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Roger Waters accuses David Gilmour of taking credit for Money’s tape loop effects, blocking release of Animals remixes: “He has no fucking idea what he’s talking about”

Waters accuses Gilmour of telling “whopping porky pies” when taking credit for Money’s tape loop effects, and blocking the release of Animals’ remixes for two years.

Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Images: Epsilon / Gus Stewart / Getty

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Roger Waters has posted an update on social media regarding the release of new stereo and 5.1 surround mixes of the Pink Floyd album Animals, accusing his ex-bandmate David Gilmour of blocking the release for two years due to its newly-written liner notes. In the same statement, Waters reproduced the apparently intended, but now removed, notes written by Mark Blake. He also accused David Gilmour of taking false credit for the famous sound effects tape loop that begins the Pink Floyd track Money.

Waters took to Facebook to share a video update alongside a lengthy written statement. He began by saying he is posting on his personal page as he is “banned by Dave Gilmour from posting on Pink Floyd’s Facebook page with its 30,000,000 subscribers.”

He then alleges that the new mixes of Animals, done by producer James Guthrie in both stereo and 5.1 surround, have “languished unreleased because of a dispute over some sleeve notes that Mark Blake has written for this new release. Gilmour has vetoed the release of the album unless these liner notes are removed.

“He does not dispute the veracity of the history described in Mark’s notes, but he wants that history to remain secret. This is a small part of an ongoing campaign by the Gilmour/[Polly Samson, Gilmour’s wife] camp to claim more credit for Dave on the work he did in Pink Floyd, 1967-1985, than is his due.”

Waters adds: “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.’”

He then states that he has agreed for the new mixes of Animals to be released without Blake’s liner notes. However, he then goes on to reproduce them as “fact-checked and agreed as factually correct by me, Nick and Gilmour.”

You can read the full liner notes in Waters’ statement here.

Waters then goes on to note that he is in the process of writing his memoirs, and relates his previous mention of “porky pies” to a passage from his upcoming book that he then posts. The passage quotes from a 1982 interview Gilmour did with David Fricke of Rolling Stone, on the subject of Money’s famous rhythmic sound effects loop. Waters says of the passage: “even back then DG was sowing the seeds of the false narrative.”

Gilmour is quoted by Waters as saying: “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 it sounded great so we’d use that.”

Waters then writes: “The reason everything [Gilmour] 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, [Gilmour] 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!”

Waters has made his dislike of Gilmour’s alleged monopoly on Pink Floyd’s online presence clear in the past. Last May he had expressed disappointment that his re-recorded version of Mother was not shared on “a website that calls itself The Pink Floyd Website.”

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