(Credit: Alamy)
Fri 26 September 2025 16:15, UK
No one really gets a choice in how they are depicted in the public eye.
They can try their best to look like one of the most well-meaning individuals in the world, but if they manage to say a few words out of line, it only takes a couple of nasty comments or people to come forward before they begin to look like the villain of their respective bands. And while Pink Floyd did have their fair share of great times, everyone tends to fall in the Roger Waters camp or the David Gilmour camp after a while.
Then again, let’s not forget those who were there during the Syd Barrett era of the group. Barrett was incredibly important in setting them on the right path during the beginning, but once Waters took the reins after he was let go, his vision for the band went back to a lot of the conceptual pieces that they were working on.
They had to do a lot of fumbling around to get there, but when Waters finally hit his stride on the song ‘Echoes’, he had a clear idea of what people wanted out of them. He needed to put some sort of empathy into his work so that people could see themselves in his characters, and from the minute that Dark Side of the Moon started, people were mesmerised by what they had heard.
From 1973 onward, Waters seemed like the great puppeteer behind everything, but that didn’t always lead to the smoothest recording sessions. It’s practically a miracle that records like Wish You Were Here and Animals sound as good as they do given the fact that they were hardly speaking to each other, but The Wall is usually the point when everyone starts making their decisions about whether or not he was a leader or a dictator.
In all fairness, the concept was his idea and he did have a specific way to see it through, but when looking at the production of the whole album, hearing about him firing Richard Wright halfway through the sessions and keeping David Gilmour at arm’s length throughout everything was bound to be frustrating, especially when they had to do the whole thing again on The Final Cut.
But even when he struck out on his own, Waters felt that the band weren’t being completely genuine about his behaviour, saying, “My memory of what happened at the time, who did what and said what… when the other guys decided to make records after I’d left and they’d gone on tour, there was a lot of attacking of me, I think to make themselves feel stronger or whatever. A lot of it was deliberately revisionist to an extent that was pretty upsetting at the time.”
I mean, I wouldn’t want to be told about how much of an asshole I was if I were in that situation, either, but it’s not like Waters was willing to roll over and take the high road. He knew that whatever Gilmour would do next would only be a facsimile of what he could do with the group, and even if he found time to make up with him during the Live 8 concert, he had no problem calling records like The Division Bell an insult to all of the classic records they had made together.
Whether you think that Waters is a casualty of Pink Floyd or a tyrant that needed to leave, there’s no denying the impact that he left on the group. The Gilmour era did have plenty of highlights to go around, but it’s always going to have to stand next to the brilliant pieces from four creative minds all working together to create a masterpiece.
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