Behind the Myth

There's a Pink Floyd track that never stops embarrassing David Gilmour. The English guitarist has come close to disowning it in no uncertain terms (“it makes me sick, I've never listened to it again”), despite its modest fame and the even greater credibility of the album it appears on, namely the double “Ummagumma“. But why all this discomfort? The reasons lie above all in the particular context in which the track in question was born…

In 1969, during a delicate transitional phase for the English band, David Gilmour wrote what was his first composition for the group: “The Narrow Way”, a suite of over twelve minutes included, as mentioned, on the double album “Ummagumma”. It's a track the guitarist now listens back to with evident unease. Not because of its technical quality, but because of what it represents: the still uncertain attempt to find his own identity after the departure of Syd Barrett. “Well, we'd decided to make that bloody album, and that each of us would write a track on our own,” Gilmour said in 1983. “It was really mostly desperation: trying to come up with something to do, something to write on my own. I'd never written anything before, I went into the studio and started messing about, piecing together bits and fragments. I haven't listened to it in years. I have no idea what it sounds like.”

When Gilmour permanently joined the band, during the making of “A Saucerful Of Secrets“, the initial idea was for him to stand alongside Syd Barrett live, in case of an eventual recovery. It soon became clear, however, that this would never be possible. The creative void left by the founder was enormous, and in the early months Gilmour moved through a state of bewilderment. With hindsight, the guitarist has admitted that during that period he even ended up imitating him. Only later did he understand just how unrepeatable Barrett's eccentric, visionary aesthetic truly was.

“Ummagumma” was conceived as a project split into two parts: a live record and a studio one, on which each member would contribute an autonomous track, without creative input from the others.

Besides Gilmour's suite, the studio side included Richard Wright's “Sysyphus”, Nick Mason's “The Grand Vizier's Garden Party”, “Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict”, and Roger Waters' “The Narrow Way”, alongside the collective tracks “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “A Saucerful Of Secrets”.

The album also opened with a live version of “Astronomy Domine”, originally released on “The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn“.

"The Narrow Way" thus remains a unicum in the Floyd catalogue: it's the only official track by the band recorded entirely by Gilmour on his own. In the suite – structured in three parts and running 12 minutes and 17 seconds – the guitarist plays guitar, bass, piano, organ, mellotron, percussion and drums, as well as handling the vocal parts in the third section. This last part, the only one with lyrics, alternates images of darkness and hope, offering a subdued meditation on mortality and one's own individual path. One emblematic passage reads:

Following the path as it leads towards

The darkness in the north

Weary stranger’s faces show their sympathy

They’ve seen that hope before

In trying to give the track a finished shape, Gilmour even went so far as to ask Waters for help with the lyrics. He recounted having called him, almost begging him to write the words for him. The reply was blunt: "Do it yourself." Then the line went dead. Over time, Gilmour has come to admit that refusal was probably the necessary push that led him to find a voice of his own. At the time, though, he experienced it as a moment of utter bewilderment.

In the years that followed, the guitarist never hid his discomfort with that phase of Pink Floyd's career. In a 1995 interview he went as far as calling both "Ummagumma" and "Atom Heart Mother" "pretty horrible" works, at most salvaging part of the live record, while still criticizing its recording quality. And yet "Ummagumma" reached number five on the British charts and made it onto the Billboard 200, while "Atom Heart Mother" is regarded by many – this writer included – as one of their absolute peaks.

There's nothing left to conclude but that, fortunately, Pink Floyd chose the career of musicians and not that of music critics…

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27/03/2026