(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 21 December 2025 17:00, UK
Roger Waters and David Gilmour never needed any excuse to fall out with each other. Almost from the very moment that Gilmour joined the ranks of Pink Floyd, the pair were consistently at each other’s throats, and the vitriol still seems to continue to this very day. Perhaps the biggest insult to Waters’ artistic output, though, was when Gilmour accused him of plagiarism.
Pink Floyd presided over one of the most revolutionary discographies in musical history, but that musical genius didn’t come without its price, and the band itself was rarely – if ever – a harmonious place to be. Even during the pre-Gilmour days, when Syd Barrett was still lucid enough to lead the band into their incredible psychedelic explorations, internal conflict still marred Floyd’s existence, and it only intensified once Roger Waters took the reins of the band in 1968.
Inevitably, if you put two musical minds as powerful as those of Waters and Gilmour in a confined space together, they are going to come to blows eventually, and repeatedly.
Throughout the band’s most successful and innovative period, stretching across seminal records like The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, there was scarcely a moment in which the pair seemed to get along, and so Waters’ eventual departure came as something of a blessing to Gilmour in 1985.
By that time, though, the two songwriters had already exchanged lifetimes’ worth of insults and arguments, one of which centred around the vastly underrated folk hero, Roy Harper. Emerging around the same time as Pink Floyd, towards the tail-end of the 1960s, Harper was once label-mates with the band during their tenure at Harvest Records, and so a friendship soon formed between the folk hero and his psychedelic comrades.
“We were obviously friends,” Harper shared to Classic Rock. “Recording in the same place at the same time. So there was some kind of cognisance that we were on the same page. It did happen that, for whatever reason, I sang on their record and they played on mine.” Perhaps most notably, Gilmour featured on Harper’s 1975 track ‘The Game’, alongside Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on bass.
Becoming so close to the Pink Floyd camp, though, it wasn’t long before Harper became unintentionally involved in the band’s complex intra-band politics. “That started a very long time ago, so we were in the same school at the same time,” he recalled. “And the edges were bound to fray. We were bound to take from each other. I mean, David openly twice accused Roger, in front of me, of copying me.”
Exactly which moments of their respective careers fell under that accusation of plagiarism is a question for Floyd and Harper obsessives to deduce on their own, but stranger things have certainly happened.
Given how close the songwriters were, after all, the idea that Waters might have taken some inspiration from the folk singer is not out of the realm of possibility. Then again, it might easily have been something Gilmour threw around in an attempt to fuel the ongoing war within the band.
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