David Gilmour: ‘There’s No Room in My Life for Pink Floyd’

Listening to the album, I realized just how crucial Rick was to the sound of the band.
Absolutely. Roger and I have always made so much noise, on the records and in the press, that Rick tends to get slightly forgotten. But he is just as vital as anyone else to this thing. He creates a whole sonic landscape in all the things that we do. That is something you can’t reproduce anywhere. No one else does it quite like him.

Did you ever considering putting vocals on any of the tracks besides the final one?
I think we thought that song was so good as it stood. Polly’s words really spoke to something about the band, certainly when it came to Rick and myself. We speak better with our musical instruments. We thought that would be a lovely way to finish the album, by making the statement and not putting words on the other songs. One could argue we should have put words on one or two other songs, but I really like it the way it is.

All of the songs flow together very nicely, and it does really feel like a cohesive final statement.
That’s right. It’s saying goodbye to the whole thing. It’s not me saying goodbye. I’m still around. I’m going to have a solo record next year, hopefully. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye permanently.

Some of them really sound like they were made around the time of Dark Side of the Moon or “Echoes.”
I some ways, I think that it’s closest to the Pink Floyd of the 1960s. Those pieces came out of Rick, me and Nick just jamming away together. You can hear the echoes of 1960s Pink Floyd in this record.

When The Division Bell tour ended in 1994 did you intend for the band to go away for a long time, or did that just sort of happen naturally?
I’m not even sure that I know the answer to that. I mean, we just never got around to doing it again, so that must say something. I think we had really pretty much done all that we’d wanted to do at that point.

You were only 48 and you’d just finished the biggest tour of all time. Many people in your position would have been tempted to keep the machine rolling, but you obviously didn’t feel that way.
Going bigger was something that I was definitely moving away from. I’ve done those tours. I’ve enjoyed those tours, loved them. But to me, that whole thing was becoming bigger than I liked. I wasn’t enjoying the size of it so much, the lack of connection with people that are a long, long way away from you. I was slightly itching to get into slightly smaller places and play to crowds where you can see them. I wanted to see each individual, more or less. I felt that was something I could do much better as a solo artist than a part of Pink Floyd.

Why did you wait 12 years to make a solo album?
Life gets in the way sometimes. After that tour I was remarried. I had more children to raise. I took them to school in the morning and I was keen to spend more time with them. Having done that huge tour I didn’t feel there was any hurry to start getting back to it.