Rock reunions are huge right now, just ask an Oasis fan. Surely, if Noel and Liam Gallagher can repair their relationship, any formerly feuding duo could?
Not, according to David Gilmour, when it comes to Pink Floyd.
In an interview with The Independent this week, the revered guitarist and solo musician opened up about his lasting marriage with wife and collaborator Polly Samson, his new album Luck and Strange, and his longterm obsession with mortality.
“I’ve never had so much fun,” he said of working on Luck and Strange, for which he enlisted new musicians, producer Charlie Andrew (Alt-J) and Samson, who contributed many of the lyrics on the record.
Gilmour said he believed he’d avoided falling into the usual pitfalls of fame and fortune through his marriage to Samson. “Fame and fortune are very double-edged, too much success, too much adulation, too much money – a recipe for disaster,” he said.
He called Samson his “saviour”, adding: “There was a time when I was letting things go, drinking too much, too much cocaine, all those sorts of things. And in my life, that stopped when we [Polly and I] started, pretty much dead on at that time… I haven’t been near any of those things for over 30 years.”
Both Gilmour and Samson have been at loggerheads with Waters for years.
However, the feud flared up last year when Samson accused Waters of being “antisemitic to your rotten core” in a social media spat over Israel, and also branded him a “Putin apologist” after he suggested in an interview that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “probably the most provoked invasion ever”.
Waters said that he was “aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely”.
Asked if there might ever be a reunion between Gilmour and Waters, the guitarist responded with an “unequivocal no”. He did, however, suggest he hadn’t completely ruled out a partial reunion with drummer Nick Mason.
Currently, however, he said his focus is his solo work.
In a four-star review of Luck and Strange, critic Helen Brown praised Gilmour’s ruminations on love and mortality, framed by the “hi-def liquid mercury” he conjures with his guitar.
“Luck and Strange ends with the thump of a slow’n’steady heartbeat, providing a counterbalance to the panic-attack pulse heard on The Dark Side of the Moon,” she wrote. “‘Yes, I have ghosts,’ sings Gilmour, ‘and they dance by the moon.’
“A splashy concert piano-style solo brings the cold drama before the bass and guitar lock into a companionable groove, and the classical guitar thaws old fears into acceptance. Floyd used to sing that ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’, but Gilmour sounds happier than that. The darkening days ‘flow like honey’, he says. All ageing Floydies will find succour here.”
Read the full review. Luck and Strange is out now.