Dave talks about David Gilmour in Concert DVD

SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND:
"'Shine On' is my favourite song from the 'Wish You Were Here' album. I thought I would try it solo with acoustic guitar. The record has the sound of fingers on wine glasses with keyboards on a long, drawn out opening, so I had to devise a new way of doing it. It struck me that there is a device I've used with a long repeating delay on my guitar with which I can give myself what sounds like a synthesised orchestral background. I found that it lent itself to it very well."

FAT OLD SUN:
"This is a song of mine from 'Atom Heart Mother' which we played live with Pink Floyd a few times in the early seventies. Several friends asked me to play this one. I was happy to oblige."

COMING BACK TO LIFE:
"This seemed an ideal one to do in this sort of set-up. The choir replaced the keyboards. I wrote it for Polly. Not much more I can say."

DOMINOES:
"I've done one of Syd Barrett tracks on each of the concerts. They're not easy to do because most of them are so personal. There are not too many that I feel I can do justice to, but this is one. Our version brought a slightly jazzy feel to it"

TERRAPIN:
"Another of my favourite Syd songs."

HIGH HOPES:
"Probably my favourite song from the recent Pink Floyd era. I wrote it on a piano, it has a classical guitar and an orchestra on it, so the line-up we had was perfect."

JE CROIS ENTENDRE ENCORE:
"I sang this song in French, from Bizet's opera, 'The Pearl Fishers'. I saw a film called 'The Man Who Cried.' I bought the soundtrack album and really liked this song. I suggested to Polly that I might give it a try and she, unhelpfully, went red at the prospect. I scared myself silly with this one."

SMILE:
"This is a new song that Polly and I have written. She wrote words to a piece of my music that she loved."

BREAKTHROUGH:
"Rick took little persuading to come and play. But I said 'You can't just wander into my concert and play two or three songs plonking away on your keyboard, we've got to put a spotlight on you.' I chose this song from his last album [1996's 'Broken China'] because when I first heard it I wished he'd written it in time for The Division Bell."

WISH YOU WERE HERE:
"'Wish You Were Here' was made for this sort of line up and I still love it."

COMFORTABLY NUMB:
"I did a demo of this that never had more than two instruments playing at any one time. Double bass and piano then double bass and hi-strung acoustic, that was it, two instruments for one of our great anthemic Pink Floyd tracks."

DIMMING OF THE DAY:
"Neill MacColl suggested this song by Richard Thompson to me when we played together at a benefit concert for his sister-in-law, Ruth Picardie. I love this song; the idea of his life being an old house that's falling down. Beautiful."

SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND:
"I thought I'd bookend the concert with this, as we did originally on the album. You can't completely let go of the classic designs of show structure! We closed with the electric version."

A GREAT DAY FOR FREEDOM:
"From the last Pink Floyd record, a song about how all that great promise of freedom and democracy when the Iron Curtain came down and has been a bit of a disappointment for many."

HUSHABYE MOUNTAIN:
"A song from 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' which my kids play at home all the time. Not much of that album appeals to me, but it certainly appeals to them and after the first 20-30 times, this one song started shining through. Some people thought I was joking when I said I was going to do it. I wasn't sure myself if I could go through with it and thought that I might just chicken out after 'A Great Day For Freedom.' I could have just walked off then, but I forced myself back to the mike and I'm glad I did because in the end you should just do what you like and please yourself".

'David Gilmour in Concert' comprises 16 songs performed by Gilmour, his semi-acoustic band rich in talent and the exquisite gospel choir led by Sam Brown. The set is tantalising in its sheer diversity - from Pink Floyd classics such as Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb and High Hopes, to Syd Barrett's Terrapin and Dominoes as well as a performance of Je Crois Entendre Encore from Bizet's opera The Pearl Fishers which one critic described as an "unlikely triumph..." and a new song Smile.

Gilmour explains where the idea for this concert came from: "Robert Wyatt was the Meltdown Festival's curator for 2001. He rang and invited me to play and my immediate answer was "yes". While Robert was still on the phone, an idea came to me, God knows where from. I thought: just a double-bass, a cello and a small gospel choir. I put down the phone and started to panic..."

That initial panic led to Gilmour being credited in the Daily Telegraph, with inventing a "whole new genre....a sound that is warm, richly textured and genuinely different...ensemble music of the highest order." The Meltdown performance went so well, David Gilmour decided to come back to the Royal Festival Hall a few months later to perform the show three more times. As he explains, "It seemed rather daft putting that amount of effort into it for only one night. So I thought maybe I'd do it again for fun. Just for me really."

The DVD also features more than thirty minutes of Special Features. These include home video footage of David Gilmour rehearsing at home with the choir, six guitar solos in "close-up" so that guitar enthusiasts can watch him play his solos in detail and there are three bonus songs recorded at other times.

Font: Pink Floyd and Co.

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