The Magic and Majesty of Pink Floyd

Extraída da Revista Rolling Stone:

There was no reason these men should ever stand together again. Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright — the four musicians who carried Pink Floyd forward after Syd Barrett fell from reason in 1968—had not appeared on a stage together since June 1981, and it hardly seemed possible they ever would again. Waters and Gilmour had famously shown contempt for each other for a quarter-century — each felt the other had tried to dishonor his life's work and hinder his future. After Waters started a solo career in 1984, he went on to disparage his former bandmates. Guitarist and singer Gilmour, he said, "doesn't have any ideas," and drummer Mason "can't play" (Waters had long before thrown keyboardist Wright out of the band). Gilmour gave as good as he got. When he took his version of the band on tour, he appropriated Waters' most famous prop, a gigantic pig balloon, and attached testicles to it, which some read as a commentary on how he viewed the band's former bassist. ("So they put balls on my pig," Waters said. "Fuck them.")

The long squabble resulted in the deepest, ugliest split in rock & roll's history, and almost certainly the most irreparable. On that warm London night in early July 2005 when the four men finally gathered again as Pink Floyd in London's Hyde Park at the historic Live 8 concert, it's unlikely that all the past anger and hurt was easily forgotten or healed, but that's partly what made the moment so moving. They played and sang despite their bitterness, in part because the evening's cause — to try to persuade the world's richest countries to forgive the debts of the poorest — was in keeping with belief systems they genuinely shared.

But there was another reason for assembling that night that ran deeper in their history. They had a debt to pay that could never be paid, but it had to be admitted. Syd Barrett, a man who had been mysterious and lonely for decades, had been the heart of Pink Floyd in its earliest days — he wrote their songs, gave them their style, made them a force in the British music scene — but in 1968, Waters, Mason and Wright threw him out of the band after he slipped into mental disintegration. None of them had seen him since a surprise encounter in 1975 that left them stunned and in tears, but over the years he continued to define Pink Floyd, as they evolved the style he had left them, and as they began to think and write about the darkness that had eclipsed him. They owed Barrett something — in a way, everything — and if they failed to honor him that night at Live 8, before the world, they could never meaningfully attempt it again. That's because they knew Pink Floyd would not exist past this night, and perhaps they sensed that in the much-too-near future, neither would Barrett, the man who gave the band its name and original purpose.

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