Mark Blake kindly gave me permission to re-produce his full interview he did with David Gilmour for MOJO magazine. Excellent article and a very interesting read!!
No more Floyd...
I can see how important this Pink Floyd business gets for other people. But it just isn't for me. I had some of the best times of my life and we created some wonderful music, but to do it again, it would be fakery. It would be trying to be something that we are not. At my age, I am entirely selfish and want to please myself. I shan't do another Pink Floyd tour.
Wish You Were Here 5.1 in the pipeline.....
Yes. But when I last listened to it last there were still some problems, which needed sorting out before we release it.
Good interview, but I would have enjoyed these follow-up questions:
MB: A September 1988 article in Penthouse, featured Roger Waters claiming that after hearing some of the new Floyd material in progress, CBS Records executive Stephen Ralbovsky suggested you should start again...
DG: A tissue of lies [emphatically]. I never stopped and started again. If you think any record company person was ever going to tell us what to do. We have had a long history of saying, 'Fuck off, we will deliver our record when we are ready to, with the cover, and you can sell it'.
Why does the demo of "Learning to Fly," for example, sound so different from the finished product? Did Bob Ezrin heavily alter the album from David's original vision?
snifferdog wrote:Demoes don't always have to sound like the finished product. They are by nature a work in progress.
Obviously there are no rules that a demo has to sound exactly like the finished product, but the question still remains as to who decided that the drastic changes were necessary. Was it a record executive, Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour or a combination of these three?
It all depends on how early into the creative process this demo was made. According to the info that comes with the Tree Full of Secrets....
1 - Learning to Fly (Gilmour, Ezrin, Carin, Moore) - demo 01:22
Recorded: 1986. Primary source: BBC Radio One interview with David Gilmour, broadcast July 28, 1992. Source for the tree: 3rd gen copy from BBC Radio One broadcast This is Jon Carin's demo. Jon Carin met David Gilmour in 1985, during "Live Aid". He played keyboards with the Floyd (in studio and on tour) from 1986 to 1994. He also played keyboards, guitars and did some vocals on Roger Waters' "In The Flesh" Tour, in 1999 and 2000.
If it's Jon Carin's demo, I think it's not unreasonable to assume that this is an embryonic version of LTF. There are no vocals/lyrics/guitars. It sounds like something knocked up with a synth and a drum machine.
In fact, it's no different to Gilmour's initial demo of Comfy Numb. It's got him strumming along on his guitar, singing "do do do do" to it. Not all of what he's singing ended up in the finished song. You could argue that this demo underwent drastic changes before turning into the song we all know now.
Last edited by snifferdog on Sun Jan 04, 2009 8:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Yeah, a very interesting insight into David Gilmour's thinking. Last sentence about not touring as Pink Floyd again pretty sad but I guess not surprising. Floyd music will still live forever I love the Gdansk album.
Thanks for the interview Keef.
Blake is a nice chap. I'm just reading his book.
Fuck, that's alot of information that needed to be gethered to complete that.
Thanks so much Keith...Pink Floyd lives forever in memories of the best concerts ever....the best of times ... and Pink Floyd fans were/are the greatest! Thanks again for the posting of this interview...always fascinating to have more insight into how David Gilmour is thinking...StarKey