The 2 Pink Floyd albums David Gilmour said are the best

A fundamental part of Pink Floyd’s sound, guitarist and singer David Gilmour created some of the most memorable guitar parts in the history of music. He appeared on 14 albums released by the band, including those that helped make Pink Floyd one of the best-selling groups of all time, with an estimated 250 million records sold worldwide.

It is not easy to determine which are the band’s best albums, but David Gilmour has already revealed which ones he considers the greatest.

The 2 Pink Floyd albums David Gilmour said are the best

“Dark Side of The Moon” (1973)

“Dark Side of the Moon” is the first album David Gilmour said to Weekend Knack that was one of Pink Floyd’s best, both textually and musically. “I can clearly remember that moment of sitting and listening to a whole mix (of the album), all the way through and thinking ‘Oh my God, we really done something fantastic,” he said in the documentary about the album.

Curiously, it was an album where his creative tensions with Roger Waters started to rise, since they didn’t agree on how the record should be mixed. “I wanted Dark Side to be big and swampy and wet, with reverbs and things like that. And Roger was very keen on it being a very dry album. I think he was influenced a lot by John Lennon‘s first solo album (Plastic Ono Band), which was very dry. We argued so much that it was suggested we get a third opinion. We were going to leave Chris (Thomas – producer/engineer) to mix it on his own, with Alan Parsons engineering. And of course on the first day I found out that Roger sneaked in there. So, the second day I sneaked in there.”

David Gilmour continued:

“And from then on, we both sat right at Chris’ shoulder, interfering. Luckily, Chris was more sympathetic to my point of view than he was to Roger’s. There’s creative tension and there’s total egocentric megalomaniacal tension, if you like,” David Gilmour told Guitar World in 1993.

Although the record appears on the charts to this day, Gilmour has expressed dissatisfaction with some aspects of it. “I had some criticisms of Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s kind of ludicrous in a way to have criticisms of an album that was so successful. But I did voice them at the time.”

“I thought that one or two of the vehicles carrying the ideas were not as strong as the ideas that they carried. I thought we should try and work harder on marrying the idea and the vehicle that carried it, so that they both had an equal magic, or whatever, to them.” he said in an interview with Classic Rock in 2002.

“Dark Side of the Moon” begins and ends with a heartbeat. It’s not a real one and as Gilmour said once, it wouldn’t be good for the person if it was. “I think that (idea) came in quite a while before the end and it’s done on a tom tom. It’s not a real heartbeat. You’d be in deep trouble if that was your heartbeat (laughs),” he told Paul Rappaport in 2011.

“Wish You Were Here” (1975)

The second one is the follow-up “Wish You Were Here”, which he reaffirmed many times that is his favorite one. “For me, Wish You Were Here is the most satisfying album. I really love it. I mean, I’d rather listen to that than ‘Dark Side of the Moon’. Because I think we achieved a better balance of music and lyrics on ‘Wish You Were Here’. Dark Side went a bit too far the other way – too much into the importance of the lyrics. And sometimes the tunes – the vehicles for the lyrics – got neglected. To me, one of Roger’s failings is that sometimes, in his effort to get the words across, he uses a less-than-perfect vehicle,” he said in an interview with Guitar World in 1993.

However, it was not easy to find the right direction after the enormous success of “Dark Side of the Moon”. It took the band some time to regain focus, but once they had a few strong songs, everything came together quickly. “We were clueless (when making the album) for a long time. We were faffing about blindly trying to find a way forward. That sort of blindly wandering about not knowing what we were doing was what helped to create what came with ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ and the whole ‘Wish You Were Here’ album.”

David Gilmour continued:

“That started quite painfully, it was difficult and we didn’t know what we were doing. But by the time we were adding in those other songs ‘Welcome to The Machine’, ‘Have a Cigar’, we were working on all cylinders, I would say.” Roger Waters originally wanted to develop the songs that later became “Dogs” and “Sheep”, but Gilmour was initially opposed to the idea.

“We had some arguing about that for a while. But he was right and I was wrong, not the first time. (Then) we went on with ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’, split it in two, to open and close the album. It seemed to work,” Paul Rappaport in 2011.

The album’s title-track became a highlight of both Pink Floyd’s concerts and David Gilmour’s solo shows over the years. Although Gilmour performed the song many times, he said that the emotion he feels when playing it’s still the same.

“(The title-track) must be fairly specifically about Syd (Barrett) but applies to so many other things. It has an emotional depth and it’s sort of fairly universal, I think. I suppose you could say that we haven’t done quite as many concerts as people like the Stones, (Yet, I performed the title track so many times live). Still resonates, still has its meaning, it means that to me every time I sing it. It’s a brilliant, a very, very good combination of music and words that seems to capture something,” David Gilmour said in an interview featured on “The High Resolution Remasters,” edition of the album.