Pink Floyd didn’t work together in the studio in a traditional manner, and songs were often at the stage of completion before they officially began to tackle them as a four-piece. As artists, Roger Waters and David Gilmour complemented one another greatly as they approached music in contrasting ways, adding variation to the Pink Floyd sound.
Therefore, as a result, there were songs in their canon that could have only originated from the mind of Waters and vice versa with Gilmour’s contributions, who once conceded he could not create a song like ‘Money’. The track, exploring the opulent lifestyle, is one of the band’s signature efforts and appeared on The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1973.
Gilmour has repeatedly played down his contribution to the track, admitting he only added a few finishing touches to allow Waters to fulfil his creative vision. Although Gilmour provided the lead vocals for the song, he once named it the song that reminds him of his former bandmate, who is now famously a foe.
During an interview with Uncut in 2015, Gilmour said: “‘Money’. I’m not talking about any connection to the lyric. Just the quirky 7/8 time reminds me of Roger. It’s not a song I would have written. It points itself at Roger, rather.”
Additionally, he told Guitar World in 1993 of ‘Money’: “It’s Roger’s riff. Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for ‘Money’ more or less completed. And we just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.”
However, recently, Gilmour’s comments about ‘Money’ caused Waters to criticise him and claim he unjustly took credit for the tape loop in the track, which contains sounds relating to the concept of cash.
In 2021, Waters took to social media to share his frustration at being locked out from the official Pink Floyd Facebook account and used comments allegedly made by Gilmour in 1982 to Rolling Stone about ‘Money’ as proof he was deceitful. In the interview, Gilmour explained how Pink Floyd managed to capture the sound, which Waters took as him taking credit for the inventive manoeuvre.
He wrote: “The reason everything [Gilmour] is saying here to David Fricke sounds like gobbledygook is because it is fucking gobbledygook. He has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. Why? Because unless he was hiding under the fucking chair, [Gilmour] wasn’t there when I made that SFX tape loop for Money in the studio I shared with my wife Judy at the bottom of our garden at 187 New North Road, Islington, next door to the North Pole Pub where I used to play darts!”
Waters said the historical comments from the 1982 interview prove that “even back then DG was sowing the seeds of the false narrative”.
Since then, the animosity between the pair has only grown, and it now appears infeasible they’ll ever get back on the same page. Yet, ‘Money’ still reminds Gilmour of happier times and the magic they created together.
