The Pink Floyd member Roger Waters said had no “heart”
The number-one priority for an artist like Roger Waters was empathy whenever he picked up an instrument.
It’s one thing to be God’s gift to music and make soundscapes no one else has heard before, but there needed to be something that could move a person more than a solo that stretched on for hours on end. Emotions demand to be felt, and even if Pink Floyd’s epic records ran a little longer than most, they always seemed to have a purpose beyond the typical pop song formula.
Look at any of the records they released from Meddle up until The Wall, and you can see what Waters was talking about. ‘Echoes’ was the first time people got to hear the version of the group that they had always wanted to hear, and from The Dark Side of the Moon onwards, each of their albums felt like one continuous statement from beginning to end, even when it could get uncomfortable hearing Waters play the role of a fascist dictator on the tail end of The Wall.
But for as much as Waters liked to consider himself the leader of the group, it’s not like David Gilmour couldn’t do anything in his place, either. They were a Lennon-McCartney type of partnership, and even if not all of their experiments worked out for the best, it was easy to see what they were going for when putting together two fragments of tunes for a track like ‘Comfortably Numb’.
Then again, Gilmour would readily admit that Waters was a better lyricist than he. Polly Sampson was brought on for a reason when they were making records like The Division Bell, and while he did have the odd tune where everything came together like on ‘Sorrow’ or the early tracks like ‘Fat Old Sun’, Waters was always the one who could set up a scene in the listener’s mind whenever he played.
That was bound to be a major blow when the band decided to continue on without him. Waters wasn’t going to be left in the dust by any means, but when he talked about their dynamic after the fact, he made no big secret about how little people could feel Pink Floyd’s music without him there.
Sure, they could play a half-decent version of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, but he felt that most of Gilmour’s writing was soulless compared to what he did, saying, “He certainly didn’t do any work regarding the philosophy or politics or heart or drive behind the records. So when I left, they were put in a situation where no one was providing that. With all due respect to the people who went out and bought those records, they are just rubbish.”
Waters might have a small point about them sounding different, but it’s hardly fair to say that Gilmour’s version of the group had no heart behind them. They weren’t chock full of the social commentary that came from him whenever he was at the helm, but hearing the themes of miscommunication on The Division Bell and especially the return of Richard Wright made them feel like the same band that we had known from back in the days of The Dark Side of the Moon.
Yes, there was always going to be a major piece missing once Waters left, but it’s not like Gilmour was looking to outright replace him by any stretch. Pink Floyd had already continued on when Syd Barrett couldn’t lead them anymore, so why couldn’t Gilmour carry on in his own way when the latter said he had had enough?
