(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 24 September 2025 15:00, UK
Roger Waters wasn’t exactly going to leave quietly when he decided he wanted out of Pink Floyd.
As far as he was concerned, the band needed to be retired after he left, but when David Gilmour motioned to keep going and cut another record without him, Waters felt like he was desecrating everything that they had created. And while he didn’t need to love everything that they made, the version of Pink Floyd that eventually appeared was a lot more underwhelming than he had hoped for.
Granted, it’s not like Waters owned the name Pink Floyd by any means. He was instrumental in helping them craft masterpieces like Dark Side of the Moon, and the band could have never carried on without his lyrical input and fantastic melodic lines, but if we were to use Waters’s own logic, wouldn’t they have had to rebrand their group the minute Syd Barrett left as well?
It’s not like a band continuing on with a new leader wasn’t a bold new concept. AC/DC had switched to Brian Johnson with flying colours after Bon Scott passed away, Van Halen had changed vocalists and carved out a whole new spot for themselves, and if any classic rock fan claimed that the original lineup is the only one in any band, they were bound to get real mad when they found out that Fleetwood Mac didn’t start off with ‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’.
But when A Momentary Lapse of Reason came out, it’s not like Waters’s arguments didn’t hold some water. Gilmour’s attempts to steer the band through rough waters did hit more than a few rough patches, but if you look at each of their later work in the 1980s, it was clear that both Waters and his old band were starting to have some issues bringing in new technology a bit too quickly.
Once Gilmour had a better handle as a frontman, though, The Division Bell seemed like a much better return to form. Was it going to light the world on fire like Wish You Were Here or even The Wall? No, but after years of going through lawsuits and trying to figure out if there was anything else he needed to say, tunes like ‘Coming Back to Life’, ‘What Do You Want From Me’, and even the closer ‘High Hopes’ are worthy entries in Floyd’s discography.
And while Waters was already fucking hated A Momentary Lapse of Reason when it came out, he thought it was a disgrace to the Pink Floyd name that Gilmour was using his wife, Polly Sampson, as a goddamn collaborator on the record, saying, “Lyrics written by the new wife? I mean, give me a fucking break! Come on. What a nerve to call that Pink Floyd. It was an awful record.”
Then again, it’s pretty unfair to critique Sampson solely based on her creative input. As much as Waters may have been trying to paint her as the Yoko of the group that invaded everything and made everyone bend to her will, a lot of her lyrics for the record are actually fairly poignant, especially when talking about her husband’s struggles trying to process the issues that he was facing on his own.
The Division Bell might not deserve the same kind of adulation that the band had when Waters was at the helm, but it doesn’t deserve to be ridiculed in the same way that Waters was. This was simply a different version of the band than the one that came before, and while the magic had been lost from the original lineup, that didn’t mean that they couldn’t find other pieces of musical perfection along the way.
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