David Gilmour has always looked like the most reluctant of rock’s reluctant gods. He doesn’t crave the adulation, doesn’t bask in mythology, and yet he inevitably finds himself surrounded by both. That’s why his comments at the London premiere of Live At Circus Maximus, Rome landed with such intrigue: he all but suggested Pink Floyd could return as avatars inside Las Vegas’s Sphere.
“The Sphere?” Gilmour smirked, when asked. “Well, you know, I’m hoping, one of these days, to go there and sit and watch myself doing it, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. My avatar, you know? So I don’t actually have to get up and do it.”
There’s something delightfully Gilmour about this, half tongue-in-cheek, half deadly serious. It echoes what he told Uncut last year: “If someone came up with all the money and all the brilliant ideas, and then once we’ve agreed to a series of very, very difficult and onerous conditions, I’d say, ‘Yeah, OK.’” Translation: don’t bet on it, but don’t rule it out either.
The thought of Floyd being resurrected as digital phantoms feels at once absurd and inevitable. ABBA pulled it off. The Sphere practically begs for it. And Gilmour, who seems quietly delighted at the thought of watching himself perform from the safety of a plush seat, sounds open in a way he rarely does about Pink Floyd’s future.
Elsewhere during the Q&A, he returned to safer ground: singing the praises of Luck And Strange, the 2024 album that marked a late-career high. “My feelings about it are the same as they’ve been ever since before we finished it,” he said. “That it’s just magic. I love it. It’s really the best work I’ve done… forever.” He even went so far as to call the band who toured it “the best I’ve ever played with,” not just for musicianship but for “presence and general loveliness.”
What Gilmour won’t do is force the issue. Whether it’s the avatars, a new album, or just him basking in the glow of Luck And Strange, he remains the calm, amused centre of a storm Pink Floyd themselves created. And yet, when he says he’d quite like to sit in Vegas and watch his younger self fill the Sphere, you can’t help but believe him.
