The Pink Floyd album Roger Waters thought no one understood: “They haven’t got the faintest idea”
It’s every artist’s job to try to translate their feelings onto the final tape. Even though it might be hard to put into words what one feels in their heart, it makes for the best connection between band and audience when they create something that moves something in the listener’s gut whenever they hear it. Although Roger Waters may have had many different classics under his belt with Pink Floyd, he felt that one of the cornerstones of their discography was never fully understood.
From the moment he stepped in front of the microphone, though, Waters was always a bit lenient about where to take the band. Taking over for the mentally ailing Syd Barrett, Waters would trade in the band’s space rock tendencies for the sounds of progressive rock, making songs that expanded the palette of what rock and roll could do.
With the help of David Gilmour on guitar, Waters would spend the late 1960s and early 1970s trying to find out what the band should sound like. While albums like Atom Heart Mother may be celebrated today as landmark achievements in rock and roll, it wasn’t until the song ‘Echoes’ off the band’s album Meddle that the group thought they had come into their own.
Starting with Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, the band would continue to innovate their sound while Waters flexed his muscles as a songwriter. Rather than write the traditional rock and roll love song or uptempo piece, Waters wanted to dissect his mental state, becoming disillusioned with the music business on albums like Wish You Were Here.
Looking to sculpt the perfect outlet for his pain, Waters would create the basis for The Wall, telling the story of a young rockstar who eventually builds emotional and physical walls to keep him at bay from the outside world. Although the band would play on the album, the work was all Waters’s vision, going so far as to fire keyboardist Richard Wright based on his various clashes with the material.
Even though the band would go on to record The Final Cut a few years later, Waters didn’t want to be confined to the band anymore, leaving for a solo career while Gilmour took the reins. Although the band would still perform various songs from The Wall onstage, Waters would later say that none had the vision for what the songs meant.
When talking about the rest of the band performing tracks like ‘Comfortably Numb’ at Knebworth, Waters thought that his bandmates never did the songs justice, saying, “They haven’t got the faintest idea of what it’s about. But then they never did. Still, most of the audience for this show will probably think it’s Pink Floyd anyway. The attachment to the brand name is limpet-like. It’s just something I live with”.
If fans wanted to hear Waters’s version of the rock opera, though, they didn’t have to wait much longer. Throughout his solo career, Waters would eventually tour worldwide off the strength of The Wall, performing the album in its entirety, complete with the most extravagant effects the world had ever seen. The Wall may be considered one of the finest works that Floyd ever made, but Waters still sees the missed potential of it since everyone wasn’t on board.
