Roger Waters says one moment made him realise Pink Floyd had come to an end

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The writing was on the wall for Pink Floyd years before the band came to an end, bassist Roger Waters has claimed. The veteran songwriter behind The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon, and The Final Cut, suggested that he knew it was all over during the making of one album. Waters would leave the group in 1985, two years after the release of The Final Cut. The experience of making the album was such a miserable one that he knew the group was finished before recording for the album had ended.

Speaking of the decision to leave the group, Waters would address what it was that made him feel like Pink Floyd as a project was over. Waters issued his thoughts in 1987, at a time where he was pitching himself as a solo artist while David Gilmour fronted Pink Floyd. He would do so until 1994 and the original line-up behind The Dark Side of the Moon would reunite just once more in 2005. They never performed again, and Waters would remain true to his word that the band’s time together was over.

He said: “Well, there are those who contend it’s not over, of course. But making The Final Cut was misery. We didn’t work together at all. I had to do it more or less single-handed, working with Michael Kamen, my co-producer. That’s one of the few things that the ‘boys’ and I agreed about. But no-one else would do anything on it.”

Even with the album coming together so painfully, the decision to rid Waters of the band was made when the sales figures came through. Waters continued: “It sold three million copies, which wasn’t a lot for Pink Floyd. And as a consequence, David Gilmour went on record as saying, ‘There you go: I knew he was doing it wrong all along.’

“But it’s absolutely ridiculous to judge a record solely on sales. If you’re going to use sales as the sole criterion, it makes Grease a better record than Graceland. Anyway, I was in a greengrocer’s shop, and this woman of about forty in a fur coat came up to me. She said she thought it was the most moving record she had ever heard. Her father had also been killed in World War II, she explained. And I got back into my car with my three pounds of potatoes and drove home and thought, good enough.”

Sessions for The Final Cut were frosty from the start, with Waters sacking founding band member Richard Wright shortly before recording began. Gilmour voiced his dislike of many of the songs featured on the album while Nick Mason’s drumming is limited at best.

Waters would resign from the band in 1985 and suggested Pink Floyd was a “spent force” following the lacklustre response to The Final Cut. The album has received positive reviews in the last few years, with its legacy now clear as a de facto Waters solo album. He sang lead vocals on many of the songs featured and wrote all of the songs, most of which were rewritten as a response to the Falklands War.