The classic Pink Floyd album David Gilmour couldn’t listen to:”Too boring

Recently, I wrote an article pitching my argument for the most talented Pink Floyd member. This is undoubtedly a contentious topic given their place in the musical canon and the divisiveness of the members within their line-up.

I argued my case for David Gilmour being the cream of the experimental crop for a number of reasons, but most of them were rooted in his more affable and modest disposition. I truly believe his more understated outlook bled into his creative process and grounded even the most outlandish Pink Floyd tracks in humanity.

It’s a concept made clearer when measured against his contemporary, collaborator and in recent years nemesis, Roger Waters. The more provocative member of the band, whose worldview is steeped in something more divisive entirely, he is steadfast and uncompromising in his creative approach.

Waters undoubtedly operates within the realms of genius and, during the very best of Pink Floyd, fed it into a broader purpose to create genre-bending, experimental heaven. With Dark Side Of The Moon, the band achieved a dangerous level of greatness, which took the tricky concept album to new heights. It cast a shadow over the rest of the band’s discography that was ultimately hard to escape, and the pursuit of such a task brought with it loftier and, at times, incoherent ideas.

Roger Waters arguably felt this burden heavier than others and laboured over what he hoped would be a triumphant answer to the album, in his 1979 narrative epic The Wall. It’s an undoubtedly complex and accomplished piece of work; a rock opera that follows the story of a burnt-out rock star who has abandoned civilisation in choice of isolation. An idea bolstered by complex lyricism and a dramatic soundscape. But many wouldn’t be corrected in framing it as somewhat of a Roger Waters solo project, supported by a session band named Pink Floyd.

He doggedly pursued his idea without a view to compromising a facet of it, such was his expectation of this album further cementing their greatness. But somewhere in the journey, Waters lost the dressing room and his begrudging bandmates followed him into the breach, with little to no confidence.

“He gave us all a cassette of the whole thing, and I couldn’t listen to it,” Gilmour explained. He continued on, saying, “It was too depressing, and too boring in lots of places. But I liked the basic idea. We eventually agreed to do it, but we had to chuck out a lot of stuff, rewrite a lot of things and put a lot of new bits in, throw a lot of old bits out”.

He added: “And when we actually were making it, and Roger was under pressure, and we had said ‘That wasn’t good enough,’ or ‘this should be…’, I mean Bob Ezrin was very good at helping get a linear storyline, making it more clear and direct, you know. Being something for Roger to bounce with a little bit. Roger actually wrote some of the best ones after that point. When we were actually doing it, when he was under pressure and being pushed to do things, he did some of the best things, I think.”

Even in a decade when the band were at their creative peak and the personal rifts that would eventually drive them apart had yet to surface, they operated under a borderline unhealthy amount of tension. While The Wall showed glimpses of this, and The Dark Side of the Moon displayed it in full, the strain can be heard throughout their music. Their greatest songs push and pull against one another before colliding into a sonic explosion of euphoria and experimental nirvana, helping to make them one of the most compelling bands in music history.