The Pink Floyd song Roger Waters refused to work on with David Gilmour: “He came around”
There are probably a few people out there in the music world who don’t know about the feud at the centre of Pink Floyd. So, for those four or five people, we will offer a quick recap. Like any songwriting partnership worth its salt, both Roger Waters and David Gilmour butted heads throughout the heyday of Pink Floyd. While Gilmour often took the plaudits of the band, being their most used vocalist and lead guitarist, Waters was, by and large, the group’s chief songwriter.
Two incredibly gifted musicians, therefore, had to deal with their egos almost continuously as they became one of the biggest bands on the planet. On stage, Gilmour spent the majority of the time bathed in the spotlight and the applause, while in the studio, it would be Waters who commanded the mixing desk with an iron fist. It would eventually see Waters branch out on his own, leave Pink Floyd behind and even try to sue the band for using their stage name. Things got ugly and couldn’t even be saved by the lipstick of a Live8 reunion.
These tensions are nothing new and, in fact, became a part of the recording process. Across some of their best work, there are many stories of frosty recording sessions or difficult interactions that somehow ended in fantastic songs. ‘Comfortably Numb’ is one such track.
Featuring on perhaps Pink Floyd’s greatest record, The Wall, the song is a showpiece of the entire band and producer Bob Ezrin called it the moment Gilmour really “stepped up”. “‘Comfortably Numb’ is my favourite song from The Wall for a variety of reasons,” he explained. “One of them being, Dave brought that music in with different lyrics. It’s funny; I was looking for a song in D to fill that spot where we were telling the story of the breakdown, and Dave had written and brought ‘Comfortably Numb’ in.”
Featuring a killer solo, it is one of the landmark moments on the LP, but while Gilmour was deftly creating the music, it needed the band’s chief lyricist to add some words. Owing in part to ego and in part to the personal nature of The Wall, Waters felt aggrieved to include Gilmour’s creation in the album. Ezrin explained: “When I got there, it had mostly been Roger songs, and I thought it was really important to have some input from the other guys because they were so important to the sound of the band in the past. Dave was the one who really stepped up with stuff. One of the things he presented was this great song – I can’t even remember what it was originally called [‘The Doctor’ before becoming ‘Comfortably Numb’] – with this fantastic chorus with a high-strung guitar, and just soaring melody, but no verse, and no real storyline, and I said to Roger that I wanted him to take it and finish it, and he was really not happy.”
“His whole thing was that it was his album. He was going to write it all. He didn’t like the idea of including this other material,” explained Ezrin of Waters’ refusal to work on the track. And though there may be some general discontent with working on someone else’s song, the reality was that the LP was built out of Waters’ very personal stories. He believed that the record needed to remain personal to be authentic. However, he would eventually see the light, and to devastating effect as he provided some of the most beautiful lyrics of the band’s canon.
Ezrin continued: “To his credit, he came around, and I asked Roger if he’d write lyrics, and at first, he was really snappy and not happy about this at all. But he took the challenge, went home, and maybe the next day came in with that unbelievable verse, and what I think may be the most interesting, literate lyric in rock history – ‘There is no pain, you are receding, a distant ship smoke on the horizon.'”
Waters and Gilmour would rarely deliver anything as equally balanced as ‘Comfortably Numb‘ again. As the 1980s rolled on, the two men became more fractious and as Waters left the group, it became clear their working relationship (bar that one reunion) was to be left in history. It remains one of the finest examples of songwriting in modern music, and Waters almost didn’t take part.
