A guitarist who would cover classic Pink Floyd songs has been hailed as bringing “his own something” to the tracks.
Bassist Roger Waters would leave the band in 1985 and go on to have a string of successful tours, playing both solo material and Pink Floyd hits. But the new line-up of musicians meant performing the likes of Comfortably Numb and Time without the masterful work of David Gilmour. The veteran guitarist would front Pink Floyd after Waters’ departure and also features songs from the band in his solo sets. Waters would praise the original solos Gilmour wrote as “beautiful” but suggested one guitarist can add his own flair to them. The veteran bassist would suggest his treatment of the songs and their solos was similar to how he would treat a “classical piece” of music.
Speaking to Rocky Mountain News, Waters suggested Dave Kilminster, who has toured with Waters in the past, was a guitarist who could play the Gilmour material “beautifully”. He said: “One has to always take one’s hat off to Dave (Gilmour) and Rick (Wright) who created the original parts. But I treat it as a classical piece.
“There are lots of musicians around who are capable of learning the parts as if it was a piece of classical music. The guitar player who plays most of the Gilmour stuff, Dave Kilminster, does it beautifully. He brings his own something to it, but basically they’re the notes in Dave’s solos.
“I make no bones about staying very close to the original parts because I think they’re beautiful. You could take another approach, like those people who did Dub Side of the Moon. You can do a reggae version of the whole thing if you want to. And that’s fine as well. Or you could take the songs and rearrange them and do them however you wanted. What I’ve done is try to treat it as a classical piece.”
It’s a different style from how Gilmour treats his own work, with the guitarist not learning the solo to Comfortably Numb as he wanted to surprise himself each time he performed the song.
Gilmour would say the reason for his lack of instrumental preparation with Comfortably Numb is nothing more than wanting to excite himself in the moment. He said: “I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest. I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I’m doing.”
“But I’ve never learned it. Yeah, I’ve never learned that guitar solo.” Gilmour would go a step further and say he’s not sure whether the song is more or less popular because of his guitar part. The former Pink Floyd member, who was frontman of the group following Roger Waters’ departure in 1985, suggested he isn’t sure which version people would rather here.
He explained: “I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it. To me, it’s just different every time. I mean, why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record?
“Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don’t know. I suspect they like they prefer it to be real, and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end’, or, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”
