Who Sang on 'The Great Gig in the Sky' and How That Session Went Down

The soaring, wordless vocals on “The Great Gig in the Sky” were performed by British session singer Clare Torry. She was only 23 at the time, brought into Abbey Road Studios in 1973 with almost no briefing — producer Alan Parsons simply told her to “sing something” over the instrumental track that had been built around a slow gospel chord progression. She later said she felt like crying in the booth because she had no idea what they wanted.

Torry improvised the entire performance in just a couple of takes, channeling the pain of losing her mother and the raw emotion of the track. Engineer Alan Parsons captured her voice with a Neumann U67 microphone through a Fairchild 660 compressor, giving it that intimate, slightly crushed sound. Pink Floyd loved it so much they used the first full take almost unaltered. For years Torry received only a standard session fee (£30, I think), but she eventually won a co-writer credit in 2005 after a legal settlement — a rare case where an improvised vocal earned a full songwriting split.