‘Poles Apart’: When Pink Floyd took a swipe at Roger Waters
No artist will be reminiscent of their old bandmates right after they’ve broken up. There’s normally anything from contract disputes to creative differences to downright revulsion that drives someone out of a group, and even if they keep everything cordial in the press, it’s easy for any musician to grow resentful of watching their old band go on without them. But given how much Roger Waters had said about what he considered the cheap version of Pink Floyd, it wasn’t long before they started to strike back at him.
When Waters did leave, though, it wasn’t like he was a fairweather member of the group by any stretch. He had been responsible for every concept they had come up with for their classic run, but when listening to The Final Cut, it was clear that his vision for what an album should be had started to overpower the rest of the band.
Granted, it’s not like he didn’t have a point on some of those records, either. The idea of telling David Gilmour to sit in the corner and only play the guitar solos when he’s needed feels delusional in many respects, but he also knew how toget the best out of his bandmates, like eventually shelving the song ‘Raving and Drooling’ from Wish You Were Here so it could grow into ‘Dogs’.
Waters’s grip was far too tight by the 1980s, though, and while Gilmour took the reins for the next few years, it took a few years to regain his footing. Yes, A Momentary Lapse of Reason is a brilliant record in many respects, but there are also patches of the album that are bogged down by the corporate 1980s-rock sheen that could have been found on any record from that time, complete with gated reverb on everything.
Since Gilmour had time to roadtest some of his new material, though, The Division Bell was certainly a step up. The band finally had Richard Wright back as a full-time member of the group, and they even had a thematic element to the record again, with most of the songs dealing with the problems of miscommunication between two people. It may have been on-the-nose in some respects regarding Waters’s dismissal, but ‘Poles Apart’ is the one song that leaves nothing to the imagination.
No matter how people feel about Polly Sampson stepping in to help write some of the material, Gilmour did like that the song balanced out both eras of Floyd that came before him, saying, “I like to let the Iyrics speak for themselves. It’s about Syd [Barrett] in the first verse and Roger in the second.” It’s nice that they were still looking out for their founder at the top of the tune, but Waters’s verse isn’t all malicious.
Throughout every line, Gilmour seems to question Waters’s decisions rather than outright disagreeing with him. Both of them had simply grown apart, but Gilmour singing about whether his old bandmate knew if he was being led astray has a lot more pain in it than outright anger, even managing to fit in a clever callback to The Wall by opening the stanza with ‘Hey You’.
If Gilmour was already agitated with Waters in this tune, he felt content to leave his old friend behind by the end of the record on ‘Lost for Words’, where he talks about not being able to win if he keeps being told to go fuck himself. There may have been a dystopian atmosphere to many of Pink Floyd’s early records, but whereas those records revolved around the pain that came out of society, this is about the raw hurt that comes from two best friends suddenly falling apart.
