To say that he is a polarising figure is an understatement: quite where he fits into the post-truth culture spectrum is anyone’s guess. The conventional take is that Waters has always been a troubled individual: the death of his father, a former conscientious objector and Communist Party activist, during the Battle of Anzio in 1944 when young Roger was just five months old has loomed large in his work, one way of another.
But of the various world issues Waters has been vocal about, his views on Israel have generated the most controversy, to the extent that his performances of songs from The Wall, in which he dresses in quasi-Nazi uniforms have lead to his solo shows been banned, with accusations of an anti-semitic agenda continuing. All of which, of course, Waters has denied.
Even this week, on the eve of his reinterpretation of The Dark Side Of The Moon being released, the topic was thrust back into the spotlight when David Gilmour seemingly reignited his feud with Waters by retweeting a post about a documentary produced by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, in which musicians and producers who’ve worked with Waters recall their experience of him making anti-Semitic remarks. Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, has played her own part in the froideur, earlier this year branding Waters “antisemitic to [his] rotten core”, “a Putin apologist” and “a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac”. Which told him.
Waters has inevitably dismissed the film as a “flimsy, unapologetic piece of propaganda”, but the flare-up of antisemitic accusation provides a profoundly uneasy context for Dark Side Of The Moon Redux to be released. Because it is, in fact, genuinely intriguing.
Remakes of anything are rarely any good. Name a film reboot or “updated” TV show that doesn’t suffer the foreshadow of the original work. Albums are no different, whether the stream of ‘unplugged’ reinventions in the 1990s or the occasional novelty reggae reworking of a Beatles record. Covers albums by the original artist are inevitably regarded as “lazy”, no matter how inventive the treatment, or feted the artist (Bowie’s Pin Ups, anyone?).
The original Dark Side was and remains seminal, even if Waters himself once dismissed its lyrics as adolescent “lower sixth” drivel. Released 50 years ago, and providing a platform for Waters, largely, to expand upon on life, death, wealth, fame and his own complex psychology, it became totemic of 1970s progressive rock and should, today, still be regarded as one of the most important albums of the entire rock era.
So why remake it, 50 years later? Why jeopardise the original’s justifiable legacy in what might seem a petulant attempt to reclaim it as Waters’ own?
Waters will (and does) argue that Dark Side was his to begin with, and he can do whatever the hell he likes with it. “I wrote The Dark Side Of The Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” he told The Telegraph recently. “Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project, and I wrote it.” In the same interview he also accused his former bandmates of being unable to write songs: “They’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” Ouch.
The origins of the Redux project date back to the pandemic, when Waters and his touring band got together virtually from wherever they were locked down to record stripped down versions of songs like The Wall’s Mother, Comfortably Numb and Vera. “When we recorded [the Lockdown Sessions], the 50th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon was looming on the horizon,” Waters explains on his website. “It occurred to me that The Dark Side Of The Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album.”
He stresses that the new version is not “a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable”, but serves as an opportunity for the now 80-year-old to look back 50 years into the eyes of himself on the cusp of 30. “And also it is a way for me to honour a recording that Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of,” a statement in marked contrast to his comments to The Telegraph. A penny, then for Gilmour’s thoughts, given that the remake is sparse and notably devoid of either his signature guitar solos, or his sweet, higher register vocals which provided a contrast to the darker, deeper sourness of Waters somewhat manic singing.
Much of that sparsity comes from a significantly downscaled group of musicians around Waters than those who participated in the Lockdown Sessions. For the most part, Waters has worked with producer Gus Seyffert and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson as the album’s musical core, with Syrian singer Azniv Korkejian providing a very different approach to Clare Torry’s soaring vocals on the original Dark Side’s The Great Gig In The Sky.
In his reimagining, Waters turns narrator, speaking in a near-whisper instead of singing entirely new passages of words that provide the most telling reflections of his octogenarian perspective. As such, the songs acquire a poignancy, especially on the themes like mortality.
Elsewhere there is a more genteel pace to songs, most notably the original’s hit single Money, which turns into a blues shuffle, Waters’ cynical intonation possessing a Leonard Cohen-like timbre. Some still rankle at multi-millionaires like Waters and Gilmour (who has performed the song on his solo tours) singing about wealth, but it is still a unique piece of music that actually works well with Waters’ new treatment.
Equally so with Us & Them, always my highlight of Dark Side, which takes on an even more reflective tone than the original, which ruminated in 1973 on the futility of war. Conflict, or at least highlighting its human waste, has always been one Waters’ passions, but in taking on the lead vocals (from Gilmour) on the reimagined version, Waters contemporizes its themes. Just don’t ask him about what he’s trying to say about the war in Ukraine.
That, though, does raise the question as to why Waters has remade Dark Side, beyond simply saying ‘up yours’ to his former bandmates. The 1973 release’s 50th anniversary earlier this year was marked by the inescapable celebratory box set (coming in a long line of reissues), so at least Waters has given Dark Side’s ten songs fresh thinking. In some sense, this new vision is overlaid on the original’s themes about the passing of time and human weakness with a current world view (even if Waters’ world view is somewhat jaundiced).
The Redux version, then, works as a curiosity. There is even a moment of levity on the new version of Brain Damage, in which Waters himself is heard asking “Why don’t we re-record Dark Side Of The Moon?” before responding with “He’s gone mad” (the original song, of course, was part inspired by Syd Barrett’s pychosis, opening with the spoken words of Floyd roadie Chris Adamson saying: “I’ve been mad for fucking years. Absolutely years. I’ve been over the edge for yonks, been working with bands so long.”).
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| Picture: Kate Izor |
Inexorably, Redux picks these batons up again, perhaps demonstrating the political maxim that anything worth saying is worth repeating. You just wish that sometimes Waters would choose his words more carefully. At 80, that’s unlikely.
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