Session musicians were used to provide the keyboards normally played by Rick Wright But a tour was unthinkable. They might have to speak to each other.In a magnanimous gesture, and thinking that the Floyd were incapable of doing anything without him, Waters left unofficially in 1983 So did Gilmour Unofficially, of course After all, solo albums beckoned. Waters later commented: "Everything after Dark Side of the Moon was very difficult. Dave and I just didn't have much in common, philosophically, musically, politically, emotionally." The band were to complete only one more album where they could be described as working together, and that was backwards-looking: Wish You Were Here, a record openly dedicated to the missing-in-action Syd .By the time The Wall was erected and released in 1979, Waters had come to the unilateral decision that the rest of the band were coasting. He was first brought into the group as a safety net, then the band simply stopped picking Barrett up for gigs.
By that time Barrett was so deflected by drugs that he'd taken to either standing staring into space on stage instead of singing, or completely de-tuning his guitar to a scuzzy toneless throb and thrashing away.Pink Floyd became respectable counter-culturalists who sold records in respectable numbers and had little difficulty in hanging on to their credibility, their sense of honour and fair play, and their egos.That all changed in 1973 with the release of the mega-selling Dark Side of The Moon and its blockbuster single 'Money', when things began to unravel internally. A court case between Waters and Gilmour about who actually had the right to call themselves Pink Floyd came and went. Gilmour won: after all, it was Waters who'd thrown his toys out of the pram and unilaterally declared the band at an end. Gilmour had never officially left.The Floyd has not had a history of calm seas and prosperous voyages.
Of course male fans, of a certain age, maintain that Floyd's troubles really began the night Syd got left at home having taken a few hundred tabs too many, to be replaced by Dave Gilmour. After all, this is the band that managed to 'lose' their frontman, co-founder and creative focus Syd Barrett by early 1968, and find incredible fame and riches in the mid 1970s with Dark Side Of The Moon (and the subsequent Wish You Were Here), but who were barely on speaking terms after 1974, and who could hardly stand being on the same album together by the close of the decade, let alone in the same recording studio.The same band, who, by the mid-80s, saw its self-proclaimed artist-in-residence and spokesman Roger Waters walk out, expecting it to fall flat on its face in his absence, only for Waters to see Dave Gilmour's re-organised rump establish themselves as The Real Thing while he ranted at them stage right. Secondly, he has managed to persuade Pink Floyd to stop burying hatchets in each other and place them instead atop the sands of time - well, at least long enough for them to appear on stage on 2 July. Of the two, it must be said that pulling the members of Pink Floyd back into the same room for more than a nanosecond is probably the greater. If the rumours are true then Sir Bob actually performed two miracles over one weekend.
