Most Pink Floyd fans were aggrieved when the highly fruitful Gilmour–Waters partnership – the one that gave the world albums like Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon – came to an end.
And while David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason still own the name, and the band still owns the publishing rights, the two have “absolutely no intention” of reviving Floyd.
This is partly due to the fact that Gilmour and Waters still seem to be on no-speaking terms.
As reported by The Telegraph, in February 2023, Polly Samson, Gilmour's wife, wrote on X that Waters is “anti-Semitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac” – to which Gilmour added, “Every word demonstrably true.”
From his end, Waters “refutes entirely” Samson’s “incendiary and wildly inaccurate portrayal”. In a new interview with The Telegraph, Samson explains her reasoning behind making that comment in the first place.
“The reason I did it was because Pink Floyd are quite a faceless band. Everywhere I went, there’s a chance that people thought I was married to the one who said things like that. And it wasn’t a great feeling.”
She continues, “If they knew you’re married to someone from Pink Floyd, half the time people were giving me quite strange looks and it was really uncomfortable and I just wanted to draw a line and make it clear that these were not views held by me or the person I was married to.”
So is there ever a world in which Gilmour reunites with Waters, for one last time? “Nothing,” he tells journalist James Hall. “There is no possible way that I would do that.”
And for those nostalgic for Pink Floyd's heyday, Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, the newly restored version of the band's groundbreaking Live At Pompeii film, was released earlier this year.
