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24.09.2007:
Ein aktuelles Interview mit David Gilmour bietet das neue englische
"The Word" Magazin (10/2007). Gilmour erzählt über Syd, Pink Floyd
und seine Solotournee.
Über die
Word Webseite kann man, das Magazin bestellen:
Word Magazin
This is the only
print interview you’re giving for this project. I sthere any
particular reason for that? Are you a reluctant interviewee?
DAVID GILMOUR: I
am, yes. I did the album, I talked. I did the tour, I talked, and
now here I am putting out a DVD. There doesn’t seem much to say
except it’s fantastically good, I reckon, and I want people to see
it.
So it’s just a question of you scaling things back? Watching the
film there is an emphasis on the relative intimacy of the project,
so I wondered if that was important to you, to do things on a
smaller scale.
DAVID GILMOUR: It’s the way I’m looking at my future and my life in
music, as something I want to be easier to do, easier to maintain
and be enjoyable. Everything I’ve done within Floyd has been
fantastic, couldn’t have had more satisfaction, but at 61 I want to
scale down a little. I don’t want to play stadiums. I don’t have any
relish for it… A Floyd gig has an element of becoming a jamboree,
with people on the periphery turning up just for th party, another
element that hasn’t necessarily come for the music.
When you started making On An Island, what were you thinking
about?
DAVID GILMOUR: I never really started, as such. I have this room,
thus studio, ad over the years technology has become so wonderful I
can sit here and make whole records without anyone else being here,
do everything myself… four-fifths of the album was done in here.
When Phil Manzanera – who lives next door, a mile away – started
getting involved, a lot of it was already done.
It’s a constant battle witt me, thinking that I can do it all and
also thinking that I ought to have, and enjoy, an interaction with
other musicians. But I do get very specific ideas, so when you do
have musicians here, there’s a tendency to say exactly what you want
instead of just throwing a tune at them and saying let’s go…
It’s a strong cast of musicians. Why is Nick Mason visible in the
DVD but not playing in the actual live shows?
DAVID GILMOUR: It’s just getting too close. That would have been
Pink Floyd and I would have lost my objective then.
How on earth did you happen to be rehearsing next to Roger?
DAVID GILMOUR: Pure coincidence. We’ve tended to use those film
studios because they have huge soundstages where you can rehearse a
whole production. Bray, Pinewood and Shepperton are about it, so it
was bound to happen, I suppose.
The meeting looks a little awkward.
DAVID GILMOUR: It’s a funny old thing. It’s nice that it’s as
frost-free as it is now.
Is it really frost-free?
DAVID GILMOUR: I don’t think anything has changed in terms of our
different views on things. I’m sure he’s had some therapy. I have.
We’ve got to a point where we can look on it and laugh, but it’s not
completely relaxed and free. There’s not much future in it.
Before Live 8, was there ever a chance that might have reconvened?
DAVID GILMOUR: I never saw the point. I can appreciate other
people’s passion for it. The fans want to see it happen but I think
I’ve earned the right to be thoroughly selfish, to do exactly what I
want to do at my advanced stage in life, and in essence [Floyd]
isn’t what I want to do, what I did on this tour is exactly what I
want to do.
The Floyd came up in age where mystique was important. Bands like
you and Led Zeppelin were unreachable. These days it’s the complete
opposite. Anyone coming up has to give the impression they’re
accessible with MySpace and blogging. Does that new relationship
with the fans excite you or make you feel uncomfortable?
DAVID GILMOUR: It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, I enjoy the
whole idea of that, but it doesn’t make me able to be the nice
genial person that I appear to be [on my website] all the time. When
I’m rushing from a car to backstage at a theatre, I still am
uncomfortable enough to not want to all my lovely fans and give them
all autographs to sell on eBay, so you could say I maintain a little
bit of – not aloofness – but discomfort, I suppose, in too crowded a
public situation. There’s always been a slight sense of, “Do I
belong here?” After 40-something years in the business.
That's
fascinating, that you retain that kind of feeling, I suppose its
ultimate expression was something like The Wall.
DAVID GILMOUR: Perforce there was always that situation: we were
always up on the stage and they were always down there in the
audience, and Roger's view of that all was a fairly radical way of
indicating what that was like - a caricature of it. But it was truer
for Roger than it was for me. I never felt the wall between me and
my audience was as thick as the one Roger appeared to have. But, as
I said earlier, if you manage to take [a show] down in size, the
people who are there, I am fairly certain, are there to hear me sing
and play, they're not gatecrashing. You're already on a winner,
intimacy wise.
Even so, it seemed a bold move to play the whole of On An Island.
DAVID GILMOUR: Throughout the Floyd that would be the normal routine:
do the new album as the first half of the show and the previous
albumd as the second half, plus one or two encores. I thought, "This
album seems to hang together as a cohesive whole and this is the
only chance I'll get to do the whole thing", so I thought I'd brave
it.
Early in the tour there was a feeling that we weren't connecting
with the audience at the beginning of the set, so we started with
Breathe and Time from DSOTM and that seemed to lift the whole thing
up.
The fly-on-the-wall documentary on the DVD is fairly candid. Did
you get used to the camera's presence quickly?
DAVID GILMOUR: You get used to it much quicker if you know you have
editorial control. If it were the BBC following you around I think
you'd be a little more circumspect.
I liked the family atmosphere around Rick's birthday. You say at
one point about him: "His abilities have returned to him and along
with them, some of his strange attitudes." What did you mean by that
exactly?
DAVID GILMOUR: As he becomes more confident he becomes more capable,
and also becomes more assertive.
Remembers he's a rock star?
DAVID GILMOUR: Yes, that sort of stuff. Which is entirely the way it
should be.
He has such a distinctive sound, hasn't he?
DAVID GILMOUR: He's got soul, for want of a better word.
If you wonder what exactly it is about bands who connect with
great numbers of people, sometimes it's somebody who's considered a
minor player who turns out to be a key element.
DAVID GILMOUR: Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. It's very strange,
it's very easy for people who've been in bands to - with the help of
people around them, advisers, managers, wives - start thinking they
are the key lynchpin of the whole thing. But there;s a mysterious
thing that happens over the years, like The Beatles wouldn't have
been the same without Ringo, the people that tend to be labelled "the
lucky buggers", become very important.
There's a long line of grey-haired musicians on stage in this
show. With Floyd you started trying to move beyond the boundaries of
pop music early on. Was that ever a conscious effort to avoid it
being just a youth thing?
DAVID GILMOUR: None of us thought of our futures beyond the age of
30, certainly not 40 - that was just some sort of grey point in the
distance. But we loved old blues players. One's assumption about pop
music is that it's a young man's thing. I don't think it is - there
are a lot of people where age is not relevant to what they do. At
the same time there are a lot who become ensconced in being some
security blanket that prevents them being as radical as they were
and able to create as well as they did when they were younger. It's
not just age - everybody does have that jug full of ability. But if
you pour it out too early...
How do you feel about the physical record becoming an endangered
species?
DAVID GILMOUR: It's hard for someone from the era I started in to be
as modern as I'd like to be: the 12in album sleeve is a wonderful
thing. I'll even miss the CD when it goes. And I like to make an
album. I've got over having a side one and side two, but the natural
length of a vinyl album seems a very good one to me.
You
recently went on the climate change march in London and give links
to climate change campaigns on your website. Floyd's carbon
footprint must have been enormous. Does that embarrass you now?
DAVID GILMOUR: The live concert with its associated juggernauts of
equipment is still something that gives more pleasure than the
carbon it produces takes away. But there are plenty of things that
everybody can do. Twenty percent of energy is used on light bulbs,
and it could be four percent. If every room had a switch that turned
the mains off at the door like they do in hotel rooms that would be
good.
Downloads save plastic and cardboard. Could you see yourself
turning to that?
DAVID GILMOUR: Yes. I can see it for recorded music but not for live
music. I think the whole object of making music is to go out and
play it to people.
But applause is the most expensive drug in the world.
DAVID GILMOUR: Definitely, that's one of the addictions I've been
fighting to get over.
You do an unrehearsed performance of Syd Barrett's Dark Globe at
one of the shows on the DVD, the first gig after his death. Where
were you when heard he'd died?
DAVID GILMOUR: I was here. His brother-in-law called me. I felt
extremely sad about it, it was a tragic waste and I also felt a
great sense of regret that I didn't go and see him in all those
years. His family had said it would be better if people didn't, but
I wouldn't have thought that would have applied to me. I do regret
that I hadn't been more bullish about it; I did know where he lived,
I could have invited myself in for a cup of tea. Syd and I were
friends as teenagers and had a lot of memories that had nothing to
do with Floyd. Some of that might have cheered him up.
Did Live 8 feel like the culmination of Pink Floyd to you?
DAVID GILMOUR: Erm, it had a sense of closure. We got there and did
it... pretty well, I think. It was great to feel how that felt on
that occasion with Roger there. Hatred and bitterness are very
negative things, it felt very good to have put all that into
perspective and rounded it off nicely.
Is there a particular thing you're looking for when you sit down
to make music now?
DAVID GILMOUR: There is, but it's hard to verbalise. To me it's a
sound in my head that I'm looking for...
Do you achieve it?
DAVID GILMOUR: Yes, very much so. I'm very happy to get one thing in
my head, it might just be one chord on a guitar, which some time
later will become this whole thing which carries the essence of that
little kernel. There's often an element of old '50s and '60s sci-fi
electronica which I seem to like to add, a third dimension, a little
request from a distance, little sounds which evoke something in me.
I assume if they evoke something in me they'll evoke something in
others too.
You can go for months, pick up a guitar every day and nothing can
happen, then one day you put your hands on it and something just
drops out of the guitar and speaks to you. Those are the moments
you're looking for.
Long may you have them.
DAVID GILMOUR: Thank you.
Info: Matt Johns from
Brain Damage,
Transcript vom A Fleeting Glimpse
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