The Pink Floyd album Roger Waters will always regret: “It’s just something I live with”
They were one of the most influential bands of all time, but like so many groups, Pink Floyd were not without their quarrels, usually centring on one man: Roger Waters. Waters would position himself as a warring member of the group and the creative commander, something which would lead to his leaving the band. The 1979 Pink Floyd album, The Wall, played a significant role in the breakdown of the band’s classic lineup. During production, creative mastermind Roger Waters fired keyboardist Richard Wright, who remained only as a salaried musician, while Waters asserted greater control over the project.
While The Wall wasn’t the definitive end of the classic Pink Floyd lineup, as that came in the form of 1983’s The Final Cut, in what was Waters’ final album with the group, it exacerbated the situation, with Waters an increasingly atomised figure. The musician had gained a certain degree of confidence with his work over the years and became more and more steadfast in his refusal to back down over creative tensions. It was Waters’ way or the highway.
The story goes that as the rest of the group focused on other things, Waters began writing the material for The Wall, with the concept album following a jaded rockstar, based on himself and the band’s former frontman and songwriter, Syd Barrett. Waters composed most of the record, with Gilmour co-writing ‘Comfortably Numb’, ‘Young Lust’ and ‘Run Like Hell’, and producer Bob Ezrin receiving a writing credit on ‘The Trial’.
After The Wall was released, the tension between Waters and the rest of the band rose, with him staying in different hotels from them when touring it. A few years later, after 1983’s The Final Cut was released and Roger Waters’ 1984 debut solo album The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking arrived, The Wall would become a sticky topic in the acrimonious schism between him and Pink Floyd.
As all fans know, the feud between Waters and Gilmour continues to this day as the two creators persist with throwing barbs at one another in the press, scuppering any faint hopes of a reunion. Much of this can be traced back to the ill will sowed by Waters when he brought High Court proceedings against Pink Floyd in 1986 in an effort to formally dissolve them, labelling the group a “spent force creatively”. As Gilmour and Mason wanted to continue as Pink Floyd, Waters failed in his objective, with both sides eventually reaching an agreement in 1987.
As part of this detente, Waters kept the copyright to the concept of The Wall, as he wrote most of the album. However, Waters wasn’t totally pleased with the outcome, as The Wall was still associated with Pink Floyd and not him. After all, the masterpiece was his.
In 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell the previous year, Waters held the now-iconic live show The Wall – Live In Berlin, which featured several distinctions from Pink Floyd’s production. Despite over 350,000 people attending the show and all-star guests such as Joni Mitchell, Scorpions, Tim Curry and members of The Band, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that the album was associated with Pink Floyd and that nobody knew what it was really about.
That year, Waters sat down with Q Magazine and was asked if The Wall – Live In Berlin was a display of force pointed at Gilmour and Mason. Here, he outlined his great regret that The Wall is misunderstood and remembered as a Pink Floyd album and not his. “No, it’s not top that!” Waters said. “But it certainly will be most gratifying that a few more people in the world will understand that The Wall is my work and always has been. There must be an element of that.”
“Though after hearing them at Knebworth, I don’t think I should worry,” he added. “They haven’t got the faintest idea of what it’s about. But then they never did. Still, most of the audience for this show will probably think it’s Pink Floyd anyway. The attachment to the brand name is limpet-like. It’s just something I live with.”
The truth is The Wall represents Waters’ vision for the group most clearly out of their entire discography, and the fact that Pink Floyd can still play the conceptual masterpiece without him remains a regret that will live with him until his dying day. A lot has been made about Waters’ steadfast decision to fight the group members in their persistence to use the name Pink Floyd, but when they perform music almost entirely written by him, without him, one might start to understand his point a little more clearly than ever before.
