Roger Waters has re-recorded Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon.
He tells The Telegraph, “I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap! 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!”
He wrote three of the album’s 10 songs and co-wrote two others, despite saying his former bandmates, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and the late Rick Wright, “can’t write.”
Waters says, “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”
Asked why re-record such a masterpiece, he says, “Because not enough people recognized what it’s about, what it was I was saying then.”
Originally scheduled for March, the month that the original album was released 50 years ago, it will now be out in May with a special concert to celebrate its release.
Tristram Fane Saunders, the reporter who interviewed Waters for The Telegraph, describes the new recordings as “a curate’s egg; parts are very good indeed. ‘Time,’ that young man’s lament for mortality, sounds terrific with his old man’s timbre. ‘Breathe’ is wonderfully re-imagined 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.
“But, surprisingly, Waters seems to have decided that what was wrong with the original album’s beautiful instrumental tracks was that they didn’t have Waters talking all over them. Now they do.
“After a bad dream one night, he splurged down a description of it on his laptop, and recites the whole dreadful prose poem over ‘On the Run’ unedited: ‘It was a revelation, almost Patmosian whatever that means… a fight with evil, in this case an apparently all-powerful hooded and cloaked figure… it brooked no rebuttal.'”
The original The Dark Side of the Moon, which will be reissued as a deluxe package in March, is the fourth bestselling album in history, with more than 50-million copies sold.
Waters recently re-recorded four of his Pink Floyd songs for his last album, The Lockdown Sessions, which he released in December. They are “Mother” and “Vera” from The Wall; and “Two Suns in the Sunset” and “The Gunner’s Dream” from The Final Cut.
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