Why did Roger Waters leave Pink Floyd?
It’s never an easy decision for anyone to leave a band like Pink Floyd.
Every member was practically faceless in the eyes of the public, but getting everyone of them working together was what made all of those records sound so pristine from the minute that you heard them. It was bad enough for most of them to deal with Syd Barrett leaving, but Roger Waters knew that there was a lot more than a few petty fights that caused him to hang things up for the last time during the 1980s.
Because, really, Pink Floyd had stopped being a band for a while by the time that Waters officially left the group. They had already been down the rabbit hole of trying to bring his vision to life on The Wall, and when The Final Cut came, it didn’t really feel like the Three Musketeers anymore. If anything, the band was a dictatorship with Waters ruling over everything they were making, and since he had already asked Richard Wright to leave one album earlier, there had to be some questions about who else was on the chopping block when working on the record.
Chances are, he would have never fired David Gilmour, but by the time that the record was finished, it was clear that Waters had started feeling a little bit jaded about everything. He had already gone through some of the most outlandish ideas that he could think of, and since the rest of the band were becoming glorified background musicians, maybe it was the right time for him to call everything off.
But that was news to the rest of the band. Sure, Waters may have had a few stumbling blocks along the way, but they weren’t about to build up all those years of work to leave it behind, either. And while Waters felt that it was time that the name be retired, his decision to sue the band for the use of the name resulted in one of the most chaotic lawsuits in rock and roll history once the dust had settled.
So, why did Roger Waters think he owned the name?
Well, Waters had already been the face of the band on the lyrical front, and chances are most of the lines that everyone came up with on their records were normally his. That’s certainly a decent case for him being an important member of the band, but when it comes to being the sole owner of the whole thing, that’s a bit more debatable. Gilmour had been in charge of writing some of their greatest songs, and even though Wright wasn’t in the picture, he was as vital to their sound as anyone else.
And it’s not like Waters’s case for being the brains behind every Pink Floyd song held any water, either. He did have some great moments throughout their history, but since Bernie Taupin wrote most of Elton John’s lyrics, do we still consider him the actual writer behind all of those songs? Hell no. While Waters would eventually have to relinquish the name, he didn’t exactly hide the fact that his heart hadn’t been in it for a long time.
What has Roger Waters said about his time in Pink Floyd?
Even though he was one of the finest lyricists of his time, Waters has made no big secret about the fact that he wasn’t in love with the classic Pink Floyd records.
Even years later, the bassist felt that he had practically checked out of being a member of the band by the time they had started working on Wish You Were Here, especially since they weren’t as united as they were when they first hit the ground running.
And when looking at the way that he conducts things, it’s not like he isn’t happy where he is. Half of his greatest solo albums usually have some overarching concept behind them, and while many of the Gilmour-led records have a few themes running throughout them, Waters has had no problem dragging them through the mud, going so far as to call records like A Momentary Lapse of Reason undeserving of the Pink Floyd tag.
But despite the massive amounts of money that were exchanged in getting him out of the group, this is one of the few times where a band breakup does actually come down to creative differences. Waters truly wanted to make something different from what he felt his bandmates could do, and while he spent a lot of time letting everyone know how different he was, he was certainly willing to fight for the right to be his own unique entity ever since.
