A little ban from Pink Floyd’s website isn’t stopping Roger Waters from getting the word out about his upcoming projects, which include a slate of memoirs, plural, he’s been writing since the coronavirus pandemic began last year. Posting a video and a blog post to his social-media pages, Waters revealed that he’s “in the middle” of the writing process, and teased a no-holds-barred vantage point from his time working with Pink Floyd and future enemy David Gilmour. And, we can only hope, extensive insights about his hair-care routine. “I had a lot of time on my hands over the last year, and I thought, Bugger me, if I don’t do it now, I’ll probably never do it, so I decided to do it,” he explained about his decision to write. “For anyone with a faint heart, I suggest you sit down, but anyone who likes a good laugh, sit back and fucking howl! I’m going to sit back and howl along with you.” He also teased a short excerpt from his memoirs, seemingly to spite Gilmour:
As chance would have it I was doing a bit of delving in a book of press clippings and came across an interview David Fricke of Rolling Stone Magazine did with DG in a hotel room in NY in 1982, DG’s talking about the Cash register tape for the defining 7/8 rhythm on Money. The interview was published in Musician Magazine, so even back then DG was sowing the seeds of the false narrative. I quote this bit of the article verbatim:
David Fricke: “You recorded the sounds for ‘Money’ on a loop of tape.” Gilmour explains: ”You’re trying to get the impact from the cash register, ‘the snap, crack, crsssh,” You’d mark that one and then measure how long you wanted that beat to go, and that’s the piece you’d use. And you’d chop it together. It was trial and error. You just chop the tapes together, and if it sounds good, you use it. If it doesn’t, you take one section out and put a different one in. Sometimes we’d put one in and it’d be backwards, because the diagonal cut on the tape, if you turn it around is exactly the same. We’d stick that in and instead it would go ‘chung, dum, whoosh.’ And sound great so we’d use that.”
Well! The reason everything DG 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, DG 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!
We think it needs more gobbledygook.
