‘Have a Cigar’: the Pink Floyd song that was too high for Roger Waters to sing
Artists might generally have no problem bringing an artistic vision to life, turning an idea into a glistening, full-bodied reality, but there are moments where even the greatest at doing so come undone. Even Roger Waters, when in his pomp as the leader of Pink Floyd, would find himself scratching his head occasionally.
It’s inevitable that without Waters stepping up and electing himself to succeed the outgoing Syd Barrett as the leader of Pink Floyd that they wouldn’t have broken into the singular area that produced time-impervious classics such as The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. While he initially only took the responsibility to steer the ship because nobody else seemed to want to do so – a strange juncture as he knew he could never replicate his out-there style – this was a pivotal moment for himself and the band.
The ascendence of Waters set Pink Floyd on a different course. Although Barrett’s musical world was fantastical and bore more in common with the narcotic essence of Lewis Carroll’s work and other pieces of surreal literature that the counterculture were revisiting, Waters’ style was very much based on real life. It might have taken him a few years to home in on the aspects that worked, but Waters and the rest of the band were inspired by the great songwriters of the day, such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and their great investigations into human nature, society and politics. This, fused with Pink Floyd’s sonic proclivity for all-encompassing music, made for an arresting blend.
There’s no doubt that 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most affecting explorations of human existence that music has ever seen. Despite Waters cynically stating that the absolute pinnacle of success it reached meant that it was essentially the beginning of the end for the band, they still had much up their sleeve. Its 1975 follow-up, Wish You Were, continued this potent examination of human psychology by using Barrett’s sad decline as its centrepiece.
As a testament to Waters’s scope, mental health wasn’t the only theme; he also described alienation and slammed the corporate avarice inherent to the music business. The most explicit show of this was ‘Have a Cigar’, something of a spiritual ancestor to ‘Money’ from the previous album. It continued to pry open this gap in the fence and set the scene for the political albums Animals and The Wall.
Featuring an indisputable groove and lines such as “And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? / We call it riding the gravy train”, it is the most direct track on the album, wherein the band leave nothing to chance. It also stands out for another reason: Roy Harper, the folk legend and friend of the quartet, sings lead.
Although the group were content with the music, in a show of this sensation that happens to all musicians, neither Waters nor David Gilmour were happy with their attempts to sing the expressive vocal line, trying it separately and as a duet. As Harper was also at Abbey Road recording his album HQ and had already sung on the bridge, as heard on the 2011 Experience and Immersion editions of Wish You Were Here, they asked him to sing lead. For the Mancunian, this was a fair return for Gilmour, who had previously gifted him some guitar licks.
Years later, Waters would look back on the song and explain that it was too high for him to sing, saying, “It’s high; I would need to do a number of vocal exercises before I attempted that.” Yet, in his typically prickly style, he also said he dislikes Harper’s performance. Ironically, his reasoning was that he wanted it to be more vulnerable and “less cynical”.
