The Pink Floyd song Roger Waters struggled to sing: “People were unkind about his singing”
While renowned for their refined music, Pink Floyd were not immune to internal conflicts, despite their highbrow image. With four strong personalities in the band, tensions occasionally arose, especially as Roger Waters asserted more control. This led to increasingly fraught dynamics within the group.
After achieving immense success with their landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, tensions within Pink Floyd escalated. This pattern, common in the annals of popular music, saw the band grappling with the inevitable decline following their peak achievement.
Waters told Chris Salewicz in 1987: “Dark Side Of The Moon finished the Pink Floyd off once and for all. To be that successful is the aim of every group. And once you’ve cracked it, it’s all over. In hindsight, I think the Pink Floyd was finished as long ago as that.”
The cracks would start manifesting in many ways during the period that followed their chef d’oeuvre. The most significant is that Waters became gradually more isolated from the rest of the group, with strained personal and creative relationships. Of course, it would be years before matters would fully come to a head, but there would be brief flashpoints indicating how it would eventually conclude.
According to guitarist David Gilmour, one of these hints of the great schism that was to occur in the following decade appeared when the band were recording the follow-up to their 1973 album, 1975’s Wish You Were Here. It was during the recording of ‘Have a Cigar’ that some in the Pink Floyd camp turned on Waters, being “unkind” about his vocals.
Famously, the lead vocals are by the influential folk singer and friend of the band, Roy Harper. This is because Waters’ voice was broken after singing the sprawling classic ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, and Gilmour simply did not want to sing it. Luckily, Harper was recording just down the hall at Abbey Road Studios. Per the Pink Floyd guitarist’s account, the rest of the group were happy with Harper’s final performance, but not Waters. This was a sign of things to come.
Gilmour told Mojo in 2011: “Roger had a go at singing it, and one or two people were unkind about his singing. One or two people then asked me to have a go at it. I did, but I wasn’t comfortable.”
He continued: “I had nothing against the lyrics. Maybe the range and intensity wasn’t right for my voice. I can distinctly remember Roy leaning on the wall outside Abbey Road while we were nattering away and (growls) ‘Go on, lemme have a go, lemme have a go.’ We all went, ‘Shut up, Roy.’ But eventually, we said, ‘Go on then, Roy, have your bloody go.’ Most of us enjoyed his version, though I don’t think Roger ever liked it.”
Harper took on a flamboyant affectation while singing the track, milking the song’s bitter sentiments for all it was worth. Rogers wasn’t always comfortable with the theatric way Harper spit out the lyrics, with the bassist feeling that Harper had almost turned the song into a parody. On the other side, Gilmour believed that Harper’s clownish performance accurately represented some of the figures that floated around the band at the time.
“We did have people who would say to us ‘Which one’s Pink?’ and stuff like that,” Gilmour claimed in 1992. “There were an awful lot of people who thought Pink Floyd was the name of the lead singer, and that was Pink himself and the band. That’s how it all came about, it was quite genuine.”
