Roger Waters shares how he adapted The Dark Side of the Moon to his solo show after changing David Gilmour parts

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Roger Waters has shared how he managed to adapt The Dark Side of the Moon to the stage without David Gilmour.

The veteran performer managed to bring one of the greatest albums of all time to the stage without the band’s lead vocalist and guitarist. Both Waters and Gilmour would manage to bring material from Pink Floyd’s discography during their solo shows. But Waters would speak on how he managed to bring the songs to the stage by himself, with a collection of instrumentalists managing to keep the songs “fairly faithful” to how they sounded on the studio release. Speaking to Uncut Magazine in 2007, Waters shared that it was not just Gilmour’s parts he hoped to keep intact, but also the work of Clare Torry, the vocalist who performs on The Great Gig in the Sky.

Waters would also hit out at Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason’s The Dark Side of the Moon adaptation, saying the singers they got for The Great Gig in the Sky didn’t come close to the Torry original. He said: “Absolutely not. I’m mostly playing my own songs. Some of them are co-written, obviously… some of The Dark Side of the Moon stuff is.

“And I’m also treating The Dark Side of the Moon as one might treat a classical piece of music. So we’re reproducing some of Dave’s solos. I’d have to say Carol Kenyon, who’s in my band, does a great job on The Great Gig In The Sky. She’s fairly faithful to Claire Torry’s original performance on the record. Audiences go apeshit because they recognise it, but they see that she reinterprets it without straying too far from the original notes.

“That’s not easy. I’ve seen other people trying to replicate Great Gig, not least on some of the shows that Dave, Rick and Nick did together. The girls they had didn’t even come close to the original.”

Waters would also share why he believes The Dark Side of the Moon is still such a popular album. He said: “The record is musically sophisticated and yet simple. The song structures are very simple. Lyrically, it speaks to successive generations who have continued to have the same concerns over and over and over again. Sadly, a song like Us and Them seems just as apposite politically in 2006 as it did in 1979.

“Also a song like Time expresses feelings lots of young people have when they reach a certain age and they’re looking for meaning. I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, all you young people out there, but it goes on. We keep re-examining out lives and our relationships with our friends, our family, and other human beings.”

Waters would go on to suggest there is an “enormous attachment” between the album and successive generations who are discovering Pink Floyd’s work for the first time. He continued: “There’s no doubt there’s an enormous attachment to the work that runs through umpteen generations of people which is very moving when you’re playing it live.

“In the show, I go out to the edges of the stage and get close to people. I get empathy from all kinds of different people, particularly out in the wings where the seats are a bit cheaper. They’re all ages, from 10- to 80-year-olds, and it’s great.”