Roger Waters ‘hated’ Pink Floyd hit and shares ‘big argument’ with David Gilmour over The Wall hit

A hit song from legendary rock band Pink Floyd left Roger Waters and David Gilmour in the midst of a “big argument”.

Waters claimed he “hated” the hit song, which the band made while recording The Wall. Speaking of their work on the song in an interview with Uncut Magazine, the bassist would suggest he had a vastly different idea in mind for Comfortably Numb. The song has since become an essential part of Gilmour’s live setlist, though he says he never learned the guitar solo. It’s a song which seems to have had a very different version kicking about the studio before Gilmour and Waters finally agreed on what the final version would sound like.

Waters said: “There was an argument. We cut the track, sent it to Michael Kamen in New York, who wrote and recorded the string charts. They sounded fantastic, almost the best thing that Michael ever did. I love it. Dave said he thought the track was sloppy, or something, and he wanted to recut the drums, the bass, this, that and the other.

“At this time I was working in Jacques Loussier’s studio doing vocals because we realised that we had to split the work up. Dave was still in Bear Studios, doing keyboard. He recut the basic rhythm of the piece and stuck it together and went ‘“’There you go’. I listened to it and I hated it.

“It had suddenly become, for me, very wooden; just not moving at all. And that was the big argument. I went: ‘No, the way it was, was great. This is bad’. He was: ‘No, the way it was, was terrible. This is great’. So the song ended up with 4 bars of his and 4 bars of mine… the whole track is like that. It was a weird sort of bargaining thing between he and I.”

The bargain seems to have paid off, though, with Comfortably Numb now recognised as one of the band’s best songs. Despite the iconic instrumental running through the track, Gilmour says he opted not to remember the original solo, instead revising and improvising it from show to show.

He said: “I’m not thinking about the audience and what they want, to be honest. I just like it starting the way it starts, and the rest of it sort of so ingrained in me that the various parts of it are going to find their way into what I’m doing.”

“But I’ve never learned it. Yeah, I’ve never learned that guitar solo.” Gilmour would go a step further and say he’s not sure whether the song is more or less popular because of his guitar part. The former Pink Floyd member, who was frontman of the group following Roger Waters’ departure in 1985, suggested he isn’t sure which version people would rather here.

He explained: “I mean, there are a lot of guys who can play that. But I don’t play it. To me, it’s just different every time. I mean, why would I want to do it the same? Would it be more popular with the people listening if I did it exactly like the record?

“Or do they prefer that I just wander off into whatever feels like the right thing at the time? I don’t know. I suspect they like they prefer it to be real, and to be happening, you know? There are cues within it, which I use to tell the band, ‘We’re going to end’, or, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And so, they crop up as being the same every time, pretty much.”