How an argument between Roger Waters and David Gilmour created Pink Floyd’s best song
Tension in the studio is standard practice, and when used correctly as a creative tool, it can spur artists on to create glittering moments of musical magic. While many artists require a zen, harmonious atmosphere to flourish, others can be motivated to achieve greatness by working in a pressure cooker, as Pink Floyd can testify.
Currently, David Gilmour and Roger Waters’s relationship is fractured beyond repair. For the past 40 years, they have been feuding intermittently, with rare exceptions like their performance at Live 8 in 2005, where they set aside their personal disdain for the greater charitable good.
Nevertheless, even when Pink Floyd were at the peak of their powers during the creation of The Wall in 1979, the environment wasn’t easy. However, Gilmour and Waters were equipped to turn sour into sweet, thriving in conditions that would have sent most bands to an early grave.
With The Wall, Waters took control, showing little regard for contributions from other members. The album remains his passion project, which is why he continues to tour it decades after its release. This dominance, however, relegated Gilmour to a reluctant passenger’s seat for much of the album’s creation.
It wasn’t only Waters and Gilmour who were at loggerheads during this time, though; keyboardist Richard Wright was also seriously struggling. At the time, he was consumed by personal problems, such as his faltering marriage, which had a knock-on effect on his relationship with his bandmates before he eventually left the band in 1981.
Yet despite all the external issues that ultimately bled into the recording sessions, Pink Floyd produced a seminal album, which notably included the masterpiece, ‘Comfortably Numb’. It’s a track that typifies the brilliance of Pink Floyd in more ways than one. Not only is it their signature song, but it was also the result of a studio altercation, another defining factor of their legacy.
While Gilmour and Waters needed each other to strive for newfound creative heights, both men simultaneously brought out the best and worst in each other. Unlike other famous songwriting partnerships, such as the one between The Beatles duo John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Gilmour and Waters were never two peas in a pod. Instead, they often chose very different motifs and themes for their material, representing the stark contrast in their personalities. However, despite their distinctions, they were stronger together, as demonstrated by their subsequent solo ventures, which paled compared to the heavy heights that Pink Floyd achieved.
At the time of ‘Comfortably Numb’, the duo’s creative differences looked ready to split the band irrevocably. In Mark Blake’s 2008 book Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd, Gilmour described the song as “the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together”.
The song’s seed was planted during the recording sessions for Gilmour’s self-titled debut solo album in 1978, a project that gave some insight into the bandmates’ relationship. All band members were signed to solo deals as part of Pink Floyd’s recording contract, suggesting they needed breathing room from Floyd and a chance to fulfil their creative juices that weren’t stimulated elsewhere.
While Gilmour’s debut solo offering didn’t have the same cultural stamp as Pink Floyd material from the same era, it did give us ‘Comfortably Numb’. Admittedly, the track truly came to life once Waters sprinkled his lyrics onto the previously instrumental take, which, incidentally, all came from a colossal argument he had with his counterpart, Gilmour.
Speaking with Absolute Radio in 2011, Waters vividly recounted the fight that would provide us with a masterpiece of the highest calibre: “Dave and I, when we were in the South of France where we did most of the recording for The Wall, we had quite a serious disagreement about the recording of ‘Comfortably Numb’.”
Waters continued: “It’s probably one story where his memory and my memory are almost exactly the same. It was that we had made a rhythm track and I loved it and he thought it wasn’t precise enough rhythmically so re-cut the drum track and said, ‘That’s better’, so I went, ‘No it’s not, I hate that.”
Although Waters did concede that the argument was over a tiny intricacy that “may seem like nothing” to “a layman” but was “really glaring and jarring” as a musician.
Co-producer Bob Ezrin, brought into Pink Floyd’s camp to smooth the tension, spoke in the same book and discussed the song in more detail than Waters. He claimed Gilmour’s take was more “stripped-down and harder” than Waters, which he called “the grander technicolour, orchestral version”. Naturally, the duo found competition with one another on this fact and tried to enact their will on the other.
“That turned into a real arm wrestle,” Ezrin recalled. “But at least this time, there were only two sides to the argument. Dave on one side; Roger and I on the other.”
After much wrangling, they somehow landed on a compromise: the body of the song would boast the orchestral arrangement, but only on the condition that the guitar solo on the outro would be from Gilmour’s composition.
Although most bands wouldn’t have needed a literal arm wrestle to come to a compromise, the Pink Floyd duo were stubborn to their core. While this personality trait led to countless disagreements and tension that could be cut with a knife, it was also the reason they achieved perfection on ‘Comfortably Numb’.
