In a lengthy message on social media, Roger Waters singled out an article by The New Statesman headlined The Battle within Pink Floyd and took aim at the fact that described him describing David Gilmour’s guitar solos in The Dark Side of the Moon as “horrible.”
Roger Waters has stated that he was misquoted by a previously published piece that said he labeled David Gilmour’s guitar solos “horrible.”
The comment was credited to a Spanish journal called El Pas, which did not specify a source at the time, with the latter claiming Waters erased the solos of his impending revised version of TDSOTM (The Dark Side of the Moon) because they were “awful.”
In response, Waters has defended Gilmour’s guitar playing, saying his solos on that album, together with a handful of other Pink Floyd songs, “comprise a collection of some of the best guitar solos in rock & roll history.”
“There is something in the story about which I need to clarify,” he wrote. “Part of this will involve him eliminating Gilmour’s “awful guitar solos,” as reported in Spain’s El Pas newspaper.”
“I’m not sure who he thinks he’s citing when he says Gilmour’s ‘awful guitar solos,’ but it ain’t me,” Waters continued. “I was there, and I love Dave’s guitar solos on DSOTM and Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut.
After engaging in a verbal spat with Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, who recently called the bassist “anti-semitic to your rotten core,” Waters has defended Gilmour’s guitar solos. Samson received support from Gilmour, who asserted that every line of her post was “demonstrably factual.”
After the tweets, Waters disparaged the contributions of Gilmour and late keyboardist Richard Wright in an interview with The Telegraph, alleging, “They can’t make songs; they’ve nothing to say. They are not creative! They don’t have a single concept, and they’ve never had, which drives them insane.”
Waters announced in the same interview that he would release a re-recorded version of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, purportedly taking his former comrades out without their permission.
Waters appears to have supplemented the album’s instrumentals with spoken word, including a “dreadful prose poem” penned after a nightmare over On the Run. Waters added that he rebuilt the album since no one understood what it was about.
“I wrote Dark Side of the Moon,” he explained. “Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ nonsense!” Of course, we were a band; four of us pitched in – but it was my project, and I wrote it. So… blah!”
The recording is expected to be released in May.