The single chosen to launch David Gilmour's new album Luck and Strangewhich will be released tomorrow, is titled The Piper's Call. It's a piece about not selling your soul and resisting the myths of success and its temptations.
Gilmour and co-writer (and wife) Polly Samson spoke to the Englishman about it Independent. “It’s about the temptations of the life I’ve lived,” he explains. “No one lives rock ‘n’ roll without…” Samson adds the rest: “Cocaine.” “Yeah, well,” he continues, “I kind of went off the rails a little bit. It was something that worried Polly. There was a time when I was letting myself go, drinking too much, doing too much coke, that sort of thing. But I stopped that when she and I started dating, pretty much right then and there.”
Samson essentially saved him. “That’s right, I haven’t touched that stuff in over 30 years,” Gilmour says. “We saved each other,” she adds.
“I was going through a difficult time with my pop group, with relationships, that kind of thing,” the guitarist explains. “I went through a very tormented period in the early '80s. I didn't even realize I was out of control, but I probably was. I'm not going to say you were a gift,” he says to Samson, “but something real came into my life, and she wouldn't have tolerated it (drug use, ed.). I needed a little push to put it all behind me.”
Samson gave him an ultimatum, “If you do that again, I'm out,” and recounted the last time Gilmour snorted coke. During a charity dinner at a grand hotel in Grosvenor Place, the musician suddenly disappeared to go to the bathroom with his (now ex-) manager. When he returned, Samson asked him, “Did you just do cocaine?” It was obvious. “I had a glass of champagne in my hand and I threw it at him. He managed to avoid it and I accidentally hit Douglas Adams,” the writer who wrote the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Embarrassed by what had happened, Samson runs out and Gilmour chases her. “He was running after me and saying, ‘I’ll never do that again!’ And I was like, ‘It’s too late, you’ve ruined everything!’ At one point the police see this man chasing me and ask me if he’s bothering me. I say yes and then they stop him.” An officer, however, recognizes him: “But you’re David Gilmour.” At that point, Samson says, “we both burst out laughing, and it was funny. Terrible and funny at the same time.”
