Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour calls Roger Waters a ‘crank’
Gilmour said he ‘100%’ agreed with his wife’s scathing public criticism of Waters on X.
Pink Floyd star David Gilmour has called his former bandmate Roger Waters a “crank”.
Gilmour made the comments as he promoted his new solo album.
Waters took legal action against the other members of Pink Floyd to stop them using the band’s name without him, but was not successful, after he left the group in acrimonious circumstances in 1985.
He reunited with the other members for Live 8 in 2005, and teamed up with Gilmour to restage Pink Floyd’s classic album The Wall in 2011 at the O2 Arena in London.
In 2023, Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, who wrote the lyrics for his new album, posted on Twitter, now X, accusing 81-year-old Pink Floyd songwriter and co-founder Waters of being “antisemitic to your rotten core”.
Gilmour followed the remarks up, saying: “Every word demonstrably true.”
Waters is a prominent supporter of the Palestinian people.
Singer and guitarist Gilmour told the Friday edition of the Times: “Polly was boiling over with something and she put it out there. I put out a tweet agreeing with it, which I do, 100%.
“But who knows the mysteries of that crank’s mind? It is a topic that I will one day talk about but now is not the time. It would obfuscate everything I am trying to do.”
A statement on Waters’ account in February 2023 said: “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely. He is currently taking advice as to his position.”
That same year, then-Tory Government minister Michael Gove and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer criticised Waters over his comments about Israel and Jewish people.
In 2020, Waters claimed Gilmour “banned” him from the Pink Floyd website, as he “thinks he owns it”.
The bassist and singer said at the time: “I think he thinks because I left the band in 1985 that he owns Pink Floyd, that he is Pink Floyd and that I’m irrelevant and that I should keep my mouth shut.”
Gilmour also said that it is “too long ago to remember” how he approached an album with Pink Floyd as he released his first record in nine years, Luck And Strange, on Friday.
He added: “I had some lovely times in my old pop group. But Roger left the band when I was still in my thirties and Rick (Wright) is dead, so the relevance of all that stuff has vanished for me.
“I haven’t spoken to Roger for almost 40 years. I can’t make connections back to Pink Floyd any more.”
The 78-year-old guitarist and vocalist last released a studio album as part of Pink Floyd, 2014’s The Endless River, featuring recordings of the psychedelic group’s late keyboard player Richard Wright, who died in 2008, and drummer Nick Mason.
Gilmour’s last solo release was Rattle That Lock, in 2015.
The star also addressed how he felt about original Pink Floyd singer and guitarist Syd Barrett, who split from the band in the 1960s after his behaviour became erratic.
Barrett, who died in 2006, lived reclusively in Cambridge after leaving the group.
Gilmour said Barrett “could be enormously fun or enormously difficult and quite often you had absolutely no idea what he was talking about”.
He added: “There was a lot of guilt involved but by then we were snowballing down our mountain and too much success brings its own kind of madness.
“Deeply unqualified people are thrust into positions of power and we’ve all seen where that can lead, destroying your life with drugs and so on.”
Formed in London in 1965, the band are one of the biggest-selling groups ever, and released the albums The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.
A representative for Waters has been contacted for comment.
