The 1975 album Roger Waters said killed his friendship with Pink Floyd: “We weren’t there”
Being in a band like Pink Floyd didn’t mean that everyone had to be friends.
If you ask Roger Waters, everything that the band has been doing ever since he left was practically a spit in the face of what he had built with them, but should he really have expected the band to have started from ground zero all over again when they first began making their new records without him? He may have been an integral part of the group, but even if he had some good times with his friends, he felt that he could have seen some of the ugliness coming from a mile away before he had even decided to fold the group.
Waters was already becoming desensitised to fame from the moment that they became the biggest band in the world, and even though The Wall is great, it does feel like a musical therapy session in some spots. Waters didn’t like the idea of being a dancing puppet, and while his commentary on stadium rock could get more than a little bit uncomfortable when he started breaking out the fascist-style outfits, it was all in the interest of performance art.
But even though The Final Cut sounds like the result of someone running on fumes at that point, Waters was already going through his own problems with the band all the way back during the Dark Side of the Moon days. He already thought he was being too generous when giving his bandmates credit for some of the songs he supposedly wrote, but it’s not like he was the be-all-end-all for the band. David Gilmour and Richard Wright were adding extensions to what he did, but Waters felt that it was only getting in the way of his vision.
So when Wish You Were Here was being workshopped, Waters had a lot more to unpack rather than the loss of Syd Barrett. Most people were listening to a tune like ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ to hear about the band’s feelings regarding their former leader, but Waters felt that the album’s themes of disconnect had everything to do with the friction that was happening in the band at the time.
Everyone was still at the top of their game, but Waters felt that his heart wasn’t in it anymore by the time they had finished, saying, “I think you could say that ‘Wish You Were Here’ was written, partially specifically about Syd, but largely about my sense of the absence of one from another, and from the band. So as far as I’m concerned, Wish You Were Here was the last Pink Floyd album. In ‘Wish You Were Here’, we weren’t there. All of us at different points had left, and I think in a way that’s why it’s a good record, because it honestly expresses that.”
If it was the final true Floyd record, though, they managed to go out on one of the highest notes possible. Nothing was going to eclipse Dark Side’s massive sales by any stretch, but even if this record is doing “less” by comparison, every single note that the band are playing is coming from the heart, whether it’s those massive textures Wright puts in or Waters talking about his friend that got caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom.
Waters still felt that he was the sole contributor at that point, but there was no way that anyone was going to listen to ‘Shine On’ without those four magical notes. Gilmour was already used to making the best solos that he could, but by only using one arpeggio, he managed to capture every bit of melancholy that the band felt towards losing their old friend and maybe even a piece of themselves as they climbed up the ladder to stardom.
So while it’s not easy for Waters to look back on Wish You Were Here without remembering the bad times, the record doesn’t really sound all that melancholy all the time. They were clearly going through tumultuous times, but even for a band that had been looked at as a bit too callous and cold by some fans, this record is what it sounded like when the band were at their most human.
