and I just played a solo once. That was it. And left it on there and I thought, I really ought to go back and do that, plug it through a proper amp in a studio and do that.

32:50But I never did that. And the one recorded with my little Zoom here, re-plugged out through an amp in a studio later, was the final one and I liked that solo so much I thought I had nailed it. I don't want to sound overconfident, but I thought I had nailed it. And I thought, well, it's worth playing that one almost note for note when I'm doing it live. So I did actually learn it. And it's quite hard to learn to get them dead right. I bet it is. I know it is. I've tried getting your solos note perfect before. It's not easy. you know that idea of like well i should maybe i should record that better i probably could do that better if i put it if i go to a proper studio or i use this amp or i like this particular sound if as a listener just as a listener and a fan it feels like that's a tricky decision to make you so many great i mean i'm thinking when you said that made me think of um you know i guess the the guitar line on like satisfaction for instance right like keith put that down as like a demo for horns but then it's like yeah wait why change that you know and it's those kinds of decisions if it's perfect then most of it you know the the it's you've got to stick with when something is right and if there's something not perfect about the sound that's kind of secondary i just think i could have learned that solo which i've actually did anyway and just played it again for the record but you'd always think something about the phrasing or the way the tremolo was working and the way this and that was not quite perfect i did it once on on the animals out years and years ago on on on dogs where i did a solo and for some reason it got erased but um i i had a stereo mix that i'd taken home because i thought that's nice really nice so i could learn it off that and then i redid it but i never thought that i got it quite as good again you know even though it's sort of note for note perfect but how can you describe that uh that difference between note for note perfect and original note for note perfect i don't know You can't explain.

35:20Yeah, missing a touch, missing a feeling, missing just something that's not quite. Which is why I guess for you, you don't find it necessarily worth it always to recreate those things. How do you go about, I was curious how you decide on a set list. You have such a deep catalog. There's things like, there's no way out of here, right? That I'm sure you haven't played in a long time. Yeah. That I bet people would love to hear. Yeah. Is it more you and your band or just you picking things out? Do you consider what the audience, like, how do you decide what a set list should be? Well, we had a big list of everything that was reasonably possible.