Credit: Far Out / digboston
Sun 23 August 2026 16:00, UK
Roger Waters never needed to be nice to others to get what he wanted all the time.
Ever since leaving Pink Floyd, there was always a vision that he had for every album that he worked on, and even though he was willing to give credit to the all-star musicians that he worked with on record, there was a good chance that a lot of the music that he came up with didn’t need all that many bells and whistles to sound great. He could normally write the most perfect songs he could on his own, and he felt the same way even when he was in his prime with the members of his band.
But becoming a great songwriter wasn’t something that happened overnight when Waters was first starting out. Syd Barrett was the key member of the band ever since they first formed, and when he was removed from the band due to his mental issues, the band lost their heart and soul in lots of ways. They had to start back at zero, but Waters felt that he could at least step up and try something new every now and again.
Becoming a great prog-rock band involved a lot of fumbling around in the dark across many of their albums, but ‘Echoes’ was the first time Waters thought that he had hit upon the right lyrical approach that he would be defined by. He wanted to empathise with his fellow man throughout his songs, and even when he was at his most confrontational on records like Animals and The Wall, he was still trying to deliver a message that there is some compassion left in the world if you know where to look for it.
That only leaves out one tiny caveat in Waters’s career, and that’s that there are other members of Pink Floyd. The band didn’t suddenly become ‘The Roger Waters Experience’ when he started writing lyrics, and a lot of the greatest tunes that he ever made wouldn’t have been half as good as they were if not for David Gilmour’s immaculate guitar parts or Richard Wright contributing his beautiful keyboard lines across every single one of their classic albums.
They were the ones who were filling in the spaces in Waters’s productions, but he was going to be dead in the ground before he let someone like Gilmour tell him how his songs were supposed to go. A piece of music that Gilmour made may have inspired him to make a tune like ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, but the idea most fans had of them being like John Lennon and Paul McCartney was far from the truth whenever they worked together.
Waters would be thankful for the inspiration Gilmour gave him, but he didn’t think that anything the guitarist created made him a co-writer with him, saying, “Dave and I never wrote together. I don’t ever remember writing with Dave. Sometimes he’d bring in a chord sequence and I’d the make a song out of it. Or he’d bring a guitar riff in and I’d make a song out of it, like ‘Wish You Were Here.’ I love that riff, it’s fantastic. But we never wrote together, ever. Never. And Dave was never interested in drama, ever. In my experience. He never showed any interest at all.”
Further reading: From The Vault
If you really think about it, though, Waters was thinking about the concept of songwriting all wrong. The entire idea of composing has to do with every part of the song, and while the bassist was fantastic at writing lyrics that could leave people absolutely dumbfounded by what they heard, there was a reason why people were so interested in hearing an album like Amused to Death when they found out that Jeff Beck would be appearing on the final mix.
So, despite Waters insisting that he was the brains behind Floyd and no one else could have possibly taken his place, his own version of Dark Side of the Moon really proved how wrong he was. Floyd always considered the spaces in between the notes to be just as important as the central song, and it took all of them working together in the late 1970s to churn out the kind of masterpieces that they ended up with.
