Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘but rock ’n’ roll.’ Having acquired a guitar from an uncle, Waters also began taking tentative classical lessons with a local female teacher, but later admitted that he’d given up ‘as it hurt my fingers, and I found it much too hard’.
    Meanwhile, David Gilmour shared none of his future bandmate’s suspicion about rock ’n’ roll. ‘I’m not sure if “Rock Around the Clock” was the very first record I bought, but it must have been one of the first,’ he recalls. (He later revealed that the 78rpm disc was destroyed when the family’s au pair accidentally sat on it.) Gilmour was much more taken with Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which followed a year later. At home, his parents’ record collection included numerous blues 78s. Like Waters and Barrett, Gilmour had also discovered Radio Luxembourg, with its diverse mix of music that was outside the remit of any existing British radio station - ‘All sorts of strange sounds’ - and which would have a marked influence on a whole generation of English rock musicians.
    While Gilmour’s musical education was already underway, his education proper had begun at the age of five when he was sent to boarding school. Doug Gilmour decided to take a six-month sabbatical from Cambridge University and go to Wisconsin in the American Midwest with Sylvia. The children were despatched to Steeple Claydon in Buckinghamshire where they remained until the end of the following school year.
    ‘My parents loved each other and enjoyed each other’s company, but, to be honest, I think they found us rather inconvenient,’ Gilmour told Mojo magazine in 2006. ‘We holidayed together when we were very little, but as soon as we got to the age where we could be bounced off into something else, like joining the Boy Scouts, we never went on holiday together again.’ Years later, Gilmour would rediscover letters and a diary from the time, revealing that even when his parents had returned to Cambridge, David and his siblings remained in Steeple Claydon until the end of the school year. ‘These things seem perfectly normal at the time. It’s only later when you think, “Hang on, that wasn’t so great.” ’
    At the age of eleven, just as Barrett made his way to the County, Gilmour returned to Cambridge and was enrolled at the Perse Preparatory School for Boys. Situated just a few doors down from Syd’s family home, the Perse was a fee-paying grammar school run on strict authoritarian lines. Its old boys included Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the Royal National Theatre. Dating back to the seventeenth century, a quarter of the Perse’s pupils were boarders, and all pupils were made to attend Saturday morning lessons, contributing to the atmosphere of, in the words of one of its former alumni, ‘a rather snooty public school’.
    Though naturally bright, Gilmour’s approach to academia was found wanting. ‘I was lazy,’ he admits now. Elvis may have been a primary influence, but it was the arrival of a pair of guitar-playing, high-harmony singing siblings - the Everly Brothers and their 1957 breakthrough hit ‘Bye Bye Love’ - that was pivotal in Gilmour picking up the guitar.
    ‘I loved the Everlys. When I was thirteen, our next-door neighbour’s son was given a guitar, and he was completely tone deaf and had no interest in it whatsoever. So I borrowed it and never gave it back. I started plonking away on it, and my parents were pretty happy about that, and got me the Pete Seeger guitar book and record. These elementary lessons were wonderful.’
    Also painstakingly working his way through the Seeger instruction manual was Gilmour’s friend Rado Klose, who, using his middle name as Bob Klose, would later go on to become a member of the early Pink Floyd.
    ‘David and I had known each other since we were born,’ says Klose. ‘His father had met mine before either of them even had families. I can’t recall if David