David Gilmour: was 2024 his last tour?
Last year David Gilmour returned to tour. He did it eight years after the last time: an event within an event. Yes, because the occasion for which the former Pink Floyd agreed to return on the road was the release of “Luck and strange”, his first album of unreleased songs in nine years (the last, “Rattle that lock”, dated back to 2015). The tour debuted with two special dates in Brighton, on 20 and 21 September 2024, before landing in Italy, in Rome, at the Circus Maximus, where from 27 September to 3 October the guitarist held six concerts. Gilmour then returned to the UK, to London, before closing the tour with a series of shows in Los Angeles and New York. The tour, now celebrated by a live album, “The luck and strange concerts”, may have been the last in the career of the 79-year-old former member of Pink Floyd, who in a long interview granted to the US edition of Rolling Stone confirmed plans for a new album but said that the album’s release may not be followed by a tour:
I’m afraid I won’t have to drag myself around all the cities in America, South America, Europe and the rest of the world. That’s for the young people.
If so, the live album “The luck and strange concerts” becomes a sort of Holy Grail for fans of David Gilmour and Pink Floyd more generally. Released yesterday by Sony Music in 4 LP and 2 CD versions (here is the link to purchase it), the album revives the magic of last year’s events. All 23 dates of the tour that accompanied the release of the unreleased album “Luck And Strange” were sold out, enjoying great success with the public and critics, with no new concerts scheduled. Gilmour explains:
I asked Charlie Andrew and Matt Glasby to listen to everything and narrow down the selection, eliminating what obviously didn’t work. And then we listened to, I don’t remember, maybe four versions of each song and everyone said which one they preferred. You listen without thinking too much about perfection, to choose the song that has that something extra. If we liked multiple versions, we listened to them again and narrowed them down further, until we found the right one.
The live songs contained on the album range from solo tracks taken from Gilmour’s recent album, including an intense performance of “Between Two Points” with Romany Gilmour (for which a video recorded at the Circus Maximus has also been published – you can find it below), to timeless Pink Floyd classics such as “Sorrow”, “High Hopes”, “Breathe (In The Air)”, “Time,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “Comfortably Numb.”
The video for “Between two points” is contained in the concert film “Live at the Circus Maximus”, present as Blu-Ray and DVD in the super deluxe edition of the box set, exclusively on the official Gilmour store. Inside there is also a 120-page hardback book, with photographs of Polly Samson taken during the tour, as well as 2 postcards, stickers of the black cat and the open-armed figure from “Luck and Strange”, the concert setlist, a double-sided color poster (930 mm x 620 mm), an 8-page booklet with credits.
And speaking of photographs: together with the box set, the collectible book Luck And Strange Studio/Live Photographs by Polly Samson (Thames & Hudson) was also published which features over 180 images taken by Polly Samson during the making of the “Luck and Strange” album and the tour. The volume is enriched by Anton Corbijn’s unmistakable hand lettering and includes a foreword by the late Alan Yentob, as well as an interview with Samson by legendary rock photographer Jill Furmanovsky. Polly Samson has been documenting David Gilmour in the studio and live since the 2005 album “On an Island”. She also collaborates with Gilmour in songwriting: she was the main songwriter for Pink Floyd’s “The Division Bell” (1994) and “The Endless River”, as well as for Gilmour’s solo albums “On an Island”, “Rattle That Lock” and “Luck and Strange”.
