Roger Waters on the “most accomplished” Pink Floyd record: “Technically and philosophically”
For most artists, albums can be like musical children. For as much as people like to talk up themselves going into a recording studio and walking with a piece of solid gold, it’s a miracle to put anything like that together in the first place, especially with the pressures from record companies breathing down your neck. While Roger Waters had always felt the brunt of pressure as the de facto leader of Pink Floyd throughout the 1970s, he knew he was dealing with something unprecedented when he made The Wall.
Ever since Syd Barrett left, though, the band seemed to be treading water most of the time. It’s not that they were making anything subpar by any stretch, but when looking at Ummagumma compared to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, it sounded like they never had a clear vision of what they had wanted to do for a while.
Once they hit on Meddle, ‘Echoes’ became the real lynchpin of their later years. After years of fumbling around trying to make something timeless, Waters found out the key to any great composition: empathy. As long as people could relate to someone, they would be able to connect with whatever they were listening to, and everything from The Dark Side of the Moon to Animals had a certain agenda in terms of how we treat our fellow man and our entire approach to modern living.
Despite Dark Side of the Moon being the objective masterpiece, The Wall is probably the closest to the bone for Waters. The character of ‘Pink’ feels like it’s modelled after Barrett’s descent into madness, and even with David Gilmour’s contributions on ‘Comfortably Numb’, this is Water’s vision through and through in terms of storyline.
And from start to finish, it’s not like Waters didn’t get what he wanted. It’s not exactly the most comfortable listening experience because of all the interludes and questionable subject matter, but Waters was determined to make the biggest spectacle possible, even if it meant firing people like Richard Wright if it meant getting everything correct.
Even with decades removed from the project and the numerous mishaps going into recreating it live over the years, Waters still felt it was Pink Floyd’s greatest creation, saying, “Yes I would [call it my favourite] because of the way the narrative works and the shape of the thing, and it’s maybe the most accomplished technically and philosophically.”
Then again, philosophically speaking, tracks like ‘Time’ and ‘Us and Them’ might be better sonic vignettes for different aspects of society than The Wall tries across its runtime. However, that doesn’t diminish its power as a theatre piece, which is really how it should be experienced outside of the context of two speakers.
But maybe Waters’s view on the album stems more from how he sees the construction of Pink Floyd in the first place. They had started out as any other psychedelic act, but as soon as he took the reins, the concept of a record had to mean just as much as the actual music being played.
