David Gilmour: Looking Back on ‘Comfortably Numb’ Performance with David Bowie

David Gilmour celebrates his birthday on March 6, and while he’s been primarily active as a solo act, it’s difficult not to get chills when he performs those Pink Floyd classics live, particularly this performance from 2007.

Gilmour performed a three-night stand at London’s Royal Albert Hall that year.  The performances were filmed and resulted in Remember That Night: Live At The Royal Albert Hall.  The highlight in the set came when Gilmour was joined by David Bowie who performed two songs:  “Arnold Layne” and “Comfortably Numb.”

To say the performance brought down the house is an understatement.

…and that guitar solo. My God…that guitar solo!

Gilmour has kept a relatively low profile in recent years. Sadly, the times he's been in the news have been related to the ongoing tension between him and Roger Waters.

The two former bandmates have been engaged in their war of words in the media for several years now. In Feb. 2023, Gilmour and his wife, Polly Samson, took aim at Waters over an interview he did with German newspaper Berliner Zeitung. Waters, himself, shared the translated interview to his official website.

He prefaced the interview with a personal message on his website saying, in part, "Against the backdrop of the outrageous and despicable smear campaign by the Israeli Lobby to denounce me as an anti-semite, which I am not, never have been and never will be."

Waters also alleges the "Israeli Lobby" tried to cancel his "85% sold out series of concerts in Germany."

The entire interview Waters gave to Berliner Zeitung is worth reading. However, among his most notable remarks, Waters defends Russian President Vladimir Putin and says people are "brainwashed" into seeing him as the aggressor in the current conflict between Russian and Ukraine. Additionally, he claims there's Nazism in Ukraine and that "Israelis are committing genocide."

Samson took to Twitter in response to Waters' interview. She wrote, "Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense."

Following Samson's tweet, Waters shared the following statement to social media: "Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely. He is currently taking advice as to his positions."

After Waters' response, Gilmour injects himself into this back-and-forth by retweeting his wife's comments and adding, "Every word demonstrably true."

Nearly 40 years after their main songwriter Roger Waters left the band and nearly 30 after their final real album (1994’s ‘The Division Bell’) Pink Floyd remain one of the most popular rock bands of all time. As their masterpiece - or one of their masterpieces - ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ turns 50, we’re counting down their greatest songs, from their early Syd Barrett era to their post-Waters days.

We are combining titles here: “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse,” for example, are hard to separate. “Pigs On The Wing (Part One)” and “Pigs On The Wing (Part Two)” kind of go together, as does the whole “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” suite, and we wish they’d put out a track that includes all of the segments of the song together. Anyway, check out our list of our favorite Floyd jams.