Of all the rock ‘n’ roll feuds to exist between members of the same band, there are few as enduring and publicized as the one between Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Despite the singular cohesion they were able to achieve on albums like Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here, they couldn’t find a similar harmony outside of the creative process.
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Both musicians have slung mud toward the other in the press, with Waters being particularly prone to outrage-inducing outbursts about Gilmour and others. But Gilmour’s comments about his ex-bandmates in a 2003 interview with Uncut weren’t exactly shining testimonials about his love for his colleagues, either. The guitarist’s interview provided fascinating insight into how Gilmour perceived the dynamics among the Pink Floyd members.
And indeed, no one was safe from his scrutinous eye—not even the people who resigned themselves to sit on the fence.
David Gilmour Elaborates on Band Dynamics in 2003 Interview
To be fair to David Gilmour, he wasn’t prattling off complaints about his former Pink Floyd bandmates unprompted. Many of the questions he was asked in his 2003 interview with Uncut asked him to elaborate or comment on things his ex-colleagues had already said. For example, Nick Mason once called Gilmour the band’s only “natural musician,” while Mason, Rick Wright, and Roger Waters were a “gifted amateur band.”
Gilmour happily accepted that he was musical, although he said Rick had plenty of musicality himself. “Rick is less pushy than I am,” Gilmour clarified. “I think I did most of the arranging and cajoling.” Gilmour was also the one who recruited saxophonist Dick Parry for Dark Side and Wish You Were Here.
As for the non-creative aspects of the band’s dynamic, Gilmour took a sly shot at Mason, the drummer, for trying to remain neutral between Gilmour and Waters. “Nick’s got a very sore bum, I imagine. He spent so many years sitting on that fence. Rick was curmudgeonly about things and wanted us to move in a more pure, maybe jazzy direction. He was always moaning and groaning. But he didn’t really mean it half the time.”
The Band Was Glad to Have a Leader…sometimes
David Gilmour continued, “We all have very different personalities is the truth of the matter. We were all very, very happy to have a driving force like Roger who wanted to push for these [philosophical and political] concepts [in our music]. I don’t remember it being a big issue at the time.”
The issues, as they were, seemed to crop up after the initial writing process was over. Gilmour said that while he was willing to defer to Waters for the bulk of their albums’ lyrical content, he had no interest in making him the de facto ruler over everything. “I certainly had a resistance to stating, ‘Roger is our leader.’ It creates a feeling that you have to defer to him on other matters—and on musical matters. I didn’t feel I should. I didn’t think it was good for us for me to not argue and try and push my case as I saw it.”
“It’s a funny old thing, the idea of a power struggle,” Gilmour said.
Gilmour and Waters’ relationship has fluctuated over the years. At the end of his interview in 2003, Gilmour said, “I won’t go into what I feel about Roger. I don’t really have any feelings about him.”
Despite these differences and disagreements that have persisted over multiple decades, there was something especially fortuitous about Gilmour and Waters’ relationship—no matter how brief those moments were—that contributed to some of the best rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time.
Photo by Dave M. Benett/CI Getty Images Entertainment
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