Credit: Far Out / Alamy
Sun 13 September 2026 18:00, UK
David Gilmour didn’t really ask for the situation he was put in after Roger Waters left Pink Floyd.
He was only brought in to be a replacement for Syd Barrett all the way back in the late 1960s, but after years of the band being a musical democracy, hearing Waters say that the band was done because he didn’t want to do it anymore wasn’t the kind of thing that Gilmour wanted to hear. He knew that there was still some life left in the band, and he was going to do everything he could to prove his friend wrong when he took the reins as Floyd’s true frontman.
And it’s not like the guitarist was that off base by thinking that he could lead the band without Waters. Sure, the bassist was the one coming up with some of the best lyrics for the band, but the music had always been a group effort, and the interplay between Gilmour and Richard Wright was the kind of magic that no one could replace even if they weren’t singing Waters’s words.
It took a long time for them to get back on the same page, but during sessions for The Division Bell, it at least felt like they were in good spirits once again. No one would have thought that the band would have been able to play together like that again, but Gilmour was going to make sure that he never turned into the kind of tyrannical frontman that Waters was slowly turning himself into during sessions for The Wall.
There’s no arguing that the band’s 1979 rock opera is one of the best albums that they ever released, but you have to wonder at what cost, considering how insufferable Waters had become. He didn’t want to take no for an answer when getting some of his ideas on the record, and aside from only a handful of songs from Gilmour, the whole thing feels like a Waters solo effort that just happened to have the rest of the band as backing musicians.
Gilmour was at least willing to play along with that kind of style and support Waters’s vision, but the more that he listened to what turned up on The Final Cut, the less patience he had for the material. He knew that the band were much better than the odds and ends that Waters was using for the album, and even when discussing the highlights from the album, Gilmour didn’t shy away from the fact that he deleted that period from his memory.
He was proud of some of the work that he made for the album, but he also felt that there was no need for the band to return to that material any time soon when talking about highlights like ‘When the Tigers Broke Free’, saying, “The whole period of the post – The Wall period and The Final Cut period are all such a nightmare in my mind that I tended to blank all of that out of my thought process. It would be a good idea. It’s a very nice track, actually. Maybe Roger should put it out on his greatest hits.”
Further reading: From The Vault
The songs did go over a bit better when they were added to Waters’s solo setlist, but when you look at the next few Floyd albums, Gilmour almost seemed determined to never make the same mistakes he made on those albums. He welcomed a bit more collaboration, and while Waters did give the band an earful for ruining their legacy with records like A Momentary Lapse of Reason, you can at least admit that the band were on the same page for the first time in a while when they were fleshing out those songs.
They were ready for anything whenever they stepped out on their own, and while it took them a while to reach the same heights that they did with the core lineup, Gilmour only wanted to remind people that there was so much more to the band than Waters’s ramblings. The classic records weren’t going anywhere, but Gilmour also knew that the world deserved a better epitaph for the band than The Final Cut.
