‘Always wished they would bury the hatchet’: Friction sparked great work, before tearing Pink Floyd apart

Share this:

Through Bob Ezrin uses words like “magical,” “illuminating” and “life altering” to describe his three-album run as producer with Pink Floyd, working with Roger Waters on The Wall was best described as “challenging.”

Not that it’s such a bad thing.

The sessions for that 1979 opus, which found Waters clashing with David Gilmour — and ultimately sacking Rick Wright — were as tempestuous as they were ultimately successful in creating a classic that Waters still tours with today.

“It was tough,” Ezrin tells 95.5 KLOS in the below video. “There was a lot of conflict. But dynamic tension makes for much better stuff. There was a lot of in the making of The Wall, but it just kept making things better, and better, and better.”

After one more album with Waters, 1983’s The Final Cut, Pink Floyd reemerged for a pair of Gilmour-led projects in 1987’s Momentary Lapse of Reason and 1994’s Division Bell, with Ezrin again co-producing.

The difference, he says, was two fold.

“Roger’s a force of nature,” Ezrin says, “and a man to be reckoned with. He takes up a lot of energy, and brings an awful lot to the room. Not having him there, on the one hand, it made things slightly less fraught and less tense, but on the other hand we missed his genius — and his spark, and watching those sparks fly between him and David and me. Somewhere in my heart of hearts, I always wished they would bury the hatchet and get back together, and that we could do stuff together.”

The 2008 death of Wright, after a lone reunion three years earlier as part of the Live8 concerts, seems to have put any idea of a Pink Floyd reformation to rest, Ezrin says: “The possibility of that disappeared.”

[amazon_enhanced asin=”B005NNV4TU” container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B0006ZE7G2″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B004ZNACA6″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B005NPCBI6″ container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /] [amazon_enhanced asin=”B00004SVID” container=”” container_class=”” price=”All” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /]

Something Else!