Roger Waters says he was misquoted calling David Gilmour’s solos “horrible”

Roger Waters has issued a statement in which he says he was misquoted by a previously published article that claimed he called David Gilmour’s guitar solos “horrible”.

In a lengthy post on Twitter, Waters singled out an article published by The New Statesman titled The War within Pink Floyd, and took aim at the fact it quoted him as labeling Gilmour’s guitar solos in The Dark Side of the Moon as “horrible”.

However, The New Statesman’s article attributed the quote to a Spanish publication called El País – which in turn did not cite a source at the time – with the latter suggesting the solos were removed by Waters’ from his upcoming re-recorded version of The Dark Side of the Moon as they were “horrible”.

In response, Water has defended Gilmour’s guitar playing, saying his solos on that album along with a handful of other Pink Floyd records “constitute a collection of some of the very best guitar solos in the history of rock and roll”.

“There is, in the article, something upon which I need to set the record straight,” he wrote. “I quote, ‘Part of this will involve him removing, as quoted in Spain’s El País newspaper, Gilmour’s “horrible guitar solos.”’

“Now, I don’t know who he thinks he’s quoting when he says Gilmour’s ‘horrible guitar solos’ but it sure as shit ain’t me,” Waters went on. “I was there, I love Dave’s guitar solos on DSOTM, both of them, and on [Wish You Were Here] and on Animals and on The Wall and on The Final Cut.

“In my, albeit biased view, Dave’s solos on those albums, constitute a collection of some of the very best guitar solos in the history of rock and roll.”

Waters’s defence of Gilmour’s guitar solos comes after the pair – along with Gilmour’s wife, novelist Polly Samson – engaged in a war of words, with Samson recently labeling the bassist a Putin apologist and “anti-semitic to your rotten core”. Gilmour backed up Samson by saying every word of her post was “demonstrably true”.

After the tweets, Waters disparaged the contributions of Gilmour and late keyboardist Richard Wright in an interview with The Telegraph, claiming, “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.”

In that same interview, Waters announced he would be releasing a rerecorded version of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, reportedly cutting his former bandmates out of the record without their knowledge.

Waters has apparently augmented the album’s instrumentals with spoken word, putting a “dreadful prose poem” that was written after a nightmare over On the Run. Waters also went on to say he reworked the album because no-one understood its meaning.

“I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon,” he said. “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!”

The recording is reportedly set to release in May.