There aren’t many guitarists who can say they were there when Pink Floyd formed and then went on to perform with two of their key members. Tim Renwick is the exception.
The English guitarist’s association with the Floyd stretches far back. He attended Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he met future Floyd members Syd Barrett and Roger Waters. Renwick was around as Barrett's mental health began to unravel in 1967 (Alice Cooper told Guitar Player about witnessing his deterioration up close). He was also friends with David Gilmour and saw him perform with his pre-Floyd group Jokers Wild. Many years later, he became the go-to guitarist for the solo tours of Gilmour and Waters.
In between, Renwick carved out his own career. In addition to performing on David Bowie’s self-titled 1969 album (famous for its hit track “Space Oddity”) and doing session work with Eric Clapton and Elton John, he was a guitarist with English outfit Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, who scored a couple of modest U.S. hits with “(I Don't Want to Love You But) You Got Me Anyway” in 1973 and “Arms of Mary” in 1976.
But it was with folk-rocker Al Stewart that Renwick firmly established his reputation. He contributed his six-string stylings to most of Stewart’s 1970s output, including his 1976 hi album Year of the Cat. The title track showcases Renwick’s hauntingly melodic guitar work as he performs the song’s acoustic and electric solos.
In the years that followed, he found himself in demand with his old Cambridgeshire mates GIlmour and Waters. In 1984, Waters invited him to join the tour for his album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, where Renwick shared guitar duties with Eric Clapton. A few years later, in 1987, Gilmour asked him to join Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. He found the experiences couldn’t have been more different.
“Roger was always quiet when I first knew him, but by the time I actually got to play in his band, he was a bit difficult,” he reveals. “He was very determined to rule everything. He had a problem passing out responsibility to people. He had to sort of do everything for himself, which made him an uncomfortable figure to work with really.
“But when I worked with David, he was much more casual,” he continues. “He'd just let people get into the swing of things without leaning on them too heavily. So, you could express yourself a bit more around him, which was more fun, obviously. So that was the difference between them. David was a far more relaxed person to work with and brought the best out of people.”
With that said, Renwick offered some anecdotes about Pink Floyd’s three guitarists.
Syd Barrett
“I first saw them when they were starting out, and Syd Barrett was very much the leader of the band. I got to know him a bit and he was really lovely, a very wide-eyed and quite amusing young chap. I was told later that pretty much all his material from the first couple of Pink Floyd albums, was written when he was an early teenager, so it was all stuff that he had in his back pocket already as it were.
“They had early success with their singles ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Apples and Oranges,’ but they didn't really get taken seriously, apart from in London where the psychedelic thing was happening in a much bigger way than anywhere else. And so they were struggling a bit. They'd play gigs out of town that weren't very terribly well attended.
“And Syd was living in a house with a bunch of people that were doing quite a large amount of psychedelic drugs, so he was completely going off his tree. I saw him later in London and hardly recognized him. He was just completely different and very difficult to communicate with. He would answer questions about four minutes after you'd asked them and all completely out of sync.
“And there were wild stories of him turning up at gigs, turning his back to the audience and not playing. He’d be just waving his arms around which became quite a common thing, and was quite strange.”
“Syd had been the main writer in the band, but once he left, David — who’d already been hired to help out due to Syd’s behavior — sort of took over and had a lot of space and room to fill. As Syd’s guitar playing was pretty strange and quite unusual, David basically had to take a lot of those ideas and make them much more musical, and he also brought melody to the band in a big way.
“At the same time, Roger also began to write, but it took a while for him to kind of get going on that.”
Roger Waters
“I got along with him very well when we were rehearsing for the Pros and Cons tour. It was just the two of us.
“But once we actually got involved with the band, he really became a bit too bossy. It wasn't as lighthearted as it could have been. I have to say he took everything very seriously, and tended to want everything to sound exactly the same as the record.
“And he was very vigilant in pointing things out. If you didn't quite play something exactly right or changed the feel of something, he would point that out and let you know that he wanted it to be exactly as close to the record as it possibly could be.”
“It has to be said that Roger was a bit resentful of the fact that whenever Eric Clapton got up and played a solo, the place would erupt. People would get their lighters out and there would be a tremendous outpouring of applause.
“And that annoyed Roger quite a lot because rightly or wrongly, he felt that the audience weren't actually listening to the songs. They were just watching out for what Eric was doing. So there was a certain amount of resentment there.”
David Gilmour
“Jokers Wild was a really good, and popular band, especially with the Cambridge college student set. They used to do a lot of Beach Boys numbers and stuff with three and four-part harmonies. Obviously, David’s playing was good, but the guitar wasn’t at the forefront so, there wasn’t much actual guitar playing or a great deal of soloing involved.
“But he was always a bit of a guitar hero. He was the sort of person that, if you walked into a room, everyone would stop talking. He was quite staggeringly good looking and had quite a presence to him as well.”
“A few years later, when I was in Sutherland Brothers & Quiver, David helped us out a lot. He came and did a bit of production, worked on our demos and things for songs, and we recorded at his home studio. He used to come along and jam at gigs but because we never announced it. No one ever knew who it was.”
“There's not really that much spoken about him and his philanthropy — for example, his work with Kate Bush and how very helpful he was to her. He actually fronted the money, paid for the arrangements to be done and all kinds of stuff. He obviously could see that she had a fantastic amount of talent.
“David also made sure she wasn't exposed to too much rock and roll nonsense when she was young. He kind of held her back in a way too, so she had time to sort of develop and grow up and be able to actually deal with the pressures of the business.”
