There aren’t many musical ideas that wouldn’t work under the Pink Floyd umbrella. As much as the band may have been able to hone a specific style throughout their years together, David Gilmour and Roger Waters were responsible for taking the genre in every direction they could think of, eventually moving into the world of lavish rock operas by the time they were finished their initial run.
Joining the group after the loss of Syd Barrett, Gilmour’s main role was with the guitar. However, he was soon regarded as one of the group’s main vocalists. Though Gilmour has been applauded for his guitar prowess, one of the band’s songs gave him the most trouble singing.
Coming out of the early 1970s, though, it was a miracle that Gilmour and Waters had managed to survive the shakeups in the band. With Syd Barrett now in the rearview, the band spent the next few years tweaking their sound to what they thought it should be, making for outlandish improvisations in albums like Ummagumma.
While the music would sometimes become too experimental for its own good, it wasn’t until the song ‘Echoes’ that Waters thought that had a vision for what the future of the band was supposed to be. After cutting Dark Side of the Moon, though, the band had a singular sound that resonated with millions worldwide, spending years on the charts and turning the group into one of the most in-demand acts of the 1970s.
As the band started to toy with their now-signature sound, Waters was beginning to let his voice be heard more on record. On the album Wish You Were Here, the bassist offered a unique approach to the band’s usual sound, creating songs informed by the dangers of the music industry and the grief over losing Barrett.
For the next album, Animals, Waters would venture out even further, creating songs informed by the dangers in modern society, equating each facet of society to one of the animals in the George Orwell novel Animal Farm. While Gilmour was more than capable of stepping up to the challenge, he admitted that one of his contributions was hard to grasp.
Talking about going over the song ‘Dogs’, Gilmour would say that the track never rolled off the song well for him, recalling, “Once in a while, I would find something uncomfortable to sing. The first lot Roger wrote for ‘Dogs’ when it was called ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ was just too many words to sing. ‘Dogs’ had so many words I physically couldn’t get them in. We just cut out two-thirds of his words to make it possible rather than impossible.”
Although the compromises may have worked, Waters would become more outspoken about how he wanted the songs to go for their next album. Throughout the making of The Wall, the band would occasionally be treated like session musicians rather than band members, with Gilmour being one of the only people Waters would listen to for advice when working on songs like ‘Comfortably Numb’. While ‘Dogs’ is still a solid fixture of Pink Floyd’s classic period, it could also be considered one of the first times their musical partnership began to split apart.
