“If I had the power”: The Pink Floyd album Roger Waters would have never made
Being in a band often means embracing one key concept: compromise. No matter how passionately someone articulates their vision for a song, there’s no guarantee it will be met with enthusiasm by the rest of the group—it might be embraced, dismissed outright, or even laughed off entirely. While Roger Waters typically wielded significant creative control in Pink Floyd, he once admitted that there was one album he would never have released if the decision had been solely his.
Looking through Pink Floyd’s discography, though, Waters always had a handle on where he wanted his music to go. There would be a few times when other musicians would speak up, but the minute that Syd Barrett started to lose his battle with mental health, all of Waters’ best moments were brought to the forefront.
Then again, that doesn’t mean that every one of his ideas was necessarily great right off the bat. Many of the songs on A Saucerful of Secrets see him finding himself in between versions of ‘Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, and even when he started making some of the more grandiose statements in the band’s canon, he wasn’t exactly diplomatic about what he wanted out of every one of his tracks.
Think of an album like Animals, for instance. Sure, it plays together as one continuous piece and flows brilliantly, but that came from Waters accidentally deleting a whole chunk of David Gilmour’s guitar solo and having him re-record pieces of it so that everything still worked out well on the recording. So when it got to be too much during The Final Cut, it was a no-brainer for the band to move on without Waters at the helm.
When the band effectively retired after The Division Bell, though, there was still more to come. They had become proud of the legacy they achieved together, but when Waters found out that they planned to release pieces of their catalogue for the best-of album Echoes, he felt like his songs were getting chopped up. After all, these were conceptual pieces, and now everyone would be getting the abridged versions of everything.
Despite the album selling in droves, Waters would have been able to rest peacefully at night if he had never seen any residuals for the record, saying, “If I had the power, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I’m not a big compilation person. Almost all my work is stuck together philosophically and musically. But clearly, there were other people involved.”
And considering Waters’s disdain for the Gilmour-fronted version of the lineup, it probably stung a little bit more seeing songs like ‘Keep Talking’ plastered next to ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ and ‘Mother’. For anyone who wanted to see what Pink Floyd was like at the turn of the century, though, this was about as close to a concentrated version of them as one could get, going from ‘Astronomy Domine’ right through to the classics from Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
Hearing some of the band’s more operatic moments out of context does feel disorienting if you know their work, but this was never meant to be a coherent body of work. This was a tool to help expose legions of younger fans to what the sounds of progressive rock were like at their absolute finest.
