“I Hated Them That Year”: Why Tom Petty Felt So Strongly About Pink Floyd in 1980

No matter how much mutual respect two artists might have for each other, when it comes down to it, contemporaries within the same genre will almost always be competing with one another for sales, chart placements, and publicity, which is precisely why Tom Petty “hated” Pink Floyd in 1980.

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Given the intense legal battles Petty was facing at the time, his frustration toward the British psychedelic rock band was understandable, if not a bit misplaced.

Why Tom Petty Felt So Strongly About Pink Floyd

The latter half of 1979 proved to be an especially pivotal time in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. On October 19, 1979, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their third and highly contentious album, Damn the Torpedoes, after a lengthy legal battle with his record label that led to Petty filing for bankruptcy and the formation of a new label, Backstreet, specifically for the Florida musician.

Just over one month later, British psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd released their magnum opus rock opera, The Wall, on November 30. With singles like “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb,” the band’s eleventh studio album became an instant success, skyrocketing to the top of the Billboard 200 chart. With Pink Floyd dominating the No. 1 chart position, Petty’s album, which was gaining quite a bit of ground, too, had nowhere to go but No. 2.

The two albums remained neck in neck throughout 1980, but much to Petty’s chagrin, Damn the Torpedoes never got past the hump to beat The Wall. Petty once told Westwood One, “I love Pink Floyd. But I hated them that year.”

Interestingly, The Two Albums Were Somewhat Similar

Sonically speaking, there is a world of difference between Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But move past the instrumentation and production styles and look at the actual content of the album, and the two are more similar than some might think. Although Petty didn’t set out to write a record about the exploitative perils of the music industry, that’s what ended up happening as his songwriting was naturally affected by his ongoing legal battles with his record label.

Damn the Torpedoes features iconic and defiant cuts like “Even the Losers,” “Refugee,” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.” Petty later explained, “I wanted to write anthems for underdogs. The theme of the album wasn’t self-conscious. But when I put it together afterwards, I could see it was about standing up for your rights. The ones that everyone has, which can’t be f***ed with or taken away. I wanted to keep the common denominator of them as love songs with other connotations.”

In that same vein, Pink Floyd’s The Wall is famously about an embittered rock star, Pink, who builds a “wall” around himself as he struggles under the weight of the entertainment industry. The two albums explored the same idea of fame not being all it’s cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there can only be one “ruler of the mountain” at a time on a Billboard chart. It just so happened that Petty came up short in 1980.

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