The Hiwatt and Delay Settings Behind David Gilmour's 'Comfortably Numb' Solo – and the Hospital Visit That Inspired the Lyrics

That solo is pure, soaring desperation, and the gear is a big part of it. Gilmour plugged a Fender Stratocaster (with a Fernandes sustainer pickup on the high strings) into a Hiwatt DR103 100-watt head, running through a pair of WEM Super Starfinder 200 cabinets. The delay was a Binson Echorec 2, set to a medium repeat rate with just two or three repeats, mixed wet enough to give the notes that trailing, liquid halo. He also used a volume pedal to swell each note into existence, which is what makes the melody sound like it’s crying.

The lyrics about being “a child in a civil war” and “the boy with the pills” came from Roger Waters’ own trip to the hospital in 1977. He’d contracted hepatitis during the Animals tour and ended up being sedated for a medical procedure. The feeling of floating, of being tranquilized while your body gets treated like a thing, turned into the narrator’s foggy dialogue with the doctor. Waters later said the song was his way of writing about how the band had become a sort of clinical, life-support system—keeping the patient alive but numb.