The Roger Waters show David Gilmour called “terrible”
Whenever a band breaks up, there’s no chance that everything will wish each other well once they catch each other out in the wild. Most artists would like to move on without having to be reminded of the albums they made back in their 20s, and even if they are still proud of their work, having to work with someone you grew to loathe day-to-day is probably a version of Hell that most of us haven’t seen yet. But while David Gilmour was hardly going to be showering Roger Waters with praise, he knew that Pink Floyd would be fine once he saw what his old bandmate was up to.
Once the band officially fractured following The Final Cut, the writing was already on the wall. Waters had been trying to turn the band into a glorified solo outfit for years, and even if Gilmour could be considered a co-captain, there was a slim chance that he was going to call their follow-up to The Wall a roaring success.
While the bassist figured that the band was spent and should consider splitting up, Gilmour wasn’t interested in folding everything up. The magic was still there between everyone, and even Waters had some extravagant concepts, he wasn’t the person in charge of every aspect of the music.
And despite Waters suing the band and claiming that he earned the right to use the Pink Floyd name, his first solo records seem to prove he was in over his head. That’s not to say that The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking or Radio KAOS are poor records. They are perfectly serviceable for what they are, but when put next to the melodic abilities of Gilmour and the ingenious chord sequences from Richard Wright, it does tend to sound like a pet project that never fully got off the ground.
Waters did keep at least one thing close to the chest, though, and after getting the rights to use The Wall, he reframed the entire rock opera as a stage show once the Berlin Wall came down. Although there are pieces of the live performance that manage to sound absolutely beautiful, Gilmour wasn’t exactly itching to pick up his guitar and jam with his old mate on ‘Comfortably Numb’.
Despite Waters debating asking Gilmour to sit in during the gig, the guitarist thought the album only served to prove how little it worked without the four core members of the band, saying, “The way we play our music is very hard to imitate. Good old Roger. He staged The Wall in Berlin. Did that sound like Pink Floyd? No, it sounded terrible.”
Granted, Gilmour might be selling things a bit short. The whole performance might feel more like a spectacle than a proper performance, but listening to the individual singers interpret the tracks, Van Morrison does an admirable job tearing through ‘Comfortable Numb,’ and while the inclusion of a German band felt a little bit on-the-nose, seeing Scorpions act as the surrogate band for the first version of ‘In The Flesh’ is still one of the best moments in the show.
Then again, it’s easy to see what Gilmour was talking about. There are many pieces of the show that seem extravagant and even add onto what Waters’s initial vision was, but when paired next to what the band could do together in the Dark Side of the Moon era, it’s no contest which act is more entertaining.
