Roger Waters shares the one Pink Floyd song that ‘still means a lot’ to him

A Pink Floyd song “still means a lot” to Roger Waters, decades on from when it was first written.

The bassist would open up on the tracks which still meant the most to him during an interview back in 2007. Waters’ work with Pink Floyd spanned the debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn through to The Final Cut. During that time Waters, along with David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright, and Syd Barrett, made some of the most genre-defining songs of their time. But it’s one song in particular, from after The Dark Side of the Moon, which still has an emotional grip on Waters. Not only does it still mean a lot to the founding member, but he says it’s a song he still loves to sing. Speaking in 2007, Waters said the second verse in particular is his favourite.

He said of the title track to Wish You Were Here: “That’s pitching it too strong. But I love singing that song. I only sang the second verse of it. But I always loved singing it when we were on the road. I still like the song very much. I wrote it whenever it was, 1975 or something, and it still means a lot to me.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Waters would note another Wish You Were Here track, Shine On You Crazy Diamond [Parts 1 – 5], was particularly hard to sing after the death of Syd Barrett.

Speaking about the track in an interview with Uncut Magazine, Waters would confirm a Wish You Were Here track remained much too difficult to play, and that he still feels a “deep connection” with Barrett when performing the song. The first few performances of the song were trickiest of all for Waters, who says the shows after Barrett’s death were an emotionally trying time.

He said: “I do Shine On You Crazy Diamond in my show as well – and I have to say it was slightly unnerving playing it for a few performances immediately after Syd died. I still feel a deep connection with Syd whenever I play those songs. Shine On You Crazy Diamond is specifically about him, but Wish You Were Here is a far more general piece.”

Further albums from Pink Floyd have left Waters feeling “relaxed” about his and the group’s success. He said: “Maybe if it was the only one it would, but of course it was in 1973 or 4 and then there was The Wall in 1979, and that was much bigger than The Dark Side of the Moon and it’s probably just as well. Since then, I’ve done what I think is an important album of my own in 1992, called Amused to Death.

“So, no, really, at this point, I’m pretty relaxed about the whole thing. I’ve got tonnes of songs that I’ve written and half recorded and whatever, and there’s a couple more albums in the old dog yet, and I will make them at some point.

“But they need to be coherent in some way. I am stuck with my attachment to the idea that records being whole pieces of work that have a beginning and a middle and an end, so the concept album as it’s sometimes rather derisively called, is a format that I’m pretty well stuck with.”