It’s about time most people learn a crucial lesson at this point: Pink Floyd is ancient history.
There’s zero chance that David Gilmour and Roger Waters are ever going to resolve their issues, and judging by where they are in their lives at this point, it’s not like they’re actively trying to make up and go on another massive tour for the hell of it. They have been content to carry on in their own way, but Waters felt that the fracture started long before they had even decided to stop making music together.
If we want to be technical here, the real “classic” lineup of the band had already come to an end before anyone had even heard of them. Syd Barrett was the one who imagined it all back in the day, but after slowly starting to become mentally unravelled, getting Gilmour in the group in the first place pretty much confirmed that the band were going to continue on without their leader and frontman.
But for all of the shoddy work that they did without Barrett, you could at least hear them slowly starting to find their sound. An album like More might not be anywhere close to the standards they would set later, but listening to a song like ‘Cymbaline’, you can at least listen to Gilmour’s v voice playing off the rest of the band and recognise it as Pink Floyd. As far as Waters was concerned, though, ‘Echoes’ was the first time he figured out how to communicate with his songs.
Atom Heart Mother may have been a fun experiment at the time, but in one side-long piece, they found out the kind of message they could spread with their music. Gone were the days of space-aged rock songs, and in their place were intricate philosophical messages about the nature of humankind and the empathy that all of us could have for our fellow man. And while Dark Side of the Moon ended up building on everything ‘Echoes’ promised, it wasn’t like Waters was enthusiastic about the band continuing on past that.
They all had turned into world-class musicians, but Waters felt that the relationships within the band were basically over when the album was completed, saying, “The Dark Side Of The Moon finished the Pink Floyd off once and for all. We were frightened of the great ‘out there’ beyond the umbrella of this extraordinarily powerful and valuable trade name.” But when you look at the material they made afterwards, does it really sound like a band that ran out of ideas?
While they were always going to be a different band without Waters in the fold after The Final Cut, the following conceptual pieces all came from them working together. Animals is one of his most in-depth pieces, and even though Richard Wright would talk about getting pushed out of the creative process on their later albums, the reason why he called Wish You Were Here the band’s best came from all of them working together to pay tribute to Barrett while he was still around.
Even when Waters did leave the fold, it’s not like the band couldn’t carry on. After all, The Wall was practically a Waters solo project that featured every member in their respective roles, so even if A Momentary Lapse of Reason was Gilmour trying to make do with what he had left, it’s not like later projects like The Division Bell should be thought of as lesser projects just because Waters isn’t there.
Did the band lose a lot when Waters left the fold? Absolutely. Were they going to be chasing after the success of Dark Side of the Moon for the rest of their lives? Absolutely. But does that mean that they needed to retire them because certain members weren’t getting along? Absolutely not.
