David Gilmour just released a new album, Luck and Strange, and he’s about to kick off his first tour since 2016 — as for any other future career plans, he’s taking it day by day. Might this be his final tour? “Well, it could be, obviously,” he tells Andy Greene in an interview featured in the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. Gilmour dwells on mortality on the new album, which he co-wrote with his wife, Polly Samson, and he’s all too aware that we’ve already lost too many musicians from his generation. “I’m still here,” he says with a laugh.
Elsewhere in the interview, Gilmour breaks down the making of the new album, explains why he’s tired of drama with former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters, and much more. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Some highlights follow, or read a full transcript.
Gilmour is playing New York’s Madison Square Garden on the night of the U.S. presidential election — but the scheduling was far from intentional. “I wish I’d known about the election-night date before we book those dates,” he says. “And I think I’d have taken a day off on that day. Hey, but you know, you Yanks have got to do what you got to do! The election is your business. We’ve just had one here [in the U.K.] I suppose I like the idea of governments being run by grown ups, and in Britain I think we’ve slightly moved in that direction, and we’ll see how you get on over there.”
Gilmour hasn’t given “a second’s thought” to the possibility of a Pink Floyd biopic. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “No one has really suggested it. If someone wanted to do one about Pink Floyd, I can’t quite imagine how they’d do it. I don’t know what I’d say at that moment if it cropped up. But it hasn’t.”
He’s eager to sell the Floyd catalog. “To be rid of the decision-making and the arguments that are involved with keeping it going is my dream,” he says. “I’m not interested in that from a financial standpoint. I’m only interested in… getting out of the the mud bath that it has been quite a while.”
His conflicts with Roger Waters are “boring.” “It’s something I’ll talk about one day, but I’m not gonna talk about that right now,” he says. “It’s boring. It’s over. As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s and I’m a pretty old chap now… It seems so totally irrelevant to me now.… People talk about ‘the battle,’ but to me, it’s a one way thing that’s been going on since he left, with different levels of intensity.”
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