The one Pink Floyd song so good Roger Waters thought it was stolen
Anything that Roger Waters ever played needed to be able to come from his heart first.
Although Pink Floyd were never meant to be the kind of band that needed to be studied at their inception, there were always going to be firmer ground for them making songs that people could relate to when they made tracks like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Time’. But when Waters heard the right piece of music, he did have reservations when Richard Wright or David Gilmour came up with something that was a little too good.
Then again, it’s not like having musical ideas that were above average was a bad problem to have. Regardless of what tension went on in the studio, Waters knew that the brightest musical moments could outshine any of the bad blood between, but it was always a matter of which idea fit on the record and which needed to be shelved for further projects down the road. It may have pissed the band off to no end, but it’s not like Waters didn’t know what he was doing.
A lot of the soundtrack fodder that the band had been working with prior to the 1970s had been interesting, but once they had music that was rejected, it was easy for Waters to turn Wright’s ‘Violent Sequence’ from Zabriske Point into the massive emotional bed of ‘Us and Them’. And even though Gilmour had the perfect idea for tunes like ‘Dogs’ during the Wish You Were Here, Waters knew it would work much better as a template for a whole different record.
After all, Wish You Were Here needed to be done right if they were going to pay tribute to Syd Barrett. They already had the pressure of following up Dark Side of the Moon breathing down their neck, but whereas ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ is the album’s centrepiece, the best moments on the record are the times where the band gives you a look behind the curtain of what rock and roll is really like.
‘Welcome to the Machine’ is already a dystopian peek at what the ins and outs of the business is like, but if those moments are about trying to warn everyone what they’re getting into, the title track is nothing but sadness. Regardless of how far they climbed to reach the top of the music world, they were gutted knowing that Barrett wasn’t there to celebrate with them, and from the first notes of Gilmour’s acoustic guitar, they all knew that had something.
But when Gilmour first presented the song to the band, Waters was so impressed by what he came up with that he was convinced that it had been nicked from another tune, saying, “I was strumming it in the control room of Studio Three at Abbey Road, and that [opening riff] just started coming out. Roger’s ears pricked up and he said, ‘What’s that?’ I had a terrible habit of playing bits of songs by other people that were good. And I think Roger was a bit nervous asking, in case it came from something else, by someone else.”
It’s not like Waters didn’t have a good reason to be afraid. There are countless songs that feature an acoustic guitar strumming away in G, but instead of inadvertently copying a Bob Dylan tune or plagiarising an old folk song, Gilmour’s notes were lifted straight from his subconscious, as if he had taken all of the band’s built-up tension and let it out with only a few notes.
Gilmour has said on numerous occasions that the version that ended up on the record is far from perfect, but the main goal was never about making the best record there is. Because when you’re paying tribute to a friend like Barrett was, it’s better that people hear some of those little imperfections than trying to figure out what exactly went wrong.
