There’s no real reason to doubt David Gilmour whenever he has a guitar in his hands.
As much as he might like the idea of playing solos throughout every one of Pink Floyd’s records, it’s always about playing for what the song needs rather than grandstanding for any length of time. Gilmour wasn’t the kind of person to spend too much time worrying about his massive musical chops, but he knew when a few artists were completely out of his depth when he threw their songs in his set.
Then again, Gilmour has been able to be somewhat of a musical chameleon. Even before he was in Pink Floyd, he was already playing music from all over the pop world. Some of them would be the standard rock and roll of the day, but it wasn’t abnormal for him to throw in the occasional blues tune or maybe pull a page out of the Motown playbook and start throwing in a bit of soul.
Even when he started working outside of Floyd, he managed to have a much better handle on what any artist wanted. Given how much he switched up his tone, Gilmour could have probably had a nice life as a session musician behind the scenes half the time, knowing when to make soaring leads like when working on Paul McCartney’s ‘No More Lonely Nights’ or when to start getting more experimental like on his various collaborations with Kate Bush.
But if Gilmour was one of a kind, that only came from the fact that he was replacing a one-of-a-kind singer before him. As much as he’s known as the voice behind Pink Floyd in many respects, Syd Barrett was the one that got the ball rolling on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The band was far more whimsical in those days, singing songs that could have been space-age fairy tales, but Gilmour wasn’t about to come on as an overt replacement.
He was a friend of the group, and the last thing he wanted was to get in the way of their artistry, but once Barrett started to become more unhinged, it’s not like he had a choice of taking over or not. The friend that they had known for so long had begun to slip away, and despite not having the best relationship with him, Gilmour knew that the next best thing was to help Barrett on his solo records.
Although The Madcap Laughs is an acquired taste among Floyd fans, Gilmour readily admits that he could have never played those tunes like Barrett could when playing them live, saying, “I think I did ‘Terrapin’ pretty much as the record, as much as I reasonably could. ‘Dominoes’ I did change around a little. I gave it a slightly jazzier feel. Many of his songs are just… too personal to Syd. Or too… incomprehensible in some ways. With some of them it’s hard to feel confident about inhabiting the song.”
Granted, Gilmour did give it a fair shot, but it’s always been clear that those songs were far from his forte. Even looking back on the old footage of the band playing without Barrett, hearing Gilmour try to sing a track like ‘Flaming’ is one of the most subtly depressing things you’ll ever see, almost looking like a statue trying his best to put any sort of whimsy he can into his vocal performance.
But the fact that Gilmour couldn’t match what Barrett did shouldn’t be considered an insult by any stretch. Barrett was simply too eccentric for standard rock and roll, and even if not every track was absolutely fantastic, they certainly made people think in a way that they would have never considered before.
