The Pink Floyd songs Roger Waters said were forever spoiled: “There was nothing I could do”
Any song is going to feel much more intimate to the person who wrote it. Even if they aren’t the ones delivering every single line, it’s easy for them to think of any composition as their musical child, and if it doesn’t work out in the studio, it’s not easy having to live with that when they come home from work. Although Roger Waters can acknowledge when he made a masterpiece, he also wasn’t afraid to share the moments when he thought that his name was getting dragged through the mud, either.
Ever since Waters started leading Pink Floyd, though, there was always a certain dominance that he needed to have over the music. There was bound to be room for everyone to add arrangements around him, but there he always managed to have the best handle on the lyrics, whether that was making a drastic comment on the world at large on ‘Echoes’ or taking industries to task for being corporate pigs on Animals.
If there was one album that was closest to Waters’s heart, it would have to be The Wall. While not every piece of the puzzle is necessarily autobiographical, the tales of a rockstar slowly losing his mind and grip on real life while living the lavish life on tour might be a lot closer to reality than Waters probably intended during his prime.
For as much as the album was supposed to act as a comment on the idea of a stage show, he did pull out all the stops when the band took everything on the road. While Richard Wright had been demoted to a touring keyboardist at this time, the band was always a unit when they got onstage, especially when they were bringing the different elements to life, like David Gilmour’s iconic stance at the top of the wall when singing his verses in ‘Comfortably Numb‘.
“When all that nonsense started, it made me fucking gloomy.”
roger waters
Once Waters left the group, though, he wasn’t going to let Pink Floyd take his musical baby with them. He was going to make sure that he had access to The Wall storyline, but while the group did manage to continue on without him, that didn’t stop them from playing many of the hits from the album live, including ‘Comfortably Numb’ appearing in every one of their setlists up until they retired from touring.
Despite Waters still holding onto the copyright, hearing the band play his songs did cheapen what he felt about his material, saying, “I wrote The Wall as an attack on stadium rock, and there’s ‘Pink Floyd’ making money out of it by playing it in stadiums! Oh well, that’s for them to live with. When all that nonsense started, it made me fucking gloomy. I stood by a river and stared at myself in the water. Pathetic, I said. They despoiled my creations, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
It’s easy to see why Waters would be upset, but it’s not like he had the final say over what his audience was supposed to like. Even if the whole thing was meant to be satire, there’s no accounting for someone who takes the album seriously, and whenever the song was played in those stadiums later in their career, its translation in stadiums worked far better than what could have been done in a small theatre.
If anything, the fact that Pink Floyd were able to continue with this material really demonstrates a crucial fact about the music industry. Waters could claim to have his own ideas all he wanted, but sometimes, the creation covers enough ground to overpower the creator.
