It’s said that all good things must come to an end. After the passing of keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008, Pink Floyd needed to be put to rest.
Floyd guitarist David Gilmour was clearly having trouble doing just that. It was his wife, the writer Polly Samson, who helped him close that chapter of his life and move on to focus on his solo career.
Samson was no stranger to the group's inner workings. Besides being Gilmour's wife, she collaborated with the prog rock greats on 1994’s The Division Bell.
And in the years after Wright's death, she helped him write the band's final chapter with their last album, The Endless River.
“David wanted something as a full stop to the whole Pink Floyd thing,” she tells Prog of her work on that album. Released in 2014, The Endless River was intended to be definitive — a tribute to Wright, and a swan song for one of progressive rock's most established bands.
It wouldn't be toured either; their last show together was at Live 8 in 2005, the first time that Gilmour, Wright, drummer Nick Mason and bass guitarist Roger Waters — who left the band in 1985 — had performed together in 23 years. After the album, Pink Floyd ceased to be.
The Endless River was predominantly instrumental, with ideas plucked from The Division Bell leftovers. Gilmour and Mason wanted to let the music do the talking.
But one song, “Louder Than Words,” became the outlier.
“I didn’t want to write lyrics for that album,” Samson admits. “I loved it so much as an instrumental album, and to impose lyrics without Rick being around felt presumptuous or wrong.”
Gilmour, however, persuaded her to do it. The song would be the punctuation mark he needed.
“So, without a piece of music, I wrote ‘Louder Than Words,’” she continues. “It was an easy lyric to write, because for years I’d noticed this thing: If you’re in a room with David, Nick and Rick — or as I was at Live 8, with David, Nick, Rick and Roger — nobody speaks. There’s nothing but awkward silences.
“They have no small talk with each other, they have no big talk with each other; they just do not speak. If you happen to be the unlucky person in the room, it’s the most awkward feeling you can imagine.
“And then they get onstage with their instruments and suddenly they’re so eloquent, and the way they communicate is beautiful. I wrote ‘Louder Than Words’ to express that feeling.”
With “Louder Than Words” as its lead single, The Endless River was a commercial success. Despite middling reactions from critics, the song's strength made it Amazon’s most pre-ordered album. Vinyl copies flew off the shelves at a speed not seen since 1997, and it topped the charts in various countries.
By that point, Gilmour had already released three solo albums: David Gilmour (1978), About Face (1984) and On an Island (2006). But as he’s recently admitted, his solo career has been stop-and-start at best all along. With 2015’s Rattle That Lock, he had a chance for a fresh start.
Samson calls her husband a “ponderous” conversationalist, saying that he primarily “communicates through the guitar,” thus necessitating Samson's lyrical talents. As work on Rattle That Lock began, however, she pushed for change. She adopted a nurturing, almost maternal approach to broaden her husband’s horizons.
“I’d just written the lyrics to [the song] ‘Rattle That Lock,’ which David was very keen on. But I said, ‘I’m not writing another one now until you’ve written one,’” she says. “It was a bit like trying to get a child to do their math homework. I had to shut him in a room with a blank paper, and he would stare at that blank paper. I’d come in with a cup of tea and say: ‘How’s it going?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, not very well.’
“Then we’d go for a walk and talk about what he was trying to write about, and it was like squeezing the words out of him. In the end, he got there, and I think they’re two very fine lyrics. But it took a lot of work.”
Granted, the world had to wait another nine years for a follow-up, but Luck and Strange — a record he deems on par with The Dark Side of the Moon — proved that patience is a virtue. Whether or not the guitarist keeps to his word that he'll complete his next record “within the next year or two,” Gilmour is clearly focused on the future.
“It’s impossible to go back there without Rick Wright, and I wouldn’t want to,” he told Guitar Player late last year. “It’s all done.”
Elsewhere, the guitarist has recalled the first moment he saw Jimi Hendrix play, and what happened when one of his “Animals” solos was completely erased.
