David Gilmour

A guitarist with a clean, evocative style, David Gilmour has tied his name to the legend of Pink Floyd, while also cultivating, especially in recent years, a parallel solo career.

His guitar solo style is marked by a blues-inflected musicality, rich in bending and sustain. Several of his solos have been ranked, through numerous polls, among the best in rock history; indeed, in January 2007, readers of Guitar World magazine voted Gilmour's solos on “Comfortably Numb”, “Time” and “Money” among the 100 greatest solos of all time, placing them 4th, 21st and 62nd respectively.

Born in Cambridge on 6 March 1946, while still a teenager David Gilmour met fellow townsmen Roger Waters and Syd Barrett (later founders of Pink Floyd), and with the latter he also attended the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology.

The first band he played in, Jokers Wild, frequently crossed paths with Pink Floyd and also enjoyed a fair amount of local success. With the arrival of the “Summer of Love” in 1967, the group changed its name to Bullitt and then to Flowers, but this venture came to a quick end. In December '67, Gilmour was approached by Pink Floyd, who offered him a spot in the band as an additional guitarist alongside the increasingly unreliable Barrett. Then, after Syd was officially ousted from the band in April of that year due to mental health issues, Gilmour became Pink Floyd's sole guitarist as well as the chief vocal and musical alter ego to leader Roger Waters, playing a decisive role in the success of albums such as “Meddle”, “The Dark Side Of The Moon“, “Wish You Were Here”, “The Wall” and “The Final Cut”.

In 1978, Gilmour released his first, self-titled solo album, which also featured former Jokers Wild drummer Willie Wilson; it would be followed six years later by the sequel, “About Face”, which also featured Pete Townshend of the Who.

After tensions within the band boiled over, Waters left Pink Floyd and Gilmour took over as leader, steering the group through its subsequent studio albums, “A Momentary Lapse Of Reason” (1987) and “The Division Bell” (1994), and the tours that followed.

Then, in the new millennium, it is mainly his solo career that occupies him (notwithstanding a one-off Pink Floyd reunion with Waters in 2005). Gilmour releases the new album “On An Island” (2006), featuring high-profile guests such as David Crosby, Graham Nash, Robert Wyatt, Rick Wright, Georgie Fame and Phil Manzanera (also serving as co-producer). A tour follows, from which a double DVD is drawn, titled “Remember That Night” (filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London), along with a double CD, “Live In Gdansk”, recorded at the Gdansk shipyards in Poland to mark the 26th anniversary of Solidarity.

While returning to the Pink Floyd fold to release the new album “The Endless River”, the fruit of recordings made between 1993 and 1994 with Nick Mason and Richard Wright, that same year Gilmour also releases a new solo record, his first in 9 years: “The Rattle That Locks”, stating in various interviews that the Pink Floyd story can now be considered over. In 2016 the tour also lands at the Roman Amphitheatre in Pompeii, where 45 years earlier Pink Floyd had filmed a historic concert movie: the event yields a live album, released in 2017.

While the feuds with Roger Waters over the history and legacy of Pink Floyd continue, in 2024 David Gilmour returns with what he calls his best solo work yet, “Luck And Strange“, with lyrics written by his wife, Polly Samson, his collaborator for almost two decades now. The new solo album comes with an ambitious tour, which sees him headline a series of shows at the Circus Maximus in Rome (27, 28 and 29 September and 1, 2 and 3 October) in a world premiere.