Spiegel (S): Last summer you dined one night with Vaclav Havel - was this the high point of your tour?
Gilmour (G): It was very pleasant, but not the high point. Mr. Havel is a very friendly man, and most people who work with him appear to be musicians or music critics.
S: Did you give him any political advice?
G: No, I would find that somewhat importunate. I must say, however, that he is planning things that blow my mind. He wants to import capitalism, and sometimes he is too careless about it. When he said how much he would like to see a few skyscrapers when he looks out the palace window, I was horrified.
S: What do you have against tall houses?
G: I don't especially like them. Four or five stories are all right, but any higher than that, I would begin not to feel too well.
S: Your tour, which is now documented on CD, was one of the most successful in the history of Rock. In 1994 you took in well over 100 million dollars. With such sums, does money mean something more to you?
G: I consider myself to be a leftist, but not so far to the left that I would be opposed to money. I am no radical anti- capitalist. I enjoy earning a little money.
S: We are not talking about just a little money.
G: I consider the amount of money we earn to be obscene.
S: Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, "I have earned too much money"?
G: Often. And then I try to regain my composure by getting up and simply writing out a couple of checks for worthy causes.
S: What gives you a guilty conscience?
G: The amount. Although, when one compares it with what the bosses in any given business earn, then I think that I'm due my millions before them. In the final analysis, I brought more pleasure to the world than Unilever.
S: Your company is called Pink Floyd, and it operates like an industrial enterprise. When you go on tour, it is like going into battle, and almost every item written about you begins with the 49 trucks and the various airplanes required once again to transport your equipment.
G: I'm not interested in these boring figures. Before a tour, we sit down together and I say: "I want lasers, I want quadrophonic sound, I want this and that." And finally someone says, "Very good, that comes to 700 tons of equipment." That costs a lot of money. I wish it could be cheaper.
S: There's a rumor that you've developed a high-tech show to draw attention away from the music.
G: We had a hunch early on that fame is like a prison. Besides, as performers none of us was a shining magician. People would have gotten bored rather quickly with us four lads alone on the stage. For that reason we made Pink Floyd into a multi-media event...
S: ... and so it happened, that a gigantic inflated pig became the most well-known star of the band.
G: Last year the pig did not play such a big role, but people like it, and therefore we turned it loose again. Without the pig we probably wouldn't have sold a single ticket.
S: This time you appeared nevertheless without the Wall that you once built because the public got on your nerves so much. You evidently seem to have relaxed.
G: The project with the Wall was Roger Waters' idea, and he took it with him when he left Pink Floyd in the mid-eighties. I myself never had any real problems with the fans.
S: Not even with all these people in the crowd who are over 40 and sing "We don't need no education"?
G: That song is about the authoritarian English school system of our youth, which I hope has gone extinct by now. But you're right; singing "We don't need no education" these days is no longer particularly relevant.
S: Many of your German fans evidently view it otherwise. "We don't need no education" serves as the hymn of the anti-authoritarian left. Even in the Startbahn West [note: this was an environmental issue, when protesters attempted to block construction of a new runway at the airport in Frankfurt because too many trees would have to be felled -- thanks to Rolf Juerrens for the explanation] it was sung by the demonstrators against the authorities.
G: The song was also sung by black school children in South Africa and was promptly forbidden by the government. But in your Startbahn West I don't completely see the relevance. The people would be better off singing "We don't need no aeroplanes."
S: Every work that is introduced into the world takes on a life of its own. Your project, The Wall, once began as a statement against mammoth concerts, against rock and roll in the stadium. And then where was the whole thing performed? In a stadium.
G: Roger Waters said it was a work against stadium-rock - however, you know, when he wrote The Wall he had already played for six, seven years in these stadiums and had never complained about it. The Wall was Roger's story and for him it became a universal symbol. The walls that surround people. Walls between oneself and one's parents. Walls between oneself and the environment. Walls between a rock band and its fans. The great alienation.
S: What were you thinking about, shut off there behind your wall?
G: I felt I was part of a wonderful show. Until the moment when the thing collapsed, then I was afraid, truly afraid, even though I was protected from falling rubble by a steel cage.
S: One of your best-known pieces is called Welcome to the Machine. Have you ever thought about just putting some machines on stage and stepping down as a musician?
G: We had at one time talked about sending other musicians out and letting them do our work. But that's just been a joke.
S: Do you think anyone would have noticed the difference?
G: Yes, the way we play our music, no one could have imitated us very readily.
S: Roger Waters has another opinion on that. He considers the trademark Pink Floyd to have such a life of its own, that he believes there will still be Pink Floyd concerts long after you are all dead -- in 500 years.
G: Ah, good old Roger. He even restaged The Wall in Berlin. Did it sound like Pink Floyd? No, it sounded awful.
S: Even so, he didn't make as much as you with your fine company. A critic once wrote, "as long as Pink Floyd releases a new CD every five years, and as long as they continue to do stadium shows, there is no power on earth that can prevent gigantic hoards of concert-goers from buying tickets."
G: Pink Floyd is no giant-sized company. Rather, it's more like a small business, with very few people who really make a contribution. We do everything from the music to the visualization ourselves, and then when it is ready, we give it all to the recording industry and say, "sell it."
S: Did you also make the classy "Pink Floyd" VW-Golf yourselves?
G: We helped out with ideas. Mine was, for example, to use the most environmental-friendly motor that VW had developed to date.
S: Did you then, along with the alleged 20 million Mark tour sponsors, also get one of the cars?
G: Yes, but it hasn't arrived yet. They probably forgot to send it to me.
S: Do you miss it?
G: Not really, this whole Volkswagen thing has given me a very guilty conscience. I donated the money. Now I feel better.
S: The biggest themes in Pink Floyd were always alienation, isolation, the curse of money. Has Pink Floyd changed the world - apart from the fact that the mayor of Venice had to resign because the loud volume of a Pink Floyd concert threatened to topple a memorial-protected monument?
G: I beg you, please be realistic. For whatever reason these damages to the palace always come up, it was not our fault. The fireworks that take place right over the city every year are much louder.
S: And yet not once did they overthrow the mayor. Are you a disappointed dreamer of the sixties?
G: After Bob Dylan, we all thought we could change the world with pop music, to be able to make it better. And what became of all that? Not very much. Human nature is an stubborn affair. If something is to change, for example, the elimination of racial prejudice, it takes at least three generations.
S: In any case, Pink Floyd had one influence: punk. When the Sex Pistols' singer Johnny rotten was discovered in 1975, he wore a torn Pink Floyd t-shirt. He had painted "I hate" on it in yellow paint.
G: Johnny Rotten later told me that he would very much like to have one of our records. But, admittedly, we were a good target, otherwise the guy would have ripped up a t-shirt from the group "Yes" and painted his hatred all over it. It was an honor for us.
S: When you started out with Pink Floyd in the sixties, you made use of an attitude of rebellion.
G: We were rebellious youths who didn't like the Establishment and had not mastered their instruments.
S: And the fans liked that?
G: Yes, in London. People were using drugs, and they joined in everything. An hour of guitar feedback - no problem, they loved it.
S: And outside London?
G: Outside London people threw bottles at us or left the concert.
S: How long would it have taken you, on a good evening, to drive everyone away?
G: On a good evening, twenty minutes.
S: Have you yourself used LSD?
G: A few times, but LSD was not really our thing; eventually the man I stepped in for, Syd Barrett, sustained real damage from LSD and similar drugs. We couldn't make use of him any more. I haven't seen him again for 20 years. He lives in a house in Cambridge, goes shopping, and washes his clothes in a laundromat. That's about all he is still able to do.
S: What's your opinion today of your earlier albums like Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma?
G: I find both of them rather dreadful. Well, okay, maybe the live side of Ummagumma is pretty good, but even that wasn't well received.
S: And where do things stand with Dark Side of the Moon, the album that remained in the charts for fifteen years after its debut? Did it become a dream or a nightmare?
G: What's the difference? It was both. It's nice when other people work for you; it is great to sell a whole lot of albums. But it's not so great if one doesn't dare try anything new musically to avoid upsetting the fans.
S: Why did Roger Waters leave the group?
G: He was our brains head. Roger is a wonderful lyricist, but as a musician he is not quite so good. I think I am the better musician and I write better music. Roger, however, suddenly believes he is the better musician.
S: And he only wanted to keep you and the others on as hired employees?
G: We were to simply carry out what he ordered.
S: Nick Mason has said that in this phase the only alternatives were total silence or war. How did you get through it - with the help of a psychiatrist?
G: Sometimes I drove home from the studio and bellowed and cursed, although I was sitting alone in my car. Roger was to blame. He didn't want my music, and he didn't want my ideas, and therefore I said: "Fine, if my ideas don't count here, then I'll take my name off the album cover, but I want my money for my work no matter what."
S: And he blamed you for your luxuriant lifestyle.
G: Didn't he have this beautiful, expensive, large house in the country where he wrote The Wall? A house with plenty of land all around it, just about the best to be found in England? But he had to play the suffering artist. How is one to understand such a person?
S: Was Pink Floyd still a band at that time, or a bunch of psychopaths that had been shut up in one room together?
G: There was just one psychopath and three normal people.
S: Why did you go on after the big split - to prove that it could go on even without him?
G: Of course that is one of the reasons. Roger wanted to declare Pink Floyd dead. But why should I stop only because one of the others lost interest? I didn't see it that way, sorry, and today I still don't see it that way. I mean, it is MY career. I was thrust into this band at 23, and I have spent a large part of my life in it.
S: Is there something of a friendship within the band today?
G: At the age of 40 a band is something different. As teenagers, one had no house, no family, no place where one belongs; and above all not yet a stage on which one can play. We get along well today, like partners even, who have worked together for a long time.
S: You own a collection of six airplanes, Mason has race cars, and Wright has a few sailing yachts. Nevertheless you like to play the outsider and say that you don't belong to the Establishment.
G: I don't actually belong to it.
S: You're sitting here in an exclusive London club, drink Cappucino at 15 Marks a cup, and say that you're not a part of the Establishment? That is a real luxury.
G: Indeed.
S: Mr. Gilmour, we thank you for this interview.
