By the late 1970s, Pete Townshend and David Gilmour‘s paths had crossed several times until they eventually met while Pink Floyd was recording their 1982 album, The Final Cut. Before their first meeting, both guitarists also appeared on Paul McCartney’s 1979 Wings album Back to the Egg.
Throughout the decades, the two retained a mutual respect for one another “He’s a natural,” Townshend told Mojo of Gilmour in 2008. “Among players, particularly British players, he’s incredibly highly rated. Adored. I’d say. He has a way of putting incredible feeling into everything he does.”
Townshend added, “Technically, yes, he’s very good, but that’s not the important thing. It’s the way that he plays. He’s had real influence, and I think he’s influenced me. There’s a gracefulness, a naturalness, to the way he writes and plays.”
Gilmour also remembered hitchhiking from Cambridge to London to see Townshend play during the earlier days of The Who. “Pete has always been one of my heroes,” said Gilmour in French Guitarist magazine in 2002. “When I was very young, I hitchhiked from Cambridge to London to see him play at the Marquee Club. It was the very beginning of the Who. He is incredible. He rarely plays lead, well, he could very well do.”
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In 1985, Gilmour joined Townshend’s short-lived supergroup Deep End and toured with the band that year, appearing on their two live albums Deep End Live! (1986) and Live: Brixton Academy ’85 (2004). More than a decade later, Gilour even joined the Who on stage at Hyde Park in London during their Quadrophenia tour.
Shortly after meeting, Gilmour and Townshend also started working together on what would become a two-year-long run of collaborations from 1984 through ’85, for one another’s solo projects, which resulted in these three songs.
[RELATED: 5 Songs You Didn’t Know Pete Townshend Wrote for Other Artists]
“Love on the Air” / About Face (1984)
Written by Pete Townshend
For Gilmour’s second solo album, About Face, Townshend penned two songs, including the more radio-friendly “Love on the Air,” centered around a love song playing on the radio. Released as the second single from About Face, Townshend wrote the song within a day after Gilmour called him for some help. Gilmour also performed the song on the tour in ’84 and in 1985 while playing with Townshend in Deep End.
Love on the air
I keep transmitting but the reception is hazy
I don’t get an answer
Keep sending it faster
Always knew it was crazy
To put my love on the air.
No one will hurt me again
No one will cause me to lie
No one will control me by pain
No one will cause me to cry
I was looking for love
In wandering eyes
Like a ship trying to fix on a beacon
I learned how to sigh
On the ribbon and wires
It’s a habit that’s so hard to weaken
“All Lovers are Deranged” / About Face (1984)
Written by Pete Townshend
Townshend also penned the harder “All Lovers Are Deranged,” which opens side two of About Face, and moves through the ways love can drive one mad.
It takes a fool to phone a fool
When both have said it all
We make the rule, bemoan the rule
That neither one should call
But love that was
Is love that is
Demands to always be unchanged
But then, all lovers are deranged
We walk away with memories
And clutch them to our hearts
We’re disembodied entities
We move in fits and starts
For burning wine
Intoxicates,
And takes all caution in its flames
All lovers are deranged
Though Townshend doesn’t play on About Face, Gilmour enlisted a wish list of musicians, including late Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro, bassist Pino Palladino (Jeff Beck, Don Henley, Nine Inch Nails), and Ian Kewley (Paul Young) on organ and piano, along with Steve Winwood, who plays the Hammond organ on two tracks.
“I wanted to make a really good record,” said Gilmour. “I didn’t want to do it very, very quickly, and I wanted to get the best musicians in the world that I could get hold of to play with me, so I thought I’d just make a little list of all my favorite musicians.”
“White City Fighting” / White City: A Novel (1985)
Written by David Gilmour and Pete Townshend
A year after the release of About Face, Gilmour returned the favor by co-writing and playing on “White City Fighting” from Townshend’s 1985 solo concept album, White City: A Novel. The album was named after the low-income housing district where Towshend grew up in West London, called White City, and set as a novel with each song as a chapter.
Initially, Gilmour, who also plays guitar on the opening White City: A Novel track “Give Blood,” had started writing a song called “Hope,” which he intended to use on About Face before Townshend reworked it into “White City Fighting.” It’s one part of the “story” within the album, chronicling some of the cultural and racial clashes within White City during the ’60s.
Down to the refuge, near QPR
I drive to committees in my German car
Prone to violence, prone to shame
I glide in silence, my pride in vain
For no one remembers, not that I can see
That we were defenders, we were the free
The White City, blood was an addiction
Now it is analyzed just as though it were fiction
That battles were won and battles were blown
At the height of the White City fighting
The White City Fighting, remember, remember
The White City Fighting, remember, remember
Photo: Pete Townshend (l) and David Gilmour at UK Music Hall Of Fame 2005 on November 16, 2005 in London, England (Dave Hogan/Getty Images)
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