Every great Pink Floyd piece has felt like a collaborative effort by every one of the band members. Even though the group may look like the brainchild of either Roger Waters or David Gilmour depending on which song they are fronting, it took every member of the band to make them who they were in their early years. Then again, Gilmour may have had more of a hand in providing the low end than most people realise.
When the band was first starting, Gilmour was initially brought in as a replacement on guitar. Filling out the six-string texture in every one of the band’s songs, Gilmour took the reins where Syd Barrett could no longer play, operating as the lead guitarist once Barrett exited the fold due to his declining mental health.
While Gilmour would eventually flesh out his songwriting to become one of the biggest strengths of the band, Waters was known for taking the reins most of the time, serving as the band’s de facto leader when working through albums like A Saucerful of Secrets. Once the band started finding their voice on songs like ‘Echoes’ from the album Meddle, Gilmour began to make his voice heard from behind the fretboard.
When working on albums like Dark Side of the Moon, Waters and Gilmour seemed to be on equal footing, both penning incredible songs together and creating spellbinding musical passages like the massive guitar solo on ‘Time’ or the complex bass part plodding away throughout ‘Money’.
Looking back on the way Pink Floyd albums were constructed, Gilmour may have been stepping on toes Waters’ toes behind the fretboard. While Waters would present the songs to Gilmour in the studio, one of his successors would talk about how the guitarist would usually play the bass on the group’s later material.
When speaking to Guitar World, bassist Guy Pratt would say that Gilmour had a hand in putting the bass down on many of Floyd’s albums, saying, “David played half the bass on those records, and I never thought of Roger as a bass player. He was this sort of grand conceptualist. I used to think it was funny when people said it as a compliment, ‘You’re as good a bass player as Roger Waters.’ It was like, ‘Well, thanks. I think I’d rather write The Wall’”.
Once Prat was asked to audition for the band, Gilmour didn’t even seem to be focused on his technical skill as a bass player, either. When describing his audition with the song ‘Run Like Hell’, Pratt would recall, “I never actually played bass at the auditions. All I did was sing ‘Run Like Hell’. I don’t know what that says about what David thinks about the complexity of Pink Floyd’s bass playing. He was just like, ‘I know you can play the bass’”.
Then again, Waters’s role had taken a different turn by the end of his run in Floyd, serving as the one overseeing each song rather than focusing on whether he had a voice behind his instrument. As opposed to the traditional session musician role, Waters seemed to guide the songs in the right direction while Gilmour served as the bandleader, trying to bring everything to life.
