Interviewed
David Gilmour- DG

There's only one person on Earth who doesn't love David Gilmour, a man who very much likes to walk smiling among the masses, to entertain and charm the pants off all he surveys. Gilmour is unflappable; he is approachable, gorgeous and gorgeously well- heeled. For Roger Waters, the world's staunch holdout, that probably translates as smug, opportunistic and mercenary, which just shows the extent to which the central theme of Pink Floyd - disillusioned idealism turned rage - could direct the lives of the men behind it.

Waters' lyrics, brutal pleas for basic human values, drew the sightlines of Floyd's vision; Gilmour's untortured delivery drew for Waters a pop-viable frame.

Waters quit in 1986, taking with him the standoffish, surreal half of the band's identity, and when he learned that Dave, drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright intended to continue as Pink Floyd, battle lines practically drew themselves. A breakup riddled with sentimentality for millions of listeners became an unsentimental battle between Waters' Pink Floyd ideal and Gilmour's tenacious pragmatism. Gilmour has been fortunate; the mollifying familiarity of his singing and playing was the title deed to Pink Floyd.

Gilmour is a guitarist first and an orchestrator second, maybe third; the lengthy sessions for the post-Waters "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" confirmed this. He's not quite as motivated a lyricist as a conversationalist - he's an improviser, not a resolute ponderer. The Waters concepts that built Pink Floyd were themselves built on small moments, on details of everyday confrontation; Dave's lyrics toy with generalities, though they are rendered somewhat less pointedly than his personal views of life and band.

Floyd's video "La Carrera Panamericana", documenting auto race he and Mason drove across Mexico last year, is cause to wonder if Dave still has a bead on his audience - and whether fans in middle America awaiting their first hit of Floyd in five years could appreciate a rich man's interest in driving around with bad radio reception on hot sticky seats for a week. Is this the Gilmour idealism? Maybe, but in the final account, Dave is a fabulous musician, and if he can't - or won't - hang the world out to twist in the wind for its own folly, he'll at least have it filling arenas to watch him not do it.

Yes, there's only one person in the world who doesn't love David Gilmour, and he shares with Dave the one thing neither shares with anyone else: the right to determine what, or if, Pink Floyd is. Waters ultimately had too much respect for the band - and for himself - to expect Floyd to survive him; Gilmour had too much concern for his career to let a good thing go. But stealing your own legacy is no crime. Waters always made the plea to connect, but never actually made the connection. Gilmour was his conduit; now the conduit has become the whole. Isn't rebirth pressure enough?

Even Roger Waters, who asserted for 20 years that humans are bound undignifiably to human nature, would concede that Dave is just doing his job.

M: "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" didn't seem to attempt a dramatic overhaul of the band's style. Did you feel pressure to create a new direction or breathe something new into Pink Floyd? Or did you have something to prove?

DG: I obviously had something to prove in that Roger was no longer a part of it and obviously I had the view that people may have misunderstood or misread the way it had been with him within our history. It was quite important to me to prove that there was something serious still going on there. It was 'Life After Rog,' you know. I don't know about any particular change of direction.

M: The standout track was "A New Machine," at the end of which you suggest that we're caught, trapped by ourselves. I wasn't clear if it was an optimistic comment about self- acceptance or a cry of imprisonment. That ambiguity - and that very message - is something Pink Floyd, with or without Waters, has never abandoned.

DG: That's right.

M: Was the message positive or negative?

DG: I don't know if I want to get into that. Whether you want to take it as optimistic or not...I mean, a lot of people didn't use it as an excuse to go and jump off a cliff or something, did they?

M: On "Sorrow," where everything 'flows to an oily sea,' I was thinking of your friend Pete Townshend's river motif. You guys both own floating recording studios that moor on the Thames, and the river figures in pretty prominently. In "Sorrow" the sea is dark and troubled, while Pete's was a welcoming sea.

DG: 'The Sea Refuses No River.' Yeah, yeah. "Sorrow" was a poem I'd written as a lyric before I wrote music to it, which is rare for me. The river's a very, very common theme; rivers are a very symbolic, attractive way of exposing all sorts of things. There's a Randy Newman song, "In Germany Before the War", where he talks about a little girl who gets killed by an old pervert. 'I'm looking at the river but thinking of the sea.' The chorus I just love, the river has nothing directly to do with it, but sums it up perfectly.

M: Is your boat near Townshend's?

DG: Yeah, a couple of miles up the river. Peter's boat is a big steel-hull barge. His main studio is not on the boat, his Eel Pie Studio is right by the mooring. In my case, I just happened to find this beautiful boat that was built as a houseboat and was very cheap, so I bought it. And then only afterward did I think I could maybe use it to record. The control room is a 30-foot by 20-foot room. It's a very comfortable working environment--- three bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, a big lounge. It's 90 feet long.

M: Might you record the next Pink Floyd album there?

DG: We would do a lot of it, yes. We did a lot of early work on the last album there. And I'd like to work with people playing together in a room this time, so if I need to add vocals I can do all the incidentals bits there. Things like the solo at the end of "Sorrow" were done on the boat, my guitar going through a little Gallien-Krueger amp.

M: Townshend wrote lyrics to two songs on your solo album "About Face". You and he have both alternated between doing your own records and being the force behind a very successful band.

DG: I think Pete feels some restrictions on what he like to do with the Who, as I guess we all feel restrictions within everything we attempt, just because of the types of personalities and role you've created for yourself. I know he's felt uncomfortable about certain things - things he could express in solo stuff. For me, the restriction was the scale of what Pink Floyd had become more than anything. It's nice to get out and do something on a slightly different scale, go out and do theaters, which is not really a possibility with Pink Floyd until we get a lot less popular.

M: So the grand scale is important to you?

DG: I like the grand scale of Pink Floyd. A lot of people want to buy tickets and see that stuff. And that carries a responsibility which doesn't fall on me when I go out on my own. It's a change, it's nice.

M: But even so, you did most of the work on "Momentary Lapse". Nick Mason admits to being an ancillary part of the band and Rick Wright had for all intents and purposes been gone since 1980. That last Floyd album was a project you cooked up and realized with the help of session musicians and one other lyricist. Aside from the name Pink Floyd and the business consideration, it was a David Gilmour solo album.

DG: Well, I don't know what is a solo album and what isn't, really. I approached that album like I would have approached a Pink Floyd album and I approach a solo album as I would approach a solo album. There's a difference in thought process in the way you go into these things. But yeah, in some ways it could have been. Yeah. And one could say that on my last solo album I could have steered more towards Pink Floyd than I did. Maybe it would have sold a few more, you know?

M: "Murder," from About Face, certainly had the elements.

DG: I steered those things away from the Pink Floyd because... I don't know why, I just felt like doing that at the time. But there's nothing within the Pink Floyd sound that I don't like. I'm not faking or having to do anything any different to do a Pink Floyd record. And we never sat down and said, 'God, this doesn't sound Pink Floyd enough - let's do this to make it sound more Pink Floyd.'

M: If there was a formula for the Floyd, "Murder" fits it: a plaintive acoustic section, a statement, a sudden band entry, some kind of guitar solo and a restatement of a more universal theme based on the first. Yet the formula was not present on "Momentary Lapse." Did you find that during the conception of the record you were fumbling with the idea of what Pink Floyd should or shouldn't be once you took over?

DG: No. I didn't do that at all. I simply thought, 'Are these songs good?' and worked on trying to make the ones I thought were good into a record. It can not help sounding quite a bit like Pink Floyd if it's got my voice and my guitar playing on it anyway. Why my second solo album and this one should have a different sound to them, I don't really know. I think it's just in my attitude towards it. On the solo one, I was actually steering a bit away from it, a little more rock'n'roll.

M: The beginning of "Short and Sweet," from your first solo record, sounds like the germ of "Run Like Hell".

DG: Yes, it's a guitar with the bottom string tuned down to a D, and thrashing around on the chord shapes over a D root. Which is the same in both [smiling]. It's part of my musical repertoire, yes.

M: For a 'progressive rocker' you don't play atonally; the only time I've noticed it is in the fadeout on "You Know I'm Right." You rarely get anarchic.

DG: I have a keen sense of melody. I don't want to be experimental to the extent of doing things I don't like. I do do a lot of that stuff in the studio when I'm mucking about; you just don't get to hear it, 'cause that's when I'm searching. By the time they get out as finished product I've ironed them into stuff I like.

"New Machine" has a sound I've never heard anyone do. The noise gates, the Vocoders, opened up something new which to me seemed like a wonderful sound effect that no one had done before; it's innovation of a sort. But exploring live in front of an audience, the way we did in the 60's and very early 70's, you make as many mistakes as you get things right. A lot of it was awful, [chuckles] and I don't feel like being that person anymore. That was then, and that part is done.

M: Coming from R&B cover bands, were you disconcerted by the wayward improvising of those shows, or did you relish the challenge?

DG: I had a large background in improvisation, but I didn't think a lot of it that the Pink Floyd were doing was very good. And yes, it took me a while before I understood where they were trying to get to, and it took a while for me to try to change into something I liked as well. It was a process working two ways after I joined: me trying to change it, and it trying and succeeding in changing me.

M: You opened the sound up; it was initially very dense late-60's English pop music.

DG: The band felt we achieved something with the title track of "A Saucerful of Secrets." I can't say as I fully understood what was going on when it was being made, with Roger sitting around drawing little diagrams on bits of paper. But throughout the following period I tried to add what I knew of harmony and bring it slightly more mainstream, if you like. And the way they worked certainly educated me. We passed on all our individual desires, talents, and knowledge to each other.

M: Was Roger an effective bassist back then?

DG: He had developed his own limited, or very simple style. He was never very keen on improving himself as a bass player and half the time I would play the bass on the records because I would tend to do it quicker. Right back to those early records, I mean, at least half the bass on all the recorded output is me anyway.

M: This is not a widely acknowledged fact.

DG: Well, I think it's been said, but it's certainly not something we go around advertising. Rog used to come in and say "Thank you very much" to me once in a while for winning him bass-playing polls.

M: Did you play the fretless bass on "Hey You"?

DG: Yeah. Hmm. Roger playing fretless bass? Please! [laughs]

M: Do you think any of the aberrations in his lyrical ideas were an attempt to contrive the kind of madness Syd Barrett communicated?

DG: I think there's something to that. How far you want to go I really don't know, but yes, I think there's certainly something to that.

M: Did you find any of the stranger lyrics tough to stomach?

DG: No, very few. One in awhile I would find something uncomfortable to sing. The first lot Roger wrote for 'Dogs', when it was called 'You Gotta Be Crazy', were just too many words to sing. But most of the *ideas* were ideas I felt good about, and encapsulated a lot of the thinking that I had as well. I often wished I had been able to express them as well as he did.

M: The potency of your creative relationship would lead an outsider to believe that maybe his not wanting you to continue Pink Floyd was simply because he didn't want to see it exist without the Roger Waters/David Gilmour collaboration- not just because he thought it shouldn't go on without him.

DG: He didn't want to continue *with* the Roger Waters/David Gilmour collaboration; he wanted it to continue with the Roger Waters-only writing force. He didn't want me to be part of it, which is why it got so difficult in the end. And the reason he didn't want us to carry on was because he wanted to go out as "Roger Waters of Pink Floyd" in rather large letters and kind of purloin the name for himself.

M: Yet looking at his solo records, he doesn't seem egomaniacal; He doesn't proselytize, he doesn't have any photos of himself on the sleeve.

DG: Hmm. He *is* an egomaniac, whatever particular way it wants to manifest itself.

M: But he eventually relented and let you be.

DG: I think his lawyers advised him that he wasn't going to have any prayer of winning, and in the end we paid him off anyway. It was not a court case he had any chance of winning whatsoever. I mean, on what basis could someone leave something that had been successfully operating for a large number of years and then say the other people in it couldn't carry on? That isn't the way the world works. Fortunately.

M: Some would say the band's magic existed in the interplay.

DG: That is suggesting that if it carried on, it would be a good thing. No one is really arguing that point. The point is that I hadn't had enough of it, it was my career. Nick hadn't had enough of it. Why should we be forced not to do it anymore? Whether it's as good or not afterwards is really kind of beside the point. To me.

M: Really?

DG: Yes. Whether it's as good or to as many people's taste is beside the point. If they don't like it as much, they don't have to buy it. But no one can tell me to stop doing it. I do my very, very best to make it as well as I can, to make the records and put on a show. I still fail to see why morally I should be persuaded to give up something I've given most of my adult life to, just 'cause one guy doesn't feel like doing it anymore.

M: Except simply the fact that you both have gone on to solo careers and left Pink Floyd, the creative dynamic between you, as a very pleasing piece of history.

DG: Yeah, yeah, that's quite true; one could have done that. But why? Why would I want to do that? It's very, very hard work to struggle a solo career up to the level that Pink Floyd stands at.

M: But even so, wasn't the effort in putting on the last tour - traveling, fighting Roger's injunctions, worrying about re-acceptance - as draining as pushing on alone?

DG: I didn't want to! I *like* the Pink Floyd very much. I don't want to get over-defensive about what I felt like doing, but it is what I do and I feel I should carry on doing it. And bring back into it the people who were pushed out. It would take a book to tell what went on within our band, and Roger's later megalomanic years, and precisely what psychologically he was attempting to do to all of us. Because he is a megalomanic. He really is. His thirst for power is more important than anything else - more important than honesty, that's for certain.

M: Well, he donated a lot of money to charity. And one symptom of megalomania is all-possessing greed.

DG: Well, yeah. What money did he donate to charity?

M: The Berlin Wall proceeds.

DG: You think that donated a lot of money to charity?

M: Certainly the TV rights; and the record sales, which were respectable, brought it in. It was a mammoth thing.

DG: It was a mammoth thing, from what I understand. And from what I understand the *costs* of putting it on were absolutely enormous, and the receipts in were nothing *like* enormous, and the record didn't sell terribly well. TV rights were sold at the very last minute for very low money, because TV rights are not very easy to sell, I can tell you. [chuckles]

There's lots of stories about people not having been paid. Sorry, I don't want to get *too* heavily into that, but I suspect that the motivation for putting the Wall show on in Berlin was *not* charitable. I don't think that was Roger's motivation at all.

M: Were your two or three song's worth of publishing royalties from that record paid to you after the broadcast?

DG: I have no idea. I don't know, I didn't check whether money for performing rights came my way or not. [laughs]

M: Have you been writing for a new Floyd record?

DG: I've been writing a bit. I've spent time in the studio fiddling around, but not really doing anything serious. Until it feels right. That last Pink Floyd project took a lot out of me. I haven't been in any great hurry to do it all again. I'm not a big workaholic. I've written quite a few things, but a lot is not complete - which really requires me to sit down in a studio and start finding a direction and the desire to do it, which has been lacking in me. I'm beginning to feel it starting to trickle back.

The last tour was a very long hard road and it took away my taste for it for a while. I've been busy flying airplanes and driving cars and enjoying those things. I'm 46, and being in Pink Floyd is not something I wish to take up all my waking hours or take up all my life.

M: Was it always all-consuming?

DG: Yeah. Really, all the things we've done have been all-consuming affairs for a while, but have never been quite as high-pressure, it was hard to put the last one together because it was a lonelier task. I mean, I don't know what it was like for Roger because I'm not Roger, but he may have felt the same pressures doing things like The Wall. When Roger was writing The Wall he had a band and experience, including my abilities, to help him achieve those things. Making this last one, it was very much me on my own. There was quite a lot of weight on my shoulders, as you would imagine.

M: There's the corporate pressure....

DG: There's no real corporate pressure.

M: When you brought in A Momentary Lapse of Reason, there was absolutely no concern that it echo the Pink Floyd sound?

DG: Oh, well, I don't take any notice of record companies, they just make the records. They never get any say in it. They don't usually get to listen to any of it until it's finished, and until such a day comes as they make a loss on one of our records, which they've never done, it'll stay that way. [laughs]

M: Does the fact that it's almost a guaranteed smash take away some of the more desirable uncertainty about being a rock musician?

DG: It's not a guaranteed smash. I mean, The Wall certainly did very well. The follow-up to it, The Final Cut, didn't, and following on from that one, with Roger gone, and the previous album having not done terribly well, I don't think any of us were thinking we were onto any guaranteed sales whatsoever. Certainly, I would have been surprised if it had sold less than a million around the world. My two solo records sold three-quarters of a million each, and the Pink Floyd name on top of that would have added a little. But we had no serious guarantees in undertaking this project. A lot of people didn't buy The Final Cut.

M: It was a good record.

DG: Yeah, but it only sold about a *fifth* of The Wall, really. I'm not talking about quality, although I personally don't like it; there were three good songs, then just rather average filler. In terms of numbers, it was the worst sales we had since before Dark Side Of The Moon.

M: Have you given thought to what kind of production the next album will be? I would personally rather listen to an album like David Gilmour than one like A Momentary Lapse Of Reason; my taste goes away from bombast and towards the sound created by a smaller number of musicians, doing it in an apparently spontaneous way. Now that you've established that Floyd can continue, is the possibility of what Floyd could do....

DG: I don't see any change in the philosophy of where it comes from. The way of recording, the way we go through it, I suspect may change a bit. I'm very, very keen on doing it much more live, in-the-studio with people actually playing together. But when we get half a dozen people in the studio and playing together it does tend to start getting weighty and big. So I guess that's just the way I like it. On the Momentary Lapse Of Reason album Nick's belief in himself was pretty well gone, and Rick's belief in himself was *totally* gone. And they weren't up to making a record, to be quite honest about it.

M: You mean the physical act of keeping time, or playing piano?

DG: Yeah, I mean, Rick really just didn't believe he could play. You see, this is part of what had been going on for years. Roger's very good at belittling people, and I think over the years he managed to convince Rick completely that he was useless and more or less had convinced Nick of the same thing. And they both did not play a major part on that record. But we put a touring band together, and I got Gary [Wallis] to back up Nick on percussion and drums, and I got Jon Carin to help out on keyboard stuff, and at the beginning they played strong roles - in playing drum *parts* in Gary's case, and keyboard parts in Jon's. But by halfway through the first leg of the tour, Nick was starting to believe in himself again. And by the time we did the live album at the end of the first year, they were both playing absolutely great, and the drumming on the live album is all straight Nick. And Rick's playing is great. Now, two years later than that, we went into the studio at Christmas to do these tracks [for the video] and they just picked up and played fantastic.

There's been a rehabilitation through the touring and the project that has been not far short of miraculous, in my view. It has been a great thrill and has given me the confidence to make the next album the way we did these things at Christmas.

M: So on the new record you'll take a freer approach?

DG: I don't know. You are putting words into my mouth there. I said I want to do it with a band playing in a studio; how much work it'll take before we get to that point, I don't know. Now that I've got Rick and Nick rehabilitated and playing as well as they've ever played, and I've got these good, younger characters to help fill it out and do stuff with me, we can go in with a sense of fun and still get to the end product.

M: Are you considering a concept record?

DG: Concept, [hippie accent] a *con*cept record. Umm. I'm considering all sorts of things, and that's one of the things under consideration, yes. I've kind of got one, but I'm *certainly* not going to tell you about it. [laughs] It's premature for any announcements.

M: You envision another tour?

DG: Yeah. I don't think I could handle another tour doing the same material. And having moved from a Pink Floyd that did basically the newest album on all our old tours to a sort of greatest-hits show last time, I couldn't do that same show. And we did pick *all* the numbers we liked - more than we felt justified in doing - that I had sung or had major involvement in.

M: If Nick decided he didn't want to do it, would you still do it as Pink Floyd?

DG: Yeah, I think so. But I don't think that's a problem. I want Nick *and* Rick to do it. You can never quite tell what makes something have its magic, and the more you fuck with it, the more you get away from that. I liked it when Roger was there too, but that's outside my control. What I can do to maintain it is what I'm doing.

M: 'Money' is in 7/4 time. Initially, Roger's sense of song form was somewhat elastic.

DG: He was always a big fan of John Lennon, and was very keen on changing rhythms in the middle of songs. And Syd. Syd used to sing a lyric till he finished it and then change. There are old songs Syd's in which you can't count how many beats are in the bar - drummers would have hell trying to get through these things. I was always keen on changing from 4/4 time to a triplet 3 time, which were considered against each other. I don't know where Roger came up with the 7 time for Money; I've got the demo tape of it someplace. It's funny. It's just him and a double-tracked acoustic guitar.

On Mother the timing follows the words: "Mo-ther-do-you-think- they'll-drop-the-*bomb*?" How many beats is that? Nine. It was very very difficult to get it to work. You can't [mimes standard Floyd 4] - there's no rhythm that carries on straight through like that. You've got to find a way of floating through it, which [session drummer] Jeff Porcaro did immediately.

M: I had no idea session musicians played on The Wall. Nobody other than singers was credited.

DG: Yeah, there were quite a few on there. There's a guy playing the Spanish guitar on Is There Anybody Out There; I could play it with a leather pick but couldn't play it properly fingerstyle. I got a rhythm player in on One Of My Turns because I couldn't think of a good part to play. [laughs] Lee Ritenour played that part on the last half of that, and we had a Hammond organ player, Freddie Mandell, on In The Flesh. Don't ask me why. [laughs] Who else was on there? Loads of singers, Toni Tenille and Bruce, from the Beach Boys.

From Dark Side Of The Moon on we had backing singers and a sax player added. On the Animals tour we had singers, a sax and a guitar player. And on the Wall tour we had everyone doubled up. It's been moving at a steady progression since Dark Side.

I have no *pride* about this sort of thing. I've thought of parts that I can't play. If I can't play it I'll get someone else to. Why not? I don't worry about that stuff, really. You're trying to get something that's in your head out into other people's heads. Any way of doing that that is cool with me. Like I say, the objective is to achieve what you're trying to do on tape, and if that involves using other musicians, then so be it. I have no shame about it whatsoever.

M: What was challenging about setting Roger's lyrics to music? Did you work with him or bring together individual ideas?

DG: Usually the music got written and the lyrics came afterwards. On Wish You Were Here, he wrote the song to the rhythm of the intro. We changed things until they started sounding nice. Dogs had *so* many words, I physically couldn't get them all in. [We] just cut out two-thirds of his words, to make it possible rather than impossible.

We had few big arguments or disagreements. We argued over Comfortably Numb like *mad*. Really had a big fight, went on for ages. We recorded two versions. We took a drum fill from one take and had to cut the 16-track tape in half - we'd *edit* like this - run the razor along the middle and then insert a piece of tape one inch wide into the other piece to put a drum fill in on another track. That's what we used to call a window edit.

M: What part of the song?

DG: I can't remember. These things that seem so important at the time, I can hardly remember why one thought they *were*. [laughs] I doubt if I could even tell the difference these days. I mean, they were exactly the same tempo; one was just a little looser - I'd call it a sloppier version myself, and I liked it slightly tighter.Roger liked the looser one. They were both recorded to the same demo; we had a demo of it on a four-track tape. We would get a basic drum track. Then we'd have an acoustic guitar, a guitar and a vocal, and a drum machine pumping, and we'd just play away to that guide and record.

M: Do you think your being the only vocalist in Pink Floyd works, and can work as a rule? A cynic could say that your highly processed vocals on A New Machine are an attempt to sound eccentric and shrill, perhaps like Waters at his more theatric, trying to create variety.

DG: Would you say so? I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I sang Money, that's fairly strident. I sang *most* of the early stuff, on Meddle, Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here. It's never occurred to me to think about that. I think it's harder to sit through a whole album of Roger's voice than of mine. I always felt our two voices worked very well as counterpoints, but we don't have that option, so...

M: So things are unpatchable between the two of you.

DG: Yeah. You could safely say that.

M: And even after Roger, Rick's not been reinstated as an equal.

DG: No, Rick's in there. There are one or two legal things slightly unresolved from Rick's agreement when Roger threw him out in 1979, and there are other reasons of *his*. Mostly that he didn't want to get involved in the lawsuits, so he was not involved in the *risk*, in any possible loss financially, and consequently reaped less of the profits, which Nick and I took more of, as we were the ones who put *all* the money up to put the record and the tour together. The record company gave us an advance when we *delivered* the record, which covered all the recording costs. And then the tour was a *load* of money to put together under threat of lawsuit and the injunctions from Roger which could have stopped the whole thing. And if we couldn't get the receipts in from the shows, our accounts were shot down and we could have lost everything. A waste.

I'm sure we could have gotten someone else to put up the money, but anyone who puts up money wants a large slice of the profits. And I believed in it totally. I knew we were going to do well, so screw it.

M: Your prospects are better now.

DG: Yeah. As I'm not under any imminent threat of a lawsuit, it's not a problem.

M: And Rick's not involved even after the disposal of those problems?

DG: Well, I'm a really selfish person, and Rick is not realistically going to put in as much effort next time as I do. I'm very happy for Rick to be part of it all, but I can't see any point...it's still my life, and a *lot* of my life, and I didn't fight my way through all that lot just to start handing out larger chunks than they deserve to anyone who comes around. [laughs] If that sounds ruthless, it's not - it's just the hard reality. Rick is happy to sail off on his yacht and be part of this thing, and earn very good money out of it. He doesn't like shouldering responsibility, so it's a very good arrangement.

M: You don't seem nostalgic for the days of the teenage rock group.

DG: I've got some nostalgia for it, you know, but I'm 46, it's a different era. There's lots of kids developing their own nostalgia for their things; there are people living that stuff. I mean, it's stupid to pretend. We're not a teenage pop group. We are a big old dinosaur, and it takes a lot of work to get it lumbering on its feet. It's not the same thing as it was. But I still love it.