The Pink Floyd album Roger Waters called rubbish: “It’s not true”
No artist kicked out of a group necessarily has to have warm feelings about their bandmates. After all, these are the people who were convinced that the group worked better without you, so it might not be the most comfortable thing to watch them succeed and leave you in the dust. While Roger Waters was more than happy to be free of Pink Floyd during the 1980s, he wasn’t exactly diplomatic when calling A Momentary Lapse of Reason one of the worst records that his old band ever created.
Then again, Pink Floyd’s discography has always flirted between absolute gold and a handful of major misses throughout their career. While it’s hard to deny the power of Dark Side of the Moon, the fact that the same group also produced the atonal and borderline incoherent mess of Ummagumma was bound to have a few missteps once they lost their de facto frontman.
While Waters had a vision of every Floyd project, it was already clear that he was overstaying his welcome. His choice to fire Richard Wright during sessions for The Wall left a gaping hole in their sound, and The Final Cut ended up becoming one of the more forgettable albums they would ever release, considering half of the record was B-sides from their last effort.
So when David Gilmour decided to leave Waters behind, it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. He had already begun writing equally fantastic songs like ‘Comfortably Numb’, so there was no doubt that he could steer them in the right direction on future projects. There were bound to be growing pains, though, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason has more than a few missteps in the track listing.
Despite having 1980s production that has aged like fine milk, the core tunes are still there in some capacity. Outside of sounding like it should be a theme song for some over-the-top 1980s movie, ‘Learning to Fly’ is a great tune and would even come alive when they performed it live on the album Delicate Sound of Thunder.
Even though most of the record was immaculate, Waters didn’t bother trying to engage with it, saying, “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.’”
Just because an album doesn’t have an overlapping concept doesn’t necessarily mean it’s horrible. Yes, every Pink Floyd album usually had an overarching theme, but making an album centred around solid tracks rather than shoehorning something to explain the storyline was probably the best move.
Despite Waters’s criticism, The Division Bell managed to correct that problem, centring an entire project around the dangers of miscommunication and the inability to effectively deliver a message. Waters was most likely always going to be slightly resentful of what Pink Floyd did without him, but even without his brainchildren, the core musicians still sounded fantastic.
