David Gilmour: Wider Horizons

This programme contains some strong language

-I'll just start with a nice easy one.

-Yeah.

Who is David Gilmour?

God, that's easy?! I wish I knew, I've no idea. Um...

Someone who spends his life driven by music more than anything else,

I would say.

David John Gilmour was born on Wednesday 6th March 1946,

in Cambridge, England, the third child of Sylvia and Douglas Gilmour.

At the age of 21, he joined the band Pink Floyd,

who subsequently went on to sell over 250 million albums.

His playing style

and trademark guitar sound is known the world over

and in 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him

one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

MUSIC: Echoes, Part 1 by Pink Floyd

MUSIC: Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd

MUSIC: Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd

# How I wish How I wish you were here

# We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl

# Year after year... #

His latest solo album, Rattle That Lock,

recently entered the UK charts at number one.

And now, for the first time in nine years,

he's embarked on a tour that's seen him

perform sold-out shows in amphitheatres

and grand halls across Europe, and at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

PIANO DROWNS SPEECH

'This unlikely location on the Thames is where David Gilmour records

'and mixes all his music.'

-And this is it.

-This is the boat.

-And where did you first glimpse this?

-I was being driven by someone.

I stopped over there on the road somewhere,

and there was less foliage then.

I could see all that glass and stuff,

and I said, "Stop for a minute."

And peered over the wall up there

and thought, "Wow, that's fantastic."

The very next week I was sitting in the dentist's waiting room,

picked up a Country Life, and there it was for sale.

I rang up the agent, came straight down here, and...

And so you split your time between here, the house in Sussex,

and Brighton.

Yeah, this one has got the great technology for proper mixing.

It's got a mixing desk of Neve flying faders,

-where all the faders are motorised.

-So this is the most hi-tech bit.

This is the most hi-tech bit and I'd have to come here to mix.

-We look at it and it looks, "Oh, yeah, really?"

-Well, it's beautiful.

That's it being built.

Mahogany, Crittall's gun-metal windows.

-It's quite lavish.

-Yeah.

GUITAR PLAYS

When we started thinking about doing the Momentary Lapse Of Reason album,

I'd just found and bought this place.

Nothing had been soundproofed, there was no double glazing.

-The whole band would be in this room.

-The whole band would be in this room.

The drums would be in this corner, which has some sort of padding

behind it and up there, to help absorb the drum sound a bit.

And the rest would be in here.

Our guitar amps wouldn't be in here, they'd be in the other rooms

out there, in those little bedrooms and stuff.

So we'd be in here, we'd be hearing what we're doing on headphones,

but they'd be recording a Hammond organ, Lesley in that room, a guitar

in that room, the bass would be going straight to tape,

without an amp. So, yeah.

We made pretty much all of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in here,

most of...pretty much all of The Division Bell in here, in this room.

These tracks sound enormous, you know,

but you can't quite imagine

they come out of a tiny little space like this.

Control room's in here.

Oh, look.

Well, who wouldn't want to make music in this room, I have to say.

It's fantastic.

-What's your first memories, then?

-Gosh.

I have one sort of snapshot memory of me

when I apparently left my nursery school,

at about the age of three, which is in Homerton College,

where my mother had been doing teacher training, and trying

to walk home three miles to the other end of Cambridge,

down Hills Road.

That's my first...that's the first snapshot memory I can think of.

What kind of a family life was it?

Your father was a professor, an academic.

My father was a university lecturer at Cambridge,

lecturing in zoology and genetics.

My mother had been at teacher training college,

but she never really went into teaching.

Later she became a film editor at the BBC,

working on Junior Points Of View.

-You went to boarding school when you were five years old.

-Yes.

My dad went to a university in Madison, Wisconsin,

for six months

and we were popped into a boarding school in Buckinghamshire.

It was me, at five, my sister, maybe just approaching seven,

and my brother, who was four. We were put in there for a year.

My parents only spent one term, six months in fact, in America,

and then came back and lived in Cambridge,

but they didn't see fit to take us out for Christmas,

or for the next two terms,

while they remembered what life was like without children.

And when are the first experiences of music,

when did that first begin to resonate in your life as a kid?

I mean, we had the radio on all the time, and records on all the time.

My parents had a very early stereo hi-fi system in the house,

they loved lots of music.

They loved show music, On The Town, West Side Story,

when that came out, and my mother played a bit of piano

and my father loved singing, you know, in the house, in the bath.

So there was a lot of musical noise going on constantly,

but the first big sort of eclat sort of moment was

Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock, which came out when I was ten.

# We're going to rock around the clock tonight

# Put your glad rags on and join me hon'

# We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one

# We're gonna rock... #

That was brilliant.

# ..We're gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight

# We're gonna rock... #

And shortly after that, Elvis Presley with Heartbreak Hotel.

# Well, it's down at the end of Lonely Street

# At Heartbreak Hotel

# Where I'll be I get so lonely, baby

# Well, I'm so lonely... #

You still listen to it and you think, what a brilliant record.

I mean, it is... There's so little going on, hardly any drums,

if any, just a bass and a piano and a guitar, and a voice.

But it was absolutely magnetic.

And this is home, in the Sussex countryside.

Hello.

'It's David Gilmour's musical laboratory.'

So, explain to me what happens here.

Well, this, as you can see, this is a music room, and this has been

developing, you could call it, over 21 years we've been here.

The last album, On An Island, and a lot of the stuff for this new

album, Rattle That Lock,

were started in here, with me doing everything.

So when you're starting to build the track, you start...

-Obviously you've got your guitar, you know, plenty of them.

-Yep!

And then, drums if you need to, your sax if you need to, you also

play all these instruments, the mandolin you play, I mean...

-I'm really bad at quite a lot of instruments, yes.

-Good.

That's useful, then!

SAXOPHONE PLAYS

David is continually jotting musical ideas, whether it's on an iPhone,

minidisc, and then he will say, "Oh, I've got some stuff."

And I say, "Oh, great, yeah."

"Well, you know, about 150 or 200..."

"Oh, no!"

This song, Today, came from several pieces of music.

-I just found that sound on this.

-That's how it all started?

That's how one part of it started, and I...

..played that onto...

onto the iPhone, and Phil found that

and then he found a bit of me strumming a guitar.

A completely separate bit.

So that one became the beginning, which has got me

and Polly singing like a choir on it.

Oh, really?

# If you should wake... #

'I listen through, over a period of weeks, or whatever, and then

'I try and see if there's any sort of bits

'that would work with other bits.'

Not all of those are terribly successful

and maybe some of them scare him.

But there's been a few that survived.

GUITAR RIFF PLAYS

So, this is a bit that I recorded on my iPhone.

I was in a studio and had an electric guitar plugged in,

but didn't want to turn the gear on and get everything running,

and thought this is a nice thing, I'll remember it.

So I turned my phone on to...

VOLUME LOWERS

..to remember it.

And Phil found this bit just like this,

and he stuck it together with the other thing.

And then, you know, when you add all the instruments on...

FULL TRACK PLAYS

# ..Slides away. #

MUSIC STOPS

I found it very hard to try and replicate that exactly as it is,

with something about the rhythm of it and stuff,

so we just used the original one.

ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYS

This is Polly, Polly Samson.

She's learning guitar, level seven, apparently.

She's an acclaimed author in her own right

and she's David's partner in more ways than one.

'Polly, my lovely wife, she is at the heart of everything we do.

'Don't know where to begin with Polly,

'she's my sort of partner in life

'and she writes most of the lyrics for my songs.

'Along with being a writer and a lyricist,'

she is a sounding board for all the stuff I do.

I will play her things and she will voice her opinion and she'll be

very astute in spotting things that maybe I haven't noticed, musically.

And has been doing that since we did the Division Bell album.

# Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young

# In a world of magnets and miracles... #

Were you a Floyd fan yourself?

When I was 12, my brother had... I think it was Dark Side Of The Moon

and...Wish You Were Here,

but they didn't have a band name on them.

So, I remember I used to play them but I didn't know who they were by.

So I don't think I ever wrote "Pink Floyd" on my pencil case.

I wrote "David Bowie" on my pencil case.

When you met David for the first time, you didn't think,

-"Oh, this is David Gilmour, from Pink Floyd?"

-I didn't...

He was a man with lots of children, I think is what I thought.

I mean, the first time I met him,

he had four children and I had one child,

and I think it was our children who kind of played with each other,

and so we kind of ended up at this nice day,

lunch in the countryside, sort of sitting near each other

because our children were trying to climb the same tree.

ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYS

David is not someone who is loquacious, but he is

very emotionally engaged, but he doesn't necessarily display that.

So, do you think that you're there partly to interpret what's

-going on in David's...

-Yes, I think so.

And that does feel like a huge responsibility.

But then, I mean, the whole of marriage is a bit like that,

isn't it? I mean, particularly with a partner who is quite silent.

I mean, you know, he plays guitar a lot and I often think that

if ever we were going to have an argument,

the best way we could do it would be for me to use words and him

to answer in guitar, because he's very eloquent,

and emotionally eloquent with a guitar.

So, yes, a lot of it is just trying to get under his skin

and sort of feel what he's feeling.

OK, so here's a track recorded ten years ago

for The Girl In The Yellow Dress.

It says it's got a guide vocal on here.

TRACK PLAYS

# De der

# Der-de de-de-der

# Der-de

# De de-er de-er... #

Was the process always the music first,

-was he kind of humming to you in bed?

-No, it's always music first.

And he... Nowadays, he puts tracks on my iPod and I just walk up

and down playing all the tracks and eventually, you know,

one or two start to suggest things to me.

# Der de

# De der do-do-do

# De der... #

That would be what Polly would have on her headphones

and would be listening to when she wrote the lyrics.

So that's really interesting

-because you sort of feel it's almost got the words on it.

-Yes.

His scats really do sound like someone singing in tongues.

It's as though the words are just, sort of, under the surface,

and it's quite interpretative at that point.

# De-der de-de...

# ..Ever closer

# This girl gets right down in a groove

# Woos and moves

# Leads him on... #

Most people imagine that people writing lyrics would be

sitting down at a table and crossing things out and writing things down.

-Do you write anything down?

-I, um, it's a bit...

Actually, it's the same for my fiction, I think that

the work is done while I walk. By the time I get back to the house,

it's practically like typing

because I...while walking I've kind of worked out what it is.

But I have a notebook...

..so this will be full of things that are not all to do with lyrics,

but...

Yeah, this was the start of Today, I think.

It looks to me like "a wide Sargasso Sea of shit".

Yes, I had written "a wide Sargasso Sea of shit"!

It just... I think it became something else in the song.

I think it was a missing line, and I thought I'll get to that line later.

So I think I had written in the song "a wide Sargasso Sea of shit".

PIANO PLAYS

SAXOPHONE PLAYS

PIANO PLAYS

I wish I'd learnt the piano properly when I was young,

and that I'd learnt to read music and could do all that stuff.

Still can't read music.

So, you just kind of know that your children will be

grateful for having learnt piano, when they're adults.

But they certainly aren't when they're young! It's just a chore.

So, they've all had piano lessons until they were bored to tears

and begged us to be allowed to stop.

Now they are moving forward, learning things by themselves.

It's terrific, they are thoroughly enjoying...

Gabriel's piano playing, since he stopped having lessons,

has gone from strength to strength

and he is in fact playing on one of the songs on the album.

Purely because he's the right person to be doing that job.

Romy has picked up the ukulele entirely on her own,

and play a number of chords, and will happily sing anything.

She's got a really nice voice, you know, with a bit of huskiness to it.

Nice low-register voice, lovely.

Joe is into science and mathematics and is excited by those things

and has got a fantastic direct, linear mind that looks to see

if there's a better way of doing things,

which will stand him in very good stead.

They don't want to be musicians

and I don't know if they'll change,

and I wouldn't dream of influencing that in any way.

Gabriel wants to be a set designer, maybe an actor as well.

Romy definitely wants to be an actor.

SLIDE GUITAR PLAYS

I use this on Breathe,

and on Great Gig In The Sky, on Dark Side Of The Moon, this one.

-This machine.

-This actual one, yeah,

and have used it ever since, occasionally.

When was... Your first guitar, were you yet in your teens or not?

My next-door neighbour had a guitar, was given a guitar,

he was completely non musical.

-I borrowed it and played it for a while.

-How old were you?

Probably 12, 13, and I think I gave it back to him

a couple of times and then I borrowed it again,

and thought, "Oh, never mind."

-And he never asked for it back and I kept it.

-You stole it.

Basically, yeah.

My parents moved to America permanently when I was 18 or 19,

and they lived in Greenwich Village, from 1965 onwards.

So, you know, they could see the end

of Bleecker Street out of their window.

So, I mean, I got Bob Dylan's first record for my 16th birthday,

which they sent me from Greenwich Village.

Before then, they'd sent me Pete Seeger's guitar tutor record.

Which is the...my only actual instruction

was with the Pete Seeger guitar tutor record.

-PETE SEEGER:

-For most of us, playing a guitar can be about as simple as walking.

Of course, remember it took us

all a couple of years to learn how to walk...

There's an LP with a big book, with all the chord shapes you might need.

It started out with a pitch pipe playing the six notes of a guitar,

so the most important thing was to learn how to tune it.

And now we're in business.

The second band was teaching you how to play a D chord, which is

three fingers on the guitar, which you then strum.

And then he sang some words, so you could do a song, instantly,

with just one chord.

# I gave my love a cherry that has no stone

# I gave my love a chicken that has no bone... #

So from the beginning of learning the guitar

I was learning singing as well.

And singing is just as important to me.

That's your vinyl collection, is it?

There's vinyl over there, well, it's mine and Polly's mixed

together in a sort of obsolete pile of tea chests and shelves.

Loads of stuff here, going way, way back.

That's the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, which I was given,

on my 16th birthday, by my parents,

who were in America at the time, along with Bob Dylan's first record,

which I've...I think I've got somewhere but I can't it any more!

So I've had these since my 16th birthday,

-as you can see by my youthful possessive writing on the back.

-Yes.

I was very into folk music. Leon Bibb, some great people.

And then you can go straight on to something like the Shangri-Las,

you know, girl group in the '60s, early '60s.

Produced by a guy called George Shadow Morton,

who painted aural pictures.

I mean, Remember (Walking In The Sand), Past, Present And Future,

they are like movies.

# Whatever happened to the boy that I once knew... #

So is that where you got your interest in extra natural

sounds of even unnatural sounds?

It's the idea of creating a picture or something like a movie with

the story that's being told that I love.

Who were the guitarists who you...

Well, you talked about Pete Seeger, obviously.

Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, I was very keen on at a very early age,

12-string he played mostly, brilliant.

# Me and my wife can pick a bale of cotton

# Me and my wife can pick a bale a day

# Oh, Lordy, pick a bale of cotton

# Oh, Lord, I can pick a bale a day... #

You know, later, Hendrix, of course, Clapton, Joni Mitchell's

guitar playing, her use of different guitar tunings was a big influence.

# There's a man who's been out sailing in a decade full of dreams

# And he takes her to a schooner and he treats her like a queen

# Bearing beads from California... #

Another Side Of Bob...

The first Dylan album, just called Bob Dylan,

was recorded in December '61, and I got it in March '62, which was

when it...probably about a week after it came out in the States.

That's pretty quick going,

definitely long before it came out over here.

# Highway 51 runs right by my baby's door

# Highway 51... #

When I went into the sixth form at school,

the music teacher had given up doing music lessons

by then for the sixth form, he just said to people,

"Bring in a record, we'll play it and we'll talk about it."

And so I brought Bob Dylan's first record in. I absolutely loved it.

Played it.

Silence.

I was the only one who liked it.

I went to see him at the Festival Hall.

At one point he lost a harmonica.

-IMITATES DYLAN:

-Has anyone got a harmonica in C?

And half the audience came rushing to the front like this,

with harmonicas.

MUSIC: Seamus The Dog by Pink Floyd

-Everyone went that way.

-We're going this way.

-Just whatever.

-Whatever...

'Family is everything, and you have to devote time and yourself to

'raising children, if that's what you elect to do in your life.

'So, yeah, I'm loving my life with my family, raising these children.

'When I was a young man, ambition,

'the desire to be together with these other guys in a pop group,

'you're very driven and ambitious, otherwise you won't get anywhere.

'And I certainly was and I'm sure there's still vestiges of that

'sort of ambition still around, but I'm not as ambitious as I was.

'I've had that. It's been fantastic.'

I put just as much work and effort into making a record

but I can prioritise my time better.

ACOUSTIC GUITAR PLAYS

Play Postman Pat.

DAVID LAUGHS

HE PLAYS POSTMAN PAT

# Postman Pat, Postman Pat

# Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat... #

Please stop!

# ..Early in the morning Right as day is dawning

# Pat puts all his post bags in his van. #

LAUGHTER

GUNFIRE

MUSIC: In Any Tongue by David Gilmour

In Any Tongue came into the mix really late on

and it was immediately clear

what that song needed to be about.

There isn't a day when one isn't affected by war.

# No sugar is enough to bring sweetness to his cup

# I know sorrow

# Tastes the same on any tongue... #

TRACK CONTINUES WITH VOCALISATION

When I'm signing this sort of vocal I try not to constrain myself

and if consonants feel like coming out they do.

Completely meaningless, you know.

You say meaningless, you mean you've not given them any kind

of status at all but they are something, obviously.

There's something in there, I suppose you could say,

trying to get out. And Polly is so brilliant at picking them out, but you can hear

consonants that she's taken that were there,

and put a proper word to.

Anyway, we'll have a quick...

'# Da da da dum...'

# What has he done?

'# Da da da doo...'

# God help our son

# Stay a while... #

Yes.

TRACK CONTINUES

What's it like, that first time that you hear, not the scat

-but the words?

-That's the best...

That's an incredibly...wonderful moment.

It's really exciting and that is...

It tends to be just the two of us, and, you know, I give him

the sheet of paper and he sticks it up and sings it and...

Yeah, I think that is the most enjoyable moment of the whole thing.

There's a very special guest joining us for the next song.

This man gave me my first guitar

and was also one of the first people to play in this venue.

Please welcome Mr David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.

CHEERING

-WOMAN:

-Oh, my God!

Some of my earliest memories are staying at his and Polly's

house in the countryside,

and we'd kind of stay there for whole summers.

And I guess I was too young, initially, to understand

who Pink Floyd were or who he was.

I guess he was just a friend of my parents, with a nice house!

This is crazy!

HE PLAYS THE OPENING TO WISH YOU WERE HERE

CROWD ROARS

He was the first person that told me I had a nice voice.

Which I probably didn't appreciate at the time,

but looking back, that was pretty cool.

So, so you think you can tell... #

CROWD SING ALONG

# ..Heaven from hell

# Blue skies from pain... #

We have a very young fan base.

Initially, I was a bit worried that all these 16-year-olds would

have no idea who he was.

But as soon as he walked on stage,

I just have this very vivid memory of this 16-year-old boy in

the front row, like, tears streaming down his face with happiness.

# We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl... #

When we were actually learning the song, I went on YouTube to look up

a live version to see how he'd done it live in the past,

and the first thing that came up was him

and my dad playing it at the Royal Festival Hall.

It had something like 20 million views

and it suddenly all felt quite familial

and circular in some way,

that my dad had done it and now I was doing it.

# So

# So you think you can tell

# Heaven from hell... #

Pretty much everyone on my dad's side in the family is a musician.

He's a guitarist called Neill MacColl and his parents were

Ewan MacColl the folk singer and Peggy Seeger, also a folk singer.

Um, and her brother was Pete Seeger.

And strangely, I think David actually learned to play guitar initially

by listening to these instructional records that Pete Seeger had made.

So, yeah, it's all connected in some strange way, I think.

-So, here we are, rehearsal room.

-So there's a lot of stuff here.

Well, this is basically pretty much what we have on stage.

We all have our full sort of stage kit.

Are you going to take all these on tour when you go?

Yes, all these things come with me.

OK, let's...

John, you play it off the thing,

cos I can't really remember what I should be doing.

Ooh.

Start... Just play it again, yeah.

Trying to remember these fucking chords.

'Without forgetting the words all the time or forgetting what

'I'm supposed to be playing all the time,

'and gradually, as you relax into it, you get more

'and more close to what you're doing, but I'm constantly, I'm listening to

'what everyone else is doing, trying to remember to say this at the end.'

Or I just stop and we do it. And I have all the lyrics here.

All of these I need to know by the time we get going.

I have...

Shine On You Crazy Diamond, I have a bit of a mental block about that,

so that is here.

And that sits on the floor during every show,

with the start of the lines,

so I get the right lines in the right order.

For some reason, I can remember 50 songs word perfect all the way

through, and I have a rotten memory.

Got that on the F.

One, two, three, four.

Bam bam, ba ba ba...

Bam bam, ba ba bam...

Great. Much better without me playing.

OK.

# Whatever it takes to break... #

Rattle That Lock came out of the work that I'd done for the last book

I wrote, which was a novel called The Kindness,

because the main character in the novel is a student of Milton.

I knew that I wanted to write a song about the need to protest

and I suddenly remembered Book Two of Paradise Lost

and Satan's heroic journey to go and challenge God.

And I thought, well, that would work really well,

within that is everything I want to say.

And I ran back and picked up the book, and there it was,

and it was a huge, huge help.

It's a sort of, not exactly a call to arms, but it's encouraging

people to stand up for themselves and shake it about a bit.

# Rattle that lock

# Lose those chains

# Rattle that lock

# Gonna lose those chains

# Rattle that lock

# I'm gonna lose those chains

# Rattle that lock... #

OK, let's do Today.

Just to cheer ourselves up, and then we can fuck off.

HE SCATS

THEY HARMONISE

Do we stay up?

# Today

# Always

# Today

# New day...

# Just a day when the weight of the world... #

Do that.

# Just a day when the weight of the world. #

BELLS CHIME

# When that fat old sun in the sky is falling

# Summer evening birds are calling... #

Way back when you were living in Cambridge,

that's when you met Syd Barrett, isn't it?

Well, there was an art school for kids in Homerton College.

They ran for, I guess, five-year-olds and above, or six-year-olds

and above, they ran art classes on a Saturday morning.

And I went to that until the age of 11 and, apparently,

I didn't know it at the time because I didn't know them,

both Syd and Roger were in the same class in the same room as me

for probably three or four years.

But I got to know Syd when I was about 14 or 15, which is

three or four years after that.

We both went to the Cambridge Tech. I was there doing A Level languages.

And Syd was doing arts and we would meet up in the art school

-every lunchtime.

-What was Syd like at that time and that age?

Syd was just... Had a real, real magnetic personality.

And a spring in his step and a glint in his eye.

And was very, very sharp and very, very funny.

Everyone wanted to be friends with Syd. Me included.

By then, musically, did you have any sense what your destiny was,

what you wanted to do with your life?

By the time it got to taking my A Levels, I think

I had pretty much decided what I wanted to do.

And I thought that if I passed my A Levels, there'd be no way out

and I'd have to go off to university,

and the moment for my rock and roll career might pass.

So I stopped going to the exams.

-You just stopped, did you?

-Yeah, in the middle of the A Levels...

-For fear that you might pass.

-Yeah. Essentially.

THEY LAUGH

# When that fat old sun in the sky... #

I've heard people saying that they got into popular music

because of the girls, the drugs, all the rest of it.

But I... Having thought about that, I think that it was definitely

the music that was the absolute main priority for why I got into it.

And when was the first move into performance?

I suppose when I was 17 or 18.

I started...joined a band or two, you know.

You sort of flit in the door and out of the door very quickly.

One or two bands, an early one was called Newcomers.

Then after that I met some more people who wanted to do something

a bit more ambitious. And we formed what became Jokers Wild.

We did a lot of harmony music, Beach Boys, The Four Seasons,

and we did your regular R and B, the Stones numbers,

Beatles numbers, and there were five of us and we could all sing.

How did you keep pace with what was happening

-if you were doing all these covers?

-It was competitive covering.

A new Beatles record, for example, would come out and we'd rush down to

Millers Music Store and we'd gather together

in one of the little booths.

They used to have those stand-up booths where you could fit

three people in like that, listening to a single,

but they also, at Millers, had bigger room booths

which were about six foot by six foot,

and you could get four or five people in

and you could listen to a whole LP.

And we would listen to a whole brand-new Beatles LP

and we'd be writing the words down and making notes on the chords

and stuff as it went through and we'd try to get them

to play it to us again.

And if the serving girls were in a good mood or you smiled at them

nicely, they might play it a second time.

And then, while you're setting up for a gig that night, you'd

rehearse one or two of the ones that seemed easiest

and you'd got to know well and then you could announce, you know,

over your PA, and this is one, a song called such and such

from the new Beatles album, which is out today. And it was...

You know, it would be massively exciting,

to play a really bad rendition with all the wrong words

and all the wrong chords, but all you could manage to pick up in one,

maybe two listens.

Can we hear some of Jokers Wild? Have you got any...

You can hear a bit of my embarrassment.

This is me singing a cover of a song by Manfred Mann.

# I give you all of my loving

# Everything I could

# And now you say you don't love me

# Well, there's no reason why you should

# But, baby, don't ask me what I say

# Don't talk about it

# You make my heart... #

NEW TRACK PLAYS

Oh, yeah, Four Seasons, three by then.

# Hey, girl

# They don't mi-i-ind

# They don't mind... #

Focusing on this popular stuff, dissecting it,

and working out how all the harmonies work,

how all the instrumentation was done and how it was produced,

this is my musical education, really.

My parents came to shows.

I mean, they would drive me to things, you know,

in the early days when I couldn't get myself to places.

Sometimes they even towed a cart full of equipment

on a trailer to gigs.

And they became big fans, you know.

Couldn't get away from them later on!

MUSIC: Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun by Pink Floyd

So, there was Jokers Wild and then, of course, there was Pink Floyd.

Jokers Wild had done a few gigs on the same bill with the early

version of Pink Floyd.

We played in a couple of art colleges in London

and a couple of gigs in Cambridge

and we played in a marquee in Shelford, just outside Cambridge.

The bill was Jokers Wild, Pink Floyd and Paul Simon.

So what next?

After I packed up with Jokers Wild,

I started moving between London

and Cambridge a lot, and some people I ran into in London offered me

a job with a band in a nightclub in Saint-Etienne in France.

Then we just hung around in France for the best part of the next year.

-And then, you lucky chap, you got to work with Brigitte Bardot.

-Yes.

I went in and sang a couple of songs for a film soundtrack,

which was called Two Weeks In September,

which starred Mike Sarne and Brigitte Bardot.

I've never heard them since.

I hope you haven't found them.

I think we may have done.

# In my small country

# Working all day until the night

# They had no worries of any kind... #

I don't think they're dancing to this track at all,

they're dancing at a different... Look.

# I never tried to ask more questions... #

More questions.

I just turned up at a studio in Paris

and sang the words they put in front of me and went home.

DIALOGUE IN FRENCH

HE PLAYS THE OPENING TO WISH YOU WERE HERE

# So

# So you think you can tell

# Heaven from hell

# Blue skies from pain

# Can you tell a green field... #

How did joining Floyd happen, because it was really to do partly

with Syd's sort of inconsistency, or whatever you want to call it?

Well, Syd, you know, I knew the guys from the Pink Floyd pretty well.

I called Syd and he invited me to go along to a recording session.

They were recording See Emily Play.

# There is no other day

# Let's try it another way... #

-But he was very strange.

-How?

You know, the light had gone out of his eyes.

He was monosyllabic and...

Yeah, it was very shocking.

So how did this transition... how did it happen?

I went to see them playing at a party at the Royal College Of Arts,

just next door to the Albert Hall, and at that party,

which must have been November, maybe, Nick came up to me

and said, whispered in my ear quietly, "If at some point soon,

"you know, we asked you to join, what would you say?"

I said, "Well, I'd probably say yes."

We did five gigs together as a five piece,

which was pretty strange, I can tell you.

And then, one day we were going to play,

I think it was at Southampton University, with T Rex

and people, Tyrannosaurus Rex then, on the bill.

And someone said, "Right, shall we go and pick up Syd?"

And someone else said, "Nah."

And we didn't, and that was the end of that,

in that sort of wonderful, callous way that you have

when you're young and ambitious.

Were you as bad as the others, then?

I'm sure I was just as bad as the others, yes.

MUSIC: Echoes, Part 1 by Pink Floyd

We became gradually more and more successful.

There was five years, really, from when I joined to when Dark Side

came out, which was when the sort of stratospheric leap happened.

# And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too

# I'll see you on the dark side of the moon... #

My mother threw herself into it, and loved every bit of it, and loved

you know, the so-called glamour of the life that I had taken on.

My father less so.

Only because it could have emasculated him a little bit.

A serious scientist doing brilliant work

but not earning anything like as much as his guitar-strumming son.

And the thrill my mother got out of that couldn't have been that

nice for him at times, I think.

PLAYBACK OF BRAIN DAMAGE TRACK

MUSIC FADES OUT

-Can we run back and drop in a bit?

-Yeah, you can if you like.

Just turn it down a bit.

I mean, I didn't really make a specific mistake, but...

-Turn it down?

-Yeah, my guitar's too loud.

And that working relationship at that time between you and Roger

and Rick and everyone, how was that at that period?

It was, um, sort of a microcosm of what went on later.

We all found our place in the hierarchy

-and made it work for ourselves, you know.

-You call it a hierarchy.

Well, it is. These things always have a hierarchy, I think.

Roger at the top, me next, then Rick, then Nick in terms of who did

the most commanding, bossing of things around.

But I felt that in my position that I was more the leader of the musical

side of things, and Roger was definitely in terms of the lyric

and the driving force sort of way it was.

Yes, we have some pretty good arguments from time to time, yes.

-And do you manage to get over them?

-Yep, we're pretty durable.

I never had that moment of thinking,

no, I really am a part of this fully.

I always thought that I was the new boy, and they enjoyed that.

-They enjoyed playing on that.

-Really?

Yes, but, you know, in that sort of jokey way that you do, you know.

They would always tease me for being the new boy,

even when I'd been in it for 20 years, you know.

And what about the next stage, you know,

post Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, what happened after that?

Well, that's ancient history, all that old, ancient Floyd history,

the arguments, the fights and...

Well, you get over it.

We did get...

We did get on pretty well as work people, as work associates,

if you want to call it that, throughout those years,

but there were changes, you know, everyone's little problems

and dissatisfactions all started coming more and more to the fore.

Boring. Let's move on to something else.

In September 2009, David Gilmour's friend and musical partner,

Rick Wright of Pink Floyd, sadly passed away after a long illness.

Let's... let's do A Boat Lies Waiting.

# And a boat lies waiting... #

The first song to be written was A Boat Lies Waiting.

A beautiful piece of music,

it was instantly suggestive of something to do with the sea.

And...I went for a walk with it in my headphones

and then I walked back and David was walking towards me,

and I said, "Just come and sit on the beach with me,

"I just want to talk to you about this piece of music."

And I said, "David, just try to put into words for me,

"what you think it's about."

And he sort of stared off into the distance,

and then he looked at me and said,

"Well, I think it's about mortality."

And what had just been happening was, he'd been trying to find other

keyboard players and he'd come back having tried a few out,

and say, "It's just not the same."

And I think he realised, you know, really after Rick died,

just what it was he'd lost.

And so that then sort of mixed with this idea of the sea,

and Rick spent most of his life on a boat, sailing the Atlantic.

And so the song became a song about David missing Rick.

This is the original recording.

This is Gabriel making an appearance.

BABY CRIES ON RECORDING

So that dates this track to 1997.

Cos that's Gabriel as a baby, and he was born in '97.

-What made you put that in? Did you add that later?

-No, that was...

-That was here.

-That I did on a mini-disc on the piano in the house.

-Yeah.

-And you can hear people wandering around

and crockery being washed up, and...

RECORDING PLAYS

-And you've left all that on the track.

-Yeah, it's all on.

Anyway.

# Silence I'd hear you

# And a boat lies waiting... #

'On the last album, On An Island, I managed to get David Crobsy

'and Graham Nash to sing on a couple of tracks from that,

'so I thought it would be great to get them in again

'and recreate their sound with me,

'cos we seem to fit quite well together.'

And that big harmony thing is something I've always really loved.

# Something

# I never knew

# In silence

# I'd hear you

# And a boat lies waiting

# Still your clouds are flaming... #

The first solo album that I did in 1978 wasn't what

I was going to be then subsequently doing as my career.

It was something to fill in a bit of loose-end time and to have some fun.

Oh, look, mushrooms. Mmm.

# There are no boundaries set

# The time, and yet you waste it still... #

'That was to take a simpler approach,

'just go with a couple of old friends

'and just play some songs'

and have a bit of fun and see what happened.

I mean, these things were really off the cuff, just sit me down,

play around a bit and say, "Right, record."

But the last thing I did was what became Comfortably Numb.

We didn't have time to work on it any more,

and it was still around when we got to starting The Wall the next year.

-So this is the original recording?

-Yeah.

# Put it on the line

# Put it to the test

# I'm just the same as all the rest

# I'm not the worst, I'm not the best... #

I'd forgotten I'd written words... of some sort.

HE SCATS ON THE RECORDING

Ran out of...

# There's nothing to live

# And nothing to die for

# There is no future,

# No past to cry for

# I'm just dust flown away on the wind... #

-Getting used to that now?

-Yeah.

-It's good, isn't it?

It sounds amazing, I love it.

I actually....

I wrote Comfortably Numb on that... on that guitar, with that tuning.

-On this guitar?

-Yeah.

-I'll call this an honour!

Do you think that your solo songs draw on a more emotional

side of yourself?

That's hard to say, I don't know.

Not yet. Wait.

Somewhere round here.

His emotional centre is musical, it isn't...

You know, most of us express our anger, love, hate,

whatever it is, we express it in words,

and David really, really doesn't but he does express it musically.

And I don't know what came first.

You know, did the language part of his brain not evolve

because the musical part of his brain was so busy,

or was he just born with a brain that worked in that way?

It's really hard to know, but it's certainly true that emotion,

for him, is expressed musically.

Every once in a while,

an idea will force its way to the surface of my mind

that I will try to write a lyric or song about, but I've got no

way of predicting where that's going to go in the future.

I keep thinking that there is a little door,

a little key that... that I could open

and I would suddenly find a way that would make it slightly

simpler for me to move those things forward and to find them...

..because there's plenty to write about but I haven't yet really

pinned that down.

-You wrote the lyrics for Faces Of Stone yourself, didn't you?

-Yes.

What prompted it?

Faces Of Stone was prompted by a memory of a day walking

in Ladbroke Gardens with my mother,

when she was suffering from dementia.

And she... As were walking through the trees,

under the trees and the hedge, she was saying, "Oh, isn't it lovely?"

She could see pictures that weren't there, hanging in the trees.

That was a moment that sparked it off and I had a line that went,

"Faces of stone that watch from the dark as the wind swirled around

"and you took my arm in the park."

So, it's basically about my mother's decline and, you know,

the ending of one life and the beginning of another,

cos Romany was born nine months before my mother died,

so there was a short period where they were both alive together

and...

She came back to our house

and held Romany in her arms as a tiny baby.

And I have a picture of that.

And so the moment in the park, which is a mental picture,

and the picture I have of her holding Romany in her arms sparked

a little thing which became that lyric.

So this is some of what became Faces Of Stone.

This has got the original vocal that I did on my iPhone late one night,

which is where the lyric spark came from.

# Faces of stone

# Bleached white by the sun

# As the wind swirled around

# And you took my arm in the park

# Your Hollywood smile

# Shone light on the past

# But it was the future

# That you held so tight to your heart. #

I suppose when you write a song about something specific that has

got some emotional content,

I mean, that one, Faces Of Stone, that is related to my mother

and her declining years, yeah, there's an emotional thing in there.

I mean, our relationship was very difficult and tricky and...

It's good at the moment, right now,

to be putting that back into a slightly different perspective.

Trying to find the affection that was there.

I must have loved her but, er,

a lot of the time it didn't feel like I did.

-Do you miss her?

-Do I miss my mother? I...

No.

No, I don't miss her, I don't think, no.

It wasn't a closely-knit emotional type family,

and when my mother wanted to be closer when she was getting old,

I found it difficult to deal with and I wanted her to...

"Get off, get off, leave me alone."

Now is not the time to be trying to do this.

The time to be doing that stuff was when I was five.

It's just days away from his first live show and David

and the band are catching up, rehearsing new songs and old.

# Money

# Get away

# Get a good job with more pay and you're OK

# Money... #

Tell me about playing live, because you haven't played live for a while.

-Do you enjoy the experience of playing?

-Yes, it's terrific.

It's almost like a completely different thing,

though, to recording in the studio where you slave away

hermit-like for years and years perfecting little things.

This you have to do the work in this rehearsal room,

getting it as good as you can get it, but then you bash it out

and mistakes don't matter, as long as you get the right overall feel

and excitement and emotional depth to what you're doing.

The performance is a great part of it.

There's a lot that he has to do to be the frontman on this show.

It's a big job being David Gilmour!

And here we are in Croatia.

Never played in Croatia before, never been here,

but...the Romans got everywhere.

-Beautiful, isn't it?

-It is.

How did you find this place?

Well, I set my team off to find me beautiful places, you know.

I just think it's fantastic for people's memories of an event

to be something special, not be just another sports arena or stadium.

They're going to go away again afterwards,

assuming I do a reasonably good show, they're going to go away

and they're going to remember it,

partly because of the place and the setting they're in.

And from here, you go...

From here we're off to Italy and then off to France

and off to Germany. And then we'll be back to London,

where we'll do some more dates at the Albert Hall.

And then, we'll have a little break

and after this school term is over we'll head to South America.

The school term comes in the middle of it

because you've got to be in London for the school term.

I want to be around and not be too absent.

I've had my moment, you know, of doing all those things

and letting my career come first,

but, um, I'm established, I think, aren't I?

Yeah!

There are some performers for whom the crowd is incredibly

important, but I sense that it's not just about the excitement

of the crowd, it's more about the moment and the music.

It is, well, we try very hard to get the music really...

heartfelt when we do it.

But you can never get above sort of 70% or something

without an audience.

Whatever you do in rehearsal, there's a whole massive lift of gear

when there's an audience,

for everyone, and for me definitely.

It's likely to be slightly less perfect, but more fun.

CHEERING

CHEERING INTENSIFIES

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

PIANO PLAYS

OK.

Guard the meat, don't eat the meat.

"I'll guard it in my stomach very well."

There's potato salad over here.

'I'm a control freak. I confess, I can't do anything about it.

'I try to stop but I just am that person who does want to man

'the barbecue and does want to light the fire and do all those things.'

-'Do you have any regrets?

-Can you get through life without regrets?

'I don't think you can. I've got tons of regrets!

'Tons of regrets.

'I mean, that silly song.

'I've got a few but then again too few to mention.

'I've got many regrets but you... You get on, don't you?'

There are things I could have done better,

things I should have done better.

'What is your favourite musical memory?

'Oh, God, there are just far, far too many.

'I mean, I did play at a Les Paul tribute

'once in the New York, in the '80s I think it was,

'and I was playing a blues number

'and BB King sort of wandered into the room and stood on the side.'

And at the end of the song he came up to me and said,

"Hey, boy, you sure you wasn't born in Mississippi?"

-Play Hey Jude.

-Hey Jude by Romany, yes.

# Don't make it bad

# Take a sad song and make it better

# Remember to let her into your heart

# Then you can start

# To make things better

# Anytime you feel the pain

# Hey, Jude, refrain

# Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

# La la la la la... # That's too high!

LAUGHTER

Cor, she knows how to seize her moment, that girl!