(Credits: Alamy)
The worst thing one can take from a musician is their morale. It’s one thing to tear through them and say that they are one of the worst bands to ever walk the Earth, but the minute that someone takes all of that criticism to heart and puts the guitar down for the final time makes it all the more tragic. No one wins when dragging bands through the mud for no reason, and David Gilmour knew better than most that fostering creativity should tower above everything else.
That said, he always had a feel for what did and didn’t work with a band like Pink Floyd. There had been a handful of moments in their career where Gilmour admitted that they screwed up on Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, but looking through some of the later period of the band when he was at the helm, it was always about creating a jam atmosphere and seeing what good could come out of it when making tunes like ‘Coming Back to Life’ and ‘Marooned’.
If anything, the fact that they were free from the conceptual pieces at the time may have been a blessing in disguise. There are some underlying themes within an album like The Division Bell, but it’s always better when a band develops a concept naturally than working on their material for hours on end trying to shoehorn something into the plot.
But when Roger Waters was at the helm, there was no time for messing around. He was going to make the record that he heard in his head, regardless of whether the rest of the band wanted to contribute, which meant stepping on a few toes when making The Wall. This was intended to be a masterpiece, and while Gilmour rose to the challenge, Waters knew that he could no longer work with Richard Wright in any capacity if he couldn’t give anything to the rock opera.
While it’s one thing to fire Wright, Nick Mason was far from enthusiastic after finishing the album. He already had to be substituted out for a session drummer on ‘Mother’, but while he managed to take the high road there, it’s easy to see his insecurities when working on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, to the point where he hardly stepped behind the drumkit outside of using different drum machines.
Although things started to gel a lot better on the accompanying tour, Gilmour felt that the band’s goodwill towards each other had been wiped out when Waters was at the helm, saying, “[The tour] brought Rick and Nick back to being functioning musicians. In my view, they had been destroyed by Roger. I stand by that. It was a gradual rebuilding that started the moment we went out. You might be correct in assuming that, right at the beginning, our second keyboard player and our percussion player were fairly essential in keeping us all going. But within the first month, Nick and Rick took over their proper parts.”
Outside of putting together a fantastic live show, the real silver lining is getting Wright back into the band as a full-time member. He had been crucial to the band’s sound since the beginning, and by having him take over keyboards and harmony vocal duties, hearing him sing songs later down the line like ‘Wearing the Inside Out’ made everyone see faint glimpses of the old version of Floyd.
So while Waters may have been a nightmare to work with towards the end of the band’s run, that didn’t mean there wasn’t still room for them to rebuild their foundations all over again. It might not be easy to break a musician’s spirit, but the strongest artists in the world are the ones brave enough to pick themselves up and start moving in the right direction again.
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