Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still / Album Cover
Sun 11 October 2026 14:30, UK
Roger Waters has never been described as the most pleasant of company when he made a record.
Even though he was responsible for some of the greatest works that Pink Floyd ever made, he wasn’t exactly going to be respectful when songs weren’t going the way that he wanted them to. He knew that there was a lot more going into many of his songs than actually playing every single thing note-perfect, but if he was a lot more vicious towards his bandmates, it was open season on the kind of musicians that he felt weren’t in the business for the right reasons.
Granted, it’s not like Waters outwardly went around trying to find someone to put down his competition. He could certainly prop up some of his friends like John Prine and his heroes like Bob Dylan whenever they made something worthwhile, but he knew that life would be better if people ignored the Osbourne family and that most people didn’t really need someone like Phil Collins in their lives to soundtrack some of the more drab moments of their lives.
Then again, there were outliers in Waters’s circle of friends as well, and out of every one of his songwriting buddies, Don Henley didn’t really seem like the person who would have been Waters’s best pal or anything. They were certainly acquaintances for a brief time, but the most important thing that Henley ever did was remind Waters what a joy playing live music was when he asked the Floyd veteran to play at a benefit for his charity, the Walden Woods Project.
Waters was up for having some fun playing music again, but when he was working on Amused to Death, he credited Henley’s gig for helping him get back into music, saying, “I realised that I actually really enjoyed performing, which I discovered when I did a charity show with Don Henley back in 1992, a long time before. He was doing a show to try and preserve part of Walden Woods, and he did a thing at the Universal Amphitheatre in LA, and he asked me if I’d go and play a few songs. I used Don’s band, and we did three or four songs, and they loved it – you could tell the audience loved it – and I suddenly thought, ‘Wow, this is actually fun.’”
That was at least enough to get them back on good terms when Waters asked him to sing on ‘Watching TV’ from Amused, but the idea of them becoming the greatest of friends fizzled out the minute that Waters heard about the Eagles getting together to go back on tour for the first time. Because, really, there was no reason in his eyes for Henley to go back to his old band if his solo career was doing well enough.
He knew the pitfalls that came with joining his former bandmates all over again, and while Waters was content to move on to the next phase of his career, he wasn’t subtle about his outlook on what Eagles were doing, saying, “In the case of the Eagles, I doubt that ‘hell froze over’ because of a huge outpouring of brotherly love – I suppose cash had something to do with it.”
Further reading: From The Vault
But at the same time, maybe Waters had a change of heart, looking at what the Eagles did when he eventually reunited with the former members of Pink Floyd for Live 8 in the 2000s. David Gilmour wasn’t afraid to talk about his own love for the country rockers, and when he and Waters did get back together, there was at least a tiny spec of the musical brotherhood that came out when they all started singing ‘Wish You Were Here’.
Those bridges have long since burned, but even if Waters has a far more nuanced opinion about his own music and the state of the world in general, he knew that what Henley did wasn’t nearly the kind of move that he imagined him doing. Then again, it’s any artist’s choice what they want to do with their music, and it just so happened that Henley felt much more comfortable sharing the credit and the blame with his bandmates every single time he worked on a new record.
