Roger Waters’ guitarist Dave Kilminster recently sat down with UG to talk about joining the Pink Floyd co-founder’s band, as well as all sorts of gear-related stuff.
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You’ve been playing with Roger Waters since 2006. How did you start playing with him? how did he contact you? And how does it feel like to play with Roger Waters? What was it like at the beginning and how does it feel now?
“My manager actually told me that Roger was looking for a guitarist. He’d been contacted by [guitarist] Snowy White, who he kind of knew.
“So Snowy had contacted my manager. He didn’t know about me, he just wondered if Martin knew any guitarists. So he came into the studio – he was already excited and he said, ‘I’ve just heard that Roger Waters is looking for a guitarist.
“And my first question was, ‘Who’s Roger Waters?’ I had no idea…
“I mean, I obviously knew who Pink Floyd were, but I didn’t know the names. Other than Dave Gilmour, obviously.
“So he said, ‘We’re looking for a guitarist for a…’ I think it was originally gonna be something like a six-week tour. Maybe 10 weeks. Very, very short.
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“And at the time, I had some dates with Keith Emerson in my calendar right in the middle of this six-week period. So I said, ‘Well, obviously I can’t do it. I already said to Keith that I’ll do this tour.’ It was five or six days, it wasn’t very much, but when you commit to something, when you say you’re gonna do something, you don’t just jump ship when you get a better offer. So I didn’t think anything about it.
“And it was about two or three days later that I got an e-mail from Keith Emerson’s manager, just saying, ‘We’re not gonna do those couple of days.’ So I’m thinking, ‘That’s a sign that I should be going and doing this.’
“So I went along. I did a recording first, which apparently they loved. They wanted to hear me playing. I think I recorded some ‘Wish You Were Here’ and I did the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo. There wasn’t a lot of time. I think they have been looking for quite a while. A few weeks.”