(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 14 August 2025 3:00, UK
Any band can get scared of the dreaded word “pretentious” coming out of fans’ mouths when they pick up one of their records. No one is safe from getting a little too high on their own hubris, but Roger Waters knew there was always room for bands to dream big while still holding onto their ideals.
Because if there weren’t any grand concepts for Pink Floyd, there’s a good chance that they would have fallen apart after Syd Barrett had to leave the group. There was no reason for them to continue on without their leader, but Waters knew that the best way to move forward would be to look at music from a different lens. They had once been a psychedelic band, and while they still had that as part of their sound, they could easily switch things when they started making longer pieces.
Some fans weren’t too happy, and they may have had to dodge a couple of drinks thrown at them when they didn’t play songs like ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’ live, but they were going to bet on themselves once the 1970s arrived. They knew they had the potential to make a fantastic piece of art, and while they took their sweet time getting to a track like ‘Echoes’, it became ground zero for what would become their classic period.
From Dark Side of the Moon onwards, the band had a hot streak going that completely transcended any of their previous work. Although some of their albums may have been a lot to take in, it was always worth it to go on the journey, but looking back, Waters had to admit that some ideas may have been considered a little too outlandish for a band to take on.
According to the frontman, many of their most celebrated works were the definition of pretentious, saying in 1992, “Maybe my pretentions to grandeur are ill-founded. However, in some way, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall were both pretentious and grand in their day, and one of them 20 years later and the other 12 years later, they stand up, they’re good pieces of work. So I can’t worry about that.”
But that kind of pretentiousness can only be a good thing in Waters’s mind. He certainly recognised the “danger” that came with people calling him out for making grand statements, but if there was something that he felt passionate about enough to create an album that runs a little too long or has multiple arrangements behind them, it was because that’s what the concept demanded out of him.
Curiously, though, few people can make pretentious claims about the albums between Pink Floyd’s masterpieces, Wish You Were Here and Animals. The former was always bound to be a classic thanks to its fantastic tributes to Barrett, and considering Waters wrote Animals based around the dangers of capitalism and the modern parallels to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it was a progressive rock album that happened to have a punk rock heart.
So while no one can outrun accusations of pretentiousness, Waters knew it was the nature of the beast in many ways. No one has any control over what the rest of the world thinks of them, but as long as they follow their heart and make the kind of art that they want, there’s hardly any reason not to be proud of what they create.
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