“I’ve tried persuading her recently. Gently.” Pink Floyd legend David Gilmour has been trying to encourage his friend and former protégé Kate Bush to play live shows again

David Gilmour and Kate Bush — (Image credit: Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

David Gilmour says that he's been “gently” encouraging his friend and former protégé Kate Bush to play live shows again.

Gilmour 'discovered' Bush, the sister of a friend of a friend, when she was just 15, and paid for her to professionally record three songs at Air studios in London with producer/arranger Andrew Powell, and engineer Geoff Emerick, who worked with The Beatles at Abbey Road. Gilmour selected which three songs - among them The Man with the Child in His Eyes - the teenage singer should record from “40 or 50” Bush compositions he had heard and helped broker a record deal for her with EMI.

“I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” Pink Floyd's vocalist/guitarist told The New Statesman in 2005.

The two musicians have remained friends ever since, memorably appearing onstage together in 1987 to perform Running Up That Hill at the Amnesty International benefit show The Secret Policeman's Third Ball at the London Palladium.

In a readers' interview with The Guardian, published today, October 3, Gilmour is asked by one reader 'Can you get Kate Bush back on stage soon?'

He replies, “Kate Bush is the only person who can get Kate Bush back on stage. I think the shows she did in 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo were some of the best I’ve ever seen. We went several nights.”

He then adds, “I’ve tried persuading her recently, actually. Gently.”

In the same interview, Gilmour is asked if he would ever share a stage with his former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters again.

“Absolutely not,” he responds. “I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators like Putin and Maduro [president of Venezuela]. Nothing would make me share a stage with someone who thinks such treatment of women and the LGBT community is OK. On the other hand, I’d love to be back on stage with [late Pink Floyd keyboardist] Rick Wright, who was one of the gentlest and most musically gifted people I’ve ever known.”

The full interview is on The Guardian's website.

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.