Roger Waters to Dispute David Gilmour’s ‘Gobbledygook’ in Memoir
Roger Waters won’t be pulling any punches against former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour in his memoir, which he is currently in the middle of writing.
The 73-year-old songwriter revealed in a recent Twitter video that he began writing his memoir during the coronavirus pandemic. In a lengthy note posted on his website, Waters teased some of the “whopping porky pies” — that is, big, fat lies — that Gilmour has allegedly told over the years about his degree of involvement in certain Pink Floyd creations.
Waters paid special attention to the famous intro to the band's 1973 hit “Money,” which features tape-looped sounds of a ringing cash register and jingling coins in an unusual time signature. He quoted an excerpt from a 1982 interview that Gilmour did with Rolling Stone’s David Fricke, which he cited as evidence that “even back then DG was sowing the seeds of the false narrative.”
On the subject of "Money," Gilmour apparently told Fricke: ”You’re trying to get the impact from the cash register, the ‘snap, crack, crsssh.’ You’d mark that one and then measure how long you wanted that beat to go, and that’s the piece you’d use. And you’d chop it together. It was trial and error. You just chop the tapes together, and if it sounds good, you use it. If it doesn’t, you take one section out and put a different one in. Sometimes we’d put one in and it’d be backwards, because the diagonal cut on the tape, if you turn it around is exactly the same. We’d stick that in and instead it would go ‘chung, dum, whoosh’ and sound great so we’d use that.”
Waters was apparently not impressed with Gilmour’s recollection. “The reason everything DG is saying here to David Fricke sounds like gobbledygook is because it is fucking gobbledygook,” he wrote. “He has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. Why? Because unless he was hiding under the fucking chair, DG wasn’t there when I made that SFX tape loop for 'Money' in the studio I shared with my wife Judy at the bottom of our garden at 187, New North Road, Islington, next door to the North Pole Pub where I used to play darts!
“The full story of what really happened is in my memoir,” Waters concluded. “So, I hope that whets your, and David and [Gilmour’s wife] Polly [Samson]’s appetites.”
Waters also revealed that the release of a remixed version of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals has been delayed for roughly two years due to a dispute over the album’s liner notes. Waters claimed that while Gilmour thinks the liner notes are factually sound, he doesn’t want them included in the rerelease “because he wanted Pink Floyd to remain enigmatic.” Waters has since agreed to have the Animals remix released without the liner notes, the final draft of which he shared on his website.