“WE had some people turn up who claimed to be a TV news crew,” says David Gilmour as he points at the section of the River Thames into which divers allegedly once launched themselves. Their objective? To ‘bug’ the boat from the outside and illicitly record Pink Floyd as they worked on The Division Bell. Standing on the spot where Nick Mason recorded his drum parts for that record, Gilmour turns to his wife and collaborator Polly Samson and asks: “Do you remember that, darling?” Her response, directed more at Uncut than Gilmour, is a real-life emoji of mock horror: “I’d only just arrived on the scene and I’m thinking, ‘This is what passes for normality in this world. Mm-hmm. OK…’”
On this March afternoon, 30 years after the release of The Division Bell, it’s conceivable that similar subterfuge might be afoot around the hull of the Astoria – the floating studio Gilmour saw advertised in Country Life 37 years ago while waiting for his dentist to call him in. But if it were, the perpetrators have little to show for their efforts. Seated at a nearby screen is producer Charlie Andrew, finessing the string parts for Gilmour’s new album Luck and Strange. “Shall we leave him to it?” suggests Gilmour.
Back at the summerhouse overlooking the Astoria, there are no clues to suggest who owns this property or by what endeavours they were able to afford it in the first place. There are books about Fred Karno, the East End entertainer for whom the Astoria, with its upper deck – large enough to house a 90-piece orchestra – was originally built. On the wall are photographs of old biplanes like the seven that Gilmour, now 78, used to keep in a hangar in North Weald. “I still love flying,” he says. “That feeling of being separated from the strings of the Earth.” Suggest that this is also what he’s trying to achieve every time he commences one of his signature guitar solos and he responds, “How deep! I have no idea what I’m trying to do when I play my guitar solos. But if they have an airborne quality to them, that’s good fortune.”
To take Gilmour at his word then, his first solo release since 2015’s Rattle That Lock is abundant with good fortune. The most confessional, captivating and sonically adventurous solo album of his life also keeps him within a tiny lineage of husbands who have sung words penned for them by their wives. It’s this arrangement also that dictates the way Gilmour wants this afternoon to go. Samson is also here today – an acknowledgement that their years writing together will soon number twice those of Gilmour and Roger Waters when they played in the same group. As Samson brings two mugs of tea to the sofa, it’s worth noting that, while almost every interview with him in recent decades makes mention of him holding a guitar throughout the conversation, Samson’s genial presence has dispensed with the need for props. The pair seem, at times, like two halves of a single composite human. But no couple starts out that way.
IN one of Franz Kafka’s letters sent to Milena Jesenská between 1920 and 1923, the Czech-Jewish novelist wrote, “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable… to tell something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.” You can assume that, 32 years ago, similar sentiments both prompted and swiftly cut short David Gilmour’s only attempt at enlisting the help of a therapist. “I went to a guy in Hampstead,” he recalls, nonplussed, “but he was the sort of therapist who doesn’t say anything. So he didn’t work for me, because I didn’t say anything either. We’d both sit there silently for an hour,
