David Gilmour explains how he maintains his singing voice while on tour as Pink Floyd guitarist has to be ‘very, very careful’

David Gilmour has suggested he has “a bit more left to” his singing voice because of how he preserves it on tour.

The Pink Floyd guitarist last toured in 2024 but took some extreme precautions to make sure he was fit and ready for each show. The 79-year-old said it’s “not an easy job” to maintain his voice while on the road but he manages to do so by limiting how much he talks between shows and a voice coach who brings out the best in what remains of his vocals. Gilmour, who took over as Pink Floyd frontman after Roger Waters departed the band in 1985, has toured intermittently since the group disbanded in 1994. His solo album releases were often enough to prompt a tour from the veteran guitarist, who has suggested he may be back on the road in the next few years.

Speaking to Rolling Stone Magazine, Gilmour explained why he thought his voice had survived for so long, especially when contemporaries and younger bands were already tackling the trouble of “totally blown voices.”

He said: “It’s a good possibility that not using it as much means there’s a bit more left to it. But it’s not an easy job to manage the voice over the tour. And I have to be very, very careful what I do. I can’t speak after a show.

“I really scarcely speak until the soundcheck the next afternoon. And I have a voice coach who comes with me and I’m doing all sorts of stuff to try and keep it fit and able. It’s not just jumping out there and doing it every night.”

Gilmour’s protective attitude for his voice has served him well as he gears up for what is believed to be another album. A tour is also expected to follow, should Gilmour follow through on his plans for the next few years. In the same interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, the veteran performer confirmed he was back in the studio and working on new material.

He said: “I’m slowly building up towards a new album, and I have quite a bit of material that is in some sort of formative stage. That’s what’s keeping me busy at the moment. I do it pretty much all myself and I work on Pro Tools. I don’t play the drums all that well, and I do that with machinery in the modern tradition.

“And I put things together so that I can fiddle around for months, adding little bits, taking things away till I think that I’ve got something close to where I want it. I then can take it into a studio with a bunch of people and know exactly what I want to do and how I want to get it done and present it to these people for their input.”

Gilmour did not share any details regarding the name of the album or theme, as it’s far too early to tell. But he did suggest it could be within the next two years that we receive a follow-up to Luck and Strange.

It’s a “little early” for a timeline of the album’s creation, but Gilmour is keen to “get some studio sessions in” before the end of the year.