The reason David Gilmour was so keen to cling to the Pink Floyd name
Pink Floyd‘s members have had a long and complicated history, with their fair share of feuding. In an interview clip from 1988, David Gilmour explains why he fought so hard to keep the Pink Floyd name after the departure of founding member Roger Waters.
“I have spent 20 years of my life working on building that name up,” Gilmour said in the clip. “It doesn’t actually make sense to me to start all over under a new name or my own solo name or anything and have to work as hard as we worked for so many years at the beginning.”
Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1968, shortly before Syd Barrett’s departure. For the next decade, Pink Floyd’s lineup consisted of Gilmour, Waters, drummer Nick Mason, and keyboardist Richard Wright. Tensions within the band escalated around the making and release of 1979’s The Wall, during which Waters fired Wright. Band members felt Waters was exerting too much control and that Pink Floyd had effectively become a solo project.
Communication between Waters and Gilmour broke down during the making of 1983’s The Final Cut, with each of them electing to work with different engineers. Waters eventually left the band in 1985, and he assumed Pink Floyd would break up. When they didn’t, Waters took the remaining members to court over the rights of the name, a legal battle that lasted for two years. They eventually settled out of court in a meeting on Gilmour’s houseboat.
“It does take an intense amount of work and effort to achieve the sort of thing that we’ve managed to achieve and I see no reason whatsoever why I should give that up just because one guy says he doesn’t want to do it any more,” Gilmour said in 1988.
Gilmour and Mason released A Momentary Lapse in Reason under the Pink Floyd name in 1987, and Wright rejoined for 1994’s The Division Bell. “If someone leaves a group or something the others normally get to carry on,” Gilmour added.
The band reunited for a one-off performance in 2005 for Live 8 in Hyde Park. In 2013, Waters told the BBC, “I was wrong! Of course I was,” about suing his former bandmates.
In 2018, another dispute delayed the reissue of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals. “David and Roger had a major disagreement about the liner notes,” Mason told Consequence in 2022. “And like all great world wars no one can quite remember what it was about now and what the problem was. But there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and eventually some sort of resolution was reached.”
It doesn’t look like a Pink Floyd reunion is in the cards, though. When asked in a recent Guardian interview about performing with Waters again, Gilmour responded, “Absolutely not. I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators like Putin and Maduro. Nothing would make me share a stage with someone who thinks such treatment of women and the LGBT community is OK.”
In response to a question about a possible Pink Floyd reunion in a recent ITV News interview, Gilmour said, “Dream on. It’s not going to happen.” Gilmour has been busy with other music projects. He recently released his fifth solo album, and his first in nine years, Luck and Strange.
