“What a load of bullshit”: The rock band Roger Waters said spent their career copying him
It can be difficult for any musician to keep a cool mindset when they gain traction. After all, with greater awareness comes the propensity for more scrutiny or peer criticism, which can be hard to reckon with when considering all the additional pressures of being in the spotlight. These factors only became enhanced for a certain Roger Waters, who seemed to face different frustrations at almost every turn.
That said, one of the biggest challenges in Waters’ world, both within Pink Floyd and outside of it, was fractured dynamics. Granted, most of this came from his relationship with David Gilmour, but these hurdles often comprised bigger learnings about creating music with the kind of artistic grandeur that transcended the boundaries of individualistic capabilities, no matter who was scrambling for control.
For Waters, however, honesty has always seemed like fodder for broader debates, the ones few are courageous enough to ever actually start, usually too engrossed in faux niceties to say what they really want to say. In Waters’ world, there’s no room for such deliberation, even if it seems harsh. As he once said: “The main drift for most of the people that call themselves artists is completely narcissistic and completely consumer-orientated.”
This position is also why it seems as though criticising his peers comes easily to him. After all, holding back is, in Waters’ view, one sure way to seem like a coward—”I am monumentally surprised how fucking scared my fellow musicians are to stick their heads out”—and that’s the ultimate no-go in his book. Well, so is pretending that your craft is authentic when it’s actually a poor imitation of someone else’s work.
Now, claiming originality is a difficult, if not impossible feat in the music industry, especially considering the many artists who were striving for greatness in the same way Pink Floyd was during their active years. However, one act that Waters claimed tried to copy his work for a significant chunk of their career was the beloved U2, a spat that began when Bono criticised The Wall.
However, his analysis of the situation centred around U2’s innate disdain for Pink Floyd and their “theatrical nonsense”, which was the antithesis of what they wanted to do. “U2 are a very young band, and they’re going [in a mock Irish accent], ‘Oh, we can’t stand all that theatrical nonsense that Pink Floyd do. We just play our music and the songs unto themselves and blah, blah, blah,” he told Rolling Stone.
He also felt they tried to imitate Pink Floyd once the rock space beckoned for a more commercial sound, saying, “All they did for the rest of their fucking career was copy what I’d been doing and continue to do. So good luck to them, but what a load of bullshit. If you lead them, people will follow.” While it’s likely that U2 did borrow some aspects of Pink Floyd and others’ sound to maintain relevance, this sentiment seems, even for Waters, a little biting.
Nonetheless, if for nothing else, it demonstrated his passion for the sounds and achievements otherwise marked by immense turbulence, with the music and Gilmour. It also showcased how, even at his most defensive, Waters knows the standard they each worked to set with Pink Floyd and their influence on countless others, especially the ones that seemed to spawn from a different pool entirely, like U2.
