'Mortality is something I think about intensely'

David Gilmour and his wife, the novelist Polly Samson, talk to Geordie Greig about collaborating on his new album and why there will never be a Floyd reunion with Roger Waters

- Geordie Greig

“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.