Sophia Michaels
Roger Waters took aim at his former Pink Floyd bandmate, David Gilmour, in a video Tuesday claiming that the singer and guitarist would not allow him to use the band’s website or social media to promote his own work.
“Nothing from me is on the website — I am banned by David Gilmour from the website,” Waters said at one point. “David thinks he owns it,” Waters said later in the clip. “I think he thinks because I left the band in 1985 that he owns Pink Floyd, that he is Pink Floyd and that I’m irrelevant that I should keep my mouth shut. We’re all welcome to our opinions.”
Last year, Waters told Rolling Stone that he had met with Gilmour and Floyd drummer Nick Mason with the hope of squashing their differences. “We spoke in June,” he said. “We had a big meeting where I came up with a big peace plan that has come to nothing, sadly.”
He expounded on the summit in another interview this year: “I wrote out a sort of a plan, but my plan didn’t bear fruit,” he said. “It was just, ‘Can we release the remastered vinyl version of Animals without it turning into the third world war?’ I said, ‘Why don’t we have a vote, and at least we can just get on with it?’ But they wouldn’t have that. God knows why.”
In his video Tuesday, Waters referenced the meeting again. “A year ago, I convened a sort of Camp David for the surviving members of Pink Floyd at a hotel at the airport in London, where I proposed all kinds of measures to get past this awful impasse that we have and the predicament we found ourselves in, and it bore not fruit, I’m sorry to say,” he said. “One of the things I asked for, I suggested that because whoever the 30 million of you are that subscribe to the web page, you do so because of the body of work the five of us created. … In consequence, it seems to me that it would be fair and correct if we should have equal access to you all and share our projects.”
Waters said in the clip that he wished the Pink Floyd socials would feature his recently released socially distanced rendition of “Mother,” a song off Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and mention that his Us + Them concert film was now available digitally and that his planned 2020 This Is Not a Drill tour was postponed. He posited that fans have been saying, “We should rise up or just change the name of the band to Spinal Tap and then everything will be hunky-dory,” before he digressed and said, “I’m not gonna get all weird and sarcastic.”
David Gilmour — who recently dipped into the solo catalog of Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett in a video performance — did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and mounted a legal battle to prevent Gilmour and Mason from using the band name without him. Ultimately, he lost, and the Gilmour-led version of the band ended up releasing A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987 and touring stadiums into the Nineties. In a 2013 BBC interview, Waters conceded regret for suing Gilmour and Mason. “I was wrong,” he said. “Of course I was. Who cares?”
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