As I walk into the vast, empty rehearsal space, a familiar bass line rolls out and a spooky electric guitar chord shimmers in the air. An 11-piece backing band are lined up at the far side of the room. In the middle stands a white bearded man, guitar in hands, an expression of intent focus on his face.  “Money, get away,” sings David Gilmour. “Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay...” I stand transfixed, a privileged audience of one, as the legendary guitar hero performs a scintillating version of Pink Floyd classic Money and follows with a spine-tingling take on Floyd’s Us & Them. Then it all rumbles to a halt in a strangely anti-climactic silence. “It’s getting there,” says Gilmour.  “It is hard, technical work, trying to get all the components to sit together, and get it so drummed in that you don’t have to think about it,” he explains, as musicians and crew take a lunch break. The band have been rehearsing five days a week for a month, in preparation for a tour that arrives in the UK next week for three sold-out dates at the Royal Albert Hall (23, 24, 25th). “The emotive stuff happens in front of an audience but there are moments, even in rehearsal, when you really get into it. Just now, singing Money and Us And Them, I became very, very aware of what the songs are talking about. I have an uncomfortable feeling that they’re just as true today as they were all those years ago.”  At 69, Gilmour has the composed, self-contained presence of an old gentleman officer, a veteran of many campaigns who finds himself quietly amused to be at the front once again. His eyes twinkle and he engages thoughtfully with questions, but there is a sense that he finds the whole game slightly ridiculous. “I think a guitar solo is how my emotion is most freely released, because verbal articulation isn’t my strongest communication strength. My wife thinks that I should do interviews by listening to the questions and playing the answer on guitar.”  Gilmour has been playing since he was nine. “I was never particularly gregarious. I was quite shy, closed in. It’s a classic isn’t it, your psychiatrist will tell you, that’s how I release it, through music.” He has an elegant vocal style, smooth and precise with a quality of dreamy yearning. “I love singing. I have spent as much of my life trying to improve my singing as I have practising guitar.” But it is his extraordinary playing for which he is celebrated, with an expressive, melodic, slow-burn style that can tug tremulously at the heart strings and then shoot off into deeper space.  John Lydon: 'Robin Williams was my kindred spirit'  “It’s a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can’t do.”  His playing has changed over the years. When Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1967, he was influenced by the experimental psychedelic daring of Floyd’s tragic, original frontman Syd Barrett (who Gilmour effectively replaced). “I still want to explore but I’m not as brave as I was then. I play safer now. In those early days you had to go through a lot of bad stuff to get to the good. Now I want it all to be good.”  His new album, Rattle That Lock, is the strongest of his four solo efforts, combining the epic vistas of latterday Floyd with the emotional intimacy of 2006’s On An Island. Never a prolific lyricist, he has once again collaborated with his wife, novelist Polly Samson. “I think this album is her best work. Some of the most exciting moments have been in the genesis of songs, singing her lyrics for the first time and suddenly seeing that it’s going to work.”  Of the song-writing process, Gilmour says “songs are ruined for me by being banal or trite. But one which has great lyrics and isn’t supported by sufficiently well-built music can also be destroyed. One is constantly aiming for that perfect marriage of vehicle and load.”  Donovan remembers encounters with Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s  Born in Cambridge in 1946 to a middle-class family (his father was a lecturer in Zoology at Cambridge University, his mother was a teacher), Gilmour learned his trade with a band called Joker’s Wild in the mid-Sixties, before being invited to join Floyd by drummer Nick Mason.  Last year, Gilmour and Mason released Endless River, a largely instrumental and apparently final Pink Floyd album assembled from sessions with late keyboard player Rick Wright. Gilmour accepts that it doesn’t have “the grand theme” and “edge” of Floyd’s finest work. “Yes, it is lacking, but who cares?” he shrugs. “There were some lovely pieces that hadn’t been finished and I thought it would be a nice little farewell gift to cheer some people up.” Although the classic line-up made an appearance at Live 8 in 2005 and Gilmour has occasionally got together on stage with old colleague, bassist and sometime antagonist Roger Waters, he has absolutely no interest in a reunion.  “I would have to be deluded not to appreciate the great moments we had together. Singing Us And Them, I was thinking how f***ing brilliant and relevant it is, and I didn’t write the words or the music (it is credited to Wright/Waters). I love still being able to play that. I just don’t want to do it with the remains of those guys any more. Rick’s dead. Roger and I don’t particularly get along. We still talk. It’s better than it has been. But it wouldn’t work. People do change. Roger and I have outgrown each other, and it would be impossible for us to work together on any realistic basis.”  Mick Hucknall remembers writing songs with Lamont Dozier in 1986  Life for Gilmour has a much wider scope than his career. “I don’t want to use the word dilettante but I am not dominated by music every second of every day, which I was in my twenties and thirties. There are children (eight from his two marraiges), Polly is writing, we are a family where different things have to be prioritised at different times. I can’t relate now to the dedication and religious fervour of youth. But something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day, as Joni Mitchell would say. I am in some ways wiser, more knowledgeable and better at doing things. So hopefully all that goes into the music.”  Get a good job with good pay and you’re OK? “I feel very lucky. And I feel some guilt at the extraordinary disparities, the great unfairness of life. How the f*** does it work that some people are obscenely rewarded for doing something and other people are not? I would love to look back at this in 200 years’ time and see where the inequality of the world is going to get us, how things are going to sort themselves out in a world that seem to be polarising more and more. How is music copyright going to be dealt with?  Will people get no reward for having created something wonderful? I’d love to see what happens in the future. But I’m not going to be around for it.” Gilmour laughs, only half joking when he concludes: “I’m a has-been. I’m a relic of history.”  David Gilmour’s Rattle That Lock is released on Friday. He plays the Royal Albert Hall Sept 23 - October 3
Ahead of a UK tour and new album, David Gilmour tells Neil McCormick why he is better off solo