Hey! Teacher! You should probably mediate a thoughtful and open dialogue between these two. Roger Waters, co-founder and bassist of OG progressive-rock virtuosos Pink Floyd, revealed in a lengthy social-media video that fellow member David Gilmour is gatekeeping the band’s website — effectively banning him and drummer Nick Mason from having any sort of access, despite multiple pleas of decency to change his mind. “About a year ago, I convened a sort of Camp David for the surviving members of Pink Floyd at a hotel at the airport in London, where I proposed all kinds of measures to get past this awful impasse that we have and predicament that we find ourselves in,” Waters explained. “I suggested that because whoever the 30 million of you are who subscribe to the web page, that you do that because of the body of work that the five of us created. It bore no fruit, I’m sorry to say … it seems to me that it would be fair and correct if we should have equal access to you all and share our projects.”
Waters insists that Gilmour gave no fulfilling explanation for the ban, although it’s not unreasonable to suggest that there’s still bad blood between the duo from Waters’s infamous lawsuit from the 1980s: He sued his bandmates for continuing to tour under the Pink Floyd name after he departed. Waters, who lost the case, later admitted that he regretted his actions. But back to the website. “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, that I’m irrelevant and I should just keep my mouth shut,” Waters said, noting that wholesome musical videos of Gilmour’s wife and family are given equal footing to The Wall vinyls. “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.” Or rather, “that is the elephant in the room.”