“We had some pretty heavy arguments” – David Gilmour on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon

This article was first published in the June 2003 issue of Uncut

David Gilmour has invited us to his riverside studio – the splendid houseboat Astoria, moored on the Thames at Hampton. It’s surrounded by spectacular private gardens which come complete with their own 18th-century tunnel, leading the visitor safely underneath the busy road outside. In the grounds is a large conservatory with a TV lounge, kitchen, dining area and all-day catering.

Gilmour enters in the manner of a country squire and, despite a reputation for being difficult, he’s immediately friendly, welcoming. He’s put on a few pounds over the years, he’s greyer, his hair is short and he’s braced against the fresh winds in a shirt and jumper – but he is instantly identifiable as David Gilmour.

We cross to the boat, a 90-foot craft built in 1911 for music-hall impresario Fred Karno, whose guests included Charlie Chaplin. The interior houses a sitting room, kitchen and bathroom as well as control room and studio, where we sit on a long window seat beside a drum kit that was recently used by Ringo Starr. The water is at window level, and swans float serenely past as Gilmour talks expansively – graciously waiving the agreed time limit. He has two guitars beside him; he plucks at one, idly. The other, a Lewis, is the very instrument that produced the third solo on “Money”. Later, Gilmour demonstrates the speeded-up, eight-note sequence from “On The Run” on his “briefcase” VCS3 Synthi. He also treats Uncut to a tape of Floyd playing “On The Run” live in Brighton in 1972, when it existed purely as a jam.

Is Dark Side the performance of a lifetime?

It’s one of them. I like the following album (Wish You Were Here) just as much, and there are moments before and after, even in much more recent times, that I think are sublime. But its consistency, its subject matter, its lyrics, the music and everything all tied together make one very original whole that you could say is once in a lifetime, although I don’t, myself.

Almost half a million people a year still buy the album in the US alone. Why?

I’m very thankful; it’s very strange. The subjects that it addresses are pretty much eternal, and the music is always fairly direct, certainly compared to some of the things that we’ve done. And although it has its own Pink Floyd sound, there are no very unusual devices applied to it that can date it.

Is it true you bet your manager, Steve O’Rourke, that it wouldn’t go into the American Top 10?

Yes, it’s true. The thing about the bet was, I couldn’t lose. If it hadn’t gone into the Top 10, then winning the bet would’ve been handy. And if I lost the bet, then I won anyway. I was very conscious of that.

Did you pay up?

Yes, of course.

You’ve been quoted as saying that you were a little lazy during the writing of the album. Is that right?

I would think I was a bit lazy during the songwriting. I didn’t actually bring anything of mine into rehearsal sessions – “Listen to this, it’s great, why don’t you write some words for it, Roger?” But it’s not something I’m wracked with guilt about. It worked out perfectly. I was part of writing “Breathe” and “Time” and stuff, and the basic synthesizer part for “On The Run” sequence was mine.

“I had a resistance to stating ‘Roger is our leader’, as it creates a feeling you have to defer to him on other matters”

David Gilmour on Roger Waters

Why did you take a back seat in the writing process? Was it because Roger and Rick had so many ideas?

I don’t think so. I was just a bit flat – people go through these periods – and I think in the studio, while making the album, my contribution was fine. It was every bit as good as it should have been.

What was that contribution?

It’s very hard to tie down. I was very active in all the production side. Most of the melodies that I sang made up in the studio at the time of doing them, or in the rehearsal room. That’s the way we tended to work.

The guitar is the instrument that I chose or that chose me, and the one I obviously have the greatest facility with. I always wanted it to be a whole ensemble – an orchestra, if you like. I don’t really see it as guitar playing as much as creating a whole sound and a background. You just hear sounds in your head and you try different sounds and different guitars and different amplifier settings until it all starts sounding the way you imagine it. I took a great deal of care and pride in putting together different guitar parts that were sympathetic and complementary, and doing solos was more just the fun, a release.

Which was the most satisfying track to play live?

I’m tempted to say it was doing the whole thing that was good. It had a cohesion and a meaning, and we had quadraphonic tapes and we had the keyboards running on a quadraphonic system that Rick could manipulate himself. We’d have a tingle of anticipation when we knew we were going to do it. Obviously it’s nice when you cut to a guitar solo and you get a chance to turn it up and jam for a minute or two.

One feature was a plane crashing into the stage. How easy was it to keep on playing with all that going on?

It was quite a large model airplane coming down at the end of the “On The Run” passage and disappearing into the dark, crashing onto a great big wodge of foam rubber, and there was a real explosion accompanied by a tape explosion happening at the same time. We’ve had all sorts of things over the years, so I don’t think it put any of us off. It was jolly entertaining.

Nick believes you’re the only natural musician in the group and that the others are “a very gifted amateur band” who have a talent for playing in a style that suits Pink Floyd.

I’m fairly musical. Rick’s very musical, too. Rick is less pushy than 1 am. I’m very happy, I suppose, to be thought of as the musical one. I think I did most of the arranging and cajoling.

Nick also says the female backing vocalists on the LP “were always going to shine”. Did you arrange and direct them?

Yes. All our vocals are perfectly balanced – for instance, on “Us And Them”. I did I don’t know how many harmony vocals, then the girls on top. It’s really great, really uplifting. You can move one element a fraction and the whole thing falls to pieces.

It was you who brought in saxophone player Dick Parry. Didn’t you know him way back in Cambridge?

I played with him. He was a jazz player. You’d be in two or three different groups at a time sometimes. My group in Cambridge very rarely had a gig on a Sunday night, and Dick had a regular spot in a ballroom on Sunday night. We got this jazz trio thing going on.

Pink Floyd were so insular in some ways. I can’t believe it, thinking about it. We didn’t know anyone. We really didn’t know how to get hold of a sax player or anything. We wanted to try a sax on “Money” and “Us And Them”, so we got Dick in. He went on to play on the Wish You Were Here album and he toured with us in ’94. He did some dates with me. He’s still playing.

“In terms of writing, nick got some credits once in a while where he… he certainly didn’t put in a chord change”

David Gilmour on Nick Mason

Roger claims the rest of the band were not supportive of the philosophical and political ideas he wanted to express. You have publicly upheld the album concept, but Rick remembers feeling that the music was more important, and Nick says he sat on the fence.

Nick’s got a very sore bum, I imagine. He spent so many years sitting on that fence. Rick was curmudgeonly about things and wanted us to move in a more pure, maybe jazzy, direction. He was always moaning and groaning, but he didn’t really mean it half the time.

We all have very different personalities is the truth of the matter. We were all very, very happy to have a driving force like Roger who wanted to push for these concepts. I don’t remember it being a big issue at the time. Jointly and severally, we wanted each piece of music to have its own magic. As an instrumental piece, we wanted it to have those little hints of magic about it before we tied it even into a lyric. Then, that lyric either has the same mood and strengthens the mood of the music, or the music then strengthens the lyric, or sometimes it’s because the music and the words conflict that it creates it. It’s not always the same way. If anything, at the end of Dark Side, I thought there were one or two moments where the lyric was stronger than the music that was carrying it.

Can you say what those moments were?

It was just a general feeling and I can remember stating it at the time, and trying to encourage all of us to make the vehicles every bit as good as the lyrics on the next one. Maybe it was just my own guilty conscience about not feeling I’d contributed enough to the writing of it anyway. It’s a very tiny thing.

Obviously, it’s not a matter of big importance.

So despite what Roger has said, you personally had no objection to his political and philosophical themes?

Absolutely not. That would have been a very strange attitude to have after the ’60s and moving into the early ’70s, and my absolute heroes were Bob Dylan and other people who expressed their philosophical and political ideas. If the political ideas being expressed by one are not the political ideas of another, you get into a slightly different minefield.

Were you thinking about Roger’s words on the tracks where you sang them?

Of course. I think back and I’m slightly amazed we didn’t push him harder for explanations sometimes.

What did you understand by the “dark side of the moon”?

The moon and the lunacy are obviously hard to get away from. It was referring to the dark side of the pressures of life that can drive a poor boy to madness

That lunacy, at least in parts, is related to Syd Barrett. Did you know this at the time?

There are specific references to “Syd moments” in some of the lyrics of Dark Side. Syd was a constant presence in our minds and consciences, I imagine.

Were you his closest friend in the band?

I would like to think so. We were quite good friends from when I was about 14.

How distressing was it to witness his decline?

You know, one just accepts things as they happen. I have no idea how much it affected me at the time. I did spend quite a lot of time – more with friends of Syd’s than with the guys in the band – really trying to think of ways of helping him, but the ideas in psychiatry and psychological counselling were rather different to what they are now. We tended to cling to rather trippy-hippie ideas of what was best for him, which I don’t think many people would agree with these days. Who knew?

Have you stayed in touch with him?

I’ve been in touch with people in his family.

Roger, Rick and Nick have no recollection of any great degree of drug consumption around the making of Dark Side Of The Moon. Is this your recollection, too?

To be really honest with you, I can’t remember. All of us, for pretty well most of our career, have been very, very professional in the studio and I don’t think that any drugs have played a significant role in any of it. It’s true that Roger and Nick were the drinkers, and Rick and I would have a puff on a reefer once in a while.

It’s nice to listen to the album that way [stoned]. It’s an accidental byproduct, really. There’s a lot going on, lots of stuff semi-hidden, all sorts of layers… it’s not that simple to get it. The more you concentrate, the better you listen and the more you’ll get out of it. The classic stoner thing of a reefer and a pair of headphones does, I’m sure, get you an awful lot out of it.

The other guys don’t recall a lot about rehearsals for the album, when the songs started coming together. Do you?

I can remember the rooms that we were in quite vividly. We went to a warehouse in Bermondsey, which belonged to The Rolling Stones, and we were there for a little while, writing pieces of music and jamming. It was a very dark room. We booked a different place in Broadhurst Gardens, near St John’s Wood, which was a light area, on the ground floor. It was a knocked-through, normal house. But I can’t remember the details of what happened when.

You jam, you knock stuff about, you plunder your old rubbish library. The process went on, the rehearsing, the writing, the performing live, the recording sessions, the final mixing moments and the cover. All these things came together and it became clearer and clearer, probably gradually, that we had definitely made progress and that this was going to be a bigger, better thing than we had previously done.

No one seems quite sure which Abbey Road studio it was recorded and mixed in.

It was mostly recorded in Studio Three. Probably some of it in Two. We did an awful lot of work in both over the years. It wasn’t that essential thing, “We’ve got to be in Two,” or, “We’ve got to be in Three.” They were quite similar.

What were your musical priorities in the production stages?

It was, I felt, my role to do whatever I could to emotionally enhance whatever was going on and make the music sound nice. There are moments when real, ear-splitting, abrasive sound is right and moments when it just isn’t. You try to make each piece of music fulfil its potential.

Is it true that feelings started running high during the mixing process?

The stereo mix was Roger and myself and Chris Thomas and Alan Parsons engineering, mostly, with other people dropping in and putting their oar in at various times. We struggled and sweated and argued and fought over every bar, all the way through the whole album. We really, really worked to get that as near perfect as we could get it.

We were fantastically busy in the run-up to the release of the album, going on tours, and when the quadraphonic mix became a possibility, we just didn’t have the time or the energy or really the belief that the system was going to take off and be in general use by people — as turned out to be the case. And so we let Alan Parsons do the quadraphonic mix of the whole album.

How valuable was Alan’s role, and also Chris Thomas’s?

Alan was the EMI staff engineer assigned to our project. He was a very good engineer, and he had one or two production ideas that were very good. In a clock shop in Hampstead, he had recorded the ticking clocks and made these tapes up to offer us as an idea, which was great. But I think we all really knew what we were doing and where we were going. We would have got there with any good engineer operating the knobs and buttons.

Chris was, I think, managed by Steve [O’Rourke] even then. Roger and I were, as usual, arguing and bickering about how things should be in the overall mix. I favoured a wetter, more echoey sound, and I favoured things like the (speaking) voices appearing more subtly within the mush of the mix. Roger wanted things to be drier and cleaner and clearer. It’s the same argument we’ve been having again over the 5.1 remix.

I think Steve suggested that we bring Chris in cos he was an expert and he’d worked with The Beatles. He’d done a lot of The White Album. He was more or less George Martin’s apprentice. He was basically brought in to help mediate between myself and Roger. We always argued. Arguments come out of passion. They come out of one’s absolute belief that one way is the right way, and the other person has an absolute belief that it should be different, and out of that compromise, wonderful things can happen.

Were you and Roger both prepared to compromise with each other?

I don’t myself look on compromise as a dirty word. In our lives together in Pink Floyd, we argued and fought and compromised on things. Whether things would have been better done one way or the other way, we can only speculate. During the making of The Wall, we had some pretty heavy arguments, which sometimes would culminate in bad feeling that would last for a day or two.

Did your professional relationship with Roger work because of or in spite of the differences?

Probably because of. It was an extraordinarily successful partnership. We had a good, valid working relationship right through until the period that’s well documented after The Wall album.

Were the recording sessions for Dark Side Of The Moon as happy as the other members remember?

You see… we had some pretty good arguments, Roger and myself, on that album, as we had had on “Echoes” and all sorts of things before. They came from a passion for getting it right. Obviously, one’s passion is sometimes obscured by one’s macho tendencies, as happens to everyone.

I can remember there being fantastic moments of harmony after that – some of the moments during the making of Wish You Were Here… One inspired moment by one person would be so obvious that it would be picked up by another person, and there would be genuine harmony, and I can say that those moments still even, for me, existed during the making of The Wall. Obviously, there was a deterioration in some elements of our relationship.

Roger feels that there was a power struggle between you.

It’s a funny old thing, the idea of a power struggle.

He sees it as a leadership issue.

I didn’t want to be the leader, but Roger desperately did want to be the leader, and I didn’t think that if someone wants to be the leader then that means he has the final say on everything that goes on.

Roger claims he had to lead because he was the one with the ideas. How do you react to that?

In terms of drive and lyrical concept matters, he was the de facto leader. But I certainly had a resistance to stating, “Roger is our leader,” as it creates a feeling that you have to defer to him on other matters – and on musical matters, I didn’t feel I should. I didn’t think it was good for us for me to not argue and try and push my case as I saw it. Those moments were the exception rather than the rule.

“Our fights at the end of making a record to decide who had what percentage of each song were always the worst arguments we had”

There were also disagreements over songwriting credits.

We tended to think that if we threw ideas into the pot while we were all working together in the rehearsal studio, unless they were specific things, you didn’t hang on too tightly – if songs came up, then you would split the credit equally. In later years, the lyric came to count for half, so the lyricist would get 50 per cent of a track and the musicians would get 50 per cent.

So if we wrote a piece of music, all four of us jointly, Roger would get 62.5 per cent of it, cos he’d written the words and a quarter of the music, and the rest of us would get 12.5 per cent. That wasn’t the case at the time of Dark Side Of The Moon. I’m very impressed by, say, U2, where they just say, “We’re all in it together,” and split it equally. Very brave. We never quite managed that. Our fights at the end of making a record to decide who had what percentage of each song were always the worst arguments we ever had.

So isn’t “Money” a bit rich coming from Pink Floyd?

So it became, subsequently. We were by no means rich at that time. “Money” was the single that helped to really break us in America. It was the track that made us guilty of what it propounds, funnily enough.

There is some feeling that credits were given, particularly to Nick, where they weren’t deserved.

I suppose it would be fair to say that in terms of actual writing, Nick has got some credits once in a while where he… he certainly didn’t put in a chord change. It seems daft to worry about it. There are swings and roundabouts. There are times when someone has done a certain amount of one song but it’s been substantially written by another person. One accepts not getting credited on that one, but gets maybe a slightly bigger credit on another.

Roger says that, although he was annoyed for a long time about giving the credits away, he’s got over it now.

He’s lying. I’m averse to getting into an argument about it all, but his interpretation of equality tended to go up and down a little bit. Roger did go through periods where he wanted to be very socialist and share everything equally. There was a period long after Dark Side Of The Moon when he was advocating for a little while that we split the profits of tours and records equally between us, and all of our staff and everyone. It never quite came to fruition. And then something changed and he went so far the other way. I still don’t know exactly how one works out the credits and percentages. It’s always been a cause of much argument and bad feeling.

Was it more about actual credit or recognition, as Nick suggests, rather than cash?

It was about credit, I think, to all of us.

How do you feel now about the other three members?

About the same as I’ve always felt. I’ve got a lot of time for Rick. He’s got soul and musical talent. He’s got some really irritating features as well. Nick and I are very different people and we just don’t really see much of each other when we’re not working. Nick is definitely the best drummer for Pink Floyd, as Rick is the best keyboard player.

How about Roger?

I won’t go into what I feel about Roger. I haven’t seen him for so long that I don’t know what he’s like these days. I don’t really have any feelings about him.