Pink Floyd has performed together just once in the last 26 years but there was a time when the band played up to four shows a week. It was a very different time for the Roger Waters and David Gilmour-featuring band, with Pink Floyd needing to keep themselves on the road and in the conversation. Gilmour would outline why the band performed so frequently between 1968 and 1972. He would say it was simply a necessity for any band at the time, and that he was glad to see the back of such a full schedule.
While the veteran guitarist who also on lead vocal duties with the band does not look back fondly on this period, he did highlight one UK venue as a particular favourite during this time. Gilmour would say that much of this period he is “extremely happy to forget” but that the heavy touring schedule did more help than harm to the band.
He said back in 2003: “No, thank you! Times change. You move on. The Festival Hall is great to play but I don’t view any of the others with that sort of nostalgia. Mothers in Erdington in Birmingham can be viewed with a certain amount of pleasure. Every time we played there it was great. Between 68 and 72, we gigged three or four times a week all the time. It wasn’t defined as a tour in those days. Later, most of them became sheds all over the country and Europe, which I’m extremely happy to forget.”
Gilmour has not toured since 2024, and nor has ex-bandmate Waters. There is a rumoured tour in the works from Gilmour who confirmed he was working on another album of solo material and a tour to support the album’s release. Details of this tour are not yet publicly available and may have been scrapped since Gilmour mentioned it in an interview last year. 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.
The long-serving guitarist would also share how he has maintained his vocal qualities over several decades. 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.”
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