The 78-year-old Pink Floyd veteran David Gilmour has had a busy few weeks. He’s been promoting his first solo album since 2015, Luck and Strange, with shows booked for Rome, LA and New York. He’s cashed out the rights to Pink Floyd’s name, likeness and albums for a share of $400m, wisely keeping the publishing – so he’ll still get paid for covers of the songs he wrote.
There have been shots fired at ex-bandmate Roger Waters (“I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators like Putin,” Gilmour remarked drily); a surprise appearance during his youngest offspring Romany’s set in a Brighton pub. And a more unexpected collaboration with rapper Ice-T’s heavy metal outfit Body Count on a vicious version of Floyd classic Comfortably Numb. Perhaps one day he’ll return the favour and cover Body Count’s KKK Bitch.
Gilmour may not be prolific but he’s never lazy, and has long been attentive to the needs of other musicians, from the days when he tried to help ailing Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett start a solo career after being sacked by the band. Gilmour knows that in another timeline things could have been very different. It’s why his latest album, played almost in full tonight, has “luck” in its title. A lucky boy, born at a lucky time.
He skulks out on to the Albert Hall’s stage with hardly anyone noticing. Then, spotlit by a single white light, he begins the lambent guitar lines of 5AM, the prelude to his previous album Rattle That Lock. With the cheapest seats weighing in at £85, and anything decent about twice that, the crowd consists mostly of fans who grew up with Gilmour’s music. Any younger faces are accompanied by someone twice their age. So once the initial roars of recognition have died down, it’s a reverential, near-silent reception, closer to a theatre performance than Pink Floyd’s 1966 Double Giant Freak-Out All Night Raves at the Camden Roundhouse.
Dressed in shadowy colours, hunched over the six strings that have given him everything, Gilmour stands stock still as his fingers dance across the fretboard. His playing is so liquid, fulsome and lyrical it takes a while to process that he’s completely unaccompanied. All night, the sound is sensational, powerful and judiciously balanced – if obviously a little skewed towards the guitars. As the band fills out over the next few songs, the crowd relax a little and begin to enjoy the giddy excitement of sharing space with their hero. Like many of the new songs, Black Cat and Luck and Strange feel even more bluesy played live under Gilmour’s weathered yet reasonably powerful voice.
The show’s first set is excellent, with several visits to The Dark Side of the Moon greeted by mini-ovations and an unexpected amount of air drumming. Romany emerges with a Celtic harp for their lead vocal on Gilmour’s lovely version of the Montgolfier Brothers cult classic Between Two Points. A lightly folky version of Wish You Were Here is superb, and even lesser Pink Floyd songs such as Marooned and Fat Old Sun are delivered with a vehemence much less fragile than their earlier incarnations, all three guitarists playing off each other alongside the three-woman choir, keys and piano also filling out the sound. The first half ends with a brilliant version of High Hopes, with giant white balls appearing to emerge from the video screen into the auditorium and bouncing happily around the audience, right up to a beautiful coda.
The interval is nearly half an hour, though, and kills the gig’s momentum. A Great Day for Freedom and In Any Tongue, placed together, become lugubrious downers, and it increasingly feels as if each song is just marking time until it gets to Gilmour’s solo. The Great Gig in the Sky offers the underused choir a moment in the spotlight, but as the show enters its third hour some of the more elderly patrons are no longer hiding their yawns.
Gilmour’s tribute to Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright, A Boat Lies Waiting, is simply brilliant, a wonderfully emotional peak, but ending on three songs from Luck and Strange is a misjudgment. Thankfully, you can end a main set however you like if you have the unimpeachable genius of Comfortably Numb for an encore, and – though, alas, there’s no sign of Ice-T – Gilmour gives us two more astonishing, goosebump-swelling solos, says his goodbyes and slips away. The ovation is rightly rapturous.
David Gilmour is at the Royal Albert Hall, London, until 15 October. Luck and Strange is out now on Sony
