The singer Roger Waters called a fraud in Pink Floyd: “First-class talent”
Roger Waters didn’t really want to go quietly the minute that he left Pink Floyd.
He knew that the band wasn’t going to be operating at the same level by the time they finished The Final Cut, and since Waters had exhausted everything that he could with the band, he figured that the rest of the group would die around him. But David Gilmour didn’t sign up to become a band that decided to pack it in the minute that one of the core members decided to quit.
That’s not how it worked when Syd Barrett was unfit to play, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen when Waters left, either. Gilmour had every intention of keeping the band going, and while Waters suing him for the use of the name had to have been a headache, it’s not like Gilmour was going to watch all that hard work over decades go to waste. He knew that the band could continue, and all they needed was the right idea to get back into the studio and create something special.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they had many ideas at first, which explains why A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounds like one of the most dated albums of their career. That said, it could have been a lot worse. Gilmour was being encouraged to try out new genres by producer Bob Ezrin, and even if he tried his best to bring some new ideas to the mix, the idea of him rapping on one of the songs would have been one of the most unintentionally hilarious in the band’s entire body of work.
But how the hell do you replace someone like Waters? He was the brains behind most of the band’s greatest lyrics, and those shoes weren’t going to be easy to fill. But even if Gilmour was a fairly decent lyricist on his own, he knew that the lyrics needed to be more of a group effort if he was going to turn in something that he could be proud of.
And so began one of the most controversial choices in the band’s history: outside songwriters. There has already been a lot of talk about how Polly Samson wrecked this version of the band by bringing in some new ideas into the mix, and while Waters had his fair share of potshots thrown her way, he knew exactly what Gilmour was doing when he decided to bring in someone like Eric Stewart to help finish off his songs.
10cc was already one of the finest bands working during the late 1970s, but compared to what they did together, Waters felt that Stewart was nothing but a great musician pretending to be a member of the band, saying, “One is Eric Stewart, a founding member of the original 10cc band and a very talented British songwriter who’s collaborated with Paul McCartney, for instance, on Paul’s 1986 Press to Play album. I’ll give Gilmour credit: When he devises a fraud, he goes to first-class talent for assistance.”
While Waters did also mention people like Carol Pope, Roger McGough, and other musical frauds, it’s not like they didn’t help Gilmour produce something great. The Division Bell works because it has an underlying theme, and even when looking through the dated pieces of Reason, they do have a way of making everything mesh together on tunes like ‘On the Turning Away’.
Waters can bitch and complain about how Gilmour has turned Floyd into a parody of itself, what else was the guitarist supposed to do? There was no point in them trying to make music that sounded like Waters’s vision, and if they could continue on back in the late 1960s, this would simply be another version of what Pink Floyd could do without one of their founding members.
