Credit: Far Out / Andrés Ibarra
Mon 21 September 2026 3:00, UK
‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd is a song that really highlights the beauty that two contrasting minds are capable of producing.
A lot of people think when they have a writing partner that partner should like the same things as them, but this isn’t always the case. Sure, you need a commonality as far as style and genre is concerned, but you also need to be able to leap over creative hurdles, and that means approaching things differently from time to time. It’s the differences in creatives that bring out their best work, not the similarities.
When Pink Floyd started working on ‘Comfortably Numb’, David Gilmour and Roger Waters had different ideas about what the music should sound like. Gilmour wanted the song to be a lot more stripped back, while Waters wanted the song to be larger than life and deeply psychedelic. Bob Ezrin had the same opinion as Waters, and remembered the back and forth between band members during the recording process.
“I fought for the introduction of the orchestra on that record,” he said. “This became a big issue on ‘Comfortably Numb’, which Dave saw as a more bare-bones track. Roger sided with me.”
What you hear on the end result of the track is essentially the middle ground that both Gilmour and Waters agreed to meet on. In the first verse of the track, you get to hear Gilmour’s much more subdued version. In the second verse, you get the experience of the much heavier and psychedelic version that both Ezrin and Waters wanted. The result is a song that we at Far Out dubbed the best Pink Floyd song ever written.
“We argued over ‘Comfortably Numb’ like mad,” said Gilmour when discussing the track.
“Really had a big fight, went on for ages.”
It’s not a massive surprise that Waters fought for his version of the song given that the original idea of the track came from something quite personal to him, namely, being sick but having to push through it. The lyrics for the song originally came about because Waters was once very sick with stomach cramps, but was on tour with the band at the time and so needed to keep taking to the stage and performing at different stadiums around the world. Given that the show must go on, he wound up taking a lot of pain medication, so much that he felt numb as a result.
Further reading: From The Vault
The gig that comes to Waters’ mind when talking about how horrible he felt was in 1977 at the Philadelphia Spectrum, when he went on stage but barely felt like he was in the room because of how much medication he had. The show was pretty horrendous, but the end result is a track which is undoubtedly one of the very best that Pink Floyd ever put together.
“That was the longest two hours of my life,” said Waters when reflecting on the show. “Trying to do a show when you can hardly lift your arm.” He originally wanted to call the track ‘The Doctor’, but when he finished writing the song, the words ‘Comfortably Numb’ screamed out to both him and the rest of the band.
