You'd have to be crazy to think a Pink Floyd reunion was possible. David Gilmour has made it clear he has no interest in reuniting with bass guitarist Roger Waters, and has said the death of founding keyboardist Rick Wright makes the question moot.
That doesn't stop people from asking, though. The prog icons last shared a stage at Live 8 in 2005. It was a show where Gilmour saw Waters, who left the band in 1985 and promptly engaged in legal battles against the group, as merely a “guest” rather than a band member outright.
If that suggests things are frosty between Gilmour and Waters, it's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Sitting down with U.K. newspaper The Telegraph for a rare joint interview with his wife and longtime collaborator/lyricist Polly Samson, Gilmour was asked what could possibly thaw relations between the former bandmates and allow them to perform together once again.
“Nothing,” was his retort. “There is no possible way that I would do that.”
It would be particularly difficult given that Samson has herself been a vocal critic of Waters.
In February 2023, she attacked him in a merciless tweet which, among other choice words, labelled him as “anti-Semitic” to the “rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac.”
Gilmour backed up his wife adding, “Every word demonstrably true.”
Waters, in turn, refuted Samson's “incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments,” which were prompted in light of an interview where he seemed to praise the Russian president's leadership and criticized then U.S. president Joe Biden.
Samson said she did it because she thought some readers were confusing Waters and Gilmour.
“The reason I did it was because Pink Floyd are quite a faceless band,” she explains to The Telegraph. “Everywhere I went, there was a chance that people thought I was married to the one who said things like that. And it wasn’t a great feeling.
“If they knew you’re married to someone from Pink Floyd, half the time people were giving me quite strange looks, and it was really uncomfortable,” she continues. “I just wanted to draw a line and make it clear that these were not views held by me or the person I was married to.”
Alongside Waters, Gilmour helped transform the band's fortunes following the departure of founding guitarist Syd Barrett. Gilmour's tenure saw him celebrated as one of rock's greatest electric guitar players, bringing him immense fame and acclaim, while it lifted the group to prominence.
Although he gives Waters credit for his contributions to the band's monumental success — particularly for his songwriting and story-telling talents on albums like Animals and The Wall — he has no wish to carry on with the group.
“I’m at peace with all of these things,” Gilmour told Guitar Player last year. “But I absolutely don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go and play stadiums. I’m free to do exactly what I want to do and how I want to do it.”
He's certainly done that. He believes his latest solo album, Luck and Strange, is his finest work in 50 years, and has already laid out a timeline for its follow-up as he looks to end his run of long gaps between solo LPs.
Elsewhere, he's theorized why vintage guitars outperform their modern counterparts — even though he admits he couldn't pick out his legendary Black Strat in a blindfold test — and named his favorite prog guitarist.
