David Gilmour recalls working with producer who was ‘throwing up into bin’ while trying to make album

An album which featured guitar samples from David Gilmour was made while the producer was “throwing up into a bin” according to the guitarist.

The Pink Floyd legend confirmed he was the man behind the guitar work heard on a Grace Jones hit. Invited to work on the album by a frontman turned producer, Gilmour shared the horror studio experience when working on Slave to the Rhythm. His work on the title track gave the song its hit-making sound, though the producer, Trevor Horn, was left vomiting the whole way through recording. He was so ill, in fact, that he had to produce the record on the floor while throwing up into a bin. Gilmour recalled the wild moment when recording the album, suggesting he had much sympathy for the Video Killed the Radio Star hitmaker.

Gilmour, speaking to Q Magazine in 1990, said: “I never met Grace Jones. I was approached by Trevor Horn, and went down to their studio SARM East and set up my equipment, and Steve Lipson and Trevor Horn was there.

“Trevor had a terrible food poisoning and was throwing up every three minutes, lying on the floor trying to produce a record and chucking up into a bin! I think mostly they sampled anything I did into a Synclavier and tried to make some sort of sense out of it later, because he was too ill then, poor chap.”

Despite Horn throwing up into a bin as Gilmour played guitar for the title track of Jones’ hit 1985 album, it is likely not the worst experience the guitarist had in the studio. Fellow Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters shared one album for the group was “absolute misery” to make.

Waters shared: “The Final Cut was absolutely misery to make, although I listened to it of late and I rather like a lot of it. But I don’t like my singing on it. You can hear the mad tension running through it all. If you’re trying to express something and being prevented from doing it because you’re so uptight… It was a horrible time.

“We were all fighting like cats and dogs. We were finally realising, or accepting, if you like, that there was no band. It was really being thrust upon us that we were not a band and had not been in accord for a long time. Not since 1975, when we made Wish You Were Here. Even then, there were big disagreements about content and how to put the record together.

“We didn’t work together at all. I had to do it more or less single-handed, working with Michael Kamen, my co-producer. That’s one of the few things that the ‘boys’ and I agreed about. But no one else would do anything on it.

“It sold three million copies, which wasn’t a lot for the Pink Floyd. And as a consequence, Dave Gilmour went on record as saying, ‘There you go: I knew he was doing it wrong all along.’ But it’s absolutely ridiculous to judge a record solely on sales. If you’re going to use sales as the sole criterion, it makes Grease a better record than Graceland.”