David Gilmour tours are very rare, very brief, and often hit only a handful of cities. But he’s always been good about capturing at least one show on film so that fans all over the world can experience what they missed. Over the past 40 years, he’s shot solo gigs at London’s Hammersmith Odeon (1984), London’s Royal Festival Hall (2002), London’s Royal Albert Hall (2006), Poland’s Gdańsk Shipyard (2006), and Italy’s Amphitheatre of Pompeii (2016).
His newest concert film is Live at the Circus Maximus, Rome. It’s a chronicle of three shows he played at the historic Circus Maximus in Rome, Italy, in October 2024 on his Luck and Strange tour. It’s coming to movie theaters and IMAX screens on Sept. 17, and will be released as part of a double Blu-ray/3-DVD box set on Oct. 17. (A super deluxe edition of the set will also feature The Luck and Strange Concerts, featuring footage from other Luck and Strange gigs in America and Europe.)
We hopped on Zoom with Gilmour to talk about the Circus Maximus movie, the chances of a future tour, Pink Floyd‘s vault of unreleased music, his impending 80th birthday, and the possibility of a Sphere residency.
When you start plotting a tour, are you already thinking about ways to capture it on film?
Capturing a tour for posterity, which is as much for me as it is for anyone else, is obviously something that I like to do. And the Circus Maximus, which was built originally to contain 150,000 people, then was enlarged by Julius Caesar up to 250,000 people, of which we only use a tiny bit, is one of my favorite venues. As you probably know, I am very keen on performing in those historical sites.
It looks great for the filming. You have the views of Rome and the trees, and the stadium. And you can imagine the chariots racing around there at high speed.
You’ve shot other shows at the Royal Albert Hall, Gdańsk, and Pompeii. Did you want to film one this time that looks different than those?
I wanted a record of what we’re doing. It’s a beautiful place. It does look different. It’s another show. It’s another moment in my life. I’ve got a lot of new music that I’m playing. The emphasis of what I’m doing is on the new. So, it is different. The Albert Hall one is 2006. It’s a different moment in life, and this is lovely. It was a really lovely show to perform and with a bunch of mostly new musicians. It was a thrill for me, and I hope that how thrilling it was will get over to the people who go to watch and listen.
Did you film all six nights at Circus Maximus and then pick the best moments?
No, we did the last three nights. It was right at the beginning of the tour, and we thought we’d bed ourselves in with three nights without filming. And then one of the three remaining nights that we did film was torrential rain. It’s absolutely soaking. We had to wait until the rain stopped before we could perform, and there was a lot of mopping up to be done. But some of the glistening was used.
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How do you pick the best “High Hopes” between three nights? What are you looking for?
We watch all three and make notes and say that one’s got the best vibe and that’s the one we would then use.
You’ve worked with director Gavin Elder on your concert movies for a long time now. What drew you to him?
He started with us in 2006, and he came along on that tour at the beginning. As we moved into an age where all the extra moments are used for little clips online, we wanted to have someone recording the backstage moments. He was the guy who was recommended by Clare Singers, Phil Manzanera’s wife. And he was so good at what he was doing and we gave him a shot at doing the Gdańsk show, directing that, which he pulled off beautifully, and he’s on the team.
Prior to the tour, you said you were hesitant to revisit the Seventies Floyd songs. You wound up doing a handful of them though. Do you still enjoy playing songs like “Breathe” and “Time” or are you doing them partially out of obligation to the fans?
Not obligation. I really love playing those songs. The idea that I’m being… What I want to do is attempt to go with the new as much as possible, but there’s a reality that one faces that one has to live with: There are people there who want and expect to hear some of those songs. I love those songs and I love playing those songs. We reduced it a little bit this time, but those ones are still in there.
I hear “Learning to Fly” a lot on classic-rock radio. Why do you never do that one? I think it would go over really well.
There’s so much material to choose from. For me, there are other ones that take priority that come from Momentary Lapse of Reason. So we did a couple from there, and a couple from the next album, The Division Bell. It’s a lovely tune, “Learning to Fly,” but it didn’t seem essential to me at this moment. Out of all the material that I have, five solo albums, God knows how many Pink Floyd albums, there are songs that just have to fall by the wayside. You just can’t do them all, so you have to make a list and strike out the ones you think you can live without, and it is a tough choosing some of the time.
The tour was the introduction of your daughter Romany to many fans.
She was at college and we thought at first she’d only appear at the London shows and only sing “Between Two Points.” But then things worked out differently and she decided she wanted to do it on the whole tour, and she wanted to be a part of the backing singers troupe. And that sounded like a great idea to me and to Polly and to everyone else. She got in there and gave it her all like a true pro.
If you look at Spotify, “Between Two Points” is the most streamed song on the album by a fairly wide margin. Does that surprise you?
No, it doesn’t really surprise me. I can live with it. It is very, very nice that it has hit a chord with so many people, and that it has become a sort of a hit on Spotify and on YouTube and other places.
What are her plans now? Does she want to be a singer?
Well, over here with the other girls on the tour, Louise Marshall and Hattie and Charlie Webb, Romany has formed a little troupe of their own…a band of their own because they all play instruments. They’ve done four nights in a club in London a month or so ago, all sold out, and they were brilliant. So, I think that is the direction she’s looking in. She comes from a background of wanting to be an actor and other things, but she’s young. Everything is still open to her.
I presume you were introduced to the Webb Sisters when you saw them with Leonard Cohen.
About 10 times, yes. They are fantastic. And lovely. And Louise Marshall as well has a voice to die for.
You made very big changes to the band, but Guy Pratt remains on bass, where he’s been since 1987. Is he just your musical deputy no matter what?
He’s always there. We’ve been friends for so long, and it wouldn’t feel quite right without him.
How did the rest of the guys do? It’s your first time touring with many of them.
They’re such brilliant musicians. Adam Betts on the drums is renowned over here. He also tours with Pulp, and doesn’t play the drums for them. He plays guitar and sings and all sorts of other things with Pulp, because he’s a multi-talented guy. He was absolutely brilliant.
Rob Gentry on the keyboards has a magical, inspirational, and very unusual touch to everything he does. And [guitarist/singer] Ben Worsley came by a recommendation of Charlie Andrew, our producer, and he had never been onstage in front of more than about a hundred people in his life, I think. But took to it like a duck to water and was absolutely perfect.
[Keyboardist] Greg Phillinganes, who I love dearly, he’s an old hand at the business. He’s done everything and been everywhere. This team of people threw themselves into it with such relish and joy and enthusiasm. It made for a really lovely touring atmosphere.
You said before you didn’t want anything that sounded like a Pink Floyd cover band.
Well, gradually over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that giving people more of their own freedom is what you want to do. I obviously have seen versions of things by cover bands. I can’t play the whatever guitar solo on “Comfortably Numb” that they copy. I just make it up as I go along every night.
I want people who know what the essence of what you are doing is, but can step outside of the confines of what most people would think was essential, and just be freer to actually perform and bring their own abilities and talents to what I’m doing. And that has come to its culmination on this particular tour. I’m really pleased, thrilled with the way that worked, and I wouldn’t go back.
The tour was just 23 shows, and you hit just two cities in the States. It’s the shortest tour you’ve ever done. Why didn’t you want it to keep going?
Well, I did London, Rome, New York, and L.A. I did a week in each place. Quite a lot of people. I think at this point of my life in the business, I can be a bit more demanding about people coming to me rather than me going to them. And I didn’t want to do a big long tour. Being out on the road as they call it for months on end is something that’s in my past.
I imagine you had offers to do more.
Yeah. Obviously, there are offers that followed… That felt like the right thing to do, the right amount of shows, the right places to do them, and leave them wanting more.
The movie also allows people who couldn’t attend to experience it.
On the 17th of September, it’ll be showing in IMAXs all over the world and other cinemas that are as high quality as we can get. And then it will be free to move to cinemas and other places if people want to put that on there. And of course, you’ll be able to stream it and get the DVD. I’m thrilled with it. It captures something that I felt really needed to be captured.
I spoke to Nick Mason a few years back, and he said he regretted not filming the Wish You Were Here and Animals tours. They’re both just totally lost to time. Do you feel that same regret?
I do actually, yes. I mean, I think we thought we had an idea that you had to be there in the moment, and the moment was all that mattered, and that the filming of it and releasing it was maybe a secondhand way of doing things. And the way that one could have these things to watch at home in those days on a lovely old VHS tape didn’t really, to be fair, do it justice on a small screen.
Obviously, you can film with real film, but it was a hell of a process back in those days. Luckily, the Pompeii one, Pink Floyd in Pompeii film that we’ve recently released, we had that all on proper film and we had every box of every can of film taken out, cleaned, restored, and done to 4K so that it could be re-edited back together as it was in the highest possible quality. And that is an option we could have taken, but we didn’t. I suspect our thinking was skewed. We should have had stuff in the can for later.
Nick told me there weren’t really many soundboard tapes from those tours either.
Well, there are many, many mixing desk tapes which would, in the Seventies, have been done to cassette. And later on in the Eighties and Nineties were done to DAT, but they are just straight off the mixing desk. But we did record most shows just sound-wise, and God knows where all those tapes are. I guess they now are in the hands of Sony. So, you have to persuade them to have a look.
With brand new technologies, they can take even a subpar recording on a single track, strip off every individual element, and remix it.
Yeah, I guess they can. Good luck to them.
Are you working on any new songs at the moment?
Yes. I’m slowly building up towards a new album, and I have quite a bit of material that is in some sort of formative stage. That’s what’s keeping me busy at the moment.
Are you using the same band from the last album and tour?
At the moment that I start recording, I do it pretty much all myself and I work on Pro Tools. I don’t play the drums all that well, and I do that with machinery in the modern tradition. And I put things together so that I can fiddle around for months, adding little bits, taking things away till I think that I’ve got something close to where I want it. I then can take it into a studio with a bunch of people and know exactly what I want to do and how I want to get it done and present it to these people for their input.
You tend to have big gaps between your albums, often about a decade. It sounds like this one will be out much sooner though.
It’s always my intention to be a bit quicker, and I suspect this one will be a bit quicker. But you never can tell. Within the next year or two.
Do you think you’ll tour behind it?
That’s another decision that… I guess I’ll probably do it. I probably wouldn’t mind doing something again on a similar level to this one. I’m afraid I will not be schlepping around all the cities of America, South America, Europe, and the rest of the world. That’s for the young folk.
I just saw Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson play a show together. They’re in their eighties and nineties, and always on tour. That must be a lifestyle you just can’t imagine.
God, I’m so impressed by the people that get out there and are doing it the way they do and transcending their own age and everything. I mean, look at Mick Jagger, phenomenal. Bob Dylan, as you say…Willie Nelson’s getting on a bit. But those people are themselves, and my life just works in a slightly different way.
Do you think by not touring much that you’ve saved your singing voice? You sound pretty remarkable for your age, and people much younger than you have totally blown voices.
It’s a good possibility that not using it as much means there’s a bit more left to it. But it’s not an easy job to manage the voice over the tour. And I have to be very, very careful what I do. I can’t speak after a show. I really scarcely speak until the soundcheck the next afternoon. And I have a voice coach who comes with me and I’m doing all sorts of stuff to try and keep it fit and able. It’s not just jumping out there and doing it every night.
That sounds pretty stressful.
Yeah. Well, this way of doing it makes it much easier on the body. If you are just doing the four cities and it’s heading off in the afternoon from a hotel, doing a soundcheck, and then a show, cutting out most of the travel is a nice way to do touring.
The Sphere in Vegas would be pretty perfect for you. Is that a place you could imagine playing?
Well, to be honest, I really know almost nothing about what it does. But they have been on and suggested that I might do something there. But in the future, who knows. I haven’t got that far.
Is there anything left in the Pink Floyd vault you want to see released?
The entire Pink Floyd catalog, as I say, these desk tapes, all sorts of stuff is now out of my hands. Whatever Sony wants to do with it is what will happen. And I’m thrilled to not have that responsibility and to have a life that is more peaceful and at peace with itself than all the arguing and aggravation that’s gone along with helping to curate that over the last 40 or 50 years. I don’t make any suggestions to them and if they want to ask me anything they undoubtedly will.
It must be very freeing. You guys couldn’t even agree on the Animals box all those years. Getting the three of you on the same page about basically anything is pretty hard.
It certainly is.
I want to get back to the Pompeii movie for a minute. What was it like to see in the theater and watch your young, shirtless self play that show?
It’s a young 25-year-old kid out there doing all that. It sounded really good, and we watched it on an IMAX screen. I could see all the pimples. Because the only versions I’ve seen of it over the years have been from a VHS tape or the old 405-line televisions. Appalling quality, but that’s what we were used to looking at in those days. I guess our brains and imaginations filled in the gaps. But to actually have it that sort of crystal clear coming straight at you on that huge screen, it was definitely a thrill. It’s really nice to have created that and for that to be available to people now who seem to be very pleased with it.
Nick Mason has said it’s the only time he remembers you playing a show without a shirt, and it’s the only show that’s captured on film for all time.
Well, we were filming outdoors without an audience. We are making a film. I guess maybe you just don’t think that clearly. You don’t really think that what you are doing is going to be there for eternity to people. And it was very, very hot in the blazing sun of September afternoon in Pompeii. Of course that was fine and I don’t suppose I’d have minded that too much, but there were then continuity fill-in bits of film that we had to recreate in Paris in a film studio. And Adrian Maben, the director said, “Okay, continuity says you’ve got to have your shirt off.” And I go, “What? Are you joking?” He said, “No one will ever notice the difference.” And I’m going, “You know what? I think they will.” And I was right.
To finish off here with your next record, do you think the band is going to come in at some point this year to flesh out the songs? What’s your timeline for it?
I wish I could tell you what the timeline is, but it is a little early for a timeline. I’m hoping that before the end of the year I will get some studio sessions in with pretty much the same bunch of guys and put these tracks down.
Are these all brand new songs you’ve written the past year or so?
Sometimes the songs that I do are vague ideas that seem to take quite a few years to find their place. There are songs on that last album which are over 10 years old and maybe even older than that. And I still have got half-formed songs that I love. I wish I could explain it better, but sometimes they just seem to decide, “Now is the moment that I as a song want to make my appearance.” And then if everyone is in agreement and feels the same way, then we move things on. There are some that go back to probably 30, 40 years.
Do you have a big organized vault of all your songs, half-finished or otherwise?
I have a big disorganized vault. I’ve just recently tried to organize it, but…Yeah, I’ve got it in some semblance of order at the moment, I hope.
You turn 80 in March. Any plans for that?
A wonderful evening with my family and my closest friends, I guess. No great… They tend to be things you more want to forget than anything else when you get to my age.
You should really look into Sphere when you tour next. You could do something really special there.
Well, it will be in there amongst the plans that we are to think about.
From Rolling Stone US
