Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and David Gilmour in feud over website
Roger Waters has reignited his feud with former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour in a dispute over the band’s official website.
Waters – who co-founded Pink Floyd in 1965, only to leave 20 years later and sue the rest of the band for continuing to use the name without him – claims he has been “banned” by Gilmour from all Pink Floyd social media channels.
Earlier this week, Waters, 76, shared a black-and-white video of him and his band playing an isolation version of classic Pink Floyd track Mother with his 360,000 followers.
Now Waters has said in a video on Twitter: "One and half million of you have viewed our new version of Mother, which is lovely – it really warms my heart.
“But it does bring up the question: why is this video not available on a website that calls itself The Pink Floyd website?...
"Well, the answer to that is because nothing from me is on the website – I am banned by David Gilmour from the website."
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Waters argues that the 30 million subscribers to the band's official webpage should have equal access to the work of all the surviving members.
He said: “David thinks he owns it. I think he thinks that because I left the band in 1985, that he owns Pink Floyd, that he is Pink Floyd and I'm irrelevant and I should just keep my mouth shut."
He also complained that Gilmour's wife, writer Polly Samson, has been using the band's social media channels to promote her livestreams.
Waters said people have asked him: "'Why do we have to sit and watch Polly Samson, year after year, month after month, day after day? and the Von Trapps reading us excerpts from their novels to get us to go to sleep at night?”
The Pink Floyd Twitter channel has been retweeting messages from David Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson promoting their family lockdown livestreams.
Waters went on: "We're not allowed to even mention [my projects] on the official Pink Floyd website. This is wrong. We should rise up… or, just change the name of the band to Spinal Tap and then everything will be hunky dory."
This is a reference to the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, featuring a fictional British heavy metal band.
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Gilmour, 74, joined Pink Floyd in 1967, shortly before the departure of founding member Syd Barrett in 1968.
Waters left the prog rock band in 1985 and launched a legal battle against his former bandmates for continuing to perform under the name. He lost his claim and reached an out-of-court agreement in 1987.
Waters, Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason last reunited to perform all together as Pink Floyd in 2005 at Bob Geldof's Live 8 benefit concert.
Syd Barrett died in 2006, and Wright died two years later.
Gilmour has not yet responded publicly to Waters’ claims.