Soon enough would come the announcements: a new album, even a new tour, perhaps? Any day now, certainly.
He invited me up to do Arnold Layne and Uncomfortably Numb.” (Bowie felt obligated to note, in a follow-up post, that the latter title was a joke.)īowie’s appearance at the Royal Albert Hall, following his performances with Arcade Fire the previous autumn, hinted that he was testing the waters for a return to public life. “ But it fits with me.” Afterward on BowieNet, “sailor” wrote that “ I had a ball tonight singing with David Gilmour and the band. Gilmour said he chose his collaborators that night from “ people I grew up loving…David Bowie might not have worked with Pink Floyd,” he said in 2007. And at the first show, with no fanfare or pre-show hype, David Bowie walked out on stage to help sing the encores.
#Roger waters band full#
In 2006 Gilmour put out his first solo record in two decades, On an Island, and it hit #1 in the UK (given the collapse in record sales by 2006, if you had any sort of fanbase, you had a good shot to top the chart on your album’s release week).* He played the Royal Albert Hall for three nights at the end of May, with a band and set list full of guests-David Crosby and Graham Nash, Robert Wyatt, Phil Manzanera.
#Roger waters band series#
There were offers of £150 million for a series of reunion gigs, but Gilmour was done: no more tours, no more Floyd albums. Gilmour and Waters buried the hatchet (at least for a night) in 2005, when Pink Floyd reunited for Live 8, but Gilmour used the occasion as a public burial for the band. Waters, the band’s neurotic auteur, had left in acrimony in 1983 and Waters partisans considered the Gilmour-led, still-platinum-selling Pink Floyd to be a shell of its former self. He and Roger Waters had sniped at each other for decades over who “owned” Pink Floyd. “ But the weight of the whole Pink Floyd thing is something that I don’t feel like lifting these days…I just think I’ve grown out of it. “ I’m at liberty to play with Rick and Nick any time,” he said in 2001. Arnold Layne (Bowie and David Gilmour, live, 2006).Ĭomfortably Numb (Bowie and David Gilmour, live, 2006).ĭavid Gilmour was touring in the spring of 2006 as a solo artist, as Pink Floyd, the band whose name and leadership he’d assumed since the mid-Eighties, was finally in the grave.