The three Pink Floyd albums Roger Waters hated
There are a number of songs that mean a lot to Pink Floyd and have contributed to their success. If you went around all of the Pink Floyd fans in the world and asked what they think the band’s most important track is, you would get a variety of answers; however, one of the tracks that helped make the band what it became was ‘Point Me At The Sky’.
When Roger Waters was talking about the song, he described it as “One notable failure when Syd left the band.” It was one of the first songs he and David Gilmour tried to write when they became band leaders after Barrett left. It wasn’t a good song, but it was important as it revealed the subjective nature of creativity to the band, and they should open their minds to finding a new sound for Pink Floyd.
This revelation was both a help and a hindrance. It was helpful because it led to some of the band’s most experimental and well-thought-out music; however, it also led to the creative tension within the band that led to more splits and member fallouts. At the heart of this was Roger Waters, who contributed a lot of the band’s best music, but also fell out with other band members in pursuit of this music.
The result is that he absolutely detests some of the albums Pink Floyd released, both with and without Waters. These are three of his least favourites that he thinks the world will be better off without.
The Pink Floyd albums that Roger Waters hates
‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’
Once Syd Barrett left, Waters became the de facto leader of Pink Floyd. It wasn’t a role that he was used to, given that Barrett used to write all of their material. Waters was happy to slip into the background and only offer up the occasional song. When he started writing a lot of the songs, he realised how directionless a lot of that early music was, making him slightly resent the sound they achieved as a result.
“I don’t want to go back to those times at all,” he said while discussing Piper at the Gates of Dawn and how there wasn’t much of an idea behind what the band were making. “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’.”
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
There are 15 Pink Floyd studio albums out there, each made with different iterations of the line-up. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Waters isn’t a huge fan of the albums he didn’t contribute to, but this applies most of all to the 1987 record, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Waters hated this album because he felt it was David Gilmour’s best effort at making an album that sounded like Pink Floyd rather than a Pink Floyd album. “I think it’s a very facile but quite clever forgery. If you don’t listen to it too closely, it does sound like Pink Floyd. It’s got Dave Gilmour playing guitar,” said Waters, “And with the considered intention of setting out to make something that sounds like everyone’s conception of a Pink Floyd record, it’s inevitable that you will achieve that limited goal.”
The Division Bell
While Waters wasn’t a big fan of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, because the songs were so close to what Pink Floyd was capable of, he believed there was potential in some of them. “Had I still been in the band,” he said, “Those chord sequences and melodies would have been made it onto a record that I was involved in.”
While he might have seen some glimpses of potential within a record that he, by all accounts, didn’t like, the same could be said for The Division Bell, which Waters admits to hating wholeheartedly. “With all due respect to the people who went out and bought those records, they are just rubbish,” he said, “Particularly The Division Bell; it’s just nonsense from beginning to end.”
