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Mon 25 August 2025 19:00, UK

Any band can normally find themselves in a game of he-said-she-said far too often. Many people have different perspectives on how their career should take shape, but while David Gilmour was comfortable leading Pink Floyd once Roger Waters left the fold, he didn’t realise that he would need to battle for his independence as an artist all over again.

Then again, Pink Floyd were always the one band that could pull something like this off. They let their music do the talking half the time, and even if they were recognisable faces to random rock fans on the street, it wasn’t like they hadn’t replaced a member before. Syd Barrett was an essential part of their sound, and even if Waters was leaving, Gilmour simply felt that this would be another version of Floyd that no one else got to see.

But there was always going to be shaky ground with both parties. Waters did have fantastic visions for what he wanted his music to sound like, but when listening to The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, it was clear that he was in over his head just a little bit, especially with songs that seem to be aching for a great solo section or a musical resolution that never seems to come around.

And it’s not like Gilmour was in for a walk in the park, either. Pink Floyd may not have been his baby from the beginning or anything, but since he was always working as a musician rather than a conceptual artist, A Momentary Lapse of Reason was a bit of a shaky start, especially since Nick Mason was more interested in drum machines and Richard Wright still wasn’t officially a member of the band anymore, having been sacked by Waters during The Wall.

If you have a high tolerance for 1980s production, though, there are a fair number of highlights. Every song shows Gilmour in peak form as a lead guitarist, and ‘Learning to Fly’ and ‘On the Turning Away’, but Waters was less than impressed with what he heard. There could have been a certain amount of jealousy there, but Gilmour felt Waters crossed the line when he claimed that the band’s label turned down the initial version of the album Gilmour had. 

According to Gilmour, the band were never bothered about starting over again, saying, “A tissue of lies [emphatically]. I never stopped and started again. If you think any record company person was ever going to tell us what to do….we have had a long history of saying, ‘Fuck off, we will deliver our record when we are ready to, with the cover, and you can sell it’.”

Despite their verbal sparring sessions, both Gilmour and Waters did eventually find their footing on their own as well. Waters’s fantastic solo album Amused to Death has a good enough concept to rival that of Wish You Were Here, and while The Division Bell does have a much different sound than what turned up on the previous album, it is a great exploration of soundscapes and features some of the band’s greatest late-era masterpieces like ‘High Hopes’.

There are many more times where Waters and Gilmour would disagree, but it’s easy to chalk this one up as a case of musical tension. Waters was content to do what he wanted by this point, but he wasn’t above giving his own opinion on his old band, even if it did put some of his former bandmates on edge from time to time.

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