Pink Floyd bassist, songwriter and vocalist Roger Waters has decided to re-record the band’s famous 1973 album ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, but without his old bandmates.
• Read also: ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ celebrates its fiftieth anniversary
The musician made the announcement in an exclusive interview for the British media “The Telegraph”, explaining that there are “not enough people who recognized what it was regarding, what I wanted to say. »
He revealed that he had been working on the new version of the album for several months, and that he had done it from scratch, without having informed the former members, such as David Gilmour or Nick Mason.
“Let’s stop with the ‘we’ bullshit. Of course, we were a group, there were four of us, we all contributed. But it’s my project and I wrote it. That’s it,” he added during the interview.
Waters has previously claimed to be the author of the concept for the album. Officially, he is credited for having written the lyrics, having notably composed three of his titles and co-wrote two others.
In the interview, the musician did not spare his former colleagues by maintaining that they were not able to compose quality melodies: “Nick did not claim anything. But David and Rick [Wright]? They don’t know how to write songs, they have nothing to say. They are not artists!”
Besides Waters, the only other collaborator of this reissue would be the multi-instrumentalist Gus Saunders, one of the few who had the chance to listen to the solo album “from beginning to end” first.
Waters was rumored to perform a bass solo on the song “Us and Them,” and add lyrics to the original instrumentals to create poems. His voice on “Money” would also approach what Johnny Cash had achieved in his compilations released during the 2000s.
Roger Waters would have planned a big release of this new album, which might prove to be complicated while David Gilmour and Nick Mason still have the name of the group. Gilmour and Waters have been feuding publicly for several years, and once more this week.
As their flagship album, “The Dark Side of the Moon”, prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the hatchet between the two former companions is brandished once more.
Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, posted a message on Twitter criticizing Roger Waters’ comments on the war in Ukraine. “Unfortunately @rogerswaters you are antisemitic to the core. Also a Putin apologist and a liar, thief, hypocrite, tax avoider […], misogynist, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense,” she wrote.
Highly controversial in his political stances, Waters spoke before the United Nations Security Council and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also said it was “not without provocation”, blaming NATO.
The musical work “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released in March 1973, is the third best-selling album in the world with more than 45 million copies.
According to the daily “The Telegraph”, the updated version of the famous album will be released next May.
