by Jacob Wingate-Bishop

When you’re Roger Waters, you can pretty much do anything you want. No door is closed, no room off limits to you. You can say what you like, wear what you like onstage, and make whatever kind of mad music you wish. It’s your prerogative. You’re the lead singer of Pink Floyd, the man who brought The Wall to life. You’re Roger fucking Waters.

Unfortunately for Rog, though, is one tree from which he’s forbidden to gorge. In this Garden of Eden, there stands one very ancient – and very important – oak. He can do whatever he wishes, but he can’t play with Pink Floyd’s legacy. That’s just heresy. His old prog rock outfit are responsible for some of the finest songs and albums ever put to the historical record, and all these decades later, there are few names in the business which carry more weight and respect. Love them or hate them, Pink Floyd are on that plane of godlike stature, untouchable and divine. The Floyd brand weathers controversy, infighting, politics and an ever-changing musical landscape.

So why, then, would you take the pinnacle of all that – Floyd’s seminal 1973 release The Dark Side of the Moon – and rebuild it from the ground up?

The album – which has sold millions of copies worldwide and remains one of the most critically-acclaimed artistic works ever produced – celebrates it’s 50^th anniversary this year. It got the big, dramatic box set treatment, of course, but ex-lead singer Roger Waters had a different approach to marking the date.

With his current band, he’s decided to entirely re-record Moon – titled The Dark Side of the Moon Redux – in a series of stripped-back, acoustic-led performances, doing away with all the things he finds outdated about the original. In his own words, ‘[We] were so young when we made [the original], and when you look at the world around us, clearly the message hasn’t stuck.’

It’s a valid point. Everyone writes stuff in their younger years that seems naïve or laughably ignorant in retrospect. All bands have put out stinkers, whether it be commercially, sonically or thematically. But I disagree with Mr. Waters here. I think The Dark Side of the Moon, dealing with the concepts of life, death, consumerism, the dichotomy of man and the meaning of life, remains just as poignant – and needed – in the 21^st century.

Just listen to ‘Time’, a seven-minute tour-de-force on never seizing the day, or realising ambitions. It’s hard to believe a group of late twenty-somethings could write and record something with such impact, and it still rings true today. Even sonically, with all its proggy indulgences and guitar solos, Moon is a masterpiece. It sounds fresh and ahead of its time half a century later.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph earlier this year, Waters commented that the original album is ‘irreplaceable’, and ex-drummer for Floyd Nick Mason dubbed it ‘an interesting add-on’ more than a substitute. It’s difficult to believe Waters, though, who in the same interview said, ‘It’s my project and I wrote it… Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap!’ Perhaps for him, this is a golden opportunity to imagine the record as he always pictured it. Maybe all the commercial twangs and moody embellishments of the original were Phil Spector-isms better off cut out.

It is worth noting that only two tracks from the hotly anticipated upcoming release have been made available so far, ‘Money’ and ‘Time’. But they are perhaps the most famous tracks from the original LP, and the extent to which Waters has altered them is a stark sign of things to come. Redux is packed with spoken word moments and entirely devoid of electric guitar. The anguished, exhausted screams of a barely thirty-year old Waters, obsessed with the futility of life and cynicism of money and the music business are replaced with the worn-out, gruff breaths of someone who just wants to do things his way. Maybe that’s the ‘wisdom’ he spoke about instilling in this do-over.

I want to respect the project. Waters has nothing to gain from doing a reboot of Dark Side… He’s not interested in money, chart success or making a name for himself. This must be something he sincerely wants to do; his finest record re-sculpted in his own vision.

But Waters’ version of Moon lacks all the things which made the original so painstakingly perfect. The enigmatic sound collages of cash registers and clocks are gone, replaced with passages by Waters that just feel as though they’re trying to touch on something more profound than they actually do. Riffs and solos, which kept the classic rock crowd happy and solidified moon as progressive rock staple, are a thing of the past, and that kind of poignance in the atmosphere of the original hasn’t been recaptured. The biggest test, perhaps, of this new suite will be the lovably surreal ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, which somehow aimed for the artistic metaphor of death, and achieved it. ‘Brain Damage’, a personal favourite from the record, will also prove testament to how Waters goes about wrapping it all up nicely.

If this were some live album forged recorded from a stripped-back gig, performed to diehard fans and followers, I could forgive it. Waters’ ‘Time’ and ‘Money’ sound as though they were made for an acoustic set at the London Palladium (and they will be, as Waters will perform Redux for the first time there on 8^th October, the project’s release date). But to return to the studio, all these years later, and try to reforge perhaps the classic of all classics? It’s proof that the music industry is still stacked with yes men, and sometimes artistic genius tips the other way into arrogance or full-blown incompetence. To steal a line from another beloved Floyd classic, this will not do.