The decision to remove Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd hardly affected the band at the time, Roger Waters has claimed.
Waters would pull no punches when it came to discussing his former friend and bandmate, who was dropped from the line-up in April 1968. While Waters and the rest of the band would find themselves adapting to the departure of Barrett relatively easily, the bassist would say it was a necessity for the group. Waters and the band would not keep in touch with Barrett following his departure from the group, though The Wall hitmaker would suggest he was going to call Barrett on the day of his death. Speaking to TVNZ in 2007, Waters was asked about how he felt about Barrett’s death.
Barrett died on July 6, 2006. Waters said: “Sort of not very hard you know because Syd kind of died forty years ago for me. When we spent months and months and months going ‘what’s happened where are you?’ and he’d kind of gone and he’d stayed gone.
“So obviously I was very sad to hear that he was sick. I heard he was sick about three days before he died. I finally got Rosemary’s phone number and was just about to call when I heard he’d died. I’ve thought about it since on a number of occasions and I think about it still and I find myself going back to the Saturday morning painting classes we did together when he was eleven and I was ten back in 1954.”
But it was a different feeling when Barrett left the band, with the bassist suggesting there was no time to grieve the decision to have their founding member removed. Waters, speaking to Radio Bogota, said: “Everybody starts trying to write, that’s all that happens. Bands live and die by whether they have someone, or more than one person, who can write. Writing is the fundamental cornerstone of any music.
“It has to be written, and if you haven’t got somebody in the band who can write it’s gonna be a very short-lived enterprise. So we had to find out whether we did. And we did, and so it became a long-lived enterprise.” The band would create some of their all-time best records following Barrett’s departure, including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters would then leave the band himself in 1985, though reflecting on it decades later, suggested he regretted how he left.
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.”
A chance to rectify those mistakes presented itself with the band’s Live 8 reunion, which Waters considers a chance to “let bygones be bygones” with his ex-bandmates. In interviews and performances to follow that 2005 performance, the relationship between Gilmour and Waters seemed to improve slightly.
He praised not just Gilmour’s “beautiful” singing but the event itself for being an appropriate way to bury the hatchet between the four. It seemed to last, for a little while anyway, with Gilmour appearing to play a part in Waters’ solo show in 2011. The relationship between the two may now be frosty, but for a time, it seemed relatively polite.
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