Charlie Gilmour, the adopted son of David Gilmour, recently disclosed his thoughts on his biological father, Heathcote Williams, and feeling ‘abandoned’ by him. In a recent interview with Paste Magazine, where Charlie talked about his new book ‘Featherhood,’ the young writer started his words by mentioning the first time David took him to meet Williams. He said:
“My adoptive father, David, is wonderful. Kind, caring, this is the best that you could hope for. Took me [to Yo! Sushi] to meet [my biological father], and there was this little weird meeting of the fathers where the adoptive father handed over the son to the abandoning biological father.”
He then described what happened when his two fathers met:
“And Heathcote went to shake David’s hand, but he was so stuffed full of magic tricks, and he had these incredibly powerful magnets up his sleeve. So his hands stuck to the metal part of Yo! Sushi, and he was jerking his hand away from the part off, trying to shake my dad’s hand. And he was very funny and great, and we got along.”
However, according to Charlie, things got complicated when Williams ‘cut him off again.’ Gilmour explained:
“And then we had this one meeting again after that, and then [my biological father] just cut me off again without any warning. That was confusing. I didn’t understand what I had done to deserve this.”
The writer then opened up about how ’emotionally damaging’ his life was with his biological father. He said:
“Around my life, I sort of kept having these incredibly unsatisfactory, increasingly, I’d say, emotionally damaging encounters with this man. This man, who never ever explained why he couldn’t cope and why he kept on disappearing.”
In an earlier interview, Gilmour gave further details about meeting the biological father and revealed that the father wasn’t interested in their second meeting. He clarified:
“We then had another meeting, a few weeks later, at Simon Drake’s House of Magic, full of Victorian dioramas and sets, and he just wasn’t that interested. He was working on some campaign against GM crops and I was this 11-year-old playing on the floor with a noisy toy and it just felt like I was annoying him.”
In the same interview, Charlie also expressed his disappointment at his father for not communicating with him. He explained:
“We had been exchanging emails, it was when the Harry Potter films were being made and I was quite into them. The second film had come out – because he was an actor I said that he would be excellent as the character Sirius Black – a man with wild black hair and wolfish. I wrote to him saying, ‘I think you should go for the role – you would be really good.’ And then, nothing, I was completely cut off. I think what had happened is that his mother had died.”
He added:
“I was fairly upset, I have to say. I had said in my head, ‘We’ll make this compromise. You don’t have to make up for all the years of not having been there, but we can have this lovely, informal connection.’ And then he couldn’t even do that, which was … disappointing.”
According to Charlie, he was struggling with being rejected by his biological father, which made him use drugs. The author was then jailed for 16 months for going on a drink and drug-fuelled rampage during a student fees protest. After he got out, his stepfather, Gimour, helped him get over the experience.
