MOJO 1998
Dave: "He'd rarely sung leads before and he was very shy about his
voice. I encouraged him. On occasions, he would try to persuade me to
sing for him and I wouldn't. The truth is that our working relationship
remained very good even through making most of The Wall. There were many
moments when we were really talking well together and told each other
so. We had huge rows, but they were about passionate beliefs in what we
were doing. Roger is a very intelligent and creative person and I am
very stubborn and pig-headed, but I think I have a good musical sense.
Sometimes he would be willing to sacrifice all sorts of musical moments
to get his message accross. Our roles were complementary, at least in
theory. We recognised each other's strengths and weaknesses. We would
prevent one another's worst excesses and indulgences."
QUESTION: Can you give me an idea of the roles that were being played in
the recording studio? What were, perhaps, Roger's strong points that he
brought to a song, and what things do you believe you brought to it?
DAVID GILMOUR: I think I tend to bring musicality and melodies. Roger
was certainly a very good motivator and obviously a great lyricist. He
was much more ruthless about musical ideas, where he'd be happy to lose
something if it was for the greater good of making the whole album work.
So, you know, Roger'd be happy to make a lovely sounding piece of music
disappear into radio sound if it was benefiting the whole piece.
Whereas, I would tend to want to retain the beauty of that music. We
often had long bitter arguments about these things.
QUESTION: Do you, do you remember writing "Run Like Hell"?
DAVID GILMOUR: I had the music for "Run Like Hell," I guess in 1978 or
something. It was one of two pieces that I put in into "The Wall." Bob
Ezran was very keen that we should put them in. He liked them and we
worked on them, and Roger wrote words for them. But it's hard to
decipher from the very original demo. There wasn't an awful lot to it.
There was just one guitar plunking away and that became the body of the
song.
QUESTION: What about those voices in "Dark Side of the Moon"?
DAVID GILMOUR: Again, this is Roger's idea. He wanted to use things in
the songs to get responses from people. We wrote a series of questions
on cards and put them on a music stand, one question on each card, and
got people into the studio and told them to read the first question and
answer it. Then they could remove that card and see the next question
and answer that, but they couldn't look through the cards so they didn't
really know what the thread of the questions was going to be until they
got into it. We interviewed quite a few people that way, mostly roadies
and roadies' girlfriends, and Jerry the Irish doorman at Abbey Road.
But we also interviewed Henry McCullough 'cause Paul McCartney and Wings
were recording in the other studio at Abbey Road at the time. We did
that in number three at Abbey Road, and they were in number two. We also
had Paul and Linda McCartney interviewed but they're much too good at
being evasive for their answers to be usable.
QUESTION: What were some of the questions?
DAVID GILMOUR: Things like, "When did you last hit someone?" and then
the next question would be "Were you in the right?" and "Would you do it
again if the same thing happened?" Another question like, "What does
the dark side of the moon mean to you?" Of course, understanding that
the "Dark Side of the Moon" was not yet the title of the album as far as
anyone was concerned. So they were actually asking people, what does
the other side of the moon mean? And Jerry the Irish doorman said,
"There is no da'k side o' de moon really, it's all da'k." And stuff like
that, when you put it into a context on the record, suddenly developed
its own much more powerful meaning.
QUESTION: Were you happy with that?
DAVID GILMOUR: Oh that was a terrific thing to do! I mean, we've still
got the original tapes somewhere and we should dig them out and have a
listen to them one day just for fun to hear all the different responses
to all the different questions by all these different people.
ROGER:
"I'm not saying I did it all, obviously Dave Gilmour's contribution to
the making of 'The Wall' was huge. you know he's a marvelous guitarist,
and he contributed to a number of songs in terms of their construction
and so on and so forth. But we were not a together unit. The band was
really difficult then."
Interview from 'Wish You Were Here - songbook', 1975
"We have quite a bit of difficulty with vocals. I have trouble with the
quality of my voice but I don't have much difficulty keeping in tune. On
the other hand, Roger has no problem with vocal quality but he does
have trouble keeping in tune."- David Gilmour
(Guitar World, May 2006)
"It did seem that to be wandering around espousing this idea of
communicating and solving problems while not talking to Gilmour was
hypocritical."
- Sydney Morning Herald, 2007
"It [Live 8] was just... really good. I was very moved to be on stage
with Dave, Nick and Rick that night. I felt at ease and glad to be given
the opportunity to let bygones be bygones and to demonstrate that,
although we've had our difficulties in the past, we are grown men who
understand that rapprochement is possible even in the face of differeing
points of view. It was really good to transcend all the crap and say
"Well, **** it, let's just get up onstage. It's been a long while. We
can agree to disagree about all the old stuff and stand up here and play
these three of four songs and it can be fun, it can be good"."
"I just felt pleasure playing the music and hearing Rick playing his
great keyboard parts, which, of course, we know and love so much from
the records. It felt good. I thought that Nick played great. I thought
everybody played great. Dave sang beautifully. It was a great feeling."Roger Waters on Live 8
"We were so nice and modest about it all that when they told us there
were not enough dressing-rooms and we would have to share, we said OK,
fine. Then we found out that everyone else had their own proper,
assigned dressing-room because they had insisted on it. We had to share
ours with Snow Patrol, or someone. I think we should have been slightly
more superstar-ish about it.' Don't you just love that 'or someone'?David Gilmour on Live 8
Uncut, 2003
What are your fondest memories of working/recording/touring with the Floyd and your old friend Roger?
Dave: There are too numerous to mention. We had many years which I
enjoyed thoroughly. Doing the concerts I always enjoyed them. I know
Roger had more difficulty than the rest of us. It's well documented with
the huge shows who were only there for the beers so to speak
Do you see many parallels between Pink Floyd and the Beatles? Like the song writing partnership with Lennon and McCartney ?
Dave: You make that comparison with a number of different bands, I'm a
huge fan of the Beatles, but I don't know what parallels are between us
except we were both pretty good at what we did.
Did working with Gilmour bring out any good creative stuff you you?
Roger: Of course. You've only got to listen to the record.
- MSN Online Interviews with Dave and Roger, 2000
Dave: "Roger was obviously one of the main producers because it [The
Wall] was his idea and he was very, very good about many things to do
with production, like dynamics."
Dave: "Roger and I had a good working relationship. We argued a lot,
sometimes heatedly - artistic disagreements, not an ego thing. I don't
think we argued over who would take lead vocals, Roger was not
over-bothered who sang - but overall we were still achieving things that
were valid. Things like Comfortably Numb are really the last embers of
Roger and my ability to work collaboratively together."
- Mojo, 1999
Dave: “Roger has many, many good points and many talents, but he’s a very alpha male sort of person."
Dave: “I might still have been shy then, but Roger had certainly taken
to leaping around, thrashing his bass and gurning a bit. Then there was
the dramatic striking of the gong and the screaming in Careful With That
Axe. Roger had discovered letting his pain out. I know that John Lennon
did that whole Arthur ‘Primal Scream’ Janov album, which Roger was very
keen on, but he was screaming long before Lennon ever got to Janov.”
- Mojo, 2007
Dave: [when told by Jon Carin that he was thinking of working with Roger] "You must do it! He's a brilliant guy!"
- Q Pink Floyd Special Edition, 2004.
Roger: "Dave particularly, but Rick as well, had major, important contributions."
Roger: "He's a great guitar player."
Dave: "We all have very different personalities is the truth of the
matter. We were all very, very happy to have a driving force like Roger
who wanted to push for these concepts."
Dave: "It was an extraordinarily successful partnership. We had a good,
valid working relationship right through until the period that's well
documented after The Wall album."
Dave: "I can remember there being fantastic moments of harmoney after
that - some of the moments during the making of Wish You Were Here...
One inspired moment by one person would be so obvious that it would be
picked up by another pson, and there would be genuine harmony, and I can
say that those moments still even, for me, existed during the making of
The Wall."
Dave: "In terms of drive and lyrical concept matters, he was the de facto leader."
Dave: "I think at that time he was finding himself as a lyric writer. He
was realising that he could get to grips with more serious issues, some
political and others that involved him personally. His style had
developed and improved."
Dave: “Roger has many, many good points and many talents, but he’s a very alpha male sort of person."
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