By Tom Mulhern
(Guitar Player, November '84)
STEPPING OUT FROM THE security of one of the world's best known hands to record and tour as a solo artist may seem to hold little peril. Yet David Gilmour's work apart from Pink Floyd is not without risk. In these changing times of rock's domination by video, past glories may mean little to a new generation of rock aficionados, and nothing is guaranteed to the individual striking out on his own. The 37-year-old English guitarist released his first solo album. David Gilmour in 1978, predating the rock video boom. Back then, Pink Floyd's Animals was still news. Dark Side Of The Moon was receiving heavy airplay, and Gilmour's solo effort was enthusiastically embraced by a ready-made audience. But times have changed. Assessing his second solo LP, this year's About Face, he states, "It's more like starting all over this time."
Although volatile and unpredictable, the record sales charts do give a fair indication of how a band's doing in the long run. Few albums reach the top: few remain on the charts for very long. Dark Side Of the Moon has been in the top 200 for more than 11 years, attesting to Pink Floyd's tremendous staying power. Such sales are even more remarkable since, in the ensuing decade, the band has produced another four successful albums: Wish You Were Here, Animals, their 1979 hit The Wall (with its accompanying movie), and The Final Cut. And still, as new Pink Floyd albums climb the charts and then slide off, Dark Side continues on the most wanted list.
The group always changed its sound and progressed slowly but surely. However, with the turning point of Dark Side in 1973, their first #1 album in the U.S. and an audio fanatic's headphone pleasure cruise, David Gilmour, bassist Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist Richard Wright demonstrated just how much they had matured, individually and as a whole.
The guitarist's first solo album, David Gilmour, was less of a departure from Pink Floyd's style than About Face. It had more of a band sound, with the tight-knit trio of Gilmour, bassist Rick Wills, and drummer Willie Wilson producing such semi-hits as ''There's No Way Out Of Here." And it did offer a glimpse of what Gilmour could deliver when he was in charge of the songwriting, producing, and arranging with neither the aid nor the encumbrance of his Pink Floyd bandmates.
The Wall marked a dramatic upheaval in Gilmour's approach to guitar, as evidenced on solos in songs such as "Another Brick In The Wall, Part II," and "Comfortably Numb". The lead sound was cleaner and more defined, distinct and separate from his rhythm work. His lines had become far more piercing, less a part of a grand orchestration. A short but massive tour was undertaken to promote The Wall, the concerts featuring onstage cinema, additional sidemen, massive puppets, a giant wall being constructed and then demolished, and lots of lights. The more than three years tied up with the album, tour, and movie seemed to take their toll. The follow-up LP The Final Cut, was anticlimactic, settling into many of The Wall's sounds and moods largely due to Roger Waters' strong hand in the writing and choice of songs (Waters solo LP The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking is laden with similar textures and subject matter).
Pink Floyd is currently in one of its many periods of apparent inactivity (some speculate on the disintegration of the band, although no one closely involved with the group will elaborate). Gilmour's About Face, while exhibiting traces of Floyd music, is a stylistic quantum leap from his 1978 release, revealing his expanded scope both as guitarist and songwriter. From a creator of spacey, floating, phase-shifted and echo-enhanced textures in the '70s has emerged the David Gilmour of the '80s with a sharper, harder-edged sound. The songs are more polished, and they feature heavy-duty side-men- Toto's drummer Jeff Porcaro, bassist Dino Palladino and keyboardists Steve Winwood and Jon Lord, among others. "Blue Light,'' "Murder," and "All Lovers Are Deranged" receive substantial airplay, and Gilmour has also stepped into a couple of rock videos. In the summer of '84, he toured the U.S., Europe, and Canada with co-guitarist Mick Ralphs (Bad Company), bassist Mickey Feat, drummer Chris Slade, keyboardist Gregg Dechart, percussionist Jodi Linscott, and saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft.
Last profiled in the May '79 Guitar Player, Gilmour discusses the differences between his two solo outings, his metamorphosis within Pink Floyd, the merits and drawbacks of sell-producing an album, and the ever-changing electronic complement that helps him create one of the most distinctive sounds in rock guitar.
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YOUR FIRST SOLO ALBUM seemed more band-oriented than the second. Was there a conscious decision to change the approach?
The new one was done initially as a four-piece band for all the basic tracks, but people aren't available for that long a time, and you have to use whoever you can get by the day. Jeff Porcaro, Pino Palladino, and Ian Kewley are all in hands, so they can't just sit around for months waiting to finish off the little bits on my album.
Were you planning early on to have a different band for the road?
I thought that there was a probability that I would need different bands, for the road and for the studio, but I never like to limit myself in any way, by-for example scheduling one hand at the outset for the whole project. I wanted to get the best people to do various things that happened at the time. And if the best people for the album were different from the best people for the tour, then so be it.
How much time did you spend preparing for the album?
I started making demos in early '83, and went into the studio in the middle of July. I didn't get to work with the four basic musicians until we went into the studio.
You used a lot more acoustic guitar on About Face than on the first one. Were you more comfortable with it?
It's just the chance of the moment, you know, those particular songs you've written that feel right. You just use whatever instrument seems to be right at the time.
Do you work out your songs primarily on acoustic or electric?
I work them out on anything that comes to mind. Piano, organ, synthesizer, acoustic or electric guitar. When you pick up an acoustic, for example, certain ideas tend to come-you tend to move into certain areas musically. And they're very different from the ones you move into when you pick up an electric guitar.
You're best known for using a Strat, yet on the new album you're shown holding an Esquire or a Tele.
It's a converted Esquire. I started on a Telecaster actually, before I joined Pink Floyd, and it was the first really good guitar I had. I've used Telecasters all the way through, but I've used Strats a bit more. The guitar on the cover is not particularly significant. I play it on one or two tracks, but I play all sorts of other guitars as well.
What kind of onstage gear are you using?
Well, I've got the Roland SCC-700 pedal board system with a bunch of effects on it. You don't have to use just the ones on the board; you can run out to all sorts of other things. Basically, I'm using standard fuzz boxes, overdrive units, choruses, DDLs. I have two new 100-watt Fender Twin Reverb heads running to two 4xl2 cabinets each-two WEM cabinets with Fane Crescendo speakers and two Marshall cabinets with Celestions. I felt like a change in amps this time, and I tried out the new Fenders and liked them, so I thought I'd get a couple.
What are some of your more unusual effects?
I just got one of the new Roland DD-2 footpedal digital delays. It's very, very good, and it goes right on the pedalboard. I'm using all different stuff from what I've used before, mostly Boss things. I'm also using a Boogie amplifier as an overdrive unit. I can just patch it in by using a footswitch on the pedalboard. I also have a couple of MXR DDLs. That's it, really. All standard stuff, all off-the-shelf gear When I got the pedalboard, I found it too inflexible, so the last send and return on it go to a separate little box, which is connected to my DDLs and a Pete Cornish volume pedal; it's just a simple pot in a pedal. I put that in last on each of my presets, in addition to any of my other presets. That way, I can switch my volume pedal and two DDLs in and out separately from the presets.
Are you using a wireless system?
Yeah, the Schaffer-Vega Diversity System. Occasionally, you get rooms that have very high RF [radio frequencies], and then I can't use it. But that's very rare. Out of about three months of touring. I've only not been able to use it two or three times.
On "Until We Sleep" there's a dive-bombing tremolo effect on the guitar toward the end? Do you find that such radical string bending puts the guitar out of tune?
No, I push 'em as far as I can push 'em sometimes [laughs]. It depends on the string, too. The G seems to be the one you can push the farthest. I can sometimes push them up about three tones or so.
Years ago, you occasionally used a slide in your right hand while fretting notes and chords.
It was not really playing the slide guitar-it was more like making spaceship noises. But I usually hold the slide in my left hand. I mean, I don't really use bottleneck slides, and I usually work on some sort of a lap instrument if I'm going to play that style. I don't believe there's slide on About Face, though.
What kind of slide did you employ on the first album?
I used a steel one like for a lap steel. I've got a Fender pedal steel, which I use for slide, and I also have a couple of cheap Japanese slide guitars with Fender electronics that I used to play onstage. At the time, the Fender lap steels seemed too expensive to me, and I was just too tight to spend the money. I've got the one Fender pedal steel, but I really don't use the pedals. I use both a pick and fingerpicking on them. I pick with my fingers -no fingerpicks.
On "No Way, "did you use any muting techniques with the slide?
A bit. I use the edge of my right hand to keep the other strings from ringing randomly. I also dampen the strings behind the bar with the back of my left hand. It's all done in a lap sort of fashion, not in an upright position.
The steel-string on "Murder "is one of the more prominent acoustic guitar parts currently getting airplay.
That's a Martin D-35, I believe. I just miked it, and at the beginning of the song it had a capo at about the 3rd fret. It was standard tuning otherwise.
Do you use a pick on acoustic guitar?
On that number, I did. But it depends on whether I'm strumming or picking. If I want to pick individual notes, I'll just use my fingers.
The fretless bass is also quite prominent in that song.
Well, the guy I got to do the song, Pino Palladino, is a fretless player. He doesn't play fretted bass at all, really. There's no fretted bass on the whole album.
Did the potential for inaccurate intonation bother you at first?
No. I love the fretless bass. Personally, if I were a bass player, I'd give up fretted basses. On the demos for the album, I played fretless myself on all the songs because I like the sound, and I can play it enough to do demos. I chose Pino because he is a brilliant player. There is a Fairlight synthesizer doing the bass pad on "Until We Sleep," but other than that, it's all fretless.
On the second half of Murder, there is a really massive guitar sound. It 's almost a trademark of yours. How do you get it?
I try different things every time, because the old tricks never seem to work quite right whenever you try them again [laughs]. It's just a lot of fiddling around with a bunch of things until it sounds right. And I usually wind up fiddling around with fuzz boxes and guitars and DDLs.
Do you record with your amp in a large room to get the ambiance?
I've found that if you use a big amp, it only works in big rooms. And little amps only work in little rooms. I've got Fender amps, tiny little things, that sound enormous sometimes if you get them in the right place. But most of the stuff that sounds like that comes from fairly large amplifiers in fairly large rooms.
Do you ever just plug in direct to the mixing console?
Not very often, but it has happened once in a while. The solo on "Another Brick In The Wall, Part II" [The Wall] was done straight into the board. After it was recorded, the signal was then put through an amplifier. So we added a little bit of amplifier sound to it afterwards.
Do you have any problems with shielding on the Strat's single-coil pickups?
Like the wireless systems, it's usually not a problem. Once in a while we get interference from the lighting systems, and it's a pain in the neck, but it's very, very rare.
Have you ever considered using, say, a Les Paul or an ES-335 in addition to the Strat and the Tele?
I can't really get on with them that well. I don't really feel comfortable with them. I don't know why, though. I've just always been with Fenders, and I just haven't managed to make the change. I've got a hybrid guitar that's sort of like a Strat with a tremolo and a humbucking pickup. I find that less and less do I play guitars without tremolos.
Do you find that the tremolo unit tends to make you put your vibrato emphasis mainly into your right hand?
I use both fairly indiscriminately. I mean, I can be in the middle of a solo and do one note's vibrato with my finger, and then the next one with the tremolo bar. It's a different sort of sound. I don't plan to use both; I just play it without thinking.
Do you prefer stock tremolo models on your Strats?
I've got a Kahler on one Stratocaster that I've been using for a bit, and I like what it does. But I'm not quite sure how it affects the instrument. For this tour, I went up to the Fender warehouse in London, and tried out a lot of Fender Vintage Series Strats, and I picked out a couple to use on this tour. I didn't want to take out some of my older, nicer, more valuable instruments.
As a rule, do you leave all the springs in the unit?
It depends. Sometimes I have three, sometimes four. Then I just adjust the tremolo up until it feels right with my gauge of strings and everything else. I don't find that I have too much trouble with it going out of tune, either. There are a lot of little things to make it go better, but it's never been too severe a problem for me. The white Stratocaster that I use during most of my set is brand new, just out of the box a few months ago, and nothing has been altered on it, apart from screwdriver adjustments you can do for yourself. It's absolutely stock.
Toward the end of 'You Know I'm Right, "there's a strong rippling effect. Did you use a tremolo or an electronic vibrato?
Any vibrato was just done with the vibrato bar.
Have you tried any electronic vibrato pedals?
Well, I used a vibrato pedal on "Until We Sleep," for a sort of guitar noise. I have the vibrato running in time to the drums on that track.
Do you find that it's harder to control than the hand tremolo?
Well, it's very hard to set up because no one's ever made a unit to go in time to the drums before [laughs]. I'd like to have one made.
There are lots of multi-tracked guitars on the albums. In concert, where you don't have the luxury of multiple tracks, do you have to make compromises?
I usually have a second guitar player along. This time, it's Mick Ralphs. I sort of work out the bits that I think are important to have in the songs, and try to get one of us to be able to do any bit that is important at any one moment. So we sort of make up a composite guitar part for each track. Sometimes you miss things, and sometimes you can have the synth play a part.
Do you feel that you have to radically restructure some arrangements?
Not really; it doesn't feel that way. We just go in and bang about in rehearsal, and I listen to rehearsal tapes to find out what kinds of things are missing. Then we put them in. Generally, I just leave people to their own devices to come up with stuff.
Mick is also using a Strat. Does this give a more cohesive sound?
I guess so, yeah. But I find details like that not very important. I mean, Mick could easily be using a Les Paul if he wanted to. It wouldn't really make any difference. I love Les Pauls, and what people do with them. But I use a Strat because I'm comfy on it. I like the sound and the feeling from a Strat. The sound and the feeling that I like the best just happens to be Fender.
"Blue Light "has a fabulous rapid groove. It seems almost uncharacteristic - very much unlike Pink Floyd. Is it a pent-up energy explosion?
Well, "Blue Light" is partly accident, partly ideas given by myself or other people that have combined to make the track, as you say, slightly different. But I'm not trying to sound like Pink Floyd or anything else. More like blundering along [laughs], taking each moment and trying to make something out of it. "Blue Light" is in fact two separate tracks recorded at the same tempo. Afterwards, neither was interesting enough individually, so we just hacked them up with a scissors, made up a new drum part, and got the bass player to redo his part. It was hundreds of pieces of 2" tape just stuck together. [Producer] Bob Ezrin suggested putting the brass parts on them.
Why use brass instead of, say, a Fairlight or a lot of guitars?
It's as simple as someone saying, "Hey, let's try some brass." And you go, "Hey, why not?" lt's just that simple. If that thing works, and if you like it, you don't need to go any further.
For the really staccato, evenly picked Strat on the song, do you use any special setting or picking technique?
No, most of the time I'm just on the treble pickup.
Do you play closer to the bridge for more brightness?
You know, I don't know. I never looked. I try not to analyze what I'm doing on the guitar too much. I just try to play so that it comes out with some sort of melody and meaning to me. It's very hard to describe.
It's more instinctive, then.
I hope so. I try to leave the instincts open at all times.
What makes you decide where to put a solo?" "Blue Light's" solo is closer to the end of the song, for instance.
Yeah. There wasn't going to be a solo, and it was just going to be a fade-out. I was finishing the vocals on the last day of recording before we mixed. For the amusement of Bob Ezrin and the engineer in the other room, I made a silly speech, and they left the tape running after the vocals ended. So that's mixed in there slightly. And then Bob said, "Now that you've got that silly speech on there, maybe we should stick a little guitar solo on the end." So, I said okay. Then we thought, how can we do it? Because we were in a mixing room. We didn't have any amplifiers with us, so we just plugged a Rockman into the mixer. Those Rockmans are great.
For the squealing sounds, do you bring your pick in closer to your fingers?
I sort of deaden a note with the thumb after I pick it. It's like pick and then thumb skin to get those harmonics.
In other places you're right on the edge of feedback.
Well, I like to be. If I want to get feedback, I just go into the studio and stay close to the amp. I control it with great difficulty I like it to he at that point where it's all running away from you and you're only just about in control. In fact, I sometimes like it when I'm not sure whether I'm in control or the guitar and the amplifier are.
Do you prefer any one pickup over the others for getting feedback?
I use the treble pickup virtually all the time.
When you do the solos live. Do you extend them or cut loose more?
Oh, yes. Some of them go on interminably long [laughs]. Well, not too long. I hope. For a lot of the songs, in the studio you have to cut them down, chop bits out just to get them on the record.
Do you have a preference for studio or live work?
They seem to have little to do with each other, really. I think they're just different media, In the studio, I can be, for instance, ten vocalists, five or six guitar players, and all sorts of things when I'm aiming for perfection. I can add all sorts of things that aren't necessarily important. Onstage, the moment is the important thing, the moment that is here and gone. Making horrible mistakes onstage doesn't matter. The moment is gone as soon as it's gone. On a record, you can get really wild doing a solo. Anytime I get wild doing a guitar solo, I usually drop a few clangers. That's quite normal. I don't mind that. You restrict yourself if you play for safety margins, if you only play what you know you're going to get away with. In the studio, I like to do a number of solos that aren't playing it sale, and then make up one good one out of all the wild bits that do work. I often make up a composite track from three or four solos, and make certain that I don't have any mistakes in there, because who wants to listen to mistakes for the next 20 years?
Once the mix is done, and the album comes out, do you go back and learn the solos for onstage performance?
I get influenced by the solo. Sometimes I've heard it so many times or been so close to it that I actually play solos note-for-note, but not very often. The solo in "Blue Light," for example, is very short and very specific, and I tend to play that same solo. But on things like the end of "Murder" or the end of "Until We Sleep," I don't play what's on the record at all.
On "Let's Get Metaphysical," there's a beautiful guitar part with an orchestra. Did you record the guitar first and add the orchestra, or vice versa?
I wrote out the chord structure and made a demo with a guitar line on it, and I also recorded various melody lines that had come into my head. And Michael Kamen, in arranging, used some of my melody lines and some of the guitar lines, and incorporated them into the string parts. We had a click track, and the strings were recorded first. We then did the guitar promptly afterwards.
The guitar was hanging on the edge of feedback again. What was your basic guitar setup in the studio?
It changes all the time. At the moment, the sound that I'm using a lot of the time is going through a Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal to a Boogie amp on overdrive, out of the Boogie amplifier to a DDL, and then on into a regular Fender amplifier.
When you're playing in the studio, do you put the echo on right away, or do you add it later?
I use a DDL on it a little bit most of the time, because I find that it stops the fuzz box from sounding like a fuzz box. It smoothes off the unpleasant, raw frequencies that you get from the fuzz box. Then you get a nice sort of sound - that's what the Boogie does as well. That means that I get the sustain on the high notes of the Fender, which are usually hard to get on Fenders. Then I get it to smooth out a little bit.
Having used many electronic effects since the '60s, have you found that the changes in technology have made it easier to find certain sounds?
I don't know. I've never found it that difficult to get sounds. They've always been there. They just change. I can't tell sometimes if the old ways worked better or worse. I sometimes try to setup things that I did 15 years ago, and I can't get them to work. That's probably because I've forgotten how I used to make them work. These things are always very fine adjustments of many, many knobs, very minor tweaking in all sorts of directions until things are just right. It's purely esthetics that govern it, your personal ears at that moment. For example, in the studio, I can go in and get a guitar and an amplifier to sound perfect-to me. And then the next day I just turn the mains on, and don't touch anything else at all, and it sounds completely different. And you hate it. You wind up going for a different guitar, different everything.
So, it may be nothing more than an aural illusion.
Yes. It could quite easily be, but I don't really know.
Do you find that being able to quickly change echo times and other parameters on newer devices makes your work easier?
Yes. I change my echo settings fairly often in concert. I have two units, and I have different echo settings on both. There are times when I have both running at the same time for certain effects. I usually try, in solos, to set the DDLs to have some rhythmic time signature in common with the tune. Because the notes all intertwine, it doesn't matter anyway, but I find that I usually set them on a triplet. It's a sort of melodic delay to use. That may be just my fantasy; I don't know. That's another one of the personal esthetic judgments that you use in trying to get something to sound nice to yourself.
Do you use the amplifier's reverb as well?
No. I turn it off.
Have you tried out any guitar synthesizers?
I tried out one of the new Rolands before this tour, and it was too complicated to come to grips with and think that I'd be able to take it on the road with me this time. But I'm considering getting one.
Pink Floyd was always known for being heavily electronics-oriented, and it would seem that a guitar synthesizer would have fit in fairly easily. Was there any reason for not employing it?
I've never thought of us as being particularly ahead of technology, myself. I know lots of people do, but I don't think of us as being that way. I can adapt to things, and I'm not bad at learning things. I can get them together eventually. But that's not what I'm really aiming for-the use of technology. I mean, I'll take anything that comes if it's easy and it works. And I certainly don't see why I might not get into something like that. It's all about getting sounds and textures and stuff, whatever way you can find them. Some of the things we did with the early Pink Floyd material, which sounds incredibly electronic, was just Italian Farfisa organs through delays. We never even had synthesizers for the first four or five years that I was with the band. And the heyday of our most electronic-sounding music was before synthesizers had really been invented. We started using synthesizers-proper ones-on Dark Side Of The Moon. We may have used a synthesizer on Obscured By Clouds, the soundtrack that came out between Meddle and Dark Side. That was an EMS Synth.
Didn't you use a Synthi Hi-Fli [an early-70s multiple processing unit designed to give a synthesizer-like texture to guitar]?
Yes. I actually still have the two original Synthi Hi-Fli prototypes. It was a vast, vast expense. Then they were cheapened up to sell on the market. I don't remember how they work very well, because I only used them a couple of times. I haven't touched them in a long, long time, in fact, I've got a couple of them sitting in boxes that haven't been opened in about 10 years.
You had a different pedalboard a while back.
Yes. Pete Cornish has made a couple for me over the past few years. But they're basically made to my own design. He's the best guy in London, so everyone naturally goes to him. They're very well made. They're built on a wooden frame, all the switches are protected, and the inside is painted with shielding paint. I don't know how other people have theirs, hut I had a pedalboard made years ago, and I established various principles that I wanted on my pedalboard at that time. Pete Cornish added some of his ideas to some of my ideas, and made me up a board that was just what I needed. I know he's used some of my ideas on other people's pedalboards since then. For me, it's just a very simple thing, just the least complicated you can get.
Over the past several years, your style has changed somewhat.
I don't really perceive any changes. I mean, I don't sit around and analyze what I used to do and what I do now, and the differences. I think of myself as a person who plans quite a lot, but when I get to moments like this, I realize that a lot of the time I'm not planning at all [laughs]. Just going for whatever feels right at that moment. And that makes it hard to explain whatever I was originally trying to do, because I don't really know.
Do you listen to your older material very much?
Not very often.
What are your impressions of having a new hand in effect, starting over-after working for so long to establish Pink Floyd?
It's not easy. There's an awful lot of people who used to see Pink Floyd and buy Pink Floyd records. And I think we're moving into another generation; those people aren't really buying that many records or going out to concerts anymore. The people who are buying records and going out to concerts tend to be quite young. It's a very difficult time. My first solo album, which came out a few years ago, was much easier to sell than this one. It's more like starting all over this time. You've got to build up audiences.
Do you think there been a big change in the musical climate overall?
I have no idea what it is, to tell you the truth.
Dark Side Of The Moon is still on the charts after more than 11 years. It is the longest-running album on the charts. What are your feelings about that?
What do you want me to say? I mean, it pleases me. I don't understand it, but I'm very happy.
How do you gauge the importance of video right now?
The record companies certainly think it's very, very important. It seems to have an effect. I really don't know how important it is, and I don't know how involved in this I want to get. For recording artists who are thinking specifically about the video from the outset, it's a wonderful new thing to have available to you. I think there's a whole middle area of songs where it really doesn't matter too much - bouncy uptempo pop songs. To make one is fine, if you get what you want out of it, which doesn't happen very often. Most people get some director who doesn't really understand the song and doesn't care about it anyway. He just wants to gratify his own ego, I suppose. He has his concept and wants to set your music to it. Then there's the case of other songs that you've written, a song that you've personally got a meaning for, that you don't want to become that specific to people where they have a fixed image. Because it takes away all your choices. You can imagine so many things; you can make your own personal movies to songs. So a lot of that will be taken away if you see a video. You always remember the original, the one that you've seen.
So you walk around with this image lodged in your head that comes out every time you hear a song.
Which may or may not he a very good one. But it will be the one fixed thing, whereas if you read a book, you make up each character yourself. You create the way they look, the sound of their voice, and the place that they live in. All that stuff comes alive to you. And when you see it in a movie, you're usually a bit disappointed. You don't remember your own imagined things after you've seen the movie, because the movie has then replaced them all. The same thing applies to video.
In doing The Wall, had a concept for the album, movie, and so forth been created at one time in advance?
Yes. Roger Waters said he wanted to make a movie of it right from the very outset, and we actually employed a scriptwriter and director and stuff right from the very beginning of making the album. We soon realized that it was going to he impossible to do two things in tandem, so we dumped the film project and said, Lets make the album, do the shows, and then do the film. So we put it off. We had actually gotten people on salary, but we had to change it.
It had been several years since your last double-album, Ummagumma, wasn't The Wall an awful lot of music to hit a listener with at one time?
Yes, it is an awful lot. A double-album is something that I've rarely ever liked from other people in the past, but I think The Wall works. The only problem we had was reducing it down from a triple-album to a double-album [laughs]- the length of songs and all that. Toward the end we were actually cutting chunks out of songs to fit the time. It's a long double-album.
Do you find that a project of that magnitude wears you down?
Yes. It's quite tiring. That's why we got someone in to co-produce. Bob Ezrin.
Do you work mostly on your own?
On my latest solo album, I started off on my own, producing for a couple of months, and got all the basic tracks done. I got Ezrin in then, I was getting too tired, because you waste a lot of time if you do it yourself. You can waste hours dome something that could have been fixed if you had someone with the right ear and the right attitude in the control room at that moment, who stopped you after 10 minutes and said, "Listen to this; I think we're on the wrong approach." Sometimes being out in the studio playing it, you can't see that the approach is wrong until you go back into the control room and hear it. Ezrin had a lot of good ideas for The Wall and About Face, but nobody's perfect. He had some bad ideas, too. We all do. But it's very useful to get so me one who's more or less neutral in there.
On "There's No Way Out Of Here", there's a harmonica-like sound at the beginning. It's hard to get a handle on what the instrument really is.
Good. That was the intention [laughs]. It's a fuzztone-distorted guitar double-tracked with a harmonica. I can't remember what kind of fuzztone I used on it, though.
Do you collect guitars? Are any especially near and dear?
Yes, and they're all sort of near and dear and favorite. I like them because they all have different sounds, and they make you play different ways when you pick them up. I've got an old National console slide lap steel, and an electric National in the shape of a map of America, and I've got a sort of wooden dobro-type National with the metal thing in the middle [the resonator]. I've played a steel-body dobro, but not seriously. I've got the Fender Stratocaster with serial number 0001, a whole hunch of Gretsches, and one or two Gibsons. I have played all of them at one time or another, and quite a lot of them have been on one track or another somewhere-old ones and new ones. I'm technology-minded to a certain extent, but only in as far as it can get me somewhere. I only think about it if I feel short of something that I want to achieve. Otherwise, I just muddle on. It's a tool.