Few bands have travelled as far musically as Pink Floyd.
They began as one of the most adventurous psychedelic groups of the 1960s, eventually becoming global superstars with albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Even in their later years, the Pink Floyd name retained extraordinary weight, culminating in 2014’s The Endless River and the 2022 anti-war single ‘Hey, Hey, Rise Up’.
Yet David Gilmour, who became one of the architects of that remarkable legacy, has never been particularly sentimental about every step of the journey. Looking back over Pink Floyd’s career, he has been remarkably frank about several records he considers artistic misfires – including albums that have since acquired devoted followings.
'Increasingly erratic'
Gilmour was not a part of the original Pink Floyd DNA. When the band formed in London in 1965, their talisman was dominated by Syd Barrett, whose eccentric imagination and songwriting drove their early work.
Gilmour initially joined as a second guitarist in December 1967, but within months Barrett’s increasingly erratic behaviour made it impossible for the original line-up to continue. By early 1968, Gilmour had effectively taken his place.
The transition was anything but smooth. With Barrett gone, bassist Roger Waters gradually assumed a greater leadership role, while Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason were still trying to work out what Pink Floyd could become without its principal songwriter.
The albums that followed are fascinating precisely because of that uncertainty. They are albums made by a band searching for a new identity – and Gilmour has subsequently been rather less kind to them than many fans.
One of his particular targets is Ummagumma, released in 1969. The unusual double album divided its attention between live recordings and an experimental studio section in which each member was effectively given space to create his own material.
'Desperation'
For Gilmour, this was less a grand artistic experiment than an uncomfortable exercise in learning how to write.
'Well, we’d decided to make the damn album, and each of us to do a piece of music on our own,' Gilmour recalled to Sounds Guitar Heroes in 1983.
His own contribution was ‘The Narrow Way’, a three-part composition that marked his first substantial attempt at writing alone. He was hardly overflowing with confidence about the result.
'It was just desperation, really, trying to think of something to do, to write by myself,' he said. '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.'
'Brutal'
That description rather neatly captures the peculiar character of Ummagumma. Instead of sounding like a fully formed band moving confidently into its next phase, on the studio half of this 1969 LP Floyd often sound like four musicians pursuing separate ideas and seeing where they lead. There are flashes of invention, but the collective focus that would become their greatest strength was still developing.
The next stage of that process was Atom Heart Mother, and Gilmour’s verdict on that album has been even more brutal.
Released in 1970, it represented another attempt to push Pink Floyd beyond conventional rock. The enormous title suite occupies the entire first side, combining the band with brass, choir and orchestral elements, while the second side contains a more eclectic selection of songs and experiments. It was ambitious, unusual and, importantly, commercially successful: the album became Pink Floyd’s first UK No. 1.
Gilmour, however, has never been convinced that ambition automatically translated into artistic success.
Their most divisive album?
'Atom Heart Mother was a good idea, but it was dreadful,' he said in Mojo in 2001. 'I listened to that album recently: God, it’s s***, possibly our lowest point artistically. It sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it.'
That is quite a verdict on a record which has subsequently become something of a cult favourite. And there is an irony in Gilmour’s criticism: Atom Heart Mother may sound awkward and exploratory in places, but it also contains the seeds of the approach that would soon make Pink Floyd one of the biggest bands on Earth. Its willingness to abandon the constraints of the three-minute single helped move them towards the more coherent, immersive work that followed.
Indeed, Gilmour himself has acknowledged that the period was part of a necessary learning process. Looking back, he described Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother as experiments that seemed to be pointing somewhere at the time, even if the destination was unclear. 'At the time we felt like Atom Heart Mother, like Ummagumma, was a step towards something or other. Now I think they were both just blundering about in the dark.'
The tensions never disappeared
The remarkable thing is how quickly that uncertainty disappeared. Meddle, from 1971, provided a much clearer sense of direction, and the album's epic, 23-minute closing suite ‘Echoes’ demonstrated that the band could turn their taste for extended experimentation into something cohesive and emotionally powerful. From there came 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here from 1975, and 1977's Animals: a sequence that transformed Pink Floyd from an intriguing British progressive group into one of the defining bands of the era.
The internal tensions never disappeared, of course. If anything, success made the relationship between Waters and Gilmour increasingly complicated. But whatever their arguments, the music during Pink Floyd’s classic period was difficult to dismiss.
The post-Waters era was a different proposition. After Waters departed in the mid-1980s, Gilmour became the dominant creative force in the version of Pink Floyd that continued. A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and 1994's The Division Bell both achieved major commercial success, but neither approached the cultural impact of the band's 1970s peak.
Then, two decades after The Division Bell, Pink Floyd returned in 2014 with The Endless River.
'Bits and pieces'
Their swansong album was assembled largely from instrumental material left over from the Division Bell sessions, following the death of keyboard player Richard Wright in 2008. Rather than representing a completely new creative chapter, it was essentially an attempt to shape previously unused recordings into a final Pink Floyd album. Contemporary reaction was mixed, with some critics questioning whether the material justified carrying the band's name at all.
Gilmour himself eventually admitted that he had reservations about how the project had been presented.
'When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together – a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams that was out there on bootlegs. A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them,' he told the Los Angeles Times.
The problem, he felt, was not necessarily the existence of the recordings, but the decision to turn them into a fully fledged Pink Floyd album.
False starts
'My mistake, I suppose, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record,' Gilmour admitted. 'It should have been clear what it was. It was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell. But, you know, it’s never too late to get caught in one of these traps again.'
That admission neatly sums up Gilmour’s complicated relationship with Pink Floyd’s legacy. He has been one of the musicians chiefly responsible for creating some of the most celebrated music in rock history, but he is also acutely aware of the difference between inspired experimentation and material that simply does not quite work.
For fans, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother and The Endless River may all have their defenders – and each contains ideas that illuminate the band's extraordinary development. But Gilmour's perspective offers a useful reminder that even a band with Pink Floyd's remarkable hit rate had plenty of false starts, awkward experiments and decisions they later wished they had handled differently.
Pics Getty Images
