In Their Own Words: The Machine

Edited by Mike McInnis and Dave Ward

Waters: "All record companies are profit-oriented. The holy grail for them is to discover the motherlode of popular taste, in order that they should move hugh numbers of the product. And they were always that way, in my view. Ahmet Ertgen* or anybody else. You know, there are these mystic kind of figures from the early days, like Sam Phillips. But Sam Phillips wouldn't have stuck with Elvis if people hadn't bought the records!

"MTV is pure Big Brother. It's pure Brave New World. And there's no question but that those who make decisions about the way society works become the arbiters of of the quality of human life. In North America, the general trend has been this: You find a piece of wilderness. If there are people or animals living on it, you kill them. Then you build a strip mall that contains a number of the most obiviously successful and recognizable icons of the culture you're trying to spread over the land. So, inevitably, theres a McDonald's, Sam Goody and all those other things. I assume the reason for this is that it's convenient for the policy makers. It provides them with a system where theres plenty of cream floating around the top to be skimmed off. And I suppose the reason the human race goes along with it is that, as yet, we don't know any better. That seems to be enough for most human beings. Although, if you ask most people, they don't actually feel a great sense of satisfaction in thier lives, buying that dream.

"I find myself not caring about that, really, or about the way the record industry is or what's going to happen to it. Maybe that's very selfish of me. But it may be that that wall of unconcern is almost necessary to some of the rest of us, in order that we should have a reference point to develop against.

"If you're in rock and roll, you have to accept that part of the reason why you're there is because you like being patted on the back. Probably didn't get enough of it when you were a kid. That's certainly true of me. If we didn't have those needs we couldn't be in rock and roll anyway.

"I think the one thing you have to understand is that you can't go chasing the audience. That would be a living death for anyone who is serious about what they do... I've had to understand that all you can do is your work. Maybe nobody will buy any of it. That could happen. You might make a record five years down the road and four people will buy it, you know? ... Modigliani never sold any pictures. Van Gogh peddled his pictures for a bowl of soup. Some of these geniuses never got any reward at all in thier lifetimes. Except the reward that comes from doing your work and understanding your connection with the mathematics of life, or God, or whatever you want to call it." --Revolver, in the November 2000 issue

Gilmour: "One would meet an awful lot of record company people who would have that sort of Have A Cigar mentality. I don't know quite what made Roger start writing that one, but it was a very, very common thing, which we still have to amuse ourselves with endlessly and prevent ourselves from being driven mad with rage about it." --In the Studio with Redbeard, the making of Wish You Were Here

Waters: "'Have A Cigar' isn't cynicism, it's sarcasm. In fact it's not even sarcasm, it's realism." --Street Life, 24 January 1976

Gilmour: "We've always tried to keep out of those people... We needed to be nice to those people when in our earlier days much more. Now, of course, we try not to be nasty to them or nice to them, we just try to avoid getting close to them.... Luckily enough, we really don't get to see any of those people anymore." --Innerview, radio interview by Jim Ladd, June 1978

Gilmour: "We had people who would say to us, 'Which one's Pink?' and stuff like that... There we an awful lot of people who thought Pink Floyd was the name of the lead singer, and it was Pink himself in the band. That's how that all came about. It's quite genuine." --In the Studio with Redbeard, the making of Wish You Were Here

Waters: [on the sound effects at the end of Welcome to the Machine] "That was put there because of the complete emptiness inherent in that way of behaving --celebrations, gatherings of people who drink and talk together. To me that epitomizes the lack of contact and real feelings between people."

Waters: "We toured America and played only in large outdoor stadiums, lots and lots of them, finishing up in the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. And I loathed it, I thought it was disgusting in every way, and I kept saying to people 'I'm not really enjoying this, you know, there is something very wrong with this.' And the answer to that was, 'oh really? Yeah, well, do yo know we grossed over four million dollars today?' And this went on more and more, 'Do you know how many people? 98,000 people here!' And it began to dawn on me that the only thing anybody was interested in was the grosses, which is not why I got into music really. And so at a certain point something in my brain snapped, and I thought this is awful, and so I developed the idea of doing a rock concert where we built a wall across the front of the stage, that divided the audience from the performers, because it was a wall that I felt was really there, and that was not a physical wall, an invisible one." --BBC World Service, April 1990