“The sound isn’t very good”: the Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters didn’t rate as a singer
Being a member of Pink Floyd didn’t mean being one of the greatest musicians of all time for Roger Waters.
Everything was about making music that could reach far beyond what the average pop song could do, and on every one of their albums, their audience got a different side of what made them tick, whether it was them talking about the stresses of being a rockstar on The Wall or the existential parts of their life on Dark Side of the Moon. But for a band that operated as a unit, there was never any point in having one lead singer throughout their career.
They already had the perfect frontman in Syd Barrett, but once he wasn’t able to play with them anymore, there was no sense in them trying to find someone to shoehorn into his spot. David Gilmour was brought in as a substitute for those first few gigs, but if you listen to him singing along to many of Barrett’s early songs, it’s clear that he had nowhere near the same amount of whimsy to pull off what his friend could do naturally.
In fact, most of the next few years was them lost in the woods trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t on each of their albums, which was probably good and bad for their track record. They had a lot to learn about becoming their own entity, but anyone would have probably gladly forgotten about an album like Ummagumma before they actually put the finished product out there.
But even through the worst albums in their catalogue, Gilmour was still one of the best singers they could have hoped for. He had a much more bluesy tone to his voice, and while that worked on ‘Young Lust’, there were moments where Waters needed to recite his lyrics on his own. Parts of The Wall were far too personal for him to give to someone else, but that didn’t mean that every one of the tunes that he sang was absolutely perfect, either.
Because, to put it bluntly, Waters isn’t the kind of person who was blessed with a massive range to his voice. He definitely had a keen ear for what he felt the song needed in pre-production, but in a song like ‘Don’t Leave Me Now’, you can hear that the desperate off-key vocal delivery came a lot more naturally to him than making sure he was in rare form to sing lyrics in ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’.
That’s why Gilmour was there in the first place, and even Waters would admit that he was the worst singer that the band ever had during their prime, saying, “A lot of people think I can’t sing, including me a bit. I’m very unclear about what singing is. I know I find it hard to pitch, and I know the sound of my voice isn’t very good in purely aesthetic terms.” But that kind of untrained approach to vocals is partly why a lot of his songs work so well with him singing them.
Not every rock and roll star needed to have the greatest voice in order to wow people, and Waters seemed to be another instrument for them to work with. No one else could have created the kind of atmosphere that he did on tunes like ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Eclipse’, and even if he thought that he had more of a hand in what the band was supposed to be, there was no way to discount the vocal delivery that someone like Richard Wright had when he took the microphone for tunes like ‘Us and Them’.
So while Waters is the kind of artist that isn’t known to be overly gifted with the kind of gospel runs you would find in someone like Mariah Carey or Aretha Franklin, he serves his purpose the same way that Tom Waits or Bob Dylan do on their albums. His voice is far from his strongest feature, but a lot of people are coming to those records to hear Waters tell them a story rather than reach some massive high note.
