At 23 minutes long, Pink Floyd’s experimental masterpiece “Echoes” isn’t the typical rock and roll anthem…but over 50 years after its release on the 1971 album Meddle, it remains both a critically-acclaimed and fan-favorite classic. Still, no matter how much concert-goers wish guitarist and singer David Gilmour would play the song live, there’s a sad reason why that won’t happen again.
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone ahead of his solo concert at the Amphitheatre of Pompeii in Italy (where Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii was staged 44 years earlier), Gilmour opened up about why he wouldn’t be playing “Echoes” at the show.
As Gilmour explained, playing the song without late Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright was a prospect he had no interest in.
“It would be lovely to play ‘Echoes’ here, but I wouldn’t do that without Rick,” he said. “There’s something that’s specifically so individual about the way that Rick and I play in that, that you can’t get someone to learn it and do it just like that. That’s not what music’s about.”
“Being a solo artist is what I do,” Gilmour continued. “It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years and a bit before then. I can’t remember really what it’s like to do it within Pink Floyd. In my mind, that’s a thing of the past.”
After making major contributions to Pink Floyd’s sound as a founding member throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Wright pulled back from the band during the making of The Wall, though he was retained as a salaried session player for The Wall tour and officially rejoined Pink Floyd in 1994. He died of lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 65.
The story behind Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’
Originally titled “The Return of the Son of Nothing,” the song that would later become “Echoes” was heavily influenced by Wright’s input.
“The whole piano thing at the beginning and the chord structure is mine, so I had a large part in writing that. But it’s credited to other people of course,” Wright said during a 2008 interview, per Far Out magazine. “Roger obviously wrote the lyrics,” he added, referring to Roger Waters.
Wright went on to reveal that the wailing sound of Gilmour’s guitar on the track originated as a mistake.
“One of the roadies had plugged his wah wah pedal in back to front, which created this huge wall of feedback,” he said. “He played around with that and created this beautiful sound.”
In a surprise twist, Waters later accused Andrew Lloyd Webber of plagiarizing a riff from “Echoes” for his musical The Phantom of the Opera but decided against filing a lawsuit.
Related: Why Jimmy Page Regrets Never Seeing This ‘Genius’ Musician Play Live
This story was originally reported by Parade on Sep 10, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
