Roger Waters on the last real Pink Floyd collaboration: “10 years of bloody hell”
Any band mentality means having a bit of a collaborative mindset. As much as some people may claim to write all the songs and have total creative control over what the direction of the group is supposed to be, musicians need to express themselves, and the greatest albums of all time come from when it’s a pure back-and-forth between songwriters and musicians working in tandem with each other. Roger Waters could claim to have more of a say than most when he was in Pink Floyd, but he felt that Dark Side of the Moon was the last time that everyone truly worked together.
Then again, that was only the beginning of the classic period of Pink Floyd. The group had just begun working on their signature sound when they hit Meddle, so Dark Side of the Moon was bound to be the lead-in to the next phase of progressive rock, whether that was the cold outlook on capitalism in Animals or their embracing of the rock opera on The Wall.
At the same time, there’s no better way to measure perfection than this. There are different layers to every one of Floyd’s albums, but as soon as that opening heartbeat starts, it’s like being catapulted into another world where you learn about the vast intricacies of life, whether that’s knowing about the fleeting nature of every day on ‘Time’ or the inherent evil that comes from ‘Money’.
There are even parts of the record that might hold a lot more water than even Waters realises. Considering that he took a massive shit on his legacy by re-recording the entire thing, the contributions from David Gilmour and Richard Wright throughout the record give it the space to breathe half the time, from Gilmour’s sweeping solos to the keyboard motif that birthed ‘Us and Them’.
If you were to ask Waters, though, Dark Side of the Moon marked the last time that he could tolerate the band as a whole, saying, “We’d cracked it. We’d won the pools. What are you supposed to do after that? Dark Side Of The Moon was the last willing collaboration: after that, everything with the band was like drawing a teeth; 10 years of hanging on to the married name and not having the courage to get divorced, to let go; 10 years of bloody hell.”
It’s not like you couldn’t tell that the group had lost something afterwards, either. As much as Wish You Were Here was spellbinding in a completely different way, there was some sense of innocence lost in the shuffle, especially when it came to discussing the loss of their friend Syd Barrett.
Granted, if Waters thought that the true end of collaboration came with the final seconds of ‘Eclipse’, he sure as hell wasn’t about to stifle himself, either. Looking through the next few albums, Waters began to rule the group with an iron hand and treat the rest of the group as glorified vehicles for his conceptual pieces, to the point where all the Pink Floyd charm is all but removed from The Final Cut.
As much as Waters might discount one of the most essential parts of rock history, he does have a good point in it being the final moments of camaraderie. By the time they met up later, any goodwill they had towards each other had fallen by the wayside.
