Roger Waters offers a blunt assessment of his time in Pink Floyd in a new interview, claiming that the band’s working environment was “toxic” and that his former bandmates, specifically David Gilmour and Richard Wright, were “always trying to drag me down… always trying to knock me off.”
Waters was originally interviewed on the popular WTF with Marc Maron podcast several years ago, but the podcast has just been made available under its original paywall. In it Waters speaks about his post-Pink Floyd solo career and tells his host, “it was really important that I got away when I did.” Waters left Floyd in 1985, after promoting 1983’s The Final Cut album.
“I was in a very toxic environment where I was around some people…Well, David (Gilmour, guitar) and Rick (Wright, keyboards) mainly were always trying to drag me down,” Waters says. “They were always trying to knock me off.”
Waters claims that his former bandmates would tell him that he was “tone-deaf” and “didn’t understand music”.
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- “The live recording sees the piece come to life… amid the sepulchral gloom there are moments of real beauty”: Roger Waters' Super Deluxe Box Set of his Dark Side Of The Moon Redux
“They were very snotty and snippy because they felt very insignificant, I think,” he surmises.
Asked about Pink Floyd’s contribution to music, Waters was initially lukewarm in his assessment.
“I was never that intellectual about it,” he says. “It’s something that happened, that development. Now I understand a lot more than I did about it.”
In a more generous moment, Floyd’s former vocalist/bassist concedes that the group did produce some “really good work” collaboratively.
“Those years that we were together, whatever it was like socially, there is no question but that we did some really good work together,” he recalled. “We didn’t share the vision but we shared the work.”
Pink Floyd, meanwhile, have announced that they will release a remixed and updated A Momentary Lapse Of Reason through PLG on October 29.
The new version of the band's 1987 album, which saw Gilmour helm the band in the wake of Roger Waters' departure, has been remixed and updated from the original 1987 master tapes for The Later Years by Andy Jackson with David Gilmour, assisted by Damon Iddins. The album will be available on Vinyl, CD, DVD, Blu-ray and digitally with Stereo and 5.1 mixes.
In addition, for the first time, the album will be presented in 360 Reality Audio, a new immersive music experience that closely mimics the omni-directional soundscape of live musical performance for the listener using Sony’s object-based 360 Spatial Sound technologies. A Momentary Lapse Of Reason will also be released in Dolby Audio and UHD in addition to 360 Reality Audio, all of which will continue with other Pink Floyd releases.
