I became obsessed during lockdown with the thought that David might die and leave me alone – it was unbearable, agonisingly so,” says Polly Samson, youthfully elegant at 62, intensely articulate, as she talks of David Gilmour, 78, Pink Floyd guitarist, rock legend, and her husband for the past 30 years.
Agony and ecstasy collide in Luck and Strange, his first solo album for nine years, released this week. Her primeval fear of him dying before her and their immutable love are at the core of the album, essentially a paean to an enduring rock’n’roll marriage. Her lyrics, chiselled and candid, are a seamless fit with his musicianship, their professional partnership now also stretching over three decades, since Samson began writing for both Gilmour and Pink Floyd.
As they speak, both are literally floating on water, on the Thames in Richmond aboard Astoria, Gilmour’s Edwardian houseboat-cum-recording studio, as they talk also of music, dogs, drugs, ponies, mortality and the art of songmaking.
Gilmour bought the boat on a whim after seeing it advertised in Country Life. Two Pink Floyd albums have been recorded there. Neither is as intense as this new solo one. It is rare for them to be away from their farm in Sussex, where they became almost hermetically sealed during and long after Covid. It made them focus. They began writing, composing, singing, and eventually recording – her poetic lyrics, his haunting, bluesy voice often a melodic plaintive cry.
“Thinking how will we part/ Will I hold your hand or you be left holding mine?/ Between this breath and then/ There’s this airlock of time/ This airlock of time.”
Covid, their “airlock of time”, was intense. “My consuming fear of David dying was what we endlessly talked about, but yet when the rest of the country unlocked, we didn’t; we stayed cocooned,” she explains.
The new album has their son, Joe Gilmour, now 29, caught on tape as a child, saying, “Sing Daddy!” That stayed in; also a recording from a jam session the guitarist had in his barn with Pink Floyd’s keyboardist Rick Wright, before Wright’s death in 2008. The mix also includes the couple’s daughter Romany singing and playing the harp. Their son Charlie, a writer, added some lyrics. This is a family affair from start to finish.
We chat about Samson’s love of cold water swimming and David’s views on politics. “Keir Starmer seems like a statesman, despite the fact that he was director of public prosecutions when Charlie was jailed for attacking the war memorial [during a 2010 student protest against loan fees]. But we’ve forgiven him!”
Silver-bearded and black T-shirted, Gilmour has an energetic spring in his step. He’s more of a listener than a talker, but it soon becomes clear that he, too, has had his share of doom-laden thoughts. “Mortality is something I think about and have done so intensely since I was 13 in my bedroom, essentially a linen cupboard in my parents’ house. Probably with most of the songs I have written over the years, it is the main topic. But when you get to my age, one has to be realistic and say that immortality is no longer an option,” he says. But just to be clear, he is, so to speak, in the pink, in fine fettle and very much alive, even if they both fear the shadow of death.
While isolated in Sussex with some of their children, they made a somewhat random podcast, Von Trapped (a playful reference to the family in The Sound of Music), showing them sober, tipsy, confessional, almost always singing and performing. It became a viral hit, stemming from Samson digitally promoting her novel, A Theatre for Dreamers, as Covid stopped her touring with it, not even able to visit a bookshop. It had taken five years’ research and writing. Long term, Covid altered their lifestyle. “In some ways, we still are like hobbits – we’ve been to no more than two things with 10 people in a room since then,” he adds.
Always, music dominates. Over lunch in the kitchen, Gilmour instinctively grabs a guitar (five years ago he auctioned more than 120 guitars from his collection for more than $22m, all for an eco-charity) and tinkers with fixing it, using a kitchen knife to turn a screw, the razor-edged blade perilously slipping near his hands, those precious digits that make his unique, warm, monumental sound. Ten-million-dollar hands, I suggest. His favoured guitar for his forthcoming concerts this autumn is what he calls his Black Cat Strat; it has his own private cat sticker on it as a personal branding. He also owns two black kittens, Sheldon and Sebastian. He is almost peerless as a guitarist: from the delicate swoops that define the descent into “Comfortably Numb” to the spine-tingling solo that introduces “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, Gilmour’s playing has a subtlety and majesty that rings down the decades.
“He is beyond careless with those hands on the farm, and yet they are his world,” says Samson, as her husband squints and turns the glinting blade. “You should see what he does, coming in from the woods, sometimes cut and bruised.” Gilmour chuckles as he shows how one of his fingers recently buckled and needed medical intervention.
Both are anchored by family life – dogs, ponies, long walks, their children and grandchildren – and they clearly dote on each other. They joust and playfully argue. They end each other’s sentences. Well, mostly she his. Their eyes seldom leave one another’s. Such intimacy unfolds in the lyrics, from discreet cameos of them in bed to forlorn fears about the planet.
“Darling don’t make the tea/ Stay and snooze with me/ I’m not ready for the news/ Or to leave this cocoon.”
The conversation turns to Bob Dylan as Gilmour riffs at the kitchen table to make a point about a Dylan lyric being just one line over and over again. Samson is the more loquacious, more expansive, iron-certain about two things: how painfully dependent is her love of him (which is actually mutual) and that his talent is genius, angel-given. Not that they believe in any god. Equally, he admires her books, as they democratically share their time so both can succeed.
But while death does obsess them, they are in person light, engaging, curious and down to earth. Laughter and levity define them more than grave countenance. Samson’s lyrics echo what the poet Andrew Marvell wrote in his immortal poem “To His Coy Mistress”: “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace” – but she also believes in love conquering all.
Their love affair started at a party in David Hockney’s old studio in Notting Hill, when friends introduced them, more than three decades ago. Very apt that this rock romance between the Pink Floyd guitarist and the journalist daughter of a woman who had been a major in Mao’s Red Army began in the colourful painter’s eyrie. Gilmour was 46 and she was 30; the son of Cambridge academics enraptured by the scintillating single mother (Samson already had Charlie, by the poet Heathcote Williams).
“I can’t remember many of the details of that first meeting,” says Gilmour, boyishly diffident even at 78, modest, wry, careful. “Don’t worry, I can,” chips in Samson, laughing, elfin, effervescent and chic in black. “I can humiliate David!” she teases. “One of her favourite occupations,” he joshes, eyes tenderly locked on her.
Her memory of their early dates is clear: “I remember after a few dinners in December 1990, he said, I’m going skiing tomorrow, would you like to come?” I said, ‘I haven’t got a plane ticket.’ He says: ‘It’s all right; I’m flying.’ ‘What do you mean you’re flying?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘I’m flying in my airplane.’ I said incredulously, ‘You have a plane?’ And he said ‘Yes, I have seven!’”
