“I’m Still Here”: David Gilmour Speaks for the First Time Since Emergency Surgery

London, 2 December 2025. The winter fog clings to the Thames like an old friend, muting the lights of the South Bank into a soft, hazy glow. Inside a private room at St Thomas’ Hospital, the air is thick with the scent of eucalyptus from a diffuser Polly Samson insisted on—something to cut the clinical chill. David Gilmour, 79, reclines against crisp white sheets, his trademark tousled hair now threaded more silver than gold, a faint scar tracing his jawline from the tracheotomy tube removed just 48 hours ago. The monitors hum a low, rhythmic drone, not unlike the ambient swells he once coaxed from his Stratocaster. At his bedside: Polly, ever the anchor, her hand tracing idle patterns on his forearm; Romany, their youngest, perched on a stool with her harp case at her feet, eyes red but resolute.

He didn’t want this recorded. Not after the silence that swallowed the past fortnight—the one that began with a routine scan in late October, escalating to a midnight ambulance ride from their West Sussex home after a coughing fit turned to choking. Whispers had leaked: David intubated. David in neuro-ICU. David’s voice… gone. Fans, from Pompeii pilgrims to Abbey Road devotees, flooded social feeds with thermal images of candlelit vigils, playlists of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” looping like prayers. Nick Mason posted a single black-and-white photo of an empty guitar stand: “Hold the line, mate.” Even Roger Waters, in a rare thaw, tweeted: “The notes we left unsaid… get well, Dave.” But from David? Nothing. Until now.

At 10:23 a.m., he nods to Romany, who props her phone against a stack of Mojo magazines. No filter. No script. Just the man whose bends and sustains have soundtracked generations, speaking in a voice scraped raw by intubation—a gravelly whisper that bends like one of his solos, unsteady but achingly true.

“He never wanted to worry anyone,” Polly murmurs off-camera, her novelist’s poise cracking just a fraction. “But some truths… they eventually have to be shared.”

David clears his throat, the sound small and deliberate, like tuning a string. When he speaks, it’s not the soaring tenor of “Comfortably Numb” or the languid drawl of On an Island. It’s gentle, faltering—a father’s aside in the dead of night, laced with the vulnerability he’s always hidden behind walls of sound.

“I… I suppose I’ve been quiet too long,” he begins, pausing to sip from a glass of water, ice clinking like distant cymbals. “Y’know me—always preferred letting the guitar do the talking. But last month… it caught up. A shadow on the scan, they said. Pressing where it shouldn’t. Emergency thoracotomy to lift it off my windpipe. Eight hours under, Polly pacing the hall like she did when the kids were born.”

His laugh is a soft rasp, eyes crinkling at the corners—the same crinkle that charmed crowds at the Circus Maximus in 2024, where Luck and Strange came alive under Roman stars.

The truth spills then, measured and unadorned. It started in Brighton, during sessions for the follow-up to Luck and Strange—that No. 1 alchemy of family and fate, with Romany’s harp weaving through “Scattered” like a lifeline. Fatigue he chalked up to age, the relentless pull of 79 years. A persistent cough dismissed as Sussex damp. But by mid-November, during a quiet supper with Polly and the boys—Charlie sketching lyrics, Joe fiddling with basslines, Gabriel debating vintage amps—the room tilted. He gasped, clutched his throat, and the world blurred to sirens and shadows.

“Benign, they think,” he says now, voice steadying. “A rogue polyp, grown rogue. But it stole my breath for a spell. Couldn’t sing. Couldn’t speak. Just lay there, listening to the machines hum like a bad loop in the mix.”

Polly squeezes his hand; Romany leans in, her crystalline voice from “Yes, I Have Ghosts” now a silent bulwark.

“There’s still a long road,” he continues, gaze drifting to the fog-shrouded window. “Therapy to rebuild the cords, scans to chase shadows away. Might not hit those high bends clean for a bit. But I believe in healing… in the music that mends what words can’t… and in every prayer you lot sent while I was adrift. I felt ’em. Like echoes in the dark, bending back to me.”

There’s something almost holy in his cadence—faith, the quiet kind, stitched from Cambridge boyhoods and psychedelic dawns, tempered by losses: Syd’s unraveling, Rick’s quiet exit, the walls that rose and fell. Raised in a home of scientists and skeptics, David’s spirituality emerged in notes, not creeds—transcendence in a sustained G, grace in the spaces between. Now, it threads his words like harp strings.

“You carried the tune,” he says, voice thickening. “Lit candles in Pompeii, where I played to ghosts. Streamed ‘Wish You Were Here’ from Tokyo basements. Posted thermal blooms from Marrakesh markets—y’know, those vigils with speakers blasting ‘Time’? That warmth… it’s like a hand in the fog, saying I’m still here.”

Tears glisten, unwept. “Still fighting. Still holding on to love—like it’s the light I need most right now. Polly’s. The kids’. Yours. The band’s, even—Nick’s drums keeping time, Guy’s bass grounding the drift.”

Because he’s David—eternal searcher, the guitarist who turned Syd’s void into Dark Side‘s diamond—he can’t resist. He hums first, tentative, then lets a fragment of “Fat Old Sun” unfurl: “And I find… many reasons… to let my foolish heart run free…” Breathy, sure, but soul-baring, the melody curling like smoke from a just-struck match.

The video cuts as the room dissolves—hugs, murmurs, Romany whispering “Dad, that’s the best take yet.” David lifts a hand to the lens, rings glinting— the silver one from his 1994 wedding to Polly, etched with a wave.

Within heartbeats, it’s viral. #GilmourSpeaks eclipses charts, outpacing Luck and Strange‘s streams. Abbey Road dims its crossing for a minute’s silence, then floods it with projections of soaring solos. In Pompeii, teens lay nine roses anew—one for each decade. Roger tweets a lone chord emoji; Nick Mason vows a Floyd jam “when you’re ready.” Tokyo clubs pause sets for dedications; Reddit’s r/pinkfloyd erupts in covers, users posting grainy Strats bent in tribute.

In West Sussex, where it lingers—the barn studio with its candlelit consoles, walls papered in setlists and sketches—the county exhales. Record shops in Cambridge restock The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Syd’s shadow a reminder of fragility’s flip side: creation from chaos.

David Gilmour isn’t silenced. Not by polyps or years or the Thames’ fog. He’s relearning the breath, one note at a time. And the world—haunted, hopeful, harmonious—will be listening, hands outstretched, for the bend that follows.

Because some lights don’t fade. They just sustain, eternal.