A mirror reflecting huddled figures in a garden shrouded in fog; a man and his dog splashing through a flooded field; women dancing ecstatically, like witches under the full moon, across a spotlit stage. These are just some of the images featured in Polly Samson’s new book chronicling the journey of her husband David Gilmour’s fifth studio album, Luck and Strange.
“It’s been really good to take ownership of my concert pictures as they’ve been appearing for over 20 years in various publications and all over the internet, largely uncredited,” Samson tells The Independent. “It’s a thrill to see them so beautifully printed in a book.”
Samson is of course known to many for her writing, both as journalist and author of novels such as 2020’s excellent A Theatre for Dreamers – a fictionalised account of the talented but troubled circle of artists living on the Greek island of Hydra in the Sixties – and as the co-songwriter of much of Pink Floyd and Gilmour’s output from the mid-Nineties onwards.
“I love writing, fiction and lyrics, and I love taking photographs. I’ve realised, though, that I can’t do both things at the same time,” she says. “Writing comes largely from introspection – when I’m working on a novel or lyrics I can walk for miles and be totally blind to anything going on around me, whereas with a camera I need to be constantly aware of visual stimuli such as changes in light conditions or things moving in and out of frame.”
Asked about the process of photographing her husband, whether on tour, at home or in the recording studio, she says she is “endlessly fascinated” by his playing and “trying to capture something about that expressiveness that’s not just in his face but the way that he moves his body”.
Indeed, The Independent’s review of Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall last year noted how, “to see Gilmour live is to witness his prowess as a wordless storyteller… with his guitar, he weaves entire narratives into his solos, guiding the audience through mysterious galaxies and celestial highs”.
During the Luck and Strange tour, he was joined by his and Samson’s youngest daughter, Romany, who duetted with him on the song “Between Two Points”. Samson’s photographs document some of the earliest stages of the album’s conception and recording to intimate family portraits, behind-the-scenes pictures and startling, dramatic shots of the live tour.
“It always seems to me that his guitar, and particularly its emotional intensity, has just as much to do with his shoulders as his fingers,” Samson observes. “The surprise has been how energising it has been with Romany in the band. She’s young and fun and fabulously photogenic!”
Youth, mortality and ageing were key themes on Gilmour’s album. “Mortality is something I think about and have done so intensely since I was 13 in my bedroom, essentially a linen cupboard in my parents’ house,” he told The Independent in a joint interview with Samson last year.
“Probably with most of the songs I have written over the years, it is the main topic. But when you get to my age, one has to be realistic and say that immortality is no longer an option.”
Gilmour also released a new concert film, Live at the Circus Maximus, Rome, to cinemas in September, having returned to the historic location as part of the Luck and Strange tour.
“It’s Italy, it’s Rome, it’s beautiful venues,” he said of what performing there meant to him. “These places have an atmosphere to them which can’t help but be contagious, and the Circus Maximus, like the amphitheatre in Pompeii, are just magical places. You feel the feet of people walking there over millennia… it has a spiritual energy to it.”
Gilmour said it was “exciting” to be able to play the new material while finding a “nostalgic joy” in playing music from his extraordinary back catalogue: “That’s got to be balanced off what I consider to be one’s purpose in this venture, which is to create new music, create new art.”
He continued: “All songs, they are one thing in the studio and they have a different life onstage. The joy of playing new music live is enormous… The songs in the studio have been constructed and taken apart and re-edited and fiddled with until we get to where we think we’d squeezed as much out of the song as we could get. But live is a whole different experience: you count it in and you go.”
‘David Gilmour, Luck and Strange, Studio/Live: Photographs’ by Polly Samson is published by Thames & Hudson. ‘The Luck & Strange Concerts’ album is out now on Sony Music.
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