Inter-Band Conflict

It most certainly changed the sound.  Compare The Wall's predecessor, Animals, to their next one, The Final Cut.  On Animals we can hear a lot of input from both Gilmour and Wright even thought Waters is the principle songwriter, whereas on The Final Cut Wright is barely a presence.  In fact, he was not considered a full member of the band any longer because he bailed out on the recordings of The Wall.  Note how his presence is diminished in that album.  It was the disagreements between Wright and Waters that caused Wright to leave.  When the band whittled down to just Gilmour and Mason, there is yet another change in the sound.  A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounds little like its predecessors.  Recall how people often compare it to a Gilmour solo album as they compare The Final Cut to a solo Waters album.  And if you are just comparing the sound of The Wall to earlier PF albums, there is still a difference in sound.  The songs are more concise, there is more emphasis on sound effects, and there is a further emphasis on lyrics rather than instrumentation.

Argonaught wrote: ^ with these in mind, do you all think that the Pink Floyd sound was more or less restored to its past glory on TER?

Edited by aglasshouse - December 26 2014 at 21:03

Is the correct term for this intra-band conflict?

Having band members at each others' throats can't really be good for creating music, I think. Any kind of team effort, especially one as complicated as making music, should have everyone at least tolerating at each other; otherwise, not everyone's getting at least a bit of what they want. 

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: Floyd were never the same after Animals IMHO

The grammar geek in me (my college degree is in Communications) assures you that there is a difference.  Inter is a prefix meaning "between two things".  A conflict between bands would be interband conflict.  A conflict between the memberis of one band would be intraband conflict.

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: Floyd were never the same after Animals IMHO

Things began to change during "The Wall" not before or after, although by the time you hear Roger's anger at the Anaheim Stadium shows, you get the feeling that they are a bit tired of the whole stadium thing, and that they did not want to do any more of those huge shows ... which they didn't anymore, until David did a few shows way later.

All in all, after having been together for so many years, this is not a surprise, but if there was one thing that did not go right, it was that Roger did not have the patience to wait for Richard to come up with a new sound bit or detail for another of his songs. There were too many of them, and it was like most of them only needed a filler, which Richard was never very good at, anyway!

TER is very nice, but not really as nice as the previous stuff. If you ever try to separate the keyboards from a whole bunch of PF's material, you will find the earlier material way more interesting and pretty than all the stuff that David put together. Not to mention that this new album became a copy of the famous PF pieces, with the guitar solo exactly in the same spot and the song winding down when the guitar is done! Very boring, when you consider how original this band was for very long, which allowed us to call them "progressive", but in the end, it was MOS ... or as they say in radio ... more of the same.

You can not get a sense of what Richard's work is on this album, because these have been augmented and made to look richer than they are. But if you ever hear 10 different versions of Echoes, or Set the Controls for the heart of the Sun, or Atom Heart Mother, you might get a much better idea of the abilities and capabilities that Richard has.

One last detail ... in the "Live in Pompeii" film, it is Roger that we see fooling around with the electronics, and how much of it appeared to have ended up in the album DSOTM, which is nice, but kinda strange ... so even then Richard did not have an input? I think all you have to hear is "Welcome to the Machine" to know that Richard could do the electronics just as hard and intense as Roger helped define for DSOTM.

In another example, Robin Williamson has said that the "differences" between him and Mike Heron were quite interesting and very productive for quite some time. And they both came from very different backgrounds. He thought it helped the process work.

I don't think it is all about the "conflict" as much as it is about the willingness of each member to work together. The main issue, with PF, was that after "The Wall", no one wanted to work with Roger, when he was the boss and already knew everything he wanted! But I do not think that many of us will sit here and trash his solo albums ... except "Ca Ira" which needs to be redone with an electric guitar and rock band and tell all those classicos to take a flying leap off the pier into the dirt in the Channel!

Tension can be great for music. But it can also destroy it. It is all relative to each individual involved.

There's a big difference between having artists working together with different views of what they want, but respecting each other, or having situations where band members can't stand each other or behave in an autocratic manner.

BTW I still don't understand how could Gilmour and Mason be so submissive to Waters for The Final Cut and follow him in the dismissing of Wright out of PF. As much as I respect them as musicians, they disappointed me a lot with that, I would be ashamed if I was them. Alright they recovered him for the post-Waters PF and now they have tried to amend it even more with the release of TER but still it's a nasty episode in their career (unless they shared Waters dislike of Wright, which I'm not aware of).