David Gilmour produced – and can be heard playing guitar – on one of the greatest and most important albums of the 1970s in the shape of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside, and then followed that up a year later by appearing on the final album by Paul McCartney’s potentially best band, Wings, Back to the Egg.
He also did a lot of work during the decade with Pink Floyd, which you may remember.
Gilmour’s albums with Pink Floyd are not only some of the most beloved releases in all of the rock canon, but they’re also some of the highest-selling records of all time, too. You might not know each and every one of the songs on Dark Side of the Moon or The Wall, but everybody knows their iconic album art. Everybody recognises that that cha-ching noise preceding Gilmour’s swaggering guitar line means that ‘Money’ has started, and everybody knows that “all in all, you’re just another brick in the wall” or that by 1979, the band had become “comfortably numb”.
But while Gilmour’s guitar, lyrics, and vocals can be heard on some of the biggest songs and albums of all time, he’s also lent his name and his instrument to plenty of albums which haven’t lingered quite as long in the collective public consciousness, as well. And I don’t just mean Paul McCartney’s 1984 retrospective movie record, Give My Regards to Broad Street.
In 2009, Gilmour released a solo cover of Graham Nash’s ‘Chicago / Change the World’, in support of Scottish computer hacker Gary McKinnon, who at the time was facing extradition to the United States for having hacked into and deleting files from the US government computer systems, and even shutting down the United States Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2000 computers.
The song, an online exclusive, came to the attention of English ambient electronic group the Orb, who approached Gilmour with the intention of remixing and extending the piece. After a day of recording together, their collaboration blossomed into a full album, Metallic Spheres, and it is a genuine wonder that such a long, interconnected, meandering and often mind-numbing piece of ambient noise and droning music, electronically inseminated and painstakingly perfected, all topped with Gilmour’s trademark slow bending of the strings and blues inflected noodlings wasn’t more of a hit with the Pink Floyd faithful. There is more than an echo of ‘Echoes’ throughout the subsequent album.
With each side of the finished record made up of a ever-so-slightly different tones and textures from the other (side one is labelled as the “Metallic side” while side two is the “Sphere’s side”), the album gives more than a little bit of an insight into what we could have expected to hear from Pink Floyd had they been recording their mind-trips in the 21st century, rather than at the end of the 1960s and into the early ’70s.
The album, though not as widely known as pretty much anything else that Gilmour has ever worked on, did manage to briefly make its way towards the top of the UK dance charts upon its release, though, reaching as high as number three—behind Danny Byrd’s Rave Digger and Magnetic Man’s Magnetic Man—and stuck around in the top 100 for a further five weeks before drifting into the outer spheres of public memory, and, out there beyond the dark side of the moon.
