Regarding the Gilmour pickup configuration. I've been there and done that, and I can recommend against the Fat 50s neck pickup. It doesn't have the tone you know from his black Strat heard on the older records, and his most recent solo work. For that, I'd use another CS69 in the neck. It's much closer - the Fat 50s neck is not very lively at all.
I'm working from memory from here on it, but I think the story goes like this:
Fender made one of their perennial overtures to David with a view to creating a signature Strat, and he finally assented. Thus began the work of deciding what pickups to put in it. They gave him many, many pickups to compare with his existing Strat to try to match them. The bridge pickup was easily achieved, because, while it was originally custom wound for him by Seymour Duncan, the same pickup eventually went into production as the SSL-5. (The pickups supplied for this guitar are stamped with SSL-1C, like David's, but they are not made any differently to an SSL-5). The middle pickup likewise appears to have been easily matched with a custom wound one.
When it came to the neck pickup, things went a little differently. David tried out one of the neck pickups sent to him by Fender, and decided he actually preferred the one they'd sent him to the one in his Strat. So he told them to use that one, and asked for an extra one, which he put in his own guitar. That's the pickup that's in there now, a Fat 50s.
David has used the guitar on a few shows since then, but stuff like Live In Gdansk and On An Island is using the old pickup, stock from a 70s Strat I believe. I think he also has one of the NOS versions of his signature guitar and has used that a few times too. So if you want to use what David is using now then go with the Fat 50s, but if you want to use what he was using for Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, The Wall etc, then go with a CS69.
I started with the Fat 50s in the neck and immediately hated it and went to a CS69. Since then (five years ago or so) I have been trying to reach the holy grail: the same tone, but in a noiseless configuration. Just this past weekend I believe I have finally got there, with three Seymour Duncan pickups. The bridge pickup is an STK-S6 (Custom Stack Plus) - I've been using this for quite a while as it really does nail the tone of the SSL-5 without hum. However, for quite a while I'd been using the STK-S4 (Classic Stack Plus) in the neck and middle. The STK-S4 pickups are modelled more after a 50s Strat pickup and do a great job. It was great, but not quite right.
So what I did, was I asked the Seymour Duncan Custom Shop to come up with a pickup in the Stack Plus format (which is better than a normal stack - sounds exactly like a single coil but with no hum), with the tone modelled after a late 60s strat pickup. Fortunately they already do the "Psychedelic Strat" set of single coils, so they have the tone already, so I asked them to model the new pickups after those - just for the neck and middle, as the STK-S6 is already perfect. This was quite expensive as the engineering department had to be involved in order to create the correct configuration for the bottom coil. However, once they arrived: perfect. At some point I will try to do clips, but now I have the equivalent of late 60s pickups in the neck and middle, an SSL-5 in the bridge, all without hum.
If you're interested I could give you the pickup #s from the Custom Shop - they wouldn't be as expensive this time round because the engineering's done, they'd just need to make more of them. I ordered mine in parchment, with no logo, so they look like stock Strat pickups.
