David Gilmour Says Roger Waters Supports ‘Genocidal and Autocratic Dictators’

David Gilmour has shot down the notion that he’d ever perform with former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters again, citing the singers’ notoriously polarizing political views.

“Absolutely not. I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators like Putin and Maduro,” Waters said in an interview with The Guardian on Thursday. “Nothing would make me share a stage with someone who thinks such treatment of women and the LGBT community is OK. On the other hand, I’d love to be back on stage with Rick Wright, who was one of the gentlest and most musically gifted people I’ve ever known.”

Waters has garnered significant controversy over many of his political statements, including claims he’d made about Israel and Ukraine. His record company BMG dropped him over his Israel statements earlier this year. In a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Waters said he believed his name was on a Ukrainian “kill list.”

Speaking with Rolling Stone in September, Gilmour called his long-running feud with Waters “boring.”

“It’s over. As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s and I’m a pretty old chap now…,” Gilmour said. “It seems so totally irrelevant to me now.… People talk about ‘the battle,’ but to me, it’s a one way thing that’s been going on since he left, with different levels of intensity.”
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Elsewhere in the Guardian interview published Thursday, Gilmour addressed the state of the music industry for younger upcoming acts, saying that “the rich and the powerful have siphoned off the majority of this money.”

“The working musician today has to go out and play live — they can’t survive any other way,” Gilmour said. “They won’t do it by the recording process and that’s a tragedy because that is not encouraging new music to be created. It’s not the greatest era that the world has been through, as gradually all the work moves to robots and AI, and the amount of people creaming off the money gets smaller and smaller and they get richer and richer. ‘Sod everyone else’ seems to be the attitude.”