{"id":95164,"date":"2025-05-12T11:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T11:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/95164\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T11:04:09","slug":"the-pink-floyd-song-david-gilmour-said-was-built-from-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/95164\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pink Floyd song David Gilmour said was built from nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pink<\/p>\n

(Credit: Far Out \/ Roger Tillberg \/ Alamy)<\/p>\n

For a moment, it looked like space rock giants Pink Floyd<\/a> may have slowly trundled toward a cult footnote in prog\u2019s 1970s heyday. Following their Anglo-surrealism foundings under the creative leadership of Syd Barrett, his departure in 1968 spelt a run of albums plagued with a nagging mush of directionless, psychedelic noodlings and half-baked concepts that lacked the focus of 1967\u2019s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn debut.<\/p>\n

While there are gems of brilliance in their artistic interregnum\u2014\u2019Echoes\u2019 is a stunning closer to 1971\u2019s\u00a0Meddle\u2014they would have seven albums behind them before reaching their creative and commercial peak.<\/p>\n

Fleshing out material for their eighth LP during concert rehearsals and live shows across 1972, Pink Floyd spent the best part of a year fine-tuning what became the guts of The Dark Side of the Moon. Exorcising the pressures of fame and the mental illness that plagued their former frontman, their new work pulled the band toward an infinitely more coherent and richer sonic plane of intrepid songcraft, innovative electronic textures and powerhouse session singers delivering a heady slice of aural cinema that encapsulated the ambitions of the album era.<\/p>\n

It was a blockbuster monster too, selling over 45 million reported sales and the fourth biggest selling album of all time. Shaping a unified work that veered through greed, isolation, dissociation and madness, principal songwriter Roger Waters<\/a> felt the record needed a conceptual closer to tie the record together. <\/p>\n

Lifting lyrics from the album\u2019s \u2018Breathe\u2019 opener, \u2018Eclipse\u2019 is seamlessly segued after \u2018Brain Damage\u2019 and travels a curious form of songwriting that forced guitarist David Gilmour to think inventively about how to embellish such a challenging sketch of a song. \u201cI remember working hard on making it build and adding harmonies that join in as you go through the song,\u201d he told Rolling Stone in 2011. \u201cBecause there\u2019s nothing to it\u2014there\u2019s no chorus, there\u2019s no middle eight, there\u2019s just a straight list. So, every four lines we\u2019ll do something different\u201d.<\/p>\n

The unusual arrangements that shroud \u2018Eclipse\u2019 afford the piece a powerful and cosmic sense of coda to The Dark Side of the Moon, given a circular thematic return by closing the finale with the same introductory 9\/8 heartbeat that opens the record with \u2018Speak\u2019\u2014a device they\u2019d revisit for The Wall\u2018s \u201cIsn\u2019t this where\u2026We came in\u201d looping motif.<\/p>\n

Lyrically cycling through the myriad facets of the human condition, across the sensory fervour of life to Man\u2019s many conflicts and stuggles in the material realm as well as in the heart, Waters always felt \u2018Eclipse\u2019s plumb of emotional depths eschewed cryptic allusions and shone with an accessible universality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see it as a riddle,\u201d Waters revealed in 1987\u2019s Pink Floyd: Bricks in the Wall. \u201cThe album uses the sun and the moon as symbols; the light and the dark; the good and the bad; the life force as opposed to the death force. I think it\u2019s a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the crucial detail which sets Pink Floyd apart in the world of prog\u2014if that\u2019s even an appropriate genre tag. While their contemporaries were dreaming up double-LP fantasy tales and ballet on ice, Pink Floyd wielded prog\u2019s artistic scope and ambitions to score work that penetrated the soul in all its anguish and torment.<\/p>\n

No synth wizards<\/a> or stodgy ten-minute drum solos to compensate for ideas\u2014\u2019Eclipse\u2019 was too busy hurtling toward a remote plane of space rock awe and intrepid spiritual study to ever suffer their peers\u2019 same fate of artistic oblivion.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n

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