“That’s not what music’s about”: the three Pink Floyd songs David Gilmour refused to perform

Being in a world-famous rock band is rarely a harmonious affair. After a few weeks, months, or years, cooped up in studios, tour buses, and dressing rooms with the same people, tensions inevitably begin to rise. This was certainly the case with Pink Floyd, whose history is almost as noted for its conflict as for its incredible discography. This tumultuous tale, among other things, has caused guitarist David Gilmour to put his foot down on more than one occasion.

Gilmour did not officially join the ranks of Pink Floyd until 1967, by which time they had already unveiled their masterpiece album The Piper At The Gates of Dawn and set themselves out among the most inventive psychedelic outfits in Britain. However, the rapidly deteriorating mental state of songwriter Syd Barrett, coupled with his unpredictability and reliance on mind-altering drugs, demanded that Floyd recruit a new member to relieve Barrett of his duties. Gilmour was that new recruit, but it didn’t take long for cracks to form in his relationship with Roger Waters.

When Barrett was eventually pushed out of the band, it was Waters who took the mantle of band leader. However, Gilmour rarely saw eye-to-eye with the songwriter, leading to a multitude of disagreements and ‘musical differences’ which eventually led to Waters storming out of the band in 1985. Aside from that dramatic finale, a key moment in the timeline of the pair’s conflict came in 1975, when the band came to record ‘Have a Cigar’ for their legendary album Wish You Were Here.

Previously, Waters and Gilmour had shared vocal duties, with Waters taking on the more brooding, moody, and psychedelic offerings, while Gilmour tended to handle the more technically demanding vocal performances. When Waters wrote ‘Have A Cigar’, detailing all the seediness and phoniness of the music industry in a typically cynical fashion, his voice didn’t seem to suit the track, but Gilmour flat-out refused to perform vocals on the song.

Reportedly, Gilmour could not sympathise with the cynical, politically-charged lyricism of Waters’ track, leading him to feel uncomfortable performing on the song. Instead, the band recruited Roy Harper to sing lead, with Waters once recalling, “I can’t remember who suggested he sing it—maybe I did, probably hoping everyone would go, ‘Oh, no, Rog, you do it.’ But they didn’t. They all went, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea.’”

‘Have A Cigar’ was not the only time that Gilmour put his foot down in the history of Pink Floyd. Decades after the Wish You Were Here recording, the ‘classic’ line-up of the band reunited to perform at the 2005 Live 8 concert in London, seeing Gilmour and Waters come together in aid of charity. Still, their usual disagreements were never far away, and this time the pair butted heads over the setlist.

“Roger wanted to do ‘Another Brick In The Wall’,” Gilmour later recalled, “but I didn’t think it was appropriate. This was a thing for Africa, and I didn’t really think that little children in Africa should be singing, ‘We don’t need no education’. There was no argument about it.” So, the guitarist refused to perform the classic song, declaring, “I was absolutely right.”

In more recent years, during his celebrated career as a solo artist, Gilmour has again refused to perform one Pink Floyd song, but this time the refusal does not arise from conflict with his bandmates, but from a deep love and appreciation for them. For the guitarist’s landmark 2016 performance at the Pompeii Amphitheatre – marking 44 years since Pink Floyd performed at the historic site – Gilmour refused to include ‘Echoes’ in the performance.

“It would be lovely to play ‘Echoes’ here, but I wouldn’t do that without Rick,” he told Rolling Stone about the performance. Seemingly, the musician felt as though he could not, in good faith, perform the classic song without his friend and former bandmate Richard Wright, who passed away in 2008. “There’s something that’s specifically so individual about the way that Rick and I play in that, that you can’t get someone to learn it and do it just like that,” he shared, adding: “That’s not what music’s about.”

Gilmour’s various moments of defiance and refusal might have inflamed conflict within Pink Floyd at points, but, in the long term, his noble decisions were often made with the best interests of the group in mind. There is certainly something to be said for sticking to one’s artistic principles, and that is something every member of Floyd can likely agree upon.