Roger Waters has re-recorded The Dark Side of the Moon without the rest of his former Pink Floyd bandmates.
“I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap!” Waters declared during an interview with The Telegraph. “Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it. So… blah!”
Officially, Waters is credited with writing the 1973 album’s lyrics, composing three of its tracks, and co-writing two others.
The rocker was far from complimentary when discussing his former bandmates’ songwriting contributions, insisting the other members of Pink Floyd couldn’t craft quality material. “Well, Nick [Mason] never pretended. But [David] Gilmour and Rick [Wright]? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists!”
As The Dark Side of the Moon – which ranks among the most popular albums of all time – approaches its 50th birthday in March, Waters decided it was time to re-record the LP.
The Telegraph writer Tristram Fane Saunders was given a preview of the album, and reported that “parts are very good indeed.” “‘Time,’ that young man’s lament for mortality, sounds terrific with his old man’s timbre,” he noted. “‘Breathe’ is wonderfully reimagined as a slow, acoustic groove. A country-tinged ‘Money’ could be a late Johnny Cash cut, with Waters growling charismatically at the very bottom of his register.”
Still, perhaps Waters’ most jarring choice was to record spoken word poetry over The Dark Side of the Moon’s instrumental tracks.
The rocker insisted that his motive behind behind the project was to better convey the album’s central theme, following “the voice of reason.” “Not enough people recognized what it’s about, what it was I was saying then,” he opined.
A release date for the updated version of The Dark Side of the Moon has not yet been officially announced, though The Telegraph suggested it would come out sometime in May.
News of the re-record comes as Waters and Gilmour are once again embroiled in a public war of words.
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