“It was all just terrible”: The last album Roger Waters enjoyed making
Every great rock album is usually based on some form of camaraderie. As much as people like the idea of achieving their one singular vision, no band is built that way, and some of the biggest names in music usually have to grin through their teeth when they have to dismantle their ideas so that everyone gets a say. Although Pink Floyd understood that concept for a while, it didn’t take Roger Waters long to realise that he had made a huge mistake by relinquishing control to his bandmates.
It’s not like Waters didn’t have reason to be upset. The band were given a raw deal after Syd Barrett started to drift away, but when he stepped up to the plate, it seemed to be out of necessity rather than any kind of collaborative effort. There was no way they could write another ‘Arnold Layne’, so that meant them working with longer pieces and trying to make something that could be a bit more expansive than pop songs.
And while the band did end up cracking the code eventually on ‘Echoes’, it was still Waters’s vision in many respects. The band had a hand in every aspect of the recording and the musical arrangement, but what short lyrical passages there were in the piece were all centred around Waters’s feelings of empathy, trying his best to find a way to relate to his fellow man rather than trying to paint the same kind of lavish landscapes that Barrett had done so effortlessly.
But even for the band’s track record of being a relatively underground band, none of them could have predicted where Dark Side of the Moon was going to go. Waters knew that he had hit a watermark in talking about the state of man, but the minute that their record label put every piece of their effort into promoting it, the prism started to become one of the most identifiable images in rock music, and the album itself becoming a staple in rock and roll.
That’s because a lot of what turns up on Dark Side of the Moon has the kind of universal appeal that few artists are able to capture in their prime. Waters’s lyrics all detail the kind of fate that everyone will go through at some point in their lives, whether that’s dealing with aspects of greed on ‘Money’ or the inevitable passage of time that will never fully go away on ‘Time’. Everything was airtight, but this also marked the beginning of the end for the bassist in many respects.
Despite the album being one of the biggest pieces of their career, Waters felt that he never felt the same after that record, 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 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 was all just terrible. Awful. Terrible.”
Then again, what Waters is discounting amounts to the greatest moments of the band’s career. Sure, not everything may have come together the way that Waters heard it in his head, but is it really fair to talk about his brainchild The Wall in such negative terms or call Wish You Were Here a slog despite being one of the greatest tributes that any rockstar has ever made?
It might not have been the optimal way that he wanted his songs to be put out into the world, but jumping off of Pink Floyd’s catalogue after Dark Side of the Moon would be one of the biggest mistakes any prospective fan could make. There was some quality material before that, but this would be the equivalent of going into a movie theatre and walking out right before the climax comes.
