The Pink Floyd song Roger Waters said sounded “really awful”
When Roger Waters finally left Pink Floyd, I don’t think kissing and making up was anywhere on his agenda.
He had always been the lead lyricist of the group on every one of their albums, and even if he had become somewhat of a dictator on their last records, it’s hard to think of him as being this almighty force in the group when everyone else was used to making a majority of the music. David Gilmour was well within his rights to keep the band going if he wanted to, but Waters remembered that a lot of the road work that they were doing to get the band back off the ground wasn’t necessarily perfect.
Then again, if you look at both of their careers, it’s not like Gilmour and Waters could properly function without the other starting out. A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a Gilmour solo album in everything but name, and while Waters could rest easy knowing that his band didn’t sound the same, it had to be a strange wake-up call when they started playing stadiums around the world while he was slogging it out playing whatever gigs he could for The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking.
But even if the bassist didn’t care for their new records, that didn’t mean that Floyd couldn’t grow without him. Say what you will about The Division Bell not being as lyrically dense as what Waters was used to, but when you hear the songs in context, it serves as both a great return to form for the core band as well as a great send-off to the Pink Floyd brand when making songs like ‘High Hopes’ and ‘Coming Back to Life’.
Waters’s Amused to Death wasn’t too shabby from around that time, either, but Floyd was definitely going to get top priority when it came to the stadium circuit. There was no way that Waters could manage to tour with every single special guest that he had on his record, but chances are everyone would have gone nuts the minute that they heard Floyd performing tunes like ‘Comfortably Numb’ when they first heard the live album Pulse.
The band didn’t have to rely on a central theme outside of playing some of the new record, but Waters felt that everything that they were doing was a spit in the face to the concepts that he had worked towards, saying, “Let me put it this way: They made a live video of one of their shows a few years ago, and I thought it was really awful. It became obvious to me that they never understood any of it at all. And neither did quite a large number of the great unwashed — as long as there are lots of lights going off, and they can recognise the tunes, they’re relatively happy.”
And while it might not be the best move to call the audience dumb for liking their favourite band play the hits, it’s easy to see where Waters is coming from. He had sought to make records that were all about the sum of its parts, so seeing it broken up into different factions was like trying to take different scenes from several different movies and trying to make all of them work perfectly in one sequence.
Or maybe it was because Floyd was actually managing to pull off playing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety at these shows. No one could have imagined that they could have made such a leap without Waters, but while it was strange to see Gilmour singing the two songs that his old friend sang on the record, the fact that he gives Waters his flowers at the end of the show was the only pleasant gesture that the fans could have hoped for.
But in Waters’s mind, there was never going to be a chance for them to make the kind of music that they did back in their prime. The crowds may have still gathered when they eventually reformed for Live 8, but as far as he was concerned, the band that was known as Pink Floyd had died when he wrapped up work on The Final Cut, and everything after was a glorified tribute band.
