David Gilmour

I went to see the David Gilmour concert movie today. It was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during his "On An Island" tour last year, and will be released on DVD in a couple of days. A bunch of theatres across North America and in the UK showed some of the DVD, which was followed by a live half-hour Q&A session with QGilmour, and then a 10-minute live jam session. The whole show was unbelievably cool. Gilmour is an amazing guitar player — he can play fast but doesn't always feel the need to (unlike others), his note-bending is amazing, and he puts so much emotion into the music it's unreal. For this tour, he also surrounded himself with other amazing musicians, including Pink Floyd bandmate Rick Wright on keyboards, Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera on rhythm guitar, and Graham Nash and David Crosby on backing vocals, and David Bowie also makes a cameo appearance. The concert was amazing — as a guitar player myself, I love to watch close-up video of great guitar players, and Gilmour is a master. If the entire thing had been two hours of footage of just his fret hand, that would have been fine with me. The Q&A afterwards was a bit disappointing, since Gilmour managed to avoid answering many of the questions. Still, I may pick this DVD up once it's released next week.

Interesting but useless fact: while browsing the Wikipedia entries on Gilmour, Wright, and other members of Pink Floyd, I came across this: Floyd drummer Nick Mason owns a house that used to be owned by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the current wife of Prince Charles. David Gilmour used to own a house in London that he sold to Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, the late wife of Prince Charles.