Pink Floyd's 1973 opus, The Dark Side of the Moon, is one of the most commercially successful albums in rock history, having sold over 15 million copies in the United States alone.
Still, the band's former bass guitar player, Roger Waters, recently decided to embark on a wholesale re-imagining of the album.
Waters, who served as Pink Floyd's principal songwriter for the majority of his tenure in the band, decided to embark on the project without his surviving bandmates, drummer Nick Mason and electric guitar hero David Gilmour.
To hear Waters tell it, Mason, Gilmour and late Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright have received far too much credit for Dark Side over the years.
“I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap," he told The Telegraph in an interview last month. "Of course we were a band – there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it, so... blah.”
Earlier this week, Waters released a clip teasing his re-working of Us and Them, the first snippet of music from the new version of the album that's been made public to date. You can hear it below.
It's worth noting that the "Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap" quote wasn't even the most fiery from the Waters Telegraph interview, a crown that probably goes to: “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say," Waters said. "They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.”
In a note accompanying the release of the new Us and Them snippet, however, Waters struck a much more conciliatory tone toward his former collaborators.
"It's not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable," Waters wrote of the new recording on YouTube, "But it is a way for the 79-year-old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the 29-year-old and say – to quote a poem of mine about my father – 'We did our best, we kept his trust, our Dad would have been proud of us.'
"Also," Waters continued, "it's a way for me to honor a recording that Nick and Rick and Dave and I have every right to be very proud of."
Waters' 2023 version of The Dark Side of the Moon is provisionally set for release in May.
For updates on the project, visit Waters' website.
