When David Gilmour was contemplating producers for his fifth solo album, a well-known title got here to thoughts.

“We had thought about Rick Rubin,” the previous Pink Floyd rocker admitted throughout an look on The Rockonteurs podcast, including that “a number of other people who’ve been around for quite a while” had been additionally mentioned. Rubin, after all, has a resume that includes a few of the greatest names within the historical past of rock. Yet Gilmour finally determined he needed to go in a special route, as a substitute enlisting a younger rising star who might supply a contemporary perspective.

“My lovely wife, Polly, came up with the notion of looking at who was younger and hot in the production world,” he defined. That thought led him to Charlie Andrew, finest identified for his work with U.Okay. indie rock teams Alt-J, Wolf Alice and London Grammar.

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“There was a fresh thing in those records that really appealed to me,” Gilmour continued, including that he initially reached out to Andrew through Instagram. “He came down and listened to the early formation of the demos, which some of them weren’t that early, but they were certainly unfinished. And he asked some pertinent questions and then said he’d love to work.”

Andrew Helped Gilmour Find a ‘Different Sound’

The result’s Luck and Strange, an album Gilmour believes is his finest work since Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Stylistically, the rocker notes Andrew was ready to assist him seize “something different” than what older producers would have performed.

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“There’s less of a crystal clear purity,” he defined. “And the cohesiveness of the whole album, to me, I find quite extraordinary. They have put all those sounds together and every track ties in in a certain way. It’s a different sound. I don’t think it’s any less brilliant or any less pure.”

Some of Andrew’s selections – like “distorted elements” and “out of tune elements” – initially made Gilmour shake his head, just for him to quickly grasp the concept. “There are some things which were just, one of those moments you’re sitting there and going, ‘What? What the hell?’” the rocker admitted. “And the next day you’re going, ‘Yeah.’”