How Pink Floyd's early blues covers shaped David Gilmour's guitar style and birthed 'The Nile Song'

Before they floated off into space-rock, Pink Floyd were a blues and R&B cover band playing places like the Countdown Club in London. Setlists from 1965—when they were still called The Tea Set—included Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” and other Chicago blues standards. That’s not just trivia; it’s the genetic code for David Gilmour’s entire approach to the guitar.

Gilmour joined in late 1967, replacing Syd Barrett, but his blues roots ran deeper than the psychedelic era. He grew up on Lead Belly and B.B. King. That vibrato, those slow bends, the way he lets a single note hang and sing—that’s straight from the British blues boom, not from Floyd’s trippier impulses. Even on Dark Side of the Moon, his solos are essentially blues phrases played at a different tempo.

“The Nile Song” (1969) is the clearest link. It’s a heavy, distorted blues-rock track that sounds like a completely different band—almost a proto-metal stomp. The riff is pure blues-box, but pushed through a fuzz pedal and a loud amp. It’s what happens when you take those early covers and accelerate them into something less polite. Most fans don’t know it exists, but it shows the blues never really left, just went underground.