Roger Waters slams David Gilmour for "banning" him from Pink Floyd website

Former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters has hit out at David Gilmour for “banning” him from the group’s website and social media accounts.

In a video message posted on social media, Waters also said the group should “just change the name of the band to Spinal Tap, and then everything will be hunky dory”, before adding: “All right, I’m not gonna get all weird and sarcastic, although as you know, that is a direction in which I am known to sometimes lean temperamentally.”

Waters posted the video on social media last night (May 18), and initially used the message to thank fans for their reaction to a new version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Mother’, which he recently recorded during lockdown.

He then began his attack on Gilmour, and said the performance “does bring up the question of why is this video not available on a website that calls itself the Pink Floyd website?”

He said: “The answer to that is because nothing from me is on the website. I am banned by David Gilmour from the website. About a year ago, I convened a sort of Camp David for the surviving members of Pink Floyd at a hotel at the airport in London, where I proposed all kinds of measures to get past this awful impasse that we have and predicament that we find ourselves in. It bore no fruit, I’m sorry to say.”

Waters had previously hinted at tensions in a recent Rolling Stone interview, claiming a reunion would be “fucking awful” due to the unsuccessful meeting between the group.

He went on: “I suggested that because whoever the 30 million of you are who subscribe to the web page, that you do that because of the body of work that the five of us created. That’s Syd (Barrett), me, Rick (Wright), Nick and David, over a number of years. And in consequence, it seems to me that it would be fair and correct if we should have equal access to you all and share our projects.”

Aiming his criticism at Gilmour, Waters said: “David thinks he owns it. I think he thinks that because I left the band in 1985, that he owns Pink Floyd, that he is Pink Floyd, that I’m irrelevant and I should just keep my mouth shut. We’re all welcome to our opinions.

“But there have been rumblings and grumblings in the ranks I’m told by friends of mine who follow these things, and some of the questions being asked are: ‘Why do we have to sit and watch Polly Samson (Gilmour’s wife) for year after year, month after month, day after day, and the von Trapps reading us excerpts from their novels to get us to go to sleep at night?’ And that’s a very good question.

“And yet we don’t get to hear about anything that Roger’s doing or about ‘This is Not a Drill’ [Waters’ postponed tour], or when he makes a piece of work, it’s not shown, and so on and so forth. And none of his work is publicised. The fact that his and Sean Evans’ film ‘Us and Them,’ which has just gone out digitally for streaming everywhere, is not mentioned.”







“This is wrong. We should rise up. Or, just change the name of the band to Spinal Tap, and then everything will be hunky dory.”

Concluding his message, he said: “Stay safe, all of you. We live in dire, dire, desperate times and we need to find ways to communicate with one another so that we can act cooperatively to stop the man destroying this fragile planet that we all come home. That is the elephant in the room.”

Waters famously left Pink Floyd in the ’80s and sued the remaining three members for continuing to use the name without him. He lost the case. Waters, Gilmour and Nick Mason last reunited as Pink Floyd to play Bob Geldof’s Live 8 benefit concert in 2005.

Meanwhile, Waters recently decried Joe Biden as a “fucking slimeball” and said he was unlikely to beat Donald Trump.

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