The bad blood between Pink Floyd members has continued, this time with Roger Waters slagging off his ex-bandmates in a new interview.
As per Ultimate Guitar, Waters was appearing on the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast when he less than fondly looked back on his time in the iconic British band. When asked about Pink Floyd’s massive contribution to music, he was unbothered. “I was never that intellectual about it,” he said casually. “It’s something that happened, that development. Now I understand a lot more than I did about it.”
Waters was less dismissive about his influence on arena rock: “What happened was that the band became popular, and my major contribution to rock ‘n’ roll, if you like – I’ve written some decent songs but it was really to develop the theater of arena rock, which I did almost single-handedly back in the mid-’70s.”
He wasn’t done with the boasts there, saying that “over the years, I’ve come to realise that actually, I have quite a sophisticated musical brain and that I get a lot of things that other people don’t notice.” And he put that development down to escaping the Pink Floyd bubble. “I’m serious, I think it was really important that I got away when I did,” he insisted.
It was at this point Waters turned his fire on his former bandmates. “Well, I was in a very toxic environment where I was around some people…Well, David (Gilmour, guitar) and Rick (Wright, keyboards) mainly were always trying to drag me down. They were always trying to knock me off.”
Waters stated that they tried to undermine his artistic vision “by claiming that I was tone-deaf and that I didn’t understand music. ‘Oh, he’s just a boring teacher figure who tells us what to do but he can’t tune his own guitar…’. They were very snotty and snippy because they felt very insignificant, I think.”
He did end with a moment of more considered reflection though. “Those years that we were together, whatever it was like socially, there is no question but that we did some really good work together,” he recalled. “We didn’t share the vision but we shared the work.”
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Check out Roger Waters on the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRYuljS1u7w
