Pink Floyd, Roger Waters and the dark side of the feud

In the annals of rock feuds, few can match that between Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters for vitriol or durability. Their current state of relations is particularly bad. With customary Floydian grandeur, the areas of dispute range from geopolitics — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — to who did what on which song. The fallout now threatens to poison the 50th anniversary of the band’s magnum opus.

The Dark Side of the Moon is the pivotal moment in the band’s history. Dealing with themes of social alienation and madness, it was Pink Floyd’s first concept album. It was also their first US number one. As of this March, it has spent a record-breaking 972 weeks in the Billboard chart and sold an estimated 45mn copies globally. With its iconic cover illustration of a light ray refracted through a prism, the vinyl version of this psychedelic behemoth may well hold an unofficial record as the most popular surface ever for rolling joints.

Its half-centenary is being marked by the arrival of a remastered edition. The new Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix is designed to immerse the listener in the album’s soundscape of heartbeats, clocks, voices, ringing cash tills and majestic songcraft. But it faces rivalry from an unofficial version — the rogue orbit of another Dark Side of the Moon. Its creator is Waters, who was ejected from the band in 1985.

Pink Floyd’s pugnacious former leader, 79, has decided to remake the album as a solo work. It’s expected to arrive in May, although the exact date hasn’t been confirmed. Apparently it involves Waters adding voice-overs to the original’s instrumentals. An indication of what to expect might lie in the re-recording he released last year of the band’s 1979 song “Comfortably Numb”. It jettisons Gilmour’s famous guitar solos and adds a vocal part by singer Shanay Johnson. Her voice cries out across the acoustic space where once the guitarist’s notes scaled the heights.

According to Waters, the new Dark Side is intended “partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to readdress the political and emotional message of the whole album”. For many, not least Gilmour, these words will act like the alarm clock that goes off at the beginning of Dark Side’s track “Time”. Waters is a polemicist, determined not just to air his views but confront people with them. As the warning screened at the start of gigs on his This Is Not a Drill tour puts it, “if you’re one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd, but I can’t stand Roger’s politics’ people you might do well to fuck off to the bar right now.”

His broad-brush critique of war and state power in songs such as Dark Side’s “Us and Them” has sharpened over the decades into a specific set of grievances. One is hostility to Nato and US foreign policy, which has led him to speak approvingly of Vladimir Putin. “It may be that he’s leading his country to the benefit of all the people of Russia,” he told The Daily Telegraph in February, overlooking the countless Russians who have the disbenefit of being dead as a result of Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Another flashpoint is his criticism of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, which he likens to those of Nazi Germany. “The Israelis are committing genocide,” he asserted in the Berliner Zeitung, also in February. Such inflammatory rhetoric, and the use of an inflatable pig emblazoned with a Star of David as a stage prop at gigs, have prompted furious accusations of antisemitism, which Waters no less adamantly rejects. He’s currently threatening legal action against Frankfurt after the city’s authorities labelled him an antisemite and cancelled his planned concert there in May. Among the signatories in a petition protesting the ban is Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason.

Mason has heard Waters’ reworking of Dark Side. “Annoyingly, it’s absolutely brilliant,” he said at a playback in London last month for the Dolby remaster of the album. The drummer has remained friendly with Waters (“I’ve always been well-known for my fence-sitting,” he said in 2003). Richard Wright, the band’s keyboardist, died in 2008. That leaves Gilmour, who is 77, as Waters’ implacable antagonist in Pink Floyd.

Their differences include the usual rock-band squabbles about credits: the release of a 2018 remix of their 1977 album Animals was delayed until last year by an argument over liner notes. But Gilmour and Waters are also separated by profound differences in outlook.

Last year, the guitarist reunited with Mason as Pink Floyd to release “Hey Hey Rise Up”, a charity single for humanitarian relief in Ukraine (Gilmour has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law). “I find it really, really sad,” Waters said of the song in his Berliner Zeitung interview. Two days later, Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, tweeted a livid denunciation of Waters, to which Gilmour added a rejoinder that “every word demonstrably true”. In response, Waters said that he would be taking legal advice.

The seeds for this estrangement were implanted in The Dark Side of the Moon. It was the first Pink Floyd album on which Waters acted as sole lyricist. In 2003, when it turned 30, the bassist told Uncut magazine that Dark Side was “my baby”, although he conceded that “Dave particularly, but Rick as well, had major, important contributions”. He depicted the album as a watershed in the life of the band: “We did some very good work after that. But we’d fulfilled the dream and, to us, in some fundamental sense, it was over, so it was all downhill from then on.”

His control grew with each subsequent album until his bandmates rose up and overthrew him in the 1985 coup. Dark Side was the summit of their joint work, a collective effort that included others outside their ranks. The cover was created by the art design group Hipgnosis. The music’s sound quality was engineered by Alan Parsons. “The nice thing about working with them was that they would go home and just leave me to it,” Parsons said in 1977. Clare Torry was the session singer who devised and performed the ecstatic vocal run in “The Great Gig in the Sky”. “They didn’t know what they wanted,” she later explained.

Waters used to be more collegiate about the album’s authorship. “There was something about the symbiosis of the musical talents of the four of us that worked really well,” he told Billboard magazine in 2006. But his re-recorded version comes with a bristling sense of ownership. “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon,” he insisted in his Daily Telegraph interview. “Let’s get rid of this ‘we’ crap!” Unfolding against the backdrop of tumultuous historical events, the album’s history is thus being rewritten. The toxic bloom of Pink Floyd’s feuding is at risk of contaminating the legacy of their greatest achievement, the work that gave fullest expression to their group identity.

‘The Dark Side of the Moon 50th Anniversary Edition Box Set’ is available now, pinkfloyd.com