Roger Waters continues to make incendiary comments in the press this week. This time around, he’s talking about Pink Floyd’s landmark album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Waters said in a new interview with The Telegraph he re-recorded the album on his own without any of his bandmates. His reasoning for doing this comes off as a type of entitlement. Waters said, “I wrote ‘The Dark Side of the Moon.’ Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!” (It should be noted that in the album’s credits, Waters is credited for writing all the lyrics. David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright have various music credits on the album, along with Waters.)
To seemingly add salt to the wound, Waters said of his former bandmates, “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists!”
So, why did Waters re-record the classic album in the first place? Waters said, “Not enough people recognized what it’s about, what it was I was saying then.”
The Telegraph reported getting a preview of the re-recording. Reporter Tristram Fane Saunders said, “‘Time,’ that young man’s lament for mortality, sounds terrific with his old man’s timbre. ‘Breathe’ is wonderfully reimagined as a slow, acoustic groove. A country-tinged ‘Money’ could be a late Johnny Cash cut, with Waters growling charismatically at the very bottom of his register.” However, Waters decided to add spoken-word poetry over the LP’s instrumental tracks. That may not sit well with fans.
As for when this new version of The Dark Side of the Moon will see the light of day, The Telegraph noted it has a tentative release set for May.