Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters still maintains that the Live Aid performance from the classic line-up is a “very moving” spectacle.
The bassist would say the show he performed with David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright was a triumph, and spoke fondly of it in interviews after the performance. Though the band would never play together again, Waters was open to the idea of playing similarly charitable shows with the group. Wright would die in 2008, though Waters would perform with Gilmour and Mason separately in the years to follow. Though the group would not come together again after their Live Aid performance, Waters spoke fondly of it in the years following their charity appearance. The show would be just twenty minutes long, but would mark the final time the classic line-up ever played together.
He said: “I felt it was very moving. I thought it was great that we did that. And so did the audience I think, so many people have spoken to me about it, how good it was to see that line-up together again.”
Waters would suggest Gilmour was not as happy with the show as he was in interviews after the performance. In an interview with TVZN, Waters said: “No of course not. I’d do it in a heartbeat. I don’t think Dave wants to do it all. I think he sort of regretted Live 8 a bit, so who knows. Well because it was his band and suddenly it wasn’t any more.
“Suddenly this is what it was, this is the sort of thing it actually is – it’s Dave and Roger and Nick and Rick. And he said afterwards it would have been just the same if Roger hadn’t been there, but it’s not the same.”
Waters would say in several interviews around this time that he wanted to reform the band and also that he “regretted” the way things fell apart for the group on his departure in 1985. Speaking of his departure from the band in 2007, Waters said: “I don’t think any of us came out of the years from 1985 with any credit, really. It was a bad, negative time, really. And I regret my part in that negativity.
“I was actually more attached to the philosophy and politics of Pink Floyd than the others were — certainly more so than David was. In a way, whatever I did I did in a way to protect the integrity of what I saw as being important about the work that the four of us did together.
“I realise now that move was doomed to failure … and why should I have imposed my feelings about the work and what it was worth on the others if they didn’t feel the same? I was wrong in attempting to do that.”
