The Pink Floyd albums Roger Waters called the most “pretentious”
While in the modern age we recognise Roger Waters as a musical genius, someone who is able to make intricate and well-thought-out music, becoming such an artist wasn’t easy.
When Pink Floyd originally started making music, Waters wasn’t happy with the direction that they were going in. Keep in mind that this is during the early days of psychedelic rock, where the genre is still finding its feet and working out how best it can deliver on the style it’s reaching for. Waters believes that this resulted in music that was over-experimental without needing to be.
While a lot of artists listen to records like Piper at the Gates of Dawn and see it as somewhat groundbreaking, Waters said it was one of the band’s worst offerings. He believes it lacked direction, as decisions were made for the sake of it, rather than because they could add something genuinely exciting to the band’s dynamic.
“I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said when talking about the album. “There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it’. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”
While the circumstances leading up to his departure were sad, one of the best things that happened for the band was Syd Barrett’s leaving. When Roger Waters took over head songwriting duties, he tried to copy Barrett’s style and realised it would never work. The band wound up writing ‘Point Me at the Sky’, a track which didn’t work on a number of levels and one which Waters noted was “one notable failure when Syd left the band”.
This was a very necessary learning curve for Waters, though. He wasn’t Syd Barrett, and so he couldn’t write like him. Waters decided to keep an eye on the songs as individual works of art, but also took a step back, taking in the whole album at once rather than just focusing on these separate aspects. It allowed him to create in-depth concept albums that told a story and revolved around one specific theme. The band could well and truly engage with every single aspect of their creativity when putting such layered and intricate pieces of music together.
Some of those albums, to this day, are considered classics, as you’ll struggle to find a “best albums ever made” list that doesn’t feature the likes of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall on it. With hindsight, Waters looks back on the albums and recognises the great work Pink Floyd put into such pieces of music; however, he also thinks that by shaping such complicated worlds around music, they also might have come across as pretentious. He acknowledges this, but doesn’t lose sleep over it.
“Well, it’s a danger. If people want to call me pretentious and overambitious, believe me, they won’t be the first, and they won’t be the last,” he said. “But should I go, ‘Oh Christ, I’d better not record that song, somebody might say it’s pretentious or overambitious’? (Expletive) ‘em.”
He concluded, “Maybe my pretensions to grandeur are ill-founded. However, in some way, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall were both pretentious and grand in their day, and one of them, 20 years later and the other, 12 years later, they stand up, they’re good pieces of work. So I can’t worry about that.”
