David Gilmour and Polly Samson on death, drugs and married life after Pink Floyd

The guitarist and his wife, the novelist Polly Samson, talk to Geordie Greig about collaborating on his new album, the secret of their lasting love, their fears about mortality, and why there will never be a Floyd reunion with Roger Waters

David Gilmour: ‘Mortality is something I think about and have done so intensely since I was 13’ (Anton Corbijn)

I became obsessed during lockdown with the thought that David might die and leave me alone – it was unbearable, agonisingly so,” says Polly Samson, youthfully elegant at 62, intensely articulate, as she talks of David Gilmour, 78, Pink Floyd guitarist, rock legend, and her husband for the past 30 years.

Agony and ecstasy collide in Luck and Strange, his first solo album for nine years, released this week. Her primeval fear of him dying before her and their immutable love are at the core of the album, essentially a paean to an enduring rock’n’roll marriage. Her lyrics, chiselled and candid, are a seamless fit with his musicianship, their professional partnership now also stretching over three decades, since Samson began writing for both Gilmour and Pink Floyd.

As they speak, both are literally floating on water, on the Thames in Richmond aboard Astoria, Gilmour’s Edwardian houseboat-cum-recording studio, as they talk also of music, dogs, drugs, ponies, mortality and the art of songmaking.

Gilmour bought the boat on a whim after seeing it advertised in Country Life. Two Pink Floyd albums have been recorded there. Neither is as intense as this new solo one. It is rare for them to be away from their farm in Sussex, where they became almost hermetically sealed during and long after Covid. It made them focus. They began writing, composing, singing, and eventually recording – her poetic lyrics, his haunting, bluesy voice often a melodic plaintive cry.

“Thinking how will we part/ Will I hold your hand or you be left holding mine?/ Between this breath and then/ There’s this airlock of time/ This airlock of time.”

Covid, their “airlock of time”, was intense. “My consuming fear of David dying was what we endlessly talked about, but yet when the rest of the country unlocked, we didn’t; we stayed cocooned,” she explains.

The new album has their son, Joe Gilmour, now 29, caught on tape as a child, saying, “Sing Daddy!” That stayed in; also a recording from a jam session the guitarist had in his barn with Pink Floyd’s keyboardist Rick Wright, before Wright’s death in 2008. The mix also includes the couple’s daughter Romany singing and playing the harp. Their son Charlie, a writer, added some lyrics. This is a family affair from start to finish.

Keeping it in the family: Gilmour with his daughter, Romany (Anton Corbijn)

We chat about Samson’s love of cold water swimming and David’s views on politics. “Keir Starmer seems like a statesman, despite the fact that he was director of public prosecutions when Charlie was jailed for attacking the war memorial [during a 2010 student protest against loan fees]. But we’ve forgiven him!”

Silver-bearded and black T-shirted, Gilmour has an energetic spring in his step. He’s more of a listener than a talker, but it soon becomes clear that he, too, has had his share of doom-laden thoughts. “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. 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,” he says. But just to be clear, he is, so to speak, in the pink, in fine fettle and very much alive, even if they both fear the shadow of death.

While isolated in Sussex with some of their children, they made a somewhat random podcast, Von Trapped (a playful reference to the family in The Sound of Music), showing them sober, tipsy, confessional, almost always singing and performing. It became a viral hit, stemming from Samson digitally promoting her novel, A Theatre for Dreamers, as Covid stopped her touring with it, not even able to visit a bookshop. It had taken five years’ research and writing. Long term, Covid altered their lifestyle. “In some ways, we still are like hobbits – we’ve been to no more than two things with 10 people in a room since then,” he adds.

Von Trapped: Polly Samson and Gilmour (centre) with their children (Polly Samson)

Always, music dominates. Over lunch in the kitchen, Gilmour instinctively grabs a guitar (five years ago he auctioned more than 120 guitars from his collection for more than $22m, all for an eco-charity) and tinkers with fixing it, using a kitchen knife to turn a screw, the razor-edged blade perilously slipping near his hands, those precious digits that make his unique, warm, monumental sound. Ten-million-dollar hands, I suggest. His favoured guitar for his forthcoming concerts this autumn is what he calls his Black Cat Strat; it has his own private cat sticker on it as a personal branding. He also owns two black kittens, Sheldon and Sebastian. He is almost peerless as a guitarist: from the delicate swoops that define the descent into “Comfortably Numb” to the spine-tingling solo that introduces “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”, Gilmour’s playing has a subtlety and majesty that rings down the decades.

In the studio: Gilmour (right) recording his new album (Polly Samson)

“He is beyond careless with those hands on the farm, and yet they are his world,” says Samson, as her husband squints and turns the glinting blade. “You should see what he does, coming in from the woods, sometimes cut and bruised.” Gilmour chuckles as he shows how one of his fingers recently buckled and needed medical intervention.

Gilmour with (L-R) daughter Alice, wife Polly and son Charlie at Buckingham Palace, 2003, after receiving a CBE for services to music (Getty)

Both are anchored by family life – dogs, ponies, long walks, their children and grandchildren – and they clearly dote on each other. They joust and playfully argue. They end each other’s sentences. Well, mostly she his. Their eyes seldom leave one another’s. Such intimacy unfolds in the lyrics, from discreet cameos of them in bed to forlorn fears about the planet.

“Darling don’t make the tea/ Stay and snooze with me/ I’m not ready for the news/ Or to leave this cocoon.”

The conversation turns to Bob Dylan as Gilmour riffs at the kitchen table to make a point about a Dylan lyric being just one line over and over again. Samson is the more loquacious, more expansive, iron-certain about two things: how painfully dependent is her love of him (which is actually mutual) and that his talent is genius, angel-given. Not that they believe in any god. Equally, he admires her books, as they democratically share their time so both can succeed.

‘I can’t remember many of the details of that first meeting’: Gilmour on meeting his wife, Polly (Getty)

But while death does obsess them, they are in person light, engaging, curious and down to earth. Laughter and levity define them more than grave countenance. Samson’s lyrics echo what the poet Andrew Marvell wrote in his immortal poem “To His Coy Mistress”: “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace” – but she also believes in love conquering all.

Their love affair started at a party in David Hockney’s old studio in Notting Hill, when friends introduced them, more than three decades ago. Very apt that this rock romance between the Pink Floyd guitarist and the journalist daughter of a woman who had been a major in Mao’s Red Army began in the colourful painter’s eyrie. Gilmour was 46 and she was 30; the son of Cambridge academics enraptured by the scintillating single mother (Samson already had Charlie, by the poet Heathcote Williams).

“I can’t remember many of the details of that first meeting,” says Gilmour, boyishly diffident even at 78, modest, wry, careful. “Don’t worry, I can,” chips in Samson, laughing, elfin, effervescent and chic in black. “I can humiliate David!” she teases. “One of her favourite occupations,” he joshes, eyes tenderly locked on her.

Her memory of their early dates is clear: “I remember after a few dinners in December 1990, he said, I’m going skiing tomorrow, would you like to come?” I said, ‘I haven’t got a plane ticket.’ He says: ‘It’s all right; I’m flying.’ ‘What do you mean you’re flying?’ I asked, and he replied, ‘I’m flying in my airplane.’ I said incredulously, ‘You have a plane?’ And he said ‘Yes, I have seven!’”

Pink Floyd in 1971 (Getty)

She then chucks him a googly. “But actually,” she says, half in jest, “I think at first he really just wanted me to come to look after his children, because he couched it as ‘My nanny has let me down, would you like to come?’” He laughs, enjoying her narrative. And so, as 32 years speed by, they have three shared children (he has a total of eight) and her son Charlie is legally adopted by Gilmour. Always there flickering away has been the extreme fame and fortune of Pink Floyd, epically successful, making all the band members rich. Giving large chunks away to charity has been part of his identity.

Samson threw a grenade when she tweeted last year about the band’s former leader Roger Waters, who quit Floyd in 1985. She accused Waters of being “antisemitic to your rotten core”, in an online row. She also claimed he was a “Putin apologist”, after Waters suggested in an interview that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “probably the most provoked invasion ever”.

In response, Waters said that he was “aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely”.

It led to a re-eruption of the four-decade war between the Floydites, which centred on Waters’ attempts to fold the band upon his own departure. I ask if there will ever be a reunion; Gilmour’s answer is an unequivocal no, if it involves Waters. As to something spurring Gilmour on to do a partial reunion with drummer Nick Mason, it is not totally ruled out. But today he is focused on his own album. “I have never had so much fun.” He brought in new musicians, a new producer, and it is as fresh and mesmerising as anything he has done. And key to that has been his partnership with Samson.

Partners in rhyme: Samson and Gilmour (Gavin Elder)

So, I ask, on that first meeting, what first struck Gilmour about Samson all those years ago in the 1980s, when she was a writer at The Sunday Times. He kicks in: “Right from the start she was lovely, gorgeous and frighteningly articulate. That always helps me, the articulacy thing.” Gilmour is self-deprecating about his careful, even hesitant choice of words, unlike Samson, who is a fast-flowing torrent of articulacy – perhaps not surprising in someone whose novels and lyrics are defined by precise, compelling, freshly minted language.

She takes me down memory lane to before they were properly dating but were often sat next to each other by friends. “David asked me to go with him to a charity event, along the lines of ‘I need someone to come with me. I’m going to be besieged by women!’ I thought he wanted someone to sort of be his chaperone.”

Gilmour adds: “Yeah, well, some of my lines weren’t perfect.”

Samson overrides. “He’s terrified of rejection I think.”

He chuckles at her teasing, cod psychoanalysis, as does she. “I definitely thought she was smashing and gorgeous,” he adds. “And not afraid to put her point of view when she disagreed with me, which was often.”

Rock’n’roll has always had plenty of casualties, and both Samson and Gilmour believe they rescued each other. And the lyrics of Luck and Strange delve into darker moments in the guitarist’s life. “Definitively we saved each other’s lives,” she says. This becomes clear as I ask about the lyrics in their song “The Piper’s Call” with the warning line: “Whatever it takes, steer clear of the snakes.”

Gilmour rules out a Pink Floyd reunion if Waters was involved (Getty)

So, what are the snakes, I ask. “Temptations,” says Samson, somewhat elliptically. “It’s a kind of nod to Genesis, Paradise Lost, or knowledge that you’d be better off not addressing.”

Gilmour is more precise: “It’s about the temptations in the life I’ve led.” His rock-star life straddled the hedonistic Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, until he met Samson, when it dramatically changed.

And the lyrics’ reference to a fixer? “It could be a drug; it could be anything. What I want is for people to inhabit the song, so breaking each line down into specifics is not helpful,” she says.

But some bits do echo their lives: “The flames are high, the piper’s call contagious/ A fixer who will numb your pain, and strangeness.”

Samson expands: “Well if you wanted to, if you wanted the sort of scandalous take on it, which isn’t necessarily the take but it could be a take on it, maybe I was thinking of David’s old lifestyle...”

So we are talking drugs, then?

Gilmour: “No one gets through rock’n’roll without...” he offers, then pauses.

Samson simply adds the word: “Cocaine.”

We saved each other’s lives

Polly Samson

Gilmour: “Hmm, yes, well, slipping off the sides a little bit, here and there.” He is neither boasting nor confessing. He simply tells it as it was.

And concerns then for his health? “Well, it certainly worried Polly,” he says. “There was a time when I was letting things go, drinking too much, too much cocaine, all those sorts of things. And in my life, that stopped when we [Polly and I] started, pretty much dead on at that time.”

So, was Samson his saviour? “Yes, exactly that, and I haven’t been near any of those things for over 30 years,” Gilmour says.

She goes further: “We saved each other’s lives.”

Gilmour: “I was having a difficult time with my pop group, my relationships, all those sorts of things. In the early Eighties, I hit a really torturous time; I didn’t really notice if I was out of control, but I probably was. I won’t call you a gift, Polly, but something came along into my life that was real, and she wouldn’t stand for it [drugs]. I just needed a little kick, really, in order to put it behind me.”

“I couldn’t do otherwise,” says Samson. “I was a single mother. It was, for me, non-negotiable, and I made that clear.”

Gilmour gives Samson full credit for his transformation. “There aren’t many women who would have the strength that Polly had to deal with it,” he says.

It came down to an ultimatum from her. “It really was, ‘If you do that again, I am out of here,’ says Samson. “I am going here with an incident that illustrates it, but is also quite funny.

“At a charity dinner at one of those big hotels on Grosvenor Place [in Belgravia], David disappeared in the middle of dinner to the loo with his then manager, and when he came back, I knew what he had been doing, as it was something he promised he wouldn’t do; very early on he promised me. I just said, ‘Have you just taken cocaine?’ And as he can’t lie to me, I had a glass of champagne in my hand and I went to throw it in his face. But he ducked. I got Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and I was so appalled at what I had done, I ran out.

“The story gets worse. I ran down Park Lane, really upset, and he was scampering after me, saying, ‘I’ll never do it again.’ ‘Too late, too late, you’ve blown it.’ I was gathering speed, and then the police see this man following after me and they ask if he is bothering me. I said yes, and they went to grab him, but then the policeman said, ‘You’re Dave Gilmour.’ At that, we both start laughing, and it was then so funny. It kind of saved the situation as I found it both awful and funny.”

It was the last time he took cocaine.

And as to Gilmour saving Samson’s life? Soon after they began seeing each other, she was suffering from deeply serious glandular fever, was almost broke, and had a young child to care for on her own. In despair, she turned to him when she was an emotional and physical wreck, and stayed with him. “He took care of me and Charlie, and I really do think that he saved my life. I was so thin and utterly on the edge, so ill and he was so caring.”

And the rest is sort of history. As he cared for her, he was recording songs for the 1994 Pink Floyd album The Division Bell, and would come home and play some tracks. “And then I would sort of mumble in this kind of semi-hallucinating sense what I thought might work. And I mean, never thinking I was writing lyrics; and he started kind of trying out these things, and [I would say] ‘That’s not right. No, no, why don’t I rewrite that for you?’ And so that’s kind of where it all started.”

Gilmour: ‘No one gets through rock’n’roll without slipping off the sides a little bit, here and there’ (Anton Corbijn)

It was an unusual mix, and Gilmour is conscious of what Pink Floyd brought. “Fame and fortune are very double-edged, too much success, too much adulation, too much money – a recipe for disaster.” A disaster he dodged, he believes, through his marriage. But the other cement in their partnership is creating. Samson leaves stickers all over the place with ideas or dialogue or storylines. Gilmour sings into his phone snatches of notes, or even colliding chords. “I do all that, but in the end, if I haven’t got a piano or a guitar, it doesn’t seem to work. But still, I do it. I always think notes will come clear to me afterwards.”

As they plan a small world tour of select venues, they will be on the road before heading back to their hermetically sealed life together. But Luck and Strange may just have unlocked and freed them. “We have loved this album and are planning the next.” No nine-year wait. No novel curtailed by Covid. Final question – as they celebrate 30 years together, what would they change about each other? In unison, and unrehearsed: “Nothing.”

‘Luck and Strange’, the fifth studio album by David Gilmour, is released on 6 September through Sony Music