Some of the all-time great artists had odd jobs before they made it big, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is no exception.
The veteran performer behind the riffs to Comfortably Numb, The Dark Side of the Moon, and solo thrills like On an Island had quite the job before he became a chart-topping musician. Explaining his role in the modelling scene during the 1960s, Gilmour said that particular line of work was, as is the case for many career paths, a means to an end. Though gigging in the 1960s afforded Gilmour a decent wage, it was having to split it with several other band members that made it less than a liveable wage. It prompted the legendary musician to venture into different lines of work, with the allure of “fifty quid a day” enough to convince Gilmour of an alternate career.
He told Record Collector back in 2003: “I was hanging about in London for moments in the mid-60s. I was getting a little bored with Cambridge. Being in a band, gigging two to five times a week, there wasn’t much money around. We’d get an average of £230 to £240 a gig, to share between six or seven people.
“Every once in a while, someone I knew would say that they wanted someone to go up to Santa Pod Raceway next week and sit in a stupid motor with stupid clothes on and have your photo taken. It was A350 for a day. Fifty quid a day! I was in. I was never a model at an agency or anything like that, but if you could get a job like that, the equivalent of three weeks gigging, you jumped at it. That said, I probably only did three days like that in my life. So, it’s not strictly accurate when I’m described as a male model.”
Gilmour may have left modelling behind but he has no intention of retiring from the stage anytime soon, according to an interview he gave Rolling Stone Magazine last year.
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.”
When asked if the same band as the last album and tour were working with Gilmour, the legendary guitarist said it was just himself in the studio at the moment. He explained: “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.”
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