As one of the greatest guitarists of all time, David Gilmour has inspired and influenced countless musicians – and in 2022, a number of famous players paid tribute to the Pink Floyd legend in the pages of Total Guitar magazine.

To coincide with the release of Pink Floyd’s final single Hey, Hey, Rise Up! – an anti-war protest song created with Ukrainian musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk – Total Guitar profiled Gilmour’s long career and invited various guitarists to nominate and analyse their favourite Floyd songs.

Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard chose Echoes, the landmark 23-minute track from Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle.

“The whole of Pink Floyd’s catalogue has aged very well, but I think Echoes has aged particularly well,” Mackenzie said. “It’s 50 years old now, but it’s still so modern sounding. It still feels like a leap of faith, an experiment. I'm not sure how much other music feels like that.

“Echoes has got all the noisy, delay-based stuff I always thought was really cool. My favourite section and, to my mind, the climax of the song, is when it gets into that 4/4, almost half-time groove. In the Live At Pompeii video, the camera’s slow-panning past all of the gear, and Dave’s doing these guitar squeals with his whammy bar. I always thought that was the coolest thing I've ever seen!

“I used to go to bed thinking about it. It was a visceral moment that encouraged me to keep playing the guitar and to keep trying new things.”

Mackenzie concluded: “Echoes is a song that makes you feel like the guitar can do anything, that it's not just an instrument that's limited to one tonality or one effect. And that's pretty inspiring.”

Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery chose Breathe (In The Air) from Floyd’s most famous and celebrated album, The Dark Side Of The Moon.

“It’s such an important album, so masterfully arranged, and very few albums take you on a journey like that,” Rothery said. “It's the first time everything came together [for Floyd] in terms of the songs, the sonics and the special effects. It shows an additional level of maturity in the songwriting, and especially the lyrics.

“The opening chord progression of Breathe (In The Air) [the Em to A] is such a lovely movement. Many people have used it since, and will do so for years to come! It’s just so right for the song. And you can hear [Floyd keyboardist] Rick Wright’s influence on the chords – these more jazzy voicings he comes up with add a great additional colour that’s used throughout the album. He was a master of that.

“Dave’s guitar playing has such texture. Take the vibrato pedal at the front. I have something similar called a Mojo Vibe [by Sweet Sound], based on a pedal Hendrix used [the Dunlop Uni-Vibe]. Vibrato’s a modulation pedal but it’s got a different character to tremolo or chorus. Dave’s got great tone here. If you use effects, the trick is to be tasteful with them like this, to enhance the natural tone of the guitar without swamping it.

“His pedal steel playing’s an important part of the song too, both melodically and texturally. That has very much informed my playing over the years, which is funny because one of my pet hates is country music!

“I tend to think less in terms of scales and more about moods – if it sounds good, then it works. We're all born with this innate sense of melody and the harmonic relationship just between two notes as it changes and shifts against a chord. You can teach yourself a lot of that without having to get bogged down in the technical aspects, and again, that's what I love about Dave’s playing. It’s got that heavy blues influence but he's still got a great melodic sensibility.

“There’s an emotional purity to Dave’s approach – the choice of notes, the expression – that I try encapsulate myself at times.”

Geordie Greep, then leader of Black Midi, chose two contrasting tracks from Floyd’s 1977 album Animals – Sheep and Pigs (Three Different Ones).

Greep stated: “David Gilmour has got the same sort of thing as Angus Young, where he’s not doing anything particularly headline-grabbing in terms of technicality, but just has a wonderful kind of ‘singing’ way of playing. He's got great feel. Anyone can play the things he's playing, but the way he plays them is brilliant.

“Pigs (Three Different Ones) is where David has the talk box of course, and it’s probably the best use of that ever. I can’t think of anyone who uses it for that natural and emotional effect, rather than just a gimmick or a trick. On this it comes across as something totally sincere and in keeping with the context of the song. And in terms of the guitar solo, he just keeps going! You think, ‘Okay surely it’s time to wrap it up?’ But no, he keeps going and it’s just great.

Greep added: “The outro riff on Sheep is probably one of the best riffs they ever did. It’s the same sort of thing as on Run Like Hell [from The Wall], but on Sheep it’s particularly excellent, it feels ‘of the moment’. He’s got a very classic guitar sound on there, and that’s another great thing about David – he never used too much distortion. He used Hiwatt amps at that time and got these huge sounds, but they were never saturated and over the top. His natural touch still comes through.”

“On Animals and throughout, he never played more than he needed to, his playing was always very considered and soulful. For me he’s the only guy to do the proper blues thing in a rock band where’s it not a bit ‘white boy playing the blues’ and naff. He’s just got his own style.”

Metallica’s lead guitarist Kirk Hammett chose Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the atmospheric masterpiece that bookends the 1975 album Wish You Were Here.

“I love Shine On You Crazy Diamond because there is a riff in that song, but it’s so sideways and so around the back,” Hammett said. “When you listen to that song, it’s actually a blues. It’s a freaking blues progression but it doesn’t sound like it, and that in itself is a real accomplishment.

“So I really think that song is just amazing. With the opening to it, that weird ringing opening chord, Shine On You Crazy Diamond is just epic, and there’s so much that I love about that.

“I love how understated David Gilmour’s playing is. If anything, I could be more understated, but sometimes I just regurgitate a ton of notes. I can’t help it – it’s just how I am! But David is very, very understated and that, in itself, is a real, real beauty to behold.”

And for Muse guitarist and vocalist Matt Bellamy, the perfect example of the brilliance of Pink Floyd and the genius of David Gilmour is in another classic track from The Dark Side Of The Moon…

“For the three of us in Muse, hearing The Dark Side Of The Moon for the first time was a massive deal,” Bellamy said. “For our second album, Origin Of Symmetry, we were working with [producer] John Leckie, and he was kind of blown away by our lack of knowledge about the history of rock and music in general. He would show us some artists like Captain Beefheart and explain how that transitioned into Tom Waits.

“Obviously we’d heard of Pink Floyd, but we’d never really listened to them properly, or at least the way John wanted us to. So in 2001, he made us turn the lights out in the control room and he played The Dark Side Of The Moon a few times. It was such a mind-blowing experience.

“That was the first one that really hit us. It led to us making our fourth album, Black Holes And Revelations, in the south of France in a place called Miraval – an old chateau where [Pink Floyd] made parts of The Wall… which was the main factor in us deciding to record there!

“Picking out the best guitar moment on The Dark Side Of The Moon is a tough one,” Bellamy admitted. “But I have to say Money stands out. That riff is super cool and there’s a whole message to it – they were tapping into this anti-corporate and anti-war sentiment. It was so influential in terms of what music can stand for.”

Bellamy said in tribute: “David Gilmour is such an amazingly expressive and emotional player. He somehow makes you feel like you’re hearing a human singing at times. He plays with a degree of expression that’s very, very rare.

“There’s no real technical trickery or showing off with him, unless it’s there for an emotional reason. That tends to be my favourite kind of guitar playing – where emotion and expression are number one.

“If that takes you into a place of technical ambition, then so be it. But more often, it’s his note choices and feel that take you away… they’re evocative of infinite landscapes, things like Antarctica or the desert or roaming around the skies of Mars.

“You get this feeling of floating around indefinitely when you’re listening to David Gilmour play. I don’t think anyone else has done that, for me, or at least to that degree. You feel so elevated and out of everyday life when listening to that band and his leads. It’s incredible.”

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An old colleague of Pink Floyd’s has been talking about his involvement with the band and three of its members.

He’s Tim Renwick, who attended the same Cambridge school as Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, has also played live on Waters' solo tours and was there right at the very end, on stage at Hyde Park in 2005 at the band’s final live performance.

In between, the guitarist carved out a more than half-decent career for himself, playing with Al Stewart and Sutherland Brothers and Quiver in the 1970s as well as session work with Elton John, David Bowie, and Eric Clapton.

Anyway, in an interview with Guitar Player, Renwick has spoken about his experiences with all three leaders of Floyd. “Roger was always quiet when I first knew him, but by the time I actually got to play in his band, he was a bit difficult,” he reveals.

“He was very determined to rule everything. He had a problem passing out responsibility to people. He had to sort of do everything for himself, which made him an uncomfortable figure to work with really.”

Renwick played with Waters on the Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking tour in the mid 80s, which also featured Eric Clapton on guitar. “Roger was a bit resentful of the fact that whenever Eric Clapton got up and played a solo, the place would erupt. People would get their lighters out and there would be a tremendous outpouring of applause.

“And that annoyed Roger quite a lot because, rightly or wrongly, he felt that the audience weren't actually listening to the songs. They were just watching out for what Eric was doing.”

Later, the guitarist played with the post-Waters version of Floyd. “When I worked with David (Gilmour), he was much more casual. He'd just let people get into the swing of things without leaning on them too heavily. So, you could express yourself a bit more around him, which was more fun, obviously. So that was the difference between them. David was a far more relaxed person to work with and brought the best out of people.”

Renwick’s memories of Syd Barrett chime with other accounts we’ve heard down the years. “I first saw them when they were starting out, and Syd Barrett was very much the leader of the band. I got to know him a bit, and he was really lovely, a very wide-eyed and quite amusing young chap.”

“(Later on) Syd was living in a house with a bunch of people that were doing quite a large amount of psychedelic drugs, so he was completely going off his tree. I saw him later in London and hardly recognized him. He was just completely different and very difficult to communicate with. He would answer questions about four minutes after you'd asked them and all completely out of sync.”

Renwick is also full of praise for Gilmour personally. “There's not really that much spoken about him and his philanthropy - for example, his work with Kate Bush and how very helpful he was to her.

"He actually fronted the money, paid for the arrangements to be done and all kinds of stuff. He obviously could see that she had a fantastic amount of talent.”

David Gilmour has never been averse to chatting to the press, but over the weekend, the Telegraph got something of a rarity, a joint interview with both Gilmour and his creative partner of the last 30-odd years, Polly Samson.

Samson is, of course, not just Gilmour’s wife. She’s also been his lyricist, on all his 21^st Century solo work as well as the final two Pink Floyd albums, 1994’s The Division Bell and The Endless River from 2014.

She’s also turned photographer and is publishing a book of photos she took on Gilmour’s recent Luck And Strange tour – the pair’s daughter, Romany, was also in Gilmour’s band, so she was able to get the sort of access that most snappers can only dream of.

In a wide-ranging interview, Gilmour talked about his collaboration last year with Ice T and Body Count on their version of Comfortably Numb. It was “fun” according to the guitarist. “It was quite a culture clash. I think I was bullied into it.”

Samson also revealed the killer line with which her husband asked her out on their first date: “He rang me up and said, ‘Can you help me out? I’ve got to go to this charity thing at the Café Royal. ’He said, ‘If I don’t take someone, women will be throwing themselves at me all night.’”

Inevitably, talk turned to Roger Waters. Famously, Samson took to Twitter/X in February 2023 and, not mincing her words, condemned Waters as “anti-Semitic” to the “rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac.” Gilmour backed up his wife 100%, adding, “Every word demonstrably true.”

It seems part of the reason behind her tirade is that she thought many people were getting Waters confused with Gilmour. “The reason I did it was because Pink Floyd are quite a faceless band. Everywhere I went, there’s a chance that people thought I was married to the one who said things like that. And it wasn’t a great feeling.” When asked by the interviewer if she thought people didn't know the difference between the two Pink Floyd members, Samson said: “I mean, we do. But lots and lots of people of my age don’t.”

She continued: “If they knew you’re married to someone from Pink Floyd, half the time people were giving me quite strange looks and it was really uncomfortable and I just wanted to draw a line and make it clear that these were not views held by me or the person I was married to.”

And the answer to the question of what it would take for Gilmour to feel comfortable performing with Waters again is, of course: “Nothing. There is no possible way that I would do that.”

David Gilmour has suggested that he might be – in theory – up for the idea of a Pink Floyd avatar show at the Sphere.

The 79-year-old guitarist made the comments when he took part in a Q&A at the UK premiere of his Live At The Circus Maximus concert film at London’s BFI IMAX. He was asked about the idea of playing the Las Vegas venue and said: “The Sphere? Well, you know, I’m hoping, one of these days, to go there and sit and watch myself doing it, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. My avatar, you know? So I don’t actually have to get up and do it.”

Well, yes, why not? After all, there’s practically zero chance of the real Pink Floyd doing another live show. Though Rick Wright is no longer with us, Messrs Gilmour, Mason and Waters all are and could plausibly pre-record their instrumental parts and leave the heavy lifting to the light show.

Funnily enough, it’s not the first time Gilmour has mentioned the notion of a Floyd avatar show. Speaking to Uncut last year, he said he’d be open to it, though only under specific conditions: “If someone came up with all the money and all the brilliant ideas – and then once we’ve agreed to a series of very, very difficult and onerous conditions – I’d say, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

He also sounded less impressed with the Abba Voyage show though, saying: “I thought the images of them were sort of OK, but they weren’t ever going to convince me it was real. If you’re down the sort of mosh pit end of the thing and it’s all going on, it’s probably great. The best moment for me was when the live band played a song on their own.”

What might be more likely is a Gilmour solo residency at the Sphere. In an interview with Rolling Stone last week he revealed that it could be a possibility:

“They have been on and suggested that I might do something there,” he said. “In the future, who knows. I haven’t got that far. It will be in there amongst the plans that we are to think about.”

Few players have helped sell more stompboxes than David Gilmour. He was one of the original masters of fuzz. He would use tape echo and mechanical devices such as the Binson Echorec to suspend notes in the air, seemingly indefinitely.

And then there was his use of the the Uni-Vibe, the disorienting swirl of rotating speakers to cast a spell on his audience.

Not that it was always to his benefit. As many early adopters of cutting-edge electric guitar technologies can attest to, incorporating these effects live brought their own issues.

Upon the release of On An Island and his bravura performance at Live8, The former Pink Floyd guitarist admitted to MusicRadar in 2006 that playing a Fender Stratocaster through a bunch of effects at high volume was a recipe for disaster. The single-coil pickups kicked up a fuss.

“For many years one of the problems of touring was [RF] interference – especially if, like me, you're the sort of bastard who tends to use a huge pedalboard,” he said. “Those effects pedals really tended to pick up interference, as did the dimmers on the lighting rigs. And with Pink Floyd we did have extensive lighting rigs, which buzzed horribly.”

Over the years, Gilmour made modifications to his Strats to tackle the issue, and by and large they worked. Active EMGs stopped the hum “dead”. “They sounded great – a very full and rich tone – but they didn't sound quite as ‘Stratty’ in some ways,” he said. The pedalboard grew. Gilmour would refine his mastery of it would come to the fore.

So when he joined YouTube’s Rick Beato for an expansive, nigh-on two-hour interview, there was bound to be some insight for today’s pedal freak. There is a lot else besides, such as Gilmour’s recollections of first seeing Jimi Hendrix perform live at a club in London, with the Beatles and the Stones and anyone who was anyone among the crowd. He talks about fuzz, and about how he got turned onto it playing with Blue Cheer in the States – and how his parents got him a fuzz pedal for his birthday.

But when the conversation turned to Comfortably Numb, and Gilmour’s approach to that first solo – not the second one that was comped together solo – he shared some insight that might change how you think about dialling in your delay. Or at least it will give you something to keep in mind if you’ve got a delay pedal on the ‘board.

“That solo was a very early thing, and I don’t think it changed at all,” says Gilmour. “That particular first solo in Comfortably Numb was a one-off.”

Listening to that first solo, it’s pretty much as majestic as you can get, with big elastic Strat notes floating off into the either. It’s what you think of when you think David Gilmour.

Beato presses Gilmour on his technique: how much work is his left hand doing when it comes to vibrato, how much work is the whammy bar doing?

“I always wondered how much this changed in your playing over time,” says Beato.

“I have no idea how that happens. I do know that, when I get on a Tele or something without a whammy bar, I’m fine too, and the vibrato is still my vibrato,” says Gilmour. “But Hank Marvin from the Shadows always used the tremolo arm, and I liked to think that I refine it a lot, and take it down to almost inaudible.”

The trick for Gilmour, however, is in appreciating just how your delay reacts to your vibrato – and if you are playing a Strat, as he does, how the whammy bar movements affect the repeats. Gilmour demonstrates how a reasonably upfront delay set with long repeats can be subtle, but manipulating the whammy bar gives it the illusion that you've just turned up that mix dial and the repeats become more pronounced.

“When you have a delay or something on a guitar. [Plays a chord tab]. So there’s a long, very positive delay. Doesn’t sound really wet, but if I go [works the whammy bar] then suddenly you are in a huge chamber, and that’s the effect of a little bit of delay with using the [whammy bar],” he explains. What he can’t explain is how he arrived at this epiphany. “But how that all developed, I can’t work that out,” he continues. “They work together, hopefully in perfect cohesion.”

Watching Gilmour demonstrate this, it seems perfectly obvious. A ‘Why didn’t I think of that!?’ moment. But then sometimes you don’t, especially if you’ve grown accustomed to a hardtail.

If you are using delay on a Strat, or any guitar with a tremolo, however, it might be an invaluable approach that allows you to keep your signal quite dry, with your delay’s repeats in the background, with the option of making them more intense by manipulating the bar.

The more vibrato you apply, the deeper the ensuing psychedelic, seasickness you get from having those manually pitch-shifted repeats playing out even as your guitar has returned to standard pitch.

Working the bar like that could give you some of that wow and flutter effect not dissimilar to a mechanical tape echo. Even subtle movements on the bar can yield a dramatic effect. And as Gilmour says, it’s a similar idea when you’re applying vibrato manually, i.e. the old-fashioned way, fretting a note and shaking it.

Looking for delay inspiration? Check out MusicRadar's 10 tips for getting more out of your delay pedal.

A trailer has been released for David Gilmour’s upcoming concert film, Live At The Circus Maximus, Rome.

The show was filmed at the ancient monument at the beginning of Gilmour’s Luck And Strange tour last September. It’s out in cinemas and IMAX theatres from September, but only for a limited time. You can purchase tickets at Gilmour’s website.

As you can see from the trailer, as well as selections from Luck And Strange, Gilmour dips into the Pink Floyd songbook and includes Time, Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here, amongst others.

A month after the movie comes a new live album from the 79-year-old singer and guitarist. The Luck And Strange Concerts is a whopping 23-track affair that’s spread across two CDs and four pieces of vinyl. It was recorded at various dates on the tour, which stopped over at only five cities last autumn: Brighton, London, Los Angeles, New York and, of course, Rome.

As you’d expect, the tracklist is a spread of Gilmour’s recent solo work – including a duet with his daughter Romany on Between Two Points - plus a scattering of Floyd classics. It’s out on Sony Music on 17 October 17 and again you can pre-order via the David Gilmour website.

Jim Irsay's guitar collection was renowned as the most valuable in the world.

The American billionaire entrepreneur, who died on 21 May aged 65, was CEO of NFL club Indianapolis Colts and used his fortune to amass an astonishing array of famous instruments.

Included in The Jim Irsay Collection are are David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Bob Dylan’s Strat as featured in his controversial performance at the Newport Folk Festival, Kurt Cobain’s Fender Mustang used to record Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Eric Clapton’s ‘The Fool’ SG, which Clapton played during his tenure with Cream, during which he developed his legendary ‘woman’ tone.

Clapton’s SG was purchased by Irsay at auction for more than $1m.

The Gilmour Strat and Cobain’s Mustang are now the second and third most expensive guitars ever sold at auction – behind only the Martin D-18E that Cobain used in Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance in 1993.

Irsay also performed with his own band, which he described as “a travelling museum of rock music.”

Among the guest stars who performed alongside him in The Jim Irsay Band were ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons and blues icon Buddy Guy.

In 2023, Irsay talked about his incredible collection.

“I’ve put this together for 25 years, with blood, sweat and tears,” he said.

“The guitars keep breaking records. Gilmour’s Strat went for four million and 67 nations tuned in to that auction… Everything keeps going really up in value, because they’ve been owned for more than 20 years.”

Irsay also revealed that he had declined a bid in excess of $1billion for his guitar collection.

“I was offered by a middle east element – kind of like what’s been going on in golf a little bit – 1.15 billion dollars for the collection,” he said. “They wanted to move it to Dubai and they wanted it in totality.”

It was on this day (30 November) in 1979 that the least festive Christmas number one of all time was released.

No sleigh bells. No references to Santa, reindeer, presents, mistletoe or the baby Jesus.

Instead, this Yuletide hit was an anti-authority protest song set to a disco beat. A track lifted from a rock-opera concept album themed on war and death, paranoia and betrayal, fame and isolation.

And while this song did feature a children’s choir, these kids weren’t singing: “I wish it could be Christmas every day!” They were sneering: “We don’t need no education! We don’t need no thought control!”

It was a Christmas number one that was utterly devoid of festive cheer: Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 by Pink Floyd. And it featured one of David Gilmour’s most brilliant and inventive guitar solos.

At this stage of Floyd’s career, bassist and lead vocalist Roger Waters was very much in the driving seat. Not only did Waters devise the concept for the concept album The Wall, he wrote every song alone except for three tracks co-written with Gilmour and one co-written with producer Bob Ezrin.

But if The Wall was Waters’ baby, he acknowledged Ezrin’s role in shaping Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 into a single. “It was great,” Waters said. “Exactly what expected from a collaborator.”

It was Ezrin who suggested that they try a disco beat. “I’d just done a session in New York,” he said, “and Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards [from Chic] were in the next studio. I heard this drum beat and went, 'Wow, would that ever work great with rock ‘n’ roll!’ When I got to England a few months later and I started listening to Another Brick…, that beat kept playing through my head.”

Disco music was entirely alien to Floyd and to the guitarist in particular. As Gilmour said: “It wasn’t my idea to do disco music, it was Bob’s. He said, ‘Go to a couple of clubs and listen to what's happening with disco music.' So I forced myself out and listened to loud, four-to-the-bar bass drums and stuff and thought, Gawd, awful! Then we went back and tried to turn one of the parts into one of those so it would be catchy.”

As an albums band, Floyd hadn’t had a single out in in the UK for 11 years since Point Me At The Sky in 1968, and Ezrin said he met with resistance as he worked on transforming Another Brick In The Wall Part 2.

“The most important thing I did for the song was insist it be more than just one verse and one chorus long, which it was when Roger wrote it,” Ezrin recalled. “When we played with the disco beat I said, ‘Man, this is a hit! But it’s one minute 20, it’s not going to play. We need two verses and two choruses.’ And they said, ‘Well you’re not bloody getting them. We don’t do singles, so f**k you.’ So I said, ‘OK fine’, and they left. And because of our two machine set-up, while they weren’t around we were able to copy the first verse and chorus, take one of the drum fills, put them in between and extend the chorus.”

Ultimately, Gilmour conceded: “It doesn’t in the end not sound like Pink Floyd.”

And his solo was one of the main reasons why.

For this solo, Gilmour eschewed his Strats for a 1955 Les Paul Gold Top, which sold in 2019 for $447,000, a record for a Les Paul.

He originally recorded the solo direct into the mixing desk but felt the resulting tone needed “more meat.” He persuaded Bob Ezrin to re-amp the solo, sending the recorded take out to a mic’ed up amp. The tone on the record is a blend of the two, an inimitable blend of clean sustain with a hint of grit.

The Another Brick solo is great because it’s so memorable, and Gilmour created that effect intentionally. The opening lick has a distinctive rhythm and ends by bending up to a high D. Four bars later, Gilmour plays an answering phrase using exactly the same rhythm and ends on a D one octave lower. It creates an answer to the question he asked with the opening phrase, and it feels familiar because it repeats the earlier rhythm.

The solo’s second lick is arguably even more important. It’s a compound bend: Gilmour bends the string to one pitch, holds it, and then bends it to a new, higher pitch, creating a melody out of string bends.

In 1979, this was the cutting edge of guitar technique, the first time most listeners had heard anything like it. Gilmour plays variations on that theme twice more, adding more hooks to the solo.

Later on, Gilmour relies on some of the same tricks that made the Comfortably Numb solo so effective, although they sound quite dissimilar thanks to the different tones and musical contexts.

There are aggressive pentatonic double stops, and some long pentatonic runs with similar phrasing to the Comfortably Numb licks. He rakes into notes on the first string as he did in the first Comfortably Numb break, but with this cleaner tone it has a staccato effect that complements the track’s disco feel. As the solo builds, he travels further and further up the neck, until he ultimately finds himself backed into a corner.

In an interview earlier this year, jazz guitarist and session legend Lee Ritenour revealed he was brought in to help Gilmour finish composing the solo.

It was largely complete when Ritenour first heard it, but Gilmour couldn’t figure out what to do for the last four bars.

“You ran out of room!” Ritenour recalls telling Gilmour. “He got up so high he had nowhere to go.”

Pink Floyd’s plan was never to release Ritenour’s takes, but to use them for inspiration. Ritenour says the idea to end with funkier, rhythmic phrases lower on the neck was his, although the licks Gilmour played were ultimately his own.

It was a smart move, tying the lead parts to the underlying chords as the track winds down.

David Gilmour has debunked one of the many myths that have grown up around Pink Floyd over the years.

In an interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Gilmour told the host about the title track of Wish You Were Here. It opens, you may recall, with the sound of an analogue radio, some static and someone coughing. The urban legend is that it’s Gilmour who is doing the coughing and hearing it back convinced him to quit smoking. Not so, says the veteran guitarist.

Gilmour told Fallon about an incentive his father offered when he was 14 - If he reached the age of 17 without smoking, he could learn how to drive. The young lad stuck to his promise, but unfortunately his dad forgot about his end of the deal and didn’t teach him.

“You might think that would send me immediately off to buy a pack (of cigarettes),” Gilmour said. “But it didn’t. I never smoked.”

Gilmour then explained that he had made the same deal with his kids, “and would honour it,” he pointed out. “Come the advent of the Internet one of my kids comes up to me years later and showed me a picture of me – I think at a Knebworth concert – standing with Paul McCartney and I had a great big joint in my hand.” Much paternal embarrassment ensued.

The guitarist also pooh-poohed the myth about how Dark Side Of The Moon was written to deliberately synchronise with The Wizard Of Oz. "I only heard about it years later," Gilmour said. "Someone said you put the needle on - vinyl, you know... you've got the film running somehow, and on the third roar of the MGM line, you put the needle on for the beginning of Dark Side and there's these strange synchronicities that happen."

Gilmour said that fans have done this and posted their resulting clips on YouTube. "There are some strange coincidences," he toldFallon. "I'll call them coincidences."

The 78-year-old is currently promoting his Luck And Strange album which was another Number One for him in September. This week sees him in the middle of a five night run at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Bryan Ferry has a new solo box set out and in the course of its promotion has been talking about the tricky live debut of one of his most successful singles, 1985’s Slave To Love.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ferry spoke about its composition and its live premiere on the largest stage of all - Live Aid: “The drummer broke his snare-drum skin, the bass was in a different tuning, (David) Gilmour’s guitar wasn’t working properly, and someone had to tape another mic to mine because it wasn’t audible.”

Even before that, the recording of the song wasn’t straightforward. After starting the track in his home studio and then the White House studio in London, Ferry then moved recording to, of all places, Bette Midler’s house in New York. In the same article, producer Rhett Davies explains how they ended up there: She’d had trouble sleeping and had built a soundproof room, so we set a studio up in there. It was one of the most difficult tracks to finish and it went through a lot of lives.”

Davies remembers that Ferry took a while to finesse his lyrics. “Bryan was still working on the lyrics so the vocals came last, and it was the last track we finished for the album.

"Bob Clearmountain (mixing engineer) mixed it so many times in so many studios. He remembers falling asleep in Air Studios mixing it even more. It was finally finished at three in the afternoon. When we heard the completed song, there was just elation.”

Meanwhile no less than four guitarists can be heard on the track. “Neil Hubbard had the most wonderfully soulful tone and we recorded him early on to build the song around him,” Ferry remembers. “The guitar solo in the middle is actually three interweaving guitarists: Gilmour, Keith Scott and Hubbard.”

The sessions for the accompanying album Boys And Girls featured a stellar cast. Aside from Gilmour and Hubbard, Mark Knopfler and Nile Rodgers also contributed guitar. Andy Newmark was on drums and David Sanborn guested on saxophone. In many ways, the sound of that album, with its super smooth production and fine attention to detail, was a continuation of late period Roxy.

It remains his most successful solo album – aside from compilations it was the last to reach Number One - and Slave To Love would be his final Top Ten hit in May 1985.

On this day (10 October) in 1980, Thin Lizzy’s album Chinatown was released. It was the band’s first record with guitarist Snowy White. And as the replacement for Gary Moore, the new guy certainly had some big shoes to fill.

Gary had played brilliantly on Lizzy’s 1979 album Black Rose during his third and final stint in the band. And certainly, his lightning-fast technique and explosive power was a kick in the backside for Lizzy’s other guitarist, Scott Gorham.

Lead guitar harmonies had become a key part of Lizzy’s sound in the years when Scott had played alongside Brian Robertson on classic tracks such as The Boys Are Back In Town, Cowboy Song, Wild One and Emerald.

But during the Black Rose sessions, Gary took things up a notch - especially when he pulled off a blistering high-speed lead break for the song Waiting For An Alibi. As Scott recalled with a laugh: “I went, ‘F*ck me, Gary – do you think I’m supposed to do a harmony to that? F*ck you!’ He said, ‘Oh no, I’ll do it.’ And I said, ‘Thank f*ck for that!’”

So after Gary quit Thin Lizzy during the Black Rose tour - dismayed by the self-destructive behaviour of frontman Phil Lynott and his partner in crime Scott Gorham - he was always going to be a hard act to follow.

The Black Rose tour was completed with two temporary stand-ins. First, Lynott’s friend Midge Ure, the singer of Ultravox, who would later call himself “the worst guitar player Thin Lizzy ever had”. And then Dave Flett, who had worked with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.

But in December 1979, Snowy White became the new guitarist in Thin Lizzy, and in his own laidback way he had no fears about taking the place of Gary Moore. Snowy, like Gary, was a blues player at heart, and in the early ’70s he had gigged and recorded with former Fleetwood Mac legend Peter Green, who became a close friend. What’s more, when Snowy signed up for Thin Lizzy he was still working with Pink Floyd as second guitarist to David Gilmour on The Wall tour.

Snowy was swimming with the big fish, unfazed at joining one of the leading rock bands of the time. And on the Chinatown album he hit the ground running, co-writing three songs including the dynamic title track on which he nailed a solo as fiery as any that Gary Moore had played on Black Rose.

As Snowy recalled in an interview with EonMusic: “I just did that [solo] in one take. I was younger then, and I could do that sort of thing! I was sort of hot in those days with my playing, and I just lashed down a solo with a bit of passion, and it was alright!”

Snowy went on to make one more album with Thin Lizzy, 1981’s Renegade, again co-writing the title track, one of the best late-period Lizzy songs, and also a playful, funky little tune called Fats which showcased his versatility as a writer and player.

Snowy resigned from Thin Lizzy for the same reasons that Gary Moore had. But in a turbulent period he was solid as a rock. And those great songs, Chinatown and Renegade, are two of Thin Lizzy’s very best.

With a stretch at London’s Royal Albert Hall kicking off on 9 October and new solo album Luck and Strange out now, the Pink Floyd legend is on the promotional trail, including answering fans' questions in a new interview with The Guardian.

The slightly off-kilter result is a fresh barrage of Gilmour gold, during which the star reveals a love of carpentry, how he kept his best guitars OUT of his 2019 Christies sell-off, and laments the loss of a pair of pink velvet trousers - stolen from a laundrette in 1969…

Other gems include a scathing takedown of the modern music industry (and the fat cats within it), the likeliness of ever making up with bandmate Roger Waters (spoiler alert: it’s not likely) and an ongoing secret side mission to get Kate Bush back on the stage (gently)…

“I think the music industry is a tough one these days, and for people who are recording in it, the rewards are not justifiable,” Gilmour concedes. “The rich and the powerful have siphoned off the majority of this money. I was lucky to be part of the golden years when there was a much better share going to the musicians, so I support anything that could be done to make that easier.

“The working musician today has to go out and play live – they can’t survive any other way. They won’t do it by the recording process and that’s a tragedy because that is not encouraging new music to be created.

“It’s not the greatest era that the world has been through, as gradually all the work moves to robots and AI, and the amount of people creaming off the money gets smaller and smaller and they get richer and richer. “Sod everyone else” seems to be the attitude,” he concludes glumly.

As to which he prefers – Telecasters or Stratocasters – Gilmour neatly dodges the issue: “Every song demands a different guitar, and I just obey what that command is – I love them both.”

And speaking of hardware, despite parting with The Black Strat for £3.9 million back in 2019 (aka the most expensive guitar in history), Gilmour reveals that his real favourite guitars were very deliberately NOT part of his Christies Auction House 120-guitar sell-off.

“To be perfectly truthful, I kept a few guitars back which are my real favourites,” Gilmour admits. “But I generally think of guitars as tools of the trade. I don’t have a massive sentimental attachment and what cushions any of that loss is the good that was – and is being – done by the money that was raised by that auction, which went to ClientEarth.”

On the subject of ever playing with Roger Waters again, Gilmour only reinforces his stance from last week.

“Absolutely not. I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators like Putin and Maduro [president of Venezuela]. Nothing would make me share a stage with someone who thinks such treatment of women and the LGBT community is OK. On the other hand, I’d love to be back on stage with [late Pink Floyd keyboard player] Rick Wright, who was one of the gentlest and most musically gifted people I’ve ever known.”

It’s a point further highlighted when asked to name his favourite Waters lyric. Rather than plucking out a Floyd classic, Gilmour instead shows his disdain by citing something rather less celebrated. “Gosh, let me have a think about that. How about a song called Walk With Me Sydney? I don’t think it’s officially recorded,” he offers.

But it’s perhaps Gilmour’s behind-the-scenes prodding of Kate Bush that will perhaps be most gratefully received by his fans. When asked if he could get Kate Bush back on stage soon, Gilmour offers the glimmers of a work in progress.

“Kate Bush is the only person who can get Kate Bush back on stage,” counters Gilmour. “I think the shows she did in 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo were some of the best I’ve ever seen. We went several nights. I’ve tried persuading her recently, actually. Gently.”

We await further updates with interest… [Puts side two of Hounds of Love on repeat. Again.]

Gilmour’s latest solo work Luck and Strange is out now and he’ll be playing six nights at Royal Albert Hall commencing on 9 October, with dates in Los Angeles and New York to follow.

Our friends at Loudersound.com, where this review was first published, were on the ground at Rome's Circus Maximus to take in the opening night of David Gilmour's world tour. It's fair to say it went well...

David Gilmour dazzled Rome on the opening night of his current world tour at the Circus Maximus, with a Pink Floyd-heavy set and stunning light show that sent the locals wild with delight.

The 78-year-old Pink Floyd singer and guitarist was in imperious form as he kicked off his current world tour in support of his recent No. 1 album Luck And Strange. It was Gilmour’s first official live show for eight years (he’d played two low-key ‘rehearsal’ shows in Brighton last weekend) and he will perform a further five shows here in Rome, before six further shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall in early October and then seven more dates in the USA.

Cries of “We love you David” rang out all night around the venue that once hosted chariot racing for Ancient Romans, as Gilmour’s unmistakably fluid guitar tone introduced the instrumental 5AM (from 2015’s Rattle That Lock) followed by new instrumental Black Cat and the title track of the new album, before the instantly recognisable tones of Dark Side Of The Moon’s Breathe kicked off a run of Floyd numbers delighting the 18,000 fans. 

Time followed, complete with the classic clocks backing film on the large circular screen adorning the back of the stage, before a rousing Fat Old Sun from Atom Heart Mother, Marooned and Wish You Were Here had the whole crowd singing as one.

Early on Gilmour acknowledged his new live band, featuring established bassist guy Pratt and keyboardist extraordinaire Greg Phillanganes, alongside relative newcomers, guitarist Ben Worsley, besuited drummer Adam Betts (formerly of Prog faves Three Trapped Tigers) and second keyboard player Rob Gentry.

It’s the latter group of musicians, along with Charlie Andrews, producer of Luck And Strange (who is also here tonight), who seem to have invested Gilmour with a new creative zest and he’s certainly a happy fellow on stage tonight, proudly introducing daughter Romany for their delightful cover of The Montgolifer Brothers’ Between Two Points, before Floyd’s latter-day High Hopes ended the first half of the set.

An epic rendition of Sorrow got the second set going on a high, Gilmour peeling off fiery licks and incendiary solos, while A Great Day For Freedom reinforces the point that this is Gilmour relaying what he feels are his finest moments, having clarified why certain past old favourites no longer feature. 

Ben Worsley duelled with Gilmour, both vocally and guitar, on a fearsome In Any Tongue, perhaps a surprise inclusion from Rattle That Lock, but the song has certainly never sounded better than it does righ now.

The momentum dropped as Gilmour’s backing singers, the wonderful Webb Sisters, Charley and Hattie, Louise Marshall and Romany reworked The Great Gig In The Sky quite beautifully, with Gilmour on lap steel and Pratt on upright bass. 

It’s different enough to make you think, but respectful enough to have the whole crowd swaying to the haunting melody, while a moving A Boat Lies Waiting honoured Gilmour’s great friend, the late Pink Floyd keyboard player Rick Wright.

Gilmour might have fluffed the intro to Coming Back To Life, but it certainly didn’t stem the band’s flow as the tempo rose once more. The gritty Dark And Velvet Nights with its stunning accompanying visuals fired things up further and the epic sweep of Luck And Strange’s most obvious Floydian moment, Scattered, closed the second half of the set on a real high.

As the band appeared for the encore the locals rushed the front of the stage, ignoring the hapless stewards' rather pitiful attempts to hold back the tide as the opening chords of Comfortably Numb rang out. 

Multiple lasers lit up the night sky as the locals sang their hearts out and the band beamed with sheer delight as Gilmour, completely in his element, unleashing both of those well-known guitar solos with a passion and fire of a man half his age. It’s a welcome and timely reminder of just what a great musician David Gilmour is.

The Rome crowd went expectedly nuts. In two week’s time the Royal Albert Hall won’t know what’s hit it!

If you’ll be attending any of David Gilmour’s upcoming Albert Hall gigs this October be prepared for the absence of more than a few crowd-pleasing staples.

Speaking to Mojo, Gilmour discussed his upcoming mini-tour – effectively a Royal Albert Hall, London residency spanning October 9th through to 15th – and outlined some prominent songs from the Pink Floyd back catalogue that have fallen out of favour with the guitar-playing great.

Outlining his changing attitudes and moods, Gilmour picked out a number of tracks that for various reasons won’t be part of his set. “There are songs from the past that I no longer feel comfortable singing,” Gilmour explained to the magazine. “I love Run Like Hell [a track from 1982’s The Wall]. I loved the music I created for it, but all that ‘You’d better run, run, run…’ I now find that all rather, I don’t know… a bit terrifying and violent.”

Others on the (s)hitlist are more surprising.

“Another Brick In The Wall is another one I shan’t be doing,” Gilmour confirmed. “I don’t think I’ve done that with my own band, but I certainly did it in the post-Roger Pink Floyd, against my better judgement.” It’s a decision that’s sure to be a disappointment to fans eager to see Gilmour let loose with that solo.

Gilmour has in more recent times grown increasingly detached from The Wall, an album which ex-bandmate Roger Waters has increasingly taken as his own, forging multiple solo tours and side projects around its concept, music and imagery.

In 2021 Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson took to Twitter to describe Waters as a “Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac.” Something backed up by Gilmour himself immediately afterwards. “Every word demonstrably true,” he Tweeted. 

“That tweet was boiling up,” Gilmour tells Mojo. “It had to come out – and I have no regrets about it. No regrets whatsoever.”

Elsewhere Gilmour says he finds talk of Walters “wearisome”. “Do you know what decade of my life I was in when Roger left our pop group? My thirties. I am now 78,” he opines. “Where’s the relevance?”

And it’s not just The Wall that’s coming under fire… “The same with Money. I won’t be doing that,” says Gilmour. 

However there is some good news buried in there as Gilmour highlights songs that he still feels adequate connection with in 2024 and will be playing out live. 

“I’m going to be sticking with the ones that are essentially my music, and I feel some ownership of. Comfortably Numb, Wish You Were Here, Shine On You Crazy Diamond, maybe,” he teases.

[Checks calendar] No, it’s not April the first. And yes, notorious rap-rock LA metalheads Body Count have just dropped their cover version of one of prog rock’s most untouchable classics. 

If you’ve ever wondered what the band who brought you Cop Killer might do when let loose on Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb – the standout centrepiece of Floyd’s enduring concept album, The Wall, and multiple tours – then prepare to wonder no longer.

And if you’re wondering what David Gilmour has to say about it all, fret not – because the legendary Floyd guitarist even plays on it.

“Body Count’s version of Comfortably Numb is quite radical, but the words really struck me,” said Gilmour alongside the release. “It astonishes me that a tune I wrote almost 50 years ago is back with this great new approach. They've made it relevant again. 

“The initial contact from Ice-T was for permission to use the song, but I thought I might offer to play on it as well. I like the new lyrics, they're talking about the world we’re living in now, which is quite scary. Ice-T and Body Count played in London recently, sadly I couldn't make it, but if another opportunity came up to play with them, I'd jump at it.”

The cover is described by the band as “a fresh take on the classic Pink Floyd track that explores themes of detachment and introspection. Gilmour's seminal guitar work adds a haunting, authentic touch, seamlessly blending with Body Count's signature intensity and Ice’s profound new lyrics.” The track is the lead from their new album, Merciless, primed for release on 22 November via Century Media.

"For me, Comfortably Numb, is an introspective song – it's me acknowledging that I'm older now,” offers Body Count lead vocalist Ice-T. “I'm telling the younger generation, you've got two choices: you can keep the fire burning or you can give up. It's me trying to make sense of what's happening, but also pointing out that we're all in a place where we don’t have to face reality. 

“We've got flat-screen TVs and popcorn, and we can just sit back and watch the chaos of the world like it’s a TV show. It doesn’t feel real until it shows up at your door. I’m a little numb, too – we all are.”

Listen to the new version and make up your own mind as to the merits of the reworking via the visualiser video below.

Open mic nights are the lowest rung of the live music ladder. We’ve all been there, either to play or to support a mate. If you’re lucky you might catch a fleeting glimpse of a future star, but musicians who have enjoyed any sort of sustained success generally give them the swerve.

Not so at the Neptune in Hove, where regulars were treated last night (September 9) to the sight of a bona fide rock legend - David Gilmour - performing an acoustic version of Wish You Were Here. Not, it must be said, the sort of thing you usually expect to see at your local on a Monday evening…

Gilmour was down there with his daughter Romany, who had performed a short set at the venue. She covered Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will and This Side Of Blue by Joanna Newsom as well as her own composition Lily Of The Roses.

After her set Romany looked out at the crowd and said "Oh my gosh, you're here. And you've brought your guitar," just at the point when her dad was striding through the crowd to join Romany on the venue’s minute stage. "You're going to come and upstage me? OK, great," she laughed.

Then Gilmour struck up the opening chords to one of his old band’s best-known and most loved songs. Cue a mass singalong, and a pub full of phones held aloft, all capturing the moment.

Also in attendance last night were Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt and Ben Worsley, from Gilmour’s band, as well as Ugly Kid Joe singer Whitfield Crane.

Gilmour is a local resident and Luck And Strange, his latest album which came out last week is something of a family affair, featuring contributions from Romany, who sings and plays harp and brother Gabriel, who was in attendance last night and provides backing vocals on the track Scattered. Meanwhile, Gilmour’s wife, the novelist Polly Samson, contributes the majority of the lyrics.

Last night was a chance to blow away the cobwebs for Gilmour who has a live tour to prepare for in support of Luck And Strange. It kicks off at Rome’s Circus Maximus on September 29 and includes a six-night run at London’s Royal Albert Hall between October 9 and 15. 

Thanks to Louder for the spot and picture permission. Read their story here.

David Gilmour says he believes that people give him “too much deference” and that too many of his collaborators feel unable to give him the honest feedback that he needs.

In an interview with The Sun, the Pink Floyd legend said that: “After you achieve these dizzying heights, people tend to show you way too much deference,” he admits. “It becomes hard to retrieve the setup you had when you were young.”

“In the earlier stages of Pink Floyd, we could be as rude and insulting to each other about our personalities and our music as we wanted - and yet everything would be all right in the end. No one ever stomped off permanently - until that bloke did…”

We think he might be referring to Roger Waters. Clearly, he who cannot be named.

Gilmour is set to release a new solo album Luck And Strange this Friday and he was talking about how he came to work with Alt J and Marika Hackman producer Charlie Andrew on the album. 

“I looked at all the people I knew but I’d got to a point in life where I wanted to move things forward in a different way. I made contact with Charlie and he came down to the house. He had total lack of knowledge of Pink Floyd and the side of the music industry that I come from.”

"Charlie was refreshingly blunt with some of his opinions. He was brilliant’’.

The album is something of a family affair for Gilmour. His wife, the novelist Polly Samson contributes the majority of the lyrics, their daughter Romany played the harp on the track Between Two Points and the final track Scattered is co-written by their son Charlie and features backing vocals from his brother Gabriel.

Gilmour praised his wife’s contributions in the interview, saying: “As a married couple, we discuss our fears and our joys. She knows my preoccupations. 

"It’s a great skill that she can inhabit my head.  But her input is not limited to the lyrics. She has solid opinions on every aspect of what we do and is not scared to voice them.”

The Peter Green story is one of greatness and what could have been, but investigating the musical legacy of one of the finest guitar players and blues songwriters the world has seen unearths some surprises. At the top of the pile is the fact he dismissed one of his greatest achievements… or at least the first half of it.

Fleetwood Mac's Oh Well (Pt. 1) has recently been revisited by Slash with Chris Stapleton – a timely reminder that it houses not just an all-time great riff from Green, but the dynamics of a truly great songwriter. However, just as its name suggests, its blues-rock greatness is only half the story. 

Oh Well was never included on a Fleetwood Mac UK studio album – the single release appeared on the US version of 1969's Then Play On album, though later became a staple of Mac compilations. It followed the release of another Green single-only classic; the meditative Man Of The World that showcased just how rapidly the guitarist and vocalist was developing as a musician with ambitions that transcended his blues roots

Green had never intended the first part of Oh Well to be the main event or even a single at all – when it became clear the band wanted to put it out its songwriter envisioned it as the b-side to the very different second half, Oh Well Pt.2. 

"The first one's not necessary," the guitarist reflected in the interview footage above. "The first one did almost get to number one, Part one, Part two is the only real offering. On a compilation, I wouldn't put part one on. I call it packing to know how to get to that second one – to how to start it off maybe.

This may come as a shock to the many guitarists who were inspired by one of the greatest blues-rock compositions of all time, including a perhaps unlikely candidate.

"On Grenada television in Manchester, they used to have these things on at about 2 in the morning that were called Five Minute Profile of all these artists like Bowie and T-Rex and all that," Noel Gallagher recalled to the BBC about discovering his favourite blues player. "And because we were all on the dole [we'd put it on] and get stoned. I remember there was one on Fleetwood Mac and right at the beginning of the five minutes, it was maybe a 30-second thing that Fleetwood Mac [then] was born out of the ashes of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and they showed some black and white footage of him playing Oh Well. I remember the guitar riff and thinking, fucking hell that's amazing!"

As Gallagher dug deeper, he was taken with the emotive dimension of Green's playing.

"For my mind anyway he's the best British blues guitarist out of them all. And I'm not a wizard on the guitar and I don't know any of the technical terms and all that but his guitar playing, it fucking blows me away. Not in the same way as Hendrix. You listen to Hendrix and you go, 'The guy's a wizard', Peter Green's guitar, it weeps almost."

But the second part of Oh Well doesn't even feature any of that. It showcases a different side to Green's compositional talent; a musician seeing a broader sonic picture outside of rock conventions.  

"I listen to a lot of classical music, Vaughan Williams, Gustav Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Parudin, and I like Stravinsky very much," Green told the NME in 1970. But when asked if any of this listening had surfaced in his own music, the musician named only one example: "It showed up in the second part of Oh Well", noted Green. "Parts of that I suppose are classical." 

Perhaps this is why he was so keen to showcase the instrumental over the more commercially viable first part; it reflected a passion he hadn't been willing or able to capture before. Mick Fleetwood himself would later describe his bandmate's piece to Rolling Stone as a "classical-esque escapade."

Guitars still form an important part of the 5:39 minute piece that; beginning with a mournful Ramirez nylon-string guitar chord part, then accompanied by low notes of an electric guitar before cello and recorder played by then-girlfriend Sandra Elsdon and piano from Fleetwood Mac bandmate Jeremy Spencer. All other instrumentation was tracked by Green.

The result has a cinematic scope that isn't as unexpected as one would imagine in the context of the instrumental Albatross the year before, but further enhances the view that Green was coming into his own as a musician with grander ambitions than sateing the blues guitar crowd. 

"One of the best, if not the best," reflected bandmate and Fleetwood Mac co-founder bassist John McVie. "That's why it's such a tragedy that it all went where it did. He could have been so much more." 

Despite Green's dismissal of Oh Well Pt. 1, it continues to resonate and fascinate. And even the guitarist himself admitted revisiting the track as a listener gave him a new appreciation of its lyrics. 

"This is to do with Jesus, the Jesus thing," Green reflected in the top video above regarding the song's second verse. "Because he says, 'We all fall short of the glory of god. The pamphlets that they hand out – 'We've all sinned and we all fall short of the glory of god'. That's what that bit means – that's quite good, quite clever. It's nice to revisit yourself."  

The title itself though was a reference to Muddy Waters. "I took the idea for the lyrics from that old blues song by Muddy Waters about, ‘Oh well, if I was a catfish’, Green told Julian Piper for Guitar magazine back in 2007.

In that same interview Green reiterated his disappointment that Pt.1 would always be the better-known work. “I never really intended Oh Well to have the first section,” he complained, “I just wanted it to be the classical second side." 

Nevetheless that first part stands as a brilliantly realised song, but while it's still been covered countless times by artists, the second part would never even be performed by Fleetwood Mac during or after Green's tenure with the band. 

That was finally addressed at the Fleetwood Mac & Friends celebration of Peter Green that his close friend and bandmate Mick Fleetwood organised on 25 February 2020 in London. It was David Gilmour who took on the challenge of performing the instrumental as part of a collective of musicians including Fleetwood.

Gilmour added his own melodic touch on the Black Strat in place of Spanish guitar, but is Green's stature in the pantheon of players, even the Pink Floyd legend had his doubts before the performance.

"He initially got cold feet," Mick Fleetwood revealed to Rolling Stone in 2021 about the London Palladium performance and the long build up of calls and approaches that ensured an all-star cast of musicians would appear on the night. "He was like, 'I don’t know if I can interpret Peter’s work. It’s so amazing. Maybe I can’t do that.'

"I said, “What are you talking about? Of course you can,'" added Fleetwood. "He said, 'At the moment I’m sort of passing on the idea because of what I’m discussing with you here. But later on, if this happens, I may gather enough courage.' And at least a year and a half later, I called him back and he said, 'I’m ready and I really want to do this.' Which was huge."

Gilmour delivered on the night, as if there was ever any doubt. He interpreted Green's two most-loved instrumentals with Albatross and Oh Well Pt.2

"Peter never played it. Fleetwood Mac never played it," added Fleetwood. "That was really special that David picked that to do. I was overjoyed."

The first part isn't strictly true. A condensed version of both parts was 'performed' by Fleetwood Mac on iconic British TV music chart show Top Of The Pops in 1969 . But it barely does any justice for Green's remarkable vision for the two linked pieces. 

The question of what Green could have done next with Fleetwood Mac if he hadn't left in 1970 hangs in the air. But so too does the question of who Peter Green was; as much as we try to push him into the spotlight as a player, it was something he possibly never wanted.

"Personally, Peter was good friend," Mick Fleetwood reflected with Rolling Stone in 2021. "And musically, he’s beyond reproach in terms of what he meant to me and John [McVie] and the original band. No doubt, as much as he tried to waylay and not be responsible for leading the band, the truth was, as much as he turned away from things, he could have been a Jeff Beck. He could have been a Jimmy Page. He could have been Eric Clapton.

"But right from the beginning, he wanted to be part of the band."

• Peter Green classic interview: "I'm only Eric Clapton's replacement, I'm not Eric Clapton"

When the Pink Floyd guitar legend returned in 2006 with his first solo album in over 20 years and a year on from Pink Floyd's surprise Live 8 reunion, it was clearly time for a chat...

Passing through an ancient vaulted tunnel, the visitor to Astoria emerges into an impeccably kept garden that slopes gently downward to the Thames. David Gilmour's houseboat studio rides at anchor by the river bank, just beyond a leafy grove of bamboo and willows.

The boat, too, is named Astoria. It's not a large craft; there's barely space for a well-stocked control room, dominated by a huge Neve mixing console, and a small elegant parlour that doubles as a tracking room. A narrow passageway panelled in dark wood connects the two spaces, also giving access to a few tiny side chambers along the way.

The boat was built in 1912 by English showbiz entrepreneur Fred Karno. "He was the guy who discovered Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel," Gilmour explains. "He wanted to have his own private home place, knocking shop, whatever... It was never built to sail. It's strictly a houseboat. If you want to move it, you get a tug and tow it. My idea was to make it as good in here as we can reasonably get it, sound-wise, without fucking with the space too much."

This boat is where Gilmour recorded much of Pink Floyd's final two albums A Monetary Lapse Of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994), and it was also the main site of sessions for Gilmour's new solo album, On An Island.

The record is very much a reflection of the place where it was made - serene, unhurried. Gauzy layers of shimmering sound unfold at a stately pace, providing a lavish backdrop for Gilmour's soaring guitar and that ethereally expressive vocal style well-known and loved from Pink Floyd's catalogue of classics.

There are occasional excursions into the blues and other slightly rougher terrains, but mostly this is a record for gazing peacefully at the river "I was just letting it all flow out as naturally as it can," reflects Gilmour. "There are quite a lot of those melancholy major seventh chords and 3/4 waltz tempos. That must be the mood I'm in."

To see where On An Island was made is to understand why Gilmour had to be almost forcibly pried from the studio to take part in Floyd's reunion at Live 8. Nobody thought David Gilmour would ever get on a stage again with Roger Waters after the pair's many quarrels. They did just that, however.

Waters has since made noises about rejoining the band but Gilmour isn't interested. The guitarist seems quite content just being David Gilmour and has nothing left to prove. He's a household name among the classic rock crowd, and for a lot of younger guitar fans he's the only 1970s guitarist that matters. For many he's the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen...

"I'm thrilled if that's the case," he laughs. "It's taken me a long time to achieve that. I didn't start figuring in guitar-playing polls for a lot of years. I think one thing about the fingers and brain that I have been given is that the fingers make a distinctive sound. The fingers aren't very fast but I think I am instantly recognisable. I can hear myself and just know that it's me. And other people do too.

"The way I play melodies is connected to things like Hank Marvin and The Shadows - that style of guitar playing where people can recognise a melody with some beef to it."

On An Island is only Gilmour's third solo album. The prior two were recorded during troubled periods in Pink Floyd's career; David Gilmour (1978) was a way of blowing off steam after the difficult recording of Animals, and About Face (1984) was a full-scale effort on Gilmour's part to launch himself as a star in his own right after Waters left Pink Floyd and the band all but fell apart following the release of The Final Cut. On An Island comes from a very different place. Life is good for David Gilmour right now...

What motivates you these days? Your place in rock history is assured, you're very comfortably off. What drives you to make an album?

"That's what I do. I'm a musician. I make music. It's in my blood. The difference is that these days I'm not driven to do it all the time. Honestly, music isn't my first priority anymore. Family is.

"Now, I could see where someone could think that when I person says music isn't his first priority any more, the quality of the music might therefore suffer. But once I get going I do get rather perfectionist. And I think that the work I'm doing now is as good as anything I've ever done. I think On An Island is a really good album. I'm very proud of it."

Was your new album a bigger priority for you than doing Live 8? You declined initially...

"I did, yes. And I declined because I was in the middle of making this album. Also I thought – correctly as it turned out – that it would open a can of worms: Pink Floyd reformation stories. I selfishly didn't want to be inconvenienced by all the things I knew this would throw up. So Bob Geldof tried quite hard to persuade me.

"It's not that I didn't support what he was trying to do. I just thought he'd do just as well without us. But then Bob got Roger involved and he persuaded Roger to call me and ask me."

Was it surprising when Roger called you?

"Yes, very. And after Roger called I thought about it; I really probably would kick myself afterwards if I didn't do Live 8. There were many good reasons for doing it. The proper, and best, reason was what the event hopefully did achieve. And it put some of the bad blood between Roger and myself behind us."

How much rehearsal went into Live 8?

"We did three days of rehearsing together. But I did over two weeks on my own. I made a CD of the set and had it at my home studio. I'd blast it out through speakers, play guitar and sing along to it three or four times a day every day for a good couple of weeks. I wanted to be very 'on it'.

"I knew it would be a nerve-wracking experience and I wanted to be able to do it like falling off a log. I didn't want to be nervous and tense about not being 100 percent certain that I knew exactly what I was doing every second."

When you did the first guitar solo in Money at Live 8, it was pretty much a note-for-note duplication of the solo on the album. Do you feel you owe it to the people to give them a signature solo like that note-for-note? How does that balance against spontaneity?

"Well I think it is a balance. When I go to hear other bands and they launch into a big pop hit of theirs, if the guitar player goes off in a completely different direction I'm pissed off, frankly.

"I'm thinking; that ain't the way it is, that's not how it's supposed to go! And so my tendency is to start off pretty much like the record and then see how I'm feeling. If I move off it and it feels good, inspired and original, then I'll stay off the beaten track.

"But sometimes I realise I'm off the beaten track but it's just dull. Then I'll go back into the safety net of pretty much the original solo because I know that will turn a lot of people on more. So yeah, it is a balance."

But can you always get back to the recorded version, though?

"I can't always. But in the beginning of the end solo of Comfortably Numb, there's that note on the seventh fret of the G string – a big harmonic. I always try to start that solo with that sound and play that first line. It seems daft not to!"

Which of your many Strats is that black one you played at Live 8?

"I've been using that one since about 1970, it's the one on Comfortably Numb. I bought it at Manny's in New York. I've always used it as a testing ground for trying all sorts of things out. It's had a few different necks on; the original had that bullet [truss rod] and a larger headstock. And it has different pickups.

"Years ago, I met up with Seymour Duncan and we picked three really nice sounding pickups he had. We rewound those three and they've stayed on it ever since. But I've always considered that to be my bodge-up guitar that nothing is sacred on. I've had holes drilled in it. It's still a good guitar."

You have many Strats; how do you decide what to use on a track or live date?

"For many years one of the problems of touring was [RF] interference - especially if, like me, you're the sort of bastard who tends to use a huge pedalboard.

"Those effects pedals really tended to pick up interference, as did the dimmers on the lighting rigs. And with Pink Floyd we did have extensive lighting rigs, which buzzed horribly. But when I first heard of and got hold of those EMG pickups, they stopped that dead. They sounded great - a very full and rich tone - but they didn't sound quite as 'Stratty' in some ways.

"There's something in the thinness and particular range a Strat has that makes it a Strat. With EMG pickups you tend to lose that a little bit. But nowadays, of course, everything is much better shielded and the lighting rigs operate from a completely different generator. Things are set up far better. So these days I can go back to using the older Strats live and I've been using my black Strat again, as I did at Live 8."

Roger has been pretty vocal in the press about how positive the experience was for him. He seems to be saying he'd like to do more – to reconvene Pink Floyd on a more regular basis. What are your feelings towards that?

"I have great pride and affection for most of my Pink Floyd career. Musically and artistically it was very satisfying. But it's the past for me. Done it. I don't have any desire to go back there.

"Doing a tour without making a record would just be doing it for the money. And thinking about making a new record with all of us, including Roger, I just don't think that would work. Roger and I have had too long being horrid little despots. I just don't think it would make me a happier human being. Sorry, I'll pass on it."

It's nice the way the title track On An Island kind of floats between an E minor and a G major feel?

"G6. Yeah, it's funny how these things come out. It sounded wrong in G and it sounded wrong in E minor. So I did it in E minor and used the G root note. Originally I just used the G root note, but something made me realise I should slide between the two. It creates its own sound."

Is that triple-meter time signature a good one for soloing? You've used it a lot...

"That's a funny thing too. I write more in 3/4 time and 6/8 time than I do in 4/4. One of the things we were looking for in putting this album together was to try and balance out the 3/4s with a few more 4/4s. I guess I'm just a waltz time sort of guy."

What electric guitar and amp did you use for that On An Island solo?

"That one was the old black Strat I mentioned earlier, through a Hiwatt combo. I've got a very old Fender tweed Twin - a lovely sounding amp - but I couldn't make it work for that track so I went to the Hiwatt instead. I have a Hiwatt combo and a Hiwatt 100-watt head and 4 x 12 cab in this room. It's a bit of a problem. A 100- watt Hiwatt doesn't really like being in a close space like this. So getting the right amp that really likes the room is tricky."

For guitar solos, do you write them out in your head first, or do you just blast away and comp the best bits?

"I try to live with the track before I even touch a guitar that's going to play a solo on it. When I'm working at home it's very easy to just pick up a guitar, not work on a sound very much and just play a little bit.

"At first I find myself loving what I do that way. But ultimately I think it's not too good and want to change some bits. But then I find myself not able to match the sound of the original solo, or sometimes wishing for a better sound. So I try to make it so that when I go for a solo, the sound is really together and well thought out because very often the first take is the best take – except when you try to plan it that way. Then you're still struggling with the same damn solo three days later. So really I have no method.

"You could say that after being a professional musician for 40 years I should know what I'm fucking doing. But I find it best to just hurl myself into it in a different way each time."

Is the Glissando effect in the guitar solo for The Blue a [DigiTech] Whammy pedal?

"Yes. I love it. You've guessed what it is, but I generally don't like to say how that's done. I love driving people crazy. They come and say, How the fuck did you do that? I've been working for months trying to get that. And I say, It's just a pedal! I used it on Marooned from The Division Bell.

"It's the same sort of thing - gives a whole extra dimension. It had a flavour of that old album, Songs Of The Humpback Whale, where they recorded whale noises. It's that floating thing. Both Marooned and The Blue are pieces of music that remind me of the sea..."

This Heaven brings out some of your blues influences, doesn't it?

"That was just another little jam from my front room. Phil Manzanera took it away one day. He'd often do that because he's got a studio in London. He took it there and cut a one bar loop out of what I'd done, sped it up slightly and changed the key.

"My original demo was in E minor; he took it up to F minor. We added drums to that loop and turned it into a track. And obviously the blues is a large influence on here. But all my playing is rooted in the blues."

As a lap and pedal steel player, are you particularly fond of the Weissenborn acoustic lap steel that BJ Cole plays on Then I Close My Eyes?

"Definitely. That's my Weissenborn he's playing. I played it on Smile. But he was over my house one day and I had him play it on Then I Close My Eyes. The Weissenborn's a lovely thing. I always felt pretty good and comfortable on side instruments There are places between the notes where I really like to go and you can go there on slide instruments."

That's become another signature thing for you...

"When I started doing pedal steel and lap steel at shows, the first track I can remember using it on consistently was One Of These Days, where it's tuned to an open E minor chord. And then when we got to The Dark Side Of The Moon and we were doing The Great Gig In The Sky, I invented a different tuning for that because it's hard to know exactly what is the best tuning on slide.

"Open tunings are by definition quite restricting. So I found a tuning which is kind of an open G6. The top four strings are the same as a regular guitar: EBGD. And if you tune the bottom A down to G and the E down to E, you get a 5 string open G chord, but you've got a three-string E minor chord at the top. So you can do quite effective majors and minors. And that's the tuning I tend to use quite a bit, the one I originally laid down for The Great Gig In The Sky.

"By that time I needed to have two steel guitars on stage. The pedal steel was a bit cumbersome. It had more strings than I could actually deal with - eight strings on each neck - so what I ended up making was a six-string slide. I bought two cheap Fender copies called Jensens. They cost nothing in England in the early 1970s. I got a red one and a yellow one and eventually I put Fender pickups in them. That's what I used for a long time: one tuned to the open E minor and one tuned to open G6."

The DVD version of 1994's Pulse is significant because it was the first time you'd done The Dark Side Of The Moon all the way through in many years.

"Lyrically, The Dark Side Of The Moon is really Roger's baby. So sometimes I'd get a slight feeling of minor discomfort doing it without him. But not sufficient to make me think we shouldn't do it. It's part of our oeuvre. I spent a lot of time and sweated blood making that record, and doing it again live was always my ambition."

• In pictures: David Gilmour's guitars, amps and effects

Kate Bush and David Gilmour go back a long way.

Her extraordinary talent originally piqued the Pink Floyd guitarist’s interest in 1973 when he heard the fledgling songwriter's earliest piano/vocal demo recordings.

That year, Pink Floyd reached new heights of success following the release of Dark Side of the Moon and the benevolent Gilmour was moved to reach out and help fellow artists.

“I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” he told New Statesman back in 2005.

Having installed a recording facility in his Essex home, Gilmour promptly assembled a crew to assist Bush. 

It was the first time she had tracked with a group of musicians and this initial studio foray filled her imagination with possibilities.

In 1975, Gilmour paid for a recording session at London’s prestigious AIR studios. The results later secured her a record deal with EMI, though Bush would wait until she turned 18 the following year before the contract was fully agreed.

Released in early 1978, Wuthering Heights – the lead single from Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside – was an instant smash, reaching the number one spot in the UK charts where it stayed for four weeks.

Interestingly, Wuthering Heights is noted as the first UK number one to be both written and performed by a female artist.

Throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s Bush flourished as an artist, self-producing a string of albums while fulfilling her unique creative visions.

Often thought of as her studio masterpiece, 1985’s Hounds of Love spawned the lead single Running Up That Hill (a Deal with God), leading to Bush's second number one – albeit nearly 37 years after its original release!

Although the 1985 Running Up That Hill single managed to reach the number 3 spot in the UK charts while climbing to number 30 in the Billboard Hot 100 US charts, the track reached newfound success in both countries this month, thanks to the Netflix sci-fi horror series Stranger Things.

Released in May 2022, volume one of Stranger Things 4 prominently features Running Up That Hill in the soundtrack.

Held in the clutches of evil, the song serves as a spiritual lifeline for character Max Mayfield as it guides her back to the safety of her friends and saviours.

Set in 1986, Stranger Things 4 is a total nostalgia fest for many, but it appears a new generation of fans have discovered the genius of art rock queen Kate Bush via the series.

Although her live appearances were notoriously infrequent back in the day, this awesome clip from 1987 shows Gilmour joining Bush onstage, headless Steinberger electric guitar in hand, for a spirited rendition of Running Up That Hill.

The guitar parts on the original studio recording were performed by the late Alan Murphy (1953-1989). 

A highly respected session guitarist, Murphy played on numerous Kate Bush albums during the ‘80s and was also known for his work with Level 42 and Go West.

Buy Hounds of Love here.

David Gilmour has been moved by the plight of the Ukranian people to reform Pink Floyd and record their first new music as a band since 1994's The Division Bell.

The guitarist and vocalist is joined by Floyd drummer Nick Mason, longtime Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards. The track also features vocals by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox and can be heard above.

"I rang Nick up and said: ‘listen, I want to do this thing for Ukraine. I’d be really happy if you played on it and I’d also be really happy if you’d agree to us putting it out as Pink Floyd,'" Gilmour told the Guardian. "And he was absolutely on for that."

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has hit close to home for the guitar legend – he has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers,” he says in a statement announcing the song's release.

“It’s Pink Floyd if it’s me and Nick," Gilmour told the Guardian, "and that is the biggest promotional vehicle; that is, as I said, the platform that I’ve been working on for my whole adult life, since I was 21. I wouldn’t do this with many more things, but it’s so vitally, vitally important that people understand what’s going on there and do everything within their power to change that situation. And the thought, also, that mine and Pink Floyd’s support of the Ukrainians could help boost morale in those areas: they need to know the whole world supports them."

Floyd's original bassist; songwriter and vocalist Roger Waters is not part of the recording reunion. Gilmour makes a brief mention of Waters in the Guardian interview before moving things on, after reference in the piece was made by the writer to Waters 'condemning propaganda to demonise Russia'. “Let’s just say I was disappointed and let’s move on," replied Gilmour. "Read into that what you will."

Gilmour does go into detail on his friendship with Khlyvnyuk though - who is still in Ukraine and was recently treated in hospital for a shrapnel injury.

“In 2015, I played a show at Koko in London in support of the Belarus Free Theatre, whose members have been imprisoned," explained Gilmour. "Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian band, Boombox, were also on the bill. They were supposed to do their own set, but their singer Andriy had visa problems, so the rest of the band backed me for my set – we played Wish You Were Here for Andriy that night."

"Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense," continued Gilmour. "Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”

Gilmour used the vocals for the clip in Hey Hey Rise Up. And while writing the music for the track, David managed to speak with Andriy from his hospital bed in Kyiv where he was recovering from the mortar shrapnel injury. “I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing. We both hope to do something together in person in the future.”

While Gilmour doesn't sing on the track it's a treat for fans of his guitar playing with an extended solo.

“I hope it will receive wide support and publicity," said the musician. "We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities, and raise morale. We want express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.”

All proceeds from the track will go to Ukrainian humanitarian relief.
 
Stream the Hey Hey Rise Up 

5 songs guitarists need to hear… by David Gilmour (that aren't Comfortably Numb)

Jam Pedals has released the latest in its Pink Floyd-inspired lineup, taking the Seagull circuit out of its Pink Flow multi-effects station and housing it in a standalone enclosure with enhanced controls and more sounds to play with.

The Seagull appropriates the Red Fasel inductor found on its Wahcko wah pedal, and puts it to good use, allowing players the chance to replicate the ‘seagull’ effect heard on Pink Floyd’s Echoes, or to run the pedal as a cocked wah filter for nasally vocal tones. 

The ‘seagull’ sound effect on Pink Floyd’s Echoes began as so many great electric guitar tones do, with a mistake. 

Guitarist David Gilmour is hazy on the year – perhaps 1969 or 1970 – but definitely a time before pedalboard best practice had been established, and somehow his tech had connected his wah pedal the wrong way round. When engaged, the unit howled in protest, an animalistic, avian scream that Gilmour later played around with, tamed, and began to use in song.

According to Gilmourish, the seagull effect was used in early performances of Embryo, a then unreleased track, before being augmented by Gilmour’s Binson Echorec and finding a home on Echoes. 

Recreating this at home was not a task for the faint-hearted but the Jam Pedals Seagull should make it a lot more achievable. It has a pair of dials, with L controlling the output level, and F fine-tuning the frequency. And there’s a pair of toggle switches; C chooses between the Seagull and a cocked wah mode, while S is a three-way toggle switch that offers three distinct sweep ranges. 

The footswitch can be used as a latching or momentary switch, the latter particularly handy for using the Seagull mid-performance, adding some squawk to your solos.

While Jam Pedals is marketing this as an explicitly Pink Floyd-inspired stompbox – the enclosure of the standard edition even has a black brickwork illustration on a white background a la The Wall – the cocked wah mode is not to be sniffed at, and will pair very nicely with an overdrive or fuzz pedal of your choice.

The likes of Mick Ronson, Frank Zappa and most famously Michael Schenker popularised this use of the wah pedal as a filter. The cocked or parked wah simply involved adjusting your wah’s treadle until you find your chose sweet point in its sweep. Depending on where you set it, the cocked wah might bring out some midrange naval honk, or some bright, rich upper-mids that help you tease harmonics out of your guitar.

Jam Pedals says the Seagull is most suitable for guitars with passive pickups, and advises against placing any pedal with a buffered bypass between your guitar and the Seagull. 

Upon engaging the effect, set the output volume and turn your guitar’s volume pot to 10, then adjust the pitch of the effect via the guitar’s tone knob. Changing pickups will change the fundamental pitch of the Seagull effect.

Lastly, and this, frankly, scarcely needs to be said of a pedal that’s being marketed to Gilmour acolytes, using some reverb and a tape echo or delay pedal with long, languid repeats will elicit some very Floydian sounds.

The Seagull is available now direct from Jam Pedals and selected dealers, priced £149 for the standard edition (with the bird and the wall art work), or £199 for the Custom Artwork edition, which offers a choice of “Fly By”, “Decorum” and “Seagull Soup” designs on the enclosure. Maybe it’s lunchtime talking, but that soup version looks very tasty indeed.

To order or for more details, head over to the Jam Pedals website.

Mick Fleetwood & Friends have released the latest track from the Peter Green Tribute Concert. The Fleetwood Mac classic Albatross was performed by David Gilmour on lap steel, and he was joined by guitarists Rick Vito and Andy Fairweather Low.

The performance of the seminal electric guitar instrumental took place at the Peter Green Tribute show was held last year on 25 February at the London Palladium. 

The house band comprised Mick Fleetwood, Andy Fairweather Low, Dave Bronze and Ricky Peterson, and they were joined by an all-star cast including Billy Gibbons, Noel Gallagher, Kirk Hammett, Steven Tyler, Christine McVie, Pete Townshend and more. With the legendary Glyn Johns moonlighting as executive sound producer on the night.

One notable absentee was Peter Green himself, who chose not to attend the concert, earlier hosting his friend Bernie Marsden for a cup of tea instead, but the performances on the night are all the more poignant following Green's death on 25 July 2020.

Albatross is notable also for Danny Kirwan's debut with Fleetwood Mac. Green's six-string foil went on to record Then Play On, Blues Jam at Chess, Kiln House, Future Games and Bare Trees, before being fired from the band in 1972. Kirwan died in 2018.

The full set will be released as Mick Fleetwood & Friends Celebrate The Music Of Peter Green And The Early Years Of Fleetwood Mac, and will be available on VOD from the 24 April, and in a variety of deluxe physical formats from 30 April.

A number of fan-shot videos had been circulating on YouTube, but so far Mick Fleetwood & Friends have only released the pro-shoot footage for Albatross, The Green Manalishi (With The Two Pronged Crown) – featuring Kirk Hammett and Billy Gibbons – and Rattlesnake Shake featuring Steven Tyler.

See Mick Fleetwood & Friends for more details on the release and various commemorative formats, and to preorder.