The Pink Floyd bandmate that Roger Waters thought sold out: “Absolute bullshit”
It’s not hard to imagine Roger Waters dominating Pink Floyd. The musician spends so much of his time espousing his opinions publicly that one can only imagine the volume of rhetoric in private.
And, if you’ve been paying attention over the decades, you will note that one of his favourite targets was his own bandmates in Pink Floyd. Whether in the studio or a court of law, Waters has never been worried about upsetting the Pink Floyd apple cart, and so it is of little surprise that he would label one of them a sell-out.
One of the biggest crimes that any rock star can be is a sell-out. As much as artists want to follow their muse wherever it takes them, it doesn’t take much for an audience to see through their “new artistic vision” only to discover that they’re only concerned with making money by making radio-friendly schlock.
That’s not the typical fare of Pink Floyd so it was difficult to understand how Waters could take aim at his bandmates, and especially not his usual target of David Gilmour. It’s easy to be a sellout when not making music, though, and Roger Waters remembered that Richard Wright was starting to become a bit too extravagant during the glory years of Pink Floyd.
But before the 1970s even wrapped up, it’s not like Pink Floyd was some obscure punk band looking to subvert the system. They were among some of the biggest rock stars in the world, and the fact that Dark Side of the Moon was probably in more households than anyone could count meant they couldn’t really claim to be on the fringes of society.
Waters still held onto that outsider ethos, though, and throughout albums like Wish You Were Here and Animals, he was reminding his audience that living the life of an extravagant rock star was by no means a walk in the park. It was bound to become a lot more isolating, and to have true isolation sometimes means cutting out some of your fellow musicians.
Despite giving a letter-perfect performance across Wish You Were Here, Wright’s performance on Animals is a bit more subdued, as if he’s trying to fill in the spaces between the more extravagant parts of the group, like David Gilmour’s overlapping guitar harmonies. But that was only in the studio. On the outside, Wright remembered Waters getting pissed that he started to throw money around.
After Dark Side, Wright remembered Waters laying into him, telling Mark Blake, “I was the first of the band to buy a country house. Roger sat me down and said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this. You’ve sold out. You’re doing what every other rock star does.’ It took him a year and a half to buy his own country seat. I said, ‘Roger, you’re a hypocrite.’ He said, ‘I didn’t want it. My wife wanted it.’ Absolute bullshit.”
Then again, simply buying a house was just one of the many difficult decisions that led to Wright leaving Floyd. By the time he got to work on The Wall, Waters had grown tired of Wright’s playing style and cut him out of the project. Eventually, when the group took the record on the road, he was hired on as a salaried musician.
But Wright never really sold out in the traditional sense. If you listen to both his solo albums and his return to the group on albums like The Division Bell, he was still mining the same progressive tendencies that he used to, even managing to build off of the next generation of artists by having Sinead O’Connor work on one of his solo records.
Despite Wright’s style not working well with Floyd by the end of the 1970s, to say that he sold out seemed like nothing more than a cheap shot from Waters. Wright was still the same old sonic explorer that he always was, and looking at his track record playing with the rock icons and his solo records, he managed to continue to push himself as a player up until his tragic passing.
