Hear the first snippet from Roger Waters’ re-imagining of The Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd’s 1973 opus, The Dark Side of the Moon, is one of the most commercially successful albums in rock history, having sold over 15 million copies (opens in new tab) in the United States alone.

Still, the band’s former bass guitar player, Roger Waters, recently decided to embark on a wholesale re-imagining of the album.

Waters, who served as Pink Floyd’s principal songwriter for the majority of his tenure in the band, decided to embark on the project without his surviving bandmates, drummer Nick Mason and electric guitar hero David Gilmour. 

To hear Waters tell it, Mason, Gilmour and late Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright have received far too much credit for Dark Side over the years. 

“I wrote The Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” he told The Telegraph (opens in new tab) in an interview last month. “Of course we were a band – there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project and I wrote it, so… blah.”

Earlier this week, Waters released a clip teasing his re-working of Us and Them, the first snippet of music from the new version of the album that’s been made public to date. You can hear it below. 

It’s worth noting that the “Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap” quote wasn’t even the most fiery from the Waters Telegraph interview, a crown that probably goes to: “Well, Nick never pretended. But Gilmour and Rick? They can’t write songs, they’ve nothing to say,” Waters said (opens in new tab). “They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” 

In a note accompanying the release of the new Us and Them snippet, however, Waters struck a much more conciliatory tone toward his former collaborators.

“It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable,” Waters wrote of the new recording on YouTube (opens in new tab), “But it is a way for the 79-year-old man to look back across the intervening fifty years into the eyes of the 29-year-old and say – to quote a poem of mine about my father – ‘We did our best, we kept his trust, our Dad would have been proud of us.’ 

“Also,” Waters continued, “it’s a way for me to honor a recording that Nick and Rick and Dave and I have every right to be very proud of.”

Waters’ 2023 version of The Dark Side of the Moon is provisionally set for release in May.

For updates on the project, visit Waters’ website (opens in new tab).

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Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player (opens in new tab). Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder (opens in new tab) and Unrecorded (opens in new tab). Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.