David Gilmour: Life with a Rock God

Life with a rock god
By Lucy Cavendish, Evening Standard
12 May 2006

David Gilmour — the lead singer and guitarist of Pink Floyd, voted Best Stratocaster Player in the world by Guitarist Magazine, musical hero to hundreds of thousands — is relaxing at home. He has just come back from touring Europe and America with his solo album On An Island, which was released on his 60th birthday in March.

I went to see him play in Amsterdam last month and, bar all the irritating people who viewed the whole concert through their mobile phones, it was an extraordinary experience. Grown men cried, women in the front row held up signs expressing their undying love.

Now he is back sitting at the kitchen table of the West Sussex farmhouse he shares with his wife, the novelist Polly Samson, and four of his eight children (he has four children, now grown-up, with his first wife and four with Samson). He looks very relaxed in jeans and a T-shirt. There are splodgy children's paintings everywhere and various dogs splayed out lying on the floor like panting rugs. It is all very unprecious.

"My own parents put me in boarding school when I was five and moved to America," he recalls. "I barely saw them for that year. Maybe that's why spending time with my own children is such a priority."

But the telephone does not stop ringing; there are possible tour dates to arrange and press to do and a new single from the album to be released and endless questions from endless people to answer. The main question that everyone always asks him is: are Pink Floyd ever going to reunite?

"The answer to that is no," says Gilmour. "What would make me want to go back there? What is it that people want? A load of men in their sixties playing their old tunes in football stadiums? It's mad. They are mad. It's like being children of divorced parents. They all think it would be great if parents reunite but it's never the case.

"[Pink Floyd] had its moment and it is no longer relevant. We made a lot of that music when we were still in our twenties."

To put this in perspective, The Dark Side of the Moon, the album that is famous for being part of the record collection in one in four households in the UK, came out in the month Gilmour turned 27. But fans got very over-excited when, last July, the classic line-up of Pink Floyd (Roger Waters, David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright) reunited after 20 years, to play Live8.

Waters and Gilmour, the two main members, had fallen out in 1985 and not spoken since then. However, Bob Geldof managed to persuade them to get up on stage together. Afterwards, Floyd fans got very hopeful and yet, what Gilmour actually did was bring out On An Island.

"I was working on the album before Bob called up," says Gilmour. "Initially I didn't want to do Live8. It was fine to do it and it put some ghosts to rest. Looking back on it, I'm not sure what good it did. It got Africa on the front page but knocked climate change off."

Gilmour is politically aware. He attributes that to his wife.

"It is Polly who is the engine behind my philanthropy," he says. "We have always given money to charity but it was her idea to give large chunks away that would make a difference."

Four years ago the couple gave nearly £4 million from the sale of their London house to the homeless charity Crisis.

"The idea behind it was firstly because we really believe in the project and secondly because we hoped people might follow our example," says Gilmour.

They wrote to everyone they knew asking for donations.

"There are some very wealthy people with houses all over the place that are standing empty when all these people are homeless. Why not sell them?" he says.

Did anyone respond? "No," he snorts, "but Olivia Harrison has donated some money and is looking at the project very seriously."

Gilmour and Samson have been married for 12 years, and also work together creatively - Samson is credited as having written and co-written the lyrics for six of the songs on his latest album as well as many others including "High Hopes" on Pink Floyd's last album The Division Bell in 1994.

"It's not without difficulties," says Gilmour. "That is to be expected. Sometimes Polly feels I am not taking enough interest in the words because of my absorption with the music and she makes those feelings known. But I hope if people listen in the good fashioned way — you know, loud through a good system, nothing else going on — they will get something more each time they do so.

"The album is about life, death and everything in between, really. It is about mortality. Over the past few years my sister has died, other friends have died. We all end up back merging with the sea. Anyway, there's an emotional depth within an essential feeling of contentment."

Yet, if you look the album up on Amazon, you'll find furious comments comparing Samson to Yoko Ono.

"What's wrong with being Yoko Ono?" says Gilmour. "She is a fantastic performance artist and a talented woman."

Roger Waters is on record as having that Gilmour writing lyrics with his wife was very Spinal Tap.

"If that's what Roger said," says Gilmour. "I just think it is misogynistic to think that someone should not write lyrics just because they are a wife. There are many other examples, the wives of Tom Waits, Robert Wyatt - Polly has been a writer all her life, way before she met me," he says.

Gilmour hasn't always been so contented, though. In the late Eighties Gilmour and his first wife separated at about the same time as the well-documented split with Waters. He unsurprisingly went through a low period in his life.

"I suppose I had the usual rock star experience," he says. "I was away touring for two years. I rarely went home and it was difficult to with that [going on]. Essentially, I got carried away with a cocaine lifestyle. It was a very easy thing to do. I thought the coke helped me become more loquacious but the reality was rather more awful.

"It is actually a drug that does nothing for anyone. It just left me with a heart that has been prematurely aged. I kicked it after I met Polly and that was it."

But he does say that it did sometimes leave Samson feeling as if she was the "fun police", as he puts it.

"It was a boy's club before Polly, and she got a lot of flak, especially by people on The Division Bell tour. Lots of people were invested in the person I was, the person who had the coke, and had no interest in me being a different and better person.

"Before she met me, Polly was hardly a stay-at-home stick-in-the-mud so I am sure it was frustrating for her to bear the brunt of coping with and changing my behaviour and other people's muted anger at how much happier I was. But that's how Polly is. She has opinions. She ruffles people's feathers and she is right to do so."

Now he spends his time juggling his solo career, caretaking the Pink Floyd back catalogue and enjoying his eight children. He and Samson have a resolutely unstarry life. They take the children to school, pick them up afterwards, nag them to do their homework/piano practice/go to bed. When Gilmour is on tour, the children go too, as much as possible.

"My children are very used to telling us how they feel," he says, with a wry smile. "I have enjoyed doing those everyday things with them over the years. That is why, over the past 12 years, I haven't done album upon album or tour after tour. But I had amassed a lot of work and I wanted to do something with it and Polly encouraged me to listen to it all and whittle it down and turn it into an album."

Does he still see his older four children? "Of course," he says. "We see them all the time, although not all of them live in the UK."

Do they get on with his younger offspring? "Absolutely," he says.

I can't help thinking that family gatherings must be a nightmare: eight children of varying ages all needing to be entertained.

"We do all sorts of things," he says. "We walk down to the woods and make camp fires. We cook food and toast marshmallows... that sort of thing."

Does he ever look back and wonder how he came from his middle-class life in Cambridge — father a don, mother BBC editor — to be a rock god?

Gilmour laughs. "I don't feel much of a rock god when I'm boiling eggs for the kids at six o'clock in the morning."

But what about when he's on stage in front of those thousands of devoted fans?

"Sometimes I do think 'what the f*** am I doing here?' It's very odd to be something so major in people's lives. But sometimes when I listen to the [new] album in the evening with a glass of wine I think, 'That's f***ing brilliant.'"

David Gilmour will be playing a few special concerts in Europe over the summer, to be announced soon at davidgilmour.com. On An Island is out now on EMI. He is playing "Later... With Jools Holland" on 26 May.

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