It doesn’t matter which dictionary you consult, they all agree on what a song is: words, set to music, that are sung. Yet it’s also an entirely inadequate description, since there are so many types of song.
Take David Gilmour and Neil Finn, both men of passing years who like to switch between electric and acoustic guitars, both backed by plenty of singers and kindred instrumentation (though Finn didn’t have a pair of harps on stage with Crowded House), both playing music largely rooted in the late 1960s, both offering lightly mind-bending songs.
Yet this misses something crucial. Because, of the 23 songs that Gilmour performed – from both his solo and the Pink Floyd catalogue – over the course of two and a half hours at the Albert Hall, it became striking how few of them were actually songs. That’s not meant pejoratively. Gilmour simply does not do – and never has done – toe-tapping singalongs. We can test this theory out; just imagine a Pink Floyd song before you read the next paragraph.
There’s a fighting chance that what you imagined was something played at a torpid pace, with huge washes of keyboard, some possibly profound, possibly ridiculous lyrics and a soaring guitar solo. Something like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, or ‘Breathe’. That’s the template, and that’s what we got a lot of. And let’s face it, they’re not songs so much as chord progressions with lyrics and a guitar solo. (There’s no middle eight, or bridge, or chorus.)
That is a style that Gilmour and his bandmates invented, and it’s one, in its non-specific melancholy, that continues to echo down the decades.
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