Roger Waters Once Slung Insults at 3 of His Most Iconic Albums (And One of Them Might Shock You)

Roger Waters has never been one to bite his tongue. For as often as he has slung insults at his former bandmates and even his contemporaries, he’s also been famously critical of his own work. There’s nothing more indicative of a true musician than releasing spectacular material and then immediately talking smack about it. Let’s look at just a few albums that Roger Waters wholly or partially created, about which he has since said some untoward things. One of these albums might surprise you.

‘Atom Heart Mother’ (1970)

This progressive rock gem was quite commercially successful when it first dropped. That didn’t stop Roger Waters from very eloquently dragging it through the mud. Apparently, even David Gilmour was critical of the album in retrospect. We really are our own worst enemies.

“If somebody said to me now – right – here’s a million pounds, go out and play ‘Atom Heart Mother’, I’d say you must be f*cking joking,” said Waters in a BBC Radio 1 interview from 1984. “I’m not playing that rubbish!”

‘The Wall’ (1979)

Roger Waters didn’t drag the entirety of this iconic concept album through the mud. However, he did have a few choice words for one of its most famous songs, “Comfortably Numb”. He wrote the lyrics of the song himself, and David Gilmour composed the music. Apparently, the two had fought relentlessly over the song. Waters wanted there to be a big orchestral backing for the song, while Gilmour envisioned it as a more acoustic and stripped-down track. He even said in an interview that he “hated it” in its early stages. They reached a compromise in the end, but Waters was still not satisfied with the song that made it to the record. 

“That’s all we could do without somebody ‘winning’ and somebody ‘losing,’” said Waters. “And of course, who lost, if you like, was the band, because it was clear at that point that we didn’t [all] feel the same way about music.”

‘The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ (1967)

This one shocked me, honestly. Roger Waters wasn’t at the helm of Pink Floyd’s debut record, though he would have creative control over many of their subsequent albums. That achievement goes to former member Syd Barrett, who was the lead songwriter and singer for most of the songs on The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. This album is by far my favorite to come out of the band, and I was shocked to hear that Waters thought he and his bandmates sounded “laughable” and “useless” on it.

“There wasn’t anything ‘grand’ about it,” Waters once said of the record. “We were laughable, we were useless. We couldn’t play at all, so we had to do something stupid and ‘experimental’.”

(Photo by Jim Dyson/Getty Images)