David Gilmour Quotes

I haven't watched it [the film 'Pink Floyd at Pompeii'] in years. I find it excruciating.

To be honest, I don't listen to groups, really. Hardly ever. I know I'm in one, but I don't like them very much.

The expectation on me as a solo artist is very different to the audience's expectation of a Pink Floyd show.

I'm afraid I haven't become a born-again Christian. I'm sort of 'Church of England, lapsed' is about as far as I go.

We already had all the songs, and it turns out all you have to do is burn them to some CDs, so why not?

Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.

I mean, I have moments of huge frustration because of my inability to express myself linguistically as clearly as I would like to.

I tend to fly old airplanes and old sort of things that are nearly about as old as me. Biplanes and stuff like that.

Being a solo artist is what I do. It's what I've been doing for the last 20 years and a bit before then.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

You don't want to believe everything you hear.

I am a lover of all sorts of different music. I love blues and every piece of music that I have listened to has become an influence.

I remember Adrian [Maben, director] had lots of problems with red tape and dealing with stuff. I think we lost two or three days. Maybe those were the days we had to walk around the summit of Vesuvius, and we went around to the sulfur pits where the ground is bubbling. It's near here. It's fantastic.

People being incredibly rude and playing music incredibly badly and being incredibly obnoxious has always been a teenage sort of thing.

I don't have a very disciplined approach to practicing or anything, but I do tend to have a guitar around most of the time, which I strum on most of the day.

How much in life is determined, and how much is due to chance?

The old ways still apply. You can still send tapes to record companies, and there are record companies, you know, there are one or two of the record companies do declare proudly that they listen to every single one that comes.

My technique is laughable at times. I have developed a style of my own, I suppose, which creeps around. I don't have to have too much technique for it. I've developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I'll never be a very fast guitar player. I don't really know what to say about my style. There's always a melodic intent in there.

Well, I am David Gilmour, the voice and guitar of Pink Floyd. I have been since I was 21.

For me, gradually over the years, you refined your tastes in the way you do things and it becomes maybe less experimental.

It's a very tempting thing to try and relive your glory days when you get a little older and you worry that people have forgotten all about you.

I can't remember really what it's like to do it within Pink Floyd. In my mind, that's a thing of the past.

If you have a live reputation and your popularity is proven that way, then you're bound to get signed up because they see all those people buying those tickets and they think some of those people will buy those records, and that's what their business is primarily about.

Personally, I'm not very keen on the visualization of absolutely everything.

These days I don't look to other people with the objective of trying to steal their licks, although I've got no objections to stealing them if that seems like a good idea. I'm sure that I'm still influenced by Mark Knopfler and Eddie Van Halen as well......I can't play like Eddie Van Halen. I wish I could. I sat down to try some of those ideas and can't do it. I don't know if I could ever get any of that stuff together. Sometimes I think I should work at the guitar more.

Subconsciously you just pick up things into your sort of musical vocabulary and use them.

Yes, there's a lot of the blues in my playing.

I think I'm still trying to be experimental on everything I ever do, but it's not as obviously way-out and experimental as what we were.

No one can replace Richard Wright. He was my musical partner and my friend.

I am not a technophobe and I am using the latest technology today, some 30-odd years later, and I am really enjoying what some of the new technologies can offer. But at the same time I am always aware that one can get bogged down in that technology and that it can become more than just a method. That's something that you have to be slightly careful of.

I listen to classical music at home probably more than pop music.

Pompeii is an extraordinary place to be because it was preserved exactly as it was. There are many other sites. If you visit any other antiquity-type sites throughout the world, they're very damaged with what's gone on over the centuries since they were abandoned. But this one was just, like, sealed, so you're looking at rock surfaces and the carving of letters and names in the stones looks like it was done yesterday.

Obviously record companies tend to be following what the scene is rather than making the scene.

I've never had any religion. I'd prefer it if I did, really. Even as a boy I just couldn't make myself believe.

I don't want to be a full-time member of Pink Floyd all my life.

It's not true that you fall in love only once in your life. But it is true that you only fall in love a certain way, with a certain absoluteness, once.

Don't bait your breath. That's bad for your health.

I tend to jot down music.

If you are in a band or in any situation with other people there are obviously brilliant aspects to it, but there are also things that you start finding yourself tied to.

I think once you've seen a song with a video, it limits your own mind's ability to read into it anything other than what you've seen.

I can remember a lot of nights performing in those early years where you felt that you hit some good moments, but a lot of the time you're thinking, "Oh, God, this isn't quite making it." So I think that is what makes you in the end refine your view of things a little bit.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

If people would like to come to my concerts I'd love them to come. And if they like the music that I make, I love that too. But I do not make music for other people. I make it to please myself.

I think I could walk into any music shop anywhere and with a guitar off the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound just like me. There's no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound.

Jimi Hendrix isn't as good as me!

Little ideas can pop into one's head at any time, and if I'm being reasonably efficient I've got it close enough to hand, then I pop that little tiny moment of a few seconds down onto a tape and then I can forget about it for... years sometimes.

Usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing... you just go out and have a play over it, and see what comes, and it's usually - mostly - the first take that's the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter.