Fat Old Sun Lyrics

Inspired by Roger Waters’ childhood reverie ‘Grantchester Meadows’, Gilmour set to work on his own rose-tinted evocation of his early childhood in Cambridge. The church bells of Evensong ease you into this gentle acoustic evocation of youth spent swimming in the river Cam, laying under blue skies and smelling the sweet scent of newly mown grass from youth’s endless summer. The song also chronicles, as would many of Gilmour’s future songs, the passage from that idyllic childhood to the harsher adult world. The setting sun is employed as the symbol of that transition, and it would reappear in Gilmour’s late 80s and 90s work. This is the second of three Pink Floyd songs about Cambridge, the home town of Waters, Gilmour and Syd Barrett, and as previously mentioned, it could easily be seen as a blueprint for the track ‘High Hopes’ on The Division Bell over twenty years later, when the same territory was revisited from a middle-aged perspective. Some suggest that both the lyric and the mood of the piece were additionally influenced by The Kinks’ song ‘Lazy Old Sun’. In the same album, a track called ‘Big Black Smoke’ opens with the bells of Evensong. Gilmour explained this further coincidence by claiming that there were only two commercial sound effects libraries in existence at the time, so naturally people would end up using the same sound effects, in this case those from Abbey Road. When quizzed, he acknowledged that he had heard the track once and perhaps was subconsciously influenced by The Kinks. “They’ve never sued me,” he once stated, wryly. ‘Fat Old Sun’ is a great, soothing song. It feels very warm with Gilmour’s light vocals and acoustic guitar, and Roger’s simple bass lines and Rick’s organ. The song climaxes with a great surging electric guitar solo. The lyrics are great and I wish David Gilmour could have written great lyrics like these more often.