David Gilmour’s favorite Pink Floyd song

Surely David Gilmour with his entry into the Pink Floyd in 1967, replacing Syd Barrett, he marked a turning point in the style and history of the band.

The partnership with Waters generated seminal albums such as “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals” and “The Wall”, records in which David’s guitar plays a primary role.

In recent days (Read here) the band’s former bassist had made it known, at the request of a fan, that his choice as the song he preferred to sing was, with a somewhat “obvious” decision, “Wish You Were Here” (mostly because the audience relieved him of the effort of singing by doing it for him).

Today we discover that the guitarist’s choice is completely different and much more surprising.

Gilmour’s favorite song does not come from one of those albums mentioned above, which have entered the history of music, but from one that is considered a minor album (perhaps wrongly): “Atom Heart Mother” from 1970, the one with the spotted cow on the cover.

And the song chosen is not the long suite of the same name (23 minutes of music) or even the more than 12 minutes of Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast (Parson) (“Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”).

The choice fell on “Fat Old Sun”, a folk rock song all in all far from the more experimental soul of the group and considered a minor track on a minor album!!. It must be said (and perhaps it is one of the reasons for the choice) that the song (lasting 5 minutes) is entirely composed by David himself (who co-wrote many of the band’s other hits) and who also played all the instruments (a exclusion of a keyboard contribution by Richard Wright). It is the guitarist himself who recognizes his limitations in the quality of the recording: “I played the drums on the original version, but the drums are terrible”, he said.

“I always liked the song, one of the first I ever wrote,” he said in 2008 when reflecting on the record. Gilmour regards “Fat Old Sun” as one of their best works and a key moment for him as a musician. “I tried to persuade the rest of the Pink Floyd guys that it should go up “Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd”, but they didn’t accept it”, he added. The anthology (a double album) published in 2001 collects the 26 tracks that the group considered to be their best production in the period from the first single of 1967 (“Arnold Layne”) up to “High Hopes/Keep Talking,” from the album The Division Bell (1994). The album is divided into two thematic parts (13 songs for each album): the first collects the songs that explore the constraints that oppress man, the second the desire for redemption. The songs were remastered and remixed for that occasion to join one another seamlessly.