Pink Floyd’s story is usually told as a triumph.
The psychedelic pioneers become prog-rock innovators, the prog innovators become global superstars, and albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall turn into permanent fixtures of rock culture.
But there is another, rather more revealing way of looking at the band’s history – through the records David Gilmour would rather have left differently.
What makes his criticisms interesting is that they are not all the same. Sometimes he dislikes the music. Sometimes he thinks the band were simply flailing around without knowing what they were doing. And sometimes his regret is less about the recordings themselves than the decision to present them as a proper Pink Floyd album.
In other words, these aren't simply three albums Gilmour considers bad. They represent three very different kinds of mistake.
1. The album that forced Gilmour to discover whether he could write
When David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in late 1967, he was hardly walking into a settled creative partnership. Syd Barrett was still the band’s driving force, but his increasingly erratic behaviour was making the original line-up impossible to sustain. By early 1968, Barrett was gone and the remaining musicians were faced with the awkward task of discovering what Pink Floyd could be without him.
Ummagumma, released in 1969, captures that uncertainty almost perfectly.
It is an extraordinary record partly because it sounds as though the four members haven't quite worked out how to function as a unit. The first disc documents the live Pink Floyd; the second effectively gives each musician room to build his own miniature world.
For Gilmour, that freedom was less exhilarating than terrifying. He had never really written a Pink Floyd song before, and suddenly he had to fill a substantial portion of an album himself.
Looking back in 1983, he described the circumstances behind his contribution, The Narrow Way, with almost painful honesty:
“Well, we’d decided to make the damn album, and each of us to do a piece of music on our own…”
Then came the much more revealing admission: “It was just desperation really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself. I’d never written anything before, I just went into a studio and started waffling about, tacking bits and pieces together. I haven’t heard it in years. I’ve no idea what it’s like.”
That is a rather different kind of regret from simply thinking an album turned out badly. Gilmour was looking back at a moment when he was being forced to become the songwriter he would eventually prove himself to be.
There is an irony here. The Narrow Way may sound tentative, but the uncertainty surrounding Ummagumma was part of Pink Floyd’s creative education. They were trying things because they hadn't yet figured out what came next.
Gilmour's verdict decades later was considerably harsher. In 1995 he described the early records Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma as “pretty horrible”, although he gave the live half of the latter a little more credit.
The album he once regarded as an act of desperation therefore becomes fascinating in retrospect: it is a document of Pink Floyd learning how to become Pink Floyd.
2. The experiment that got away from them
If Ummagumma represents uncertainty, Atom Heart Mother represents something more ambitious: Pink Floyd trying to turn experimentation into a fully formed artistic statement.
The 1970 album's enormous title suite occupied the entire first side, combining the band with brass, choir and orchestral forces. It was hardly a cautious step forward. Yet Gilmour has spent decades insisting that the result did not justify the ambition.
His 2001 assessment was spectacularly blunt: “That was a good idea but it was dreadful.”
He then went considerably further: “God, it’s s***, possibly our lowest point artistically. Atom Heart Mother sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it.”
That last point is crucial. Gilmour wasn't simply dismissing an embarrassing early album. He was identifying a moment when Pink Floyd were still searching for a musical language that would soon become much more coherent.
And Atom Heart Mother was hardly an insignificant failure. It became the band's first UK No. 1 album, while its willingness to combine rock with orchestral and choral writing pointed towards the grander ambitions that would soon be realised on Meddle and The Dark Side of the Moon.
Gilmour has subsequently described the period even more succinctly: “At the time we felt Atom Heart Mother, like Ummagumma, was a step towards something or other. Now I think they were both just blundering about in the dark.”
That is perhaps the fairest way to understand the record. Atom Heart Mother is not a bad album because Pink Floyd lacked imagination. Quite the opposite: they had almost too many ideas and had not yet learned how to control them.
Gilmour's regret is therefore less about experimentation itself than about the gap between the idea and the execution.
And that distinction matters, because Pink Floyd would spend the next few years closing that gap with remarkable speed.
3. The album that wasn't supposed to be an album
By 2014, Pink Floyd's problems were very different.
The band had already produced the classic sequence of Meddle, The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals. Roger Waters had departed, Richard Wright had died, and Gilmour and Nick Mason were looking back through recordings made during the Division Bell sessions two decades earlier.
There was plenty of material. What there wasn't, necessarily, was a new Pink Floyd album waiting to emerge.
Engineer Andy Jackson had assembled hours of instrumental material into a collection known as The Big Spliff. When Gilmour and Mason returned to it, the idea of turning that material into The Endless River was partly driven by the fact that there was an audience for it.
As Gilmour later explained: “When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together called ‘The Big Spliff’ – a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams…”
And here the nature of the regret changes again.
Gilmour has not suggested that revisiting Richard Wright's playing was inherently misguided. Indeed, the presence of Wright gave the project an emotional reason to exist. His objection was to what happened next: the decision to turn this collection of atmospheric fragments into a formally released Pink Floyd album.
“My mistake, I suppose,” he said, was being “bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record.”
He added: “It was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell…”
That makes The Endless River a particularly interesting entry on this list. Gilmour's regret wasn't necessarily that the music existed. It was that the material was given a status and expectation it had never originally been designed to carry.
After decades of Pink Floyd albums being treated as major cultural events, even an album assembled from archival jams was inevitably going to be judged against The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
The mistakes were part of the journey
Seen this way, Gilmour's three problem albums tell a rather more interesting story than a simple list of Pink Floyd's worst records.
Ummagumma was the album that exposed Gilmour's insecurity as a fledgling songwriter. Atom Heart Mother was the grand experiment whose ideas outran the band's ability to shape them. The Endless River was an altogether later problem: not so much a failure of creativity as a question of what should – and shouldn't – be presented as a Pink Floyd album.
And perhaps that is why Gilmour's criticisms are more illuminating than they initially appear.
Pink Floyd's greatest achievement was not that they got everything right. It was that they kept moving until they found a way of turning uncertainty, experimentation and technological possibility into music that sounded unmistakably like them.
The awkward records are part of that story too. In fact, without the false starts, the later certainty might never have arrived.
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