S Poddar
David Gilmour, Pink Floyd guitarist and vocalist, has finally shut the lid on all hopes of reuniting with his former bandmate, Roger Waters, putting to an end their possibilities of ever standing stage upon stage.
In a candid interview with The Guardian yesterday, Thursday, 78-year-old musician expressed reluctance at sharing the same stage with Waters because of deep differences that have always divided the two musicians over their contrasting views in politics.
In response to whether he would ever work again with Waters in the future, Gilmour flatly stated, “Absolutely not.” Further on, he explained, “I tend to keep away from people that actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators.” This was a clear reference to Waters’ very public political stances, for which the two artists had been at odds for years.
Gilmour went on to point out a significant difference in their values, particularly regarding women. “Nothing would make me share a stage with someone who thinks such treatment of women is OK,” he stressed. But he recalled fondly another late Pink Floyd member, Rick Wright, the keyboardist, whose passing he misses dearly. I’d love to be back on stage with Rick Wright, one of the gentlest and most musically gifted people I have ever known,” he added, reminiscing about his late friend and bandmate.
This is not the first public show of support for him from Gilmour on his troubled relationship with Waters. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Gilmour described this long-standing feud as something that he found tiresome. “It’s over. As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s and I’m a pretty old chap now,” Gilmour explained, underscoring how irrelevant the feud feels to him at this point in his life.
He continued, “People talk about ‘the battle,’ but to me it’s one way going on since he left, in spikes.” Despite some decades of tension and media speculation regarding their relationship, Gilmour appears to have set all this aside, looking at the feud as something from the past, which has little to do with today.
Fans of Pink Floyd had waited patiently for the reunion of Gilmour and Waters. Many believed that this famed sound that had created Pink Floyd as one of the greatest rock bands of all time was a result of Waters’s combination with Gilmour when the band first began to form. Gilmour’s latest statement makes it obvious that all such possibilities are patently out of the question.
The two musicians last performed with each other for the complete length of a Pink Floyd performance when Waters left the band in 1981 after a long-standing creative difference. Their last major joint performance was a one-off appearance at the Live 8 concert in 2005, where Gilmour, Waters, Wright, and drummer Nick Mason reformed Pink Floyd’s classic lineup for a short but sweet set. That performance came to lift the hopes of fans who were awaiting more collaborations in the future, but now seems to have been an isolated instance of reconciliation rather than something that would keep on coming through.
Waters has also garnered much attention recently for his more vocal opinions on politics, which frequently placed him at odds with many of his fellow musicians, including Gilmour. Waters’ advocacy of unsavory characters and practices proved unpopular enough that Gilmour’s insistence that the politics that divide them will make it impossible to reconcile may be the last word on their end.
The personal and political cracks never would allow the two musicians to reunite, sharing the legendary musical heritage. Looking deep into their past, the past seems to be left behind Gilmour; they cannot return to that past with Waters.
To all those who hope for a full Pink Floyd reunion, it is true that Gilmour seems rather happy with his state of affairs. He apparently puts more effort toward the future, and, at the same time, cherishes the past in memory with other band members, particularly the late Rick Wright, whose gentle soul and magical musical ability he will never forget.
