Roger Waters announces new 'Animals' mixes & memoir; still feuding with David Gilmour

Roger Waters shared a new update via YouTube and his website where he announced that new mixes of Pink Floyd‘s Animals are on the way, mixed by James Guthrie in both stereo and 5.1 surround. Roger says that the mixes were finished two years and have been “sitting in a cupboard” because “a chap named Mark Blake wrote some sleeve notes for it which I then helped him correct a little bit.” Roger said they then got passed around to the other members of the band and that when it got to David Gilmour, he “thought they were good and they were true but they should not be included in the sleeve notes because he wanted Pink Floyd to remain enigmatic.”

Roger goes on to theorize that Gilmour may have had other motives for their exclusion: “This is a small part of an ongoing campaign by the Gilmour/Samson camp to claim more credit for Dave on the work he did in Pink Floyd, 1967-1985, than is his due. Yes he was, and is, a jolly good guitarist and singer. But, he has for the last 35 years told a lot of whopping porky pies about who did what in Pink Floyd when I was still in charge. There’s a lot of ‘we did this’ and ‘we did that,’ and ‘I did this’ and ‘I did that.'”

Roger, who starts his new update noting “I am banned by Dave Gilmour from posting on Pink Floyd’s Facebook page with its 30,000,000 subscribers,” has agreed to allow the album to be released without the liner notes, but he’s now published them on his website which you can read now.

The other bit of news in this update is that Waters is working on his memoirs. He’s shared just a little bit of them which he gives as an example of Gilmour’s “Porky pies”:

“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!

Roger says “THE FULL STORY OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IS IN MY MEMOIRS,” so stay tuned for that.

You can read Roger’s full missive, including Mark Blake’s Animals sleeve notes, here, and watch Roger’s video update below.

Roger Waters rescheduled his North American tour for 2022.