The 1987 album where Roger Waters stop talking to Pink Floyd: “They are just rubbish”
Being in a band like Pink Floyd for as long as Roger Waters had to come with a fair bit of baggage.
Even though he loved the idea of using his songs as an outlet for his emotions, he knew there was only so many times he could make some of the best material that he could before he started to wonder whether he needed the rest of the band to help realise his ideas. He didn’t think that Floyd was a viable entity for him anymore, but he was about to find out that leaving the band was a lot more difficult than he ever could have imagined once he started to go through legal proceedings.
Then again, Waters wasn’t one to give up making music, either. The Final Cut was the band cowering to whatever he wanted to do, and while he was grateful to David Gilmour for helping him realise his ideas every single time they worked together, it was a little bit more difficult for him to find the inspiration for what he wanted to do while still being defined by his bandmates. And it’s not like Gilmour felt that working with Waters was going anywhere good, either.
The Final Cut was one of the worst records the band had made thus far in Gilmour’s opinion, and even if the band was going to continue, Waters wasn’t going to let them take all of his songs and play them under the Pink Floyd name. In his mind, the name belonged to him, and he wasn’t going to let the rest of the band start making records that profited off of the songs that he originally wrote. At the same time, did he really deserve to play that card at that time?
Sure, a lot of the lyrics of Floyd’s tunes would have been absolutely horrible without Waters tweaking them a little bit, but there’s more to music than writing lyrics. It often comes down to how everyone works on the melody and puts little inflections into every single song, and even if Gilmour wasn’t a songwriter in the same way Waters was, A Momentary Lapse of Reason was the only way that he could think of to carry on.
The record wasn’t exactly one of the best things that the band ever made, but the real damage was done once Waters heard what his old mates were working on. They had been crafting songs that were practically caricatures of what Floyd used to be, and while he still had to deal with legal troubles when trying to sue the band for using the name, hearing what they were doing under the Floyd banner was what drew the real line in the sand for Waters once he left.
This was a facsimile of what Floyd was supposed to be, and all he could do is sit back and gawk at how far the band had fallen in such a short time, saying, “With all due respect to the people who went out and bought those records, they are just rubbish. A Momentary Lapse of Reason had a couple of really nice tunes on it that, had I still been in the band, those chord sequences and melodies would have been made it onto a record that I was involved in. But conceptually and lyrically, it’s just rubbish, partly because it’s not true. It’s like, ‘Let’s try and write songs that sound as if they’re Pink Floyd and make records that sound like Pink Floyd records.’”
At the same time, Waters probably didn’t know at the time how the album could have turned out. Bob Ezrin was already floating the idea of Gilmour rapping on the final product, and if the hardcore fans were in Waters’s camp whenever he made his case for retiring the band, they were definitely not going to put up with Gilmour trying his hand at competing with the likes of Q-Tip.
Is A Momentary Lapse of Reason a good record? By Pink Floyd standards, probably not, but that was never the point. Gilmour was just happy to have made an album after coming out of months upon months in court, and if this was the best that he could hope to make, it was at least a step forward rather than falling back into the idle sins that they worked on during the Umagumma sessions.
