Roger Waters has blasted writer Stuart Maconie for claiming he dissed his former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour.
In a piece for The New Statesman headlined “The war within Pink Floyd,” Maconie wrote about Waters’ decision to re-record The Dark Side Of The Moon. “Parts of this will involve him removing, as quoted in Spain’s El País newspaper, Gilmour’s “horrible guitar solos.’”
On Sunday, Waters posted on Facebook about the “crappy article,” calling it “the usual, s**t stirring, ill informed nonsense.” He said Maconie wrote, with an unearned condescending authority, about the process of making this new recording.”
Waters fumed: “Now, I don’t know who he thinks he’s quoting when he says Gilmour’s ‘horrible guitar solos’ but it sure as s**t ain’t me. I was there, I love Dave’s guitar solos on DSOTM, both of them, and on WYWH 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.”
On Monday, the line was removed from the online version of the article and a clarification was added. “An earlier version of this piece referred to an article in El País claiming Roger Waters is planning to remove Dave Gilmour’s guitar solos from a new version of The Dark Side of the Moon. Roger Waters has denied these claims…”
Maconie's source was a Feb. 9 piece by Diego A. Manrique in El País that reads: "After having milked The Wall, [Waters] will soon return to the celebrated Dark Side Of The Moon, which he has re-recorded with lines that promise to clarify his politics – and without Gilmour’s 'horrible guitar solos.'" Manrique did not provide attribution.
Maconie, who has not yet addressed Waters’ criticism on social media, tweeted on Feb. 15 that he wrote, "as evenhandedly as I could, about the Floyd feud.” Gilmour has not publicly addressed the article.
Earlier this month, Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson – reacting to Waters’ statements about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – called Waters “antisemitic to your rotten core” and “a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”
Gilmour retweeted Samson and wrote: “Every word demonstrably true.”
(Waters’ rep said the musician “refutes entirely” Samson’s “incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments.”)