Credit: Far Out / digboston
Fri 31 July 2026 16:30, UK
From the minute that Roger Waters left Pink Floyd, he seemed to be at war with his own legacy.
He knew that the band had been able to carry on without him, but he was going to stand by and watch as the rest of his bandmates made music that he felt didn’t reflect what he was thinking all the time. In his mind, the band needed to die after he left, but it’s not like any band has to call it a day right after they lose an important member of the group.
AC/DC didn’t simply quit once they lost Bon Scott, and Van Halen were out there to prove that they could do anything once David Lee Roth left, but it was a bit different when it came to Waters. He was the one conceptualising all of their ideas, and when they didn’t have any running themes throughout their records like they used to, it was hard to see many of his musical masterpieces being cut up to suit the live show every time they performed pieces of The Wall.
But for David Gilmour, that was the only thing that they could do at that point. There was no sense in having them go through yet another concept record about the horrors of the world, and given how The Final Cut ended up, there was no chance that the band was going to survive another minute if they kept up that creative streak. Waters didn’t have to like it, but maybe that came from the fact that getting ousted from the band was all too familiar to him.
After all, he had been on board when it was time for them to let go of Syd Barrett, and that wasn’t exactly going to be easy, either. Of course, Waters didn’t have to deal with the kind of pressures brought on by mental illness during his time with the band, but when Gilmour changed course without his bandmate, it made much more sense for them to rebrand themselves as a completely different animal from what they had been.
Because when you think about it, Waters wasn’t going to be comfortable playing any of Barrett’s material after the fact. The whole point of the band was to keep moving forward, and if they had kept his spirit alive through playing his material, the pain would have hurt too much for them to really justify continuing on if they had to find time for songs like ‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’.
Waters was still open to celebrating his old friend, but even after leaving the band, he knew that a song like ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ would have been impossible for him to visualise in the modern age, saying, “I don’t want to go back to those times at all. There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’. Syd was a genius. But I wouldn’t want to go back to playing ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ for hours and hours.”
Further reading: From The Vault
It could get a bit monotonous playing for hours on end, but a lot of that went back to that kind of childlike innocence that the band started life as. They wanted to make music that was unlike anything they had ever heard, and in those days, having an entire instrumental based around strange sounds was their way of having a laugh and communicating with each other without having to use any words.
‘Interstellar Overdrive’ was the greatest sense of community that the band could feel in their early days, but when looking back on Barrett these days, it makes more sense to play something like ‘Wish You Were Here’. Songs can feel like old photographs in many respects, but there are sometimes when a memory is much too strong to go through day after day.
