The Pink Floyd album David Gilmour thought was “too depressing” (2024)

Under Roger Waters’ leadership, Pink Floyd entered into a transitional phase of five sprawling, disparate albums of varying conceptual density and critical applause. This transition took flight with A Saucerful of Secrets, an album drummer Nick Mason described as a favourite due to its “‘goodbye to Syd’ element”, and landed triumphantly at The Dark Side of the Moon.

Waters once described his conceptual masterpiece of 1973 as “the end of the road” during an interview with Nick Sedgewick. He felt the band had “reached the point we’d all been aiming for ever since we were teenagers, and there was really nothing more to do in terms of rock ‘n’ roll”. Despite such feelings, the group persevered in its classic formation for three more studio albums throughout the late 1970s.

Of course, Wish You Were Here and Animals were well-received by the critics. The latter explored an Orwellian concept as a warm-up of sorts for Waters’ epic final conceptual work, The Wall, which was released in 1979. The audacious double album contained plenty of enjoyable material but proved to be as divisive for the band as it was among fans.

Central to the animosity endured during the creation of The Wall was friction between Waters and keyboardist Rick Wright. “Most relations within the band were fine,” Mason reflected in a recent interview with Far Out. “It really sort of shifted when Roger lost patience with Rick, who’d not had much to do for a very long period, so he’d wandered off.”

The situation worsened when the band began working towards a strict deadline. “Sony offered us a lot more money if we got the thing done by Christmas [1979], and I think that was the instigator of Roger getting really ratty with Rick,” Mason added. After releasing The Wall, Waters fired Wright from the band and subsequently re-hired him as a salaried session musician for the tour. Ironically, Wright was the only one of the five to profit from the tour due to its expensive production costs.

The animosity between Waters and Wright was just the first domino to fall in a chain of disputes that snowballed throughout the 1980s. Relations between Waters and Gilmour also began to deteriorate during the recording of The Wall, sending Waters into a dark and disillusioned haze. This sense of despair permeated the record itself.

When Waters first exhibited his demo tracks to producer Bob Ezrin and the band, he was met with tepid enthusiasm. “He gave us all a cassette of the whole thing, and I couldn’t listen to it. It was too depressing and too boring in lots of places,” Gilmour reflected in a past interview with Charlie Kendall. “But I liked the basic idea. We eventually agreed to do it, but we had to chuck out a lot of stuff, rewrite a lot of things and put a lot of new bits in, throw a lot of old bits out.”

Gilmour was happy to humour Waters’ downbeat idea as long as he could attain a degree of control over the music. As the project wore on, Gilmour and Ezrin managed to shoehorn some of their ideas into the mix in a bid to shape the narrative and offer some light to the shade. Nevertheless, “Roger was under pressure,” Gilmour reflected, and frequently found himself saying, “That wasn’t good enough.” So, Gilmour’s fears mounted that The Wall would never have reached the level of levity needed to provide the yin and yang for which the band is known.

Few will disagree with Gilmour’s position that The Wall was “depressing”, but “too depressing” is a peculiar claim. Frankly, Waters’ work on The Wall was no jarring change of pace. As an acerbic lunge at the status quo, fraught with themes of emotional trauma, war and mortality, it runs parallel to prior conceptual works like The Dark Side of the Moon, with its bleak ruminations on time, capitalism and death, and Animals with its allusion to George Orwell’s capitalist critique, Animal Farm. In short, Pink Floyd was never a band to bother about being morose previously. Begging the question, ‘Why now?’ as opposed to ‘Too far?’.

Although The Wall wasn’t a dramatic change in pace with regard to emotional tone, also noting the mournful reflection on Syd Barrett in Wish You Were Here, the songs contained maudlin nuances. Notably, The Wall was Waters’ most personal concept to date, meaning tracks like ‘Nobody Home’ and ‘Comfortably Numb’ resonated on a more sobering level than, for instance, describing death as ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’. So, the themes may have been visited before, but now there was a stark emotional candour to them.

Likewise, there is a difference between the directness of ‘Mother’ and the comparatively oblique ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. There is an emotional tenderness to these tracks that sounds like a loss of hope playing out in the studio as opposed to artful musings on emotional subjects found on previous albums.

So, is The Wall Pink Floyd’s most depressing album? The answer to this question hangs very much in the balance with listener subjectivity applying pressure either way. One could argue that Wish You Were Here is more of a tear-jerker. However, given that ‘The Final Cut’, one of the band’s most depressing songs due to its suicide connotations, was among Waters’ rejected demos for The Wall, Gilmour may have had a point regarding the initial plan being too bleak to bear. Ultimately, it comes down to whether you find Waters’ personal ruminations sadder than a sonic reproduction of existential crises in the face of capitalist greed.

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