grimtraveller
If only for a moment.....
Ex-Pink Floyd bassist {he left the band 38 years ago}, vocalist and songwriter Roger Waters has given an interview with the Daily Telegraph journalist, Tristram Fane Saunders, in which he says that he's re-recorded the entirety of the album "The Dark Side of the Moon." Here is the interview in full for anyone that's interested. Fasten your seat belts and keep the heating on low.....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It has not been a quiet week for Roger Waters.
“You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core,” novelist Polly Samson told the rock star on Twitter. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”
“Every word demonstrably true,” chipped in her husband David Gilmour, the 76-year-old Pink Floyd singer and guitarist. Naturally, his ex-bandmate Waters, 79, rejected the “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” portrayal.
Waters and Gilmour spent the 1970s collaborating on some of the most successful albums ever made, and subsequent decades hurling insults at each other. “It’s really disappointing these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads,” as the band’s drummer Nick Mason put it in 2018. After this week, a reconciliation looks less likely than ever.
The latest spat follows an interview Waters gave to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in which, not for the first time, he compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. After accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”, he went on to call the USA “the main aggressor” in the Russia-Ukraine war, a stance that seems to have gone down well in Russia, who invited him to speak at a UN Security Council hearing on Ukraine on Wednesday. He called the invasion “illegal” but “not unprovoked”.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he went much further. The idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is, in Waters’s view, “fucking insane”. “Nazis,” he tells me, echoing Russian propaganda, are “in control of the government” in the war-torn country.
Over four impassioned hours, Waters gives vent to the full range of his often divisive, sometimes contradictory opinions, while his interviewer struggles to get a word in edgeways. Waters has strong views on – in no particular order – China, Spotify, Ecuador, Biden, Haiti, Brexit, Putin and, inevitably, Israel (of which more later). He wants to share all of them, before getting round to the reason he’d invited me to meet him.
I’d been promised details of a major new musical project, one that may land Waters in yet more hot water. For months, Waters has been secretly working on a new version of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic journey through life and death, sanity and madness, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
He has re-recorded it from scratch, without the involvement or even knowledge of any of his old bandmates. He’s still polishing the final details, but plays me a full-length cut. At the time of writing, I’m one of just a handful of people to have heard it from start to finish. What I hear comes as a genuine surprise. (More on that, too, later.)
Waters is planning a lavish vinyl release, but this might prove tricky. Pink Floyd’s legacy has been the cause of much bitter debate. Waters quit Pink Floyd in 1985, expecting it to dissolve without him. But it didn’t. As a result, Gilmour and Mason, the only other surviving members, own the band’s name. “Faux Floyd,” as Waters calls them, “went touring round the world and made millions and millions and millions of dollars.” (By one newspaper’s estimate, Waters is $130 million (£108 million) richer than Gilmour, which may offer some consolation.)
After founding member Syd Barrett had, as Waters puts it, “gone loopy” (a 1968 breakdown following heavy drug use), Waters had taken on the brunt of songwriting duties. “They said I was autocratic,” he says, still clearly hurt, decades after the split. But perhaps there was a grain of truth to that description. Waters is one of his generation’s most gifted songwriters, but famously uncompromising. In our conversation, he jokingly sums up his attitude to Gilmour in the Floyd years like this: “You play the guitar and sing and do as you’re bloody well told.”
Waters’s problem with the rest of Floyd,
he says, was that they “can’t write”. “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick [Wright, the keyboardist]? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists!” He shouts the last two words. “They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” It’s oddly poignant, hearing him berate Wright (who died in 2008) in the present tense. It’s as if keeping the petty rivalry alive is a way of keeping Wright alive. Wright’s final solo album, he says, is “not as vacuous as Drake, but it’s pretty vacuous”.
A recent reissue of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals was delayed for four long years – and that was just due to a squabble over liner notes. Now Waters is planning to release a rival version of Pink Floyd’s most famous record, without Pink Floyd’s permission. I’m no copyright expert, but might there be some obstacles to that? Waters smiles: “I have no idea.”
After we speak, his rep phones up to say the album – originally set for March – has been pushed back to May, as Waters still hasn’t quite finished tinkering with the recordings. A big concert that was meant to launch it in March has also been postponed, probably to May, and moved to a different venue. It all sounds a bit shambolic, but they assure me the release is definitely happening.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It has not been a quiet week for Roger Waters.
“You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core,” novelist Polly Samson told the rock star on Twitter. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”“Every word demonstrably true,” chipped in her husband David Gilmour, the 76-year-old Pink Floyd singer and guitarist. Naturally, his ex-bandmate Waters, 79, rejected the “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” portrayal.
Waters and Gilmour spent the 1970s collaborating on some of the most successful albums ever made, and subsequent decades hurling insults at each other. “It’s really disappointing these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads,” as the band’s drummer Nick Mason put it in 2018. After this week, a reconciliation looks less likely than ever.
The latest spat follows an interview Waters gave to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in which, not for the first time, he compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. After accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”, he went on to call the USA “the main aggressor” in the Russia-Ukraine war, a stance that seems to have gone down well in Russia, who invited him to speak at a UN Security Council hearing on Ukraine on Wednesday. He called the invasion “illegal” but “not unprovoked”.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he went much further. The idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is, in Waters’s view, “fucking insane”. “Nazis,” he tells me, echoing Russian propaganda, are “in control of the government” in the war-torn country.
Over four impassioned hours, Waters gives vent to the full range of his often divisive, sometimes contradictory opinions, while his interviewer struggles to get a word in edgeways. Waters has strong views on – in no particular order – China, Spotify, Ecuador, Biden, Haiti, Brexit, Putin and, inevitably, Israel (of which more later). He wants to share all of them, before getting round to the reason he’d invited me to meet him.
I’d been promised details of a major new musical project, one that may land Waters in yet more hot water. For months, Waters has been secretly working on a new version of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic journey through life and death, sanity and madness, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
He has re-recorded it from scratch, without the involvement or even knowledge of any of his old bandmates. He’s still polishing the final details, but plays me a full-length cut. At the time of writing, I’m one of just a handful of people to have heard it from start to finish. What I hear comes as a genuine surprise. (More on that, too, later.)
Waters is planning a lavish vinyl release, but this might prove tricky. Pink Floyd’s legacy has been the cause of much bitter debate. Waters quit Pink Floyd in 1985, expecting it to dissolve without him. But it didn’t. As a result, Gilmour and Mason, the only other surviving members, own the band’s name. “Faux Floyd,” as Waters calls them, “went touring round the world and made millions and millions and millions of dollars.” (By one newspaper’s estimate, Waters is $130 million (£108 million) richer than Gilmour, which may offer some consolation.)
After founding member Syd Barrett had, as Waters puts it, “gone loopy” (a 1968 breakdown following heavy drug use), Waters had taken on the brunt of songwriting duties. “They said I was autocratic,” he says, still clearly hurt, decades after the split. But perhaps there was a grain of truth to that description. Waters is one of his generation’s most gifted songwriters, but famously uncompromising. In our conversation, he jokingly sums up his attitude to Gilmour in the Floyd years like this: “You play the guitar and sing and do as you’re bloody well told.”
Waters’s problem with the rest of Floyd,
he says, was that they “can’t write”. “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick [Wright, the keyboardist]? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists!” He shouts the last two words. “They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” It’s oddly poignant, hearing him berate Wright (who died in 2008) in the present tense. It’s as if keeping the petty rivalry alive is a way of keeping Wright alive. Wright’s final solo album, he says, is “not as vacuous as Drake, but it’s pretty vacuous”.A recent reissue of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals was delayed for four long years – and that was just due to a squabble over liner notes. Now Waters is planning to release a rival version of Pink Floyd’s most famous record, without Pink Floyd’s permission. I’m no copyright expert, but might there be some obstacles to that? Waters smiles: “I have no idea.”
After we speak, his rep phones up to say the album – originally set for March – has been pushed back to May, as Waters still hasn’t quite finished tinkering with the recordings. A big concert that was meant to launch it in March has also been postponed, probably to May, and moved to a different venue. It all sounds a bit shambolic, but they assure me the release is definitely happening.
This is why everyone wants writing credits. Furthermore, on the performance, there are two ways to get paid that I know of, one as band for hire (you were paid upfront and done) or you get a percent ever time that recording is played.
