Pink Floyd bassist, songwriter and singer Roger Waters has decided to re-record the band’s famous 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, but without his old bandmates.
• Also read: “The Dark Side of the Moon” celebrates its fiftieth birthday
The musician announced this in an exclusive interview for the British medium “The Telegraph” and explained that there were “not enough people who recognized what it was about, what I wanted to say.”
He revealed that he worked on the new version of the album for several months and that he made it from scratch without informing the former members like David Gilmour or Nick Mason.
“Let’s stop the ‘we’ nonsense. Of course we were a group, there were four of us, we all contributed. But it’s my project and I wrote it. It is,” he added during the interview.
Waters has previously claimed to be the author of the concept for the album. He is officially credited with writing the lyrics, specifically composing three of its tracks and co-writing two others.
In the interview, the musician does not spare his former colleagues by claiming that they are not able to compose high-quality melodies: “Nick didn’t claim anything. But David and Rick [Wright]? They don’t know how to write songs, they have nothing to say. They are not artists!”
Aside from Waters, the only other collaborator on this reissue was multi-instrumentalist Gus Saunders, one of the few who had a chance to listen to the solo album “from start to finish” first.
Waters was rumored to have performed a bass solo on the song “Us and Them” and added lyrics to the original instruments to create poetry. His voice on “Money” would also approximate what Johnny Cash had achieved in his compilations released in the 2000s.
Roger Waters would have planned a major release of this new album, which may prove complicated, while David Gilmour and Nick Mason still have the group’s name. Gilmour and Waters have been at odds publicly for several years, and they’re back again this week.
As their flagship album The Dark Side of the Moon prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the hatchet is swung once again between the two former collaborators.
Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife, posted a message on Twitter criticizing Roger Waters’ comments on the war in Ukraine. “Unfortunately @rogerswaters you are anti-Semitic to the core. Also a Putin apologist and a liar, thief, hypocrite, tax dodger […], misogynist, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense,” she wrote.
Highly controversial in his political stance, Waters spoke before the United Nations Security Council and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also said it was “not without provocation” and blamed NATO.
The musical work “The Dark Side of the Moon”, released in March 1973, is the third best-selling album in the world with more than 45 million copies.
According to The Telegraph newspaper, the updated version of the famous album will be released next May.