The Two Pink Floyd Albums David Gilmour Would Rather Forget, Including One He Considers Their “Lowest Point Artistically”

It’s not easy to join a band once they’ve built momentum. Fans already have their expectations, and it can be hard as an outsider to fulfill them. One musician who joined the ranks of a wildly popular band after their debut and got away with it is David Gilmour. While some prefer the Syd Barrett-era of Pink Floyd, no one can deny Gilmour’s contributions. Though the transition was relatively easy from an outsider’s perspective, the guitarist once said he struggled to find his footing in Pink Floyd. There were two albums in particular that, because of his shaky start, he’d rather forget.

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[RELATED: On This Day in 1970, Pink Floyd Scored Their First No. 1 Album With a Record They Thought Was a “Load of Rubbish”]

The Pink Floyd Albums That David Gilmour Regrets

Founding members of bands have the luxury of figuring things out for themselves. They don’t yet have crowds to appeal to, and they can find a way to gel with one another. However, if you are an add-in late in the game, you have to get on someone else’s rhythm immediately. This was the struggle that Gilmour faced when he joined Pink Floyd.

“In the beginning, I had to quickly adapt to them,” Gilmour once said in a documentary. “Play stuff that I had no clue what I was doing; it was probably dreadful. It was also excruciatingly embarrassing to the extent that I used to mostly play with back to the audience.”

“I was very embarrassed and nervous about what I was doing,” he added. “Also, I didn’t feel so sure of myself; I didn’t know what to play. I had to try and play on these songs. [But also these] sort of templates that the band and Syd had been playing on for some time. I was conscious that I needed at some point try and make it more my own.”

Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother

His issues with adapting to the band didn’t end on stage; they carried over into the studio as well. Gilmour once said the band had no ideas for two albums: Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother.

Because they were trying to distance themselves from the sound Barrett has established, they somewhat lost the plot. According to Gilmour, the band was “floundering.”

“We were fairly brave and would put anything on a record that amused us one way or another,” Gilmour said of Ummagumma. “But in some of those moments, we were floundering about. [We] didn’t have our forward momentum very clear, and inspiration might have been a bit thin on the ground at times.”

He had similar negative thoughts about Atom Heart Mother. “I listened to that album recently,” he continued. “God, it’s sh**, possibly our lowest point artistically. Atom Heart Mother sounds like we didn’t have any idea between us, but we became much more prolific after it.”

Sometimes you have to fail to succeed, and that seemed to be the case for Pink Floyd when it came to these transitional albums. Revisit “Astronomy Domine” from this era of the band’s career below.

(Photo by Roberto Panucci/Corbis via Getty Images)