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Biography

On An Island, to be released in March 2006, is David Gilmour’s third solo album. It follows 1978’s David Gilmour and 1984’s About Face.

David Jon Gilmour, CBE, was born on 6 March, 1946 in Cambridge, his father a senior lecturer in Zoology at the University. Although David Gilmour is best known as the guitarist, vocalist and writer with UK band and international phenomenon Pink Floyd, he is also renowned for his collaborations and solo work. Until this year’s showstopping performance at Live 8, Pink Floyd had not performed together since 1994’s Division Bell Tour and had not shared a stage with former bandmember, Roger Waters, since 1981.

David Gilmour and Syd Barrett both attended the Cambridgeshire
College of Arts and Technology where they spent their lunchtimes learning
the guitar. They were not, however, bandmates, and while Barrett joined Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright to form Pink Floyd, Gilmour started playing in the band Jokers Wild in 1963. Gilmour left Jokers Wild in 1966 and formed a new band with some of its members. This band, firstly named Flowers, later changing their name to Bullitt, spent the rest of 1966 and most of 1967 playing in Spain and France, before disbanding later that year.

Gilmour was asked to join Pink Floyd in January 1968, to supplement the guitar work of the increasingly erratic Barrett. Syd left the group only months later, struggling with mental illness, and Gilmour assumed the role of the band's guitarist and main vocalist.

Gilmour's guitar playing and song writing were major factors of Pink
Floyd's world-wide success during the 1970s. However, at the turn of the
decade, as Waters took more and more control over the band, the relationship between the two deteriorated.

Gilmour released his first, eponymous, solo album David Gilmour in the
spring of 1978, seeing it chart in the UK Top 20. One of the tunes he wrote at the time, but did not use, was developed to become the Pink Floyd classic "Comfortably Numb".

In 1985, having left the band, Waters declared that Pink Floyd was defunct but David Gilmour demurred and assumed full control. A new Pink Floyd album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason, was created and recorded with Nick Mason and Rick Wright and released in 1987 accompanied by a massive world tour. The Division Bell, the last Pink Floyd studio album, was released in 1994 and also supported by a 100 date global sell-out tour. A live album and video of the tour, Pulse, which was recorded and filmed at Earl’s Court in London, followed in 1995.
In 1996 Pink Floyd were inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in November 2005 the band were similarly inducted in the UK Music Hall of Fame.