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Fact #156381

When:

Short story:

Roger Waters instigates legal proceedings in London, England, UK, Europe, to prevent his former colleagues David Gilmour and Nick Mason from using the name Pink Floyd.

Full article:

October 1986 looked set to be one of the less turbulent months in the history of Pink Floyd. Superficially, it appeared to be as quiet as the waves that lapped against the sides of guitarist Dave Gilmour’s houseboat, Astoria, moored at Hampton, sixteen miles up the River Thames outside London. Inside the Astoria, along with drummer Nick Mason and producer Bob Ezrin, Gilmour was working on tracks for the album that would eventually become A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

To the world at large, the only apparent ripple of Floydian activity in the entire month was a minor one - the release of the soundtrack album to an animated film of Raymond Briggs post-nuclear-holocaust tale When The Wind Blows.

The film’s score was composed by bassist/songwriter Roger Waters who had quit the band acrimoniously in December 1985 but, knowing what his former colleagues were up to on Gilmour’s boat, Waters was becoming an increasingly unhappy bunny. As the man who had written most of their material over the last two decades, he felt so closely identified with Pink Floyd that he didn’t want anybody else recording under that name without his participation. And he didn’t want to participate.

So it was that, on the very last day of the month, he filed suit in London against Gilmour and Mason to prevent them from using the name Pink Floyd. If he succeeded, the Pink Floyd would cease to exist. “There are two ways of looking at this,” says Waters in retrospect, “my way and Dave's way. My way is I would be distressed if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr made records and went out on the road calling themselves The Beatles; if John Lennon's not in it, it's sacriligeous. I suppose it's giving something mildly divine to the entity it was when we were four guys working together.”

Given Waters’ dictatorial control of the band, those other guys might well have taken issue with the phrase “working together” but Gilmour was, albeit reluctantly, prepared to acknowledge that after the Floyd’s original leader Syd Barrett had become a dysfunctional acid casualty, Waters had taken over the helm. “It wasn’t like we were all sitting there, leaning on him to look after us,” insisted Gilmour. “It was a question of him having forced his way to that position, of him being very tough and having more energy for that sort of fighting.”

It was certainly true that, prior to Waters’ departure, his leadership of the band was disputed by the others, who frequently felt they were being railroaded into recording his material to the exclusion of their own. Ironically, Waters near-total domination of albums like The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983) brought the band so close to falling apart that only his departure could allow it to survive.

Waters, naturally, doesn’t see it that way. “The body of work the four of us produced, Dave, myself, Nick and Rick, a lot of that work had some of that connection to the same things that The Beatles' work has a connection to, and that for me makes The Pink Floyd important. That body of work that was created when we were together.”

When he left, Waters had assumed that without his creative leadership, the band would dissolve. Indeed, he was so confident of this outcome that he hadn’t immediately taken any steps to bring the band to a legal end. Now, ten months later, the thought of a Waters-less album bearing the Pink Floyd imprimatur was too much to bear. “To continue with Gilmour and Mason - because Rick wasn't part of it - and getting in a whole bunch of other people to write the material - I think there were 14 on the original record they made - it seems to me to demean and diminish the value of the body of work that came before. It's an insult to it in my view.”

For Gilmour and the rest, however, there were other considerations. “I had an awful lot of time invested in the group,”explained Gilmour. “It was an intolerable situation but I was damned if I was going to be forced out.”

The case was still trundling through court when the hotly contested album was released on September 7, 1987, and it wasn’t until three months later, on December 23, that Waters and Gilmour signed an agreement ending their legal dispute. “I didn’t want to get into a huge slanging match,” explained Gilmour, “I just wanted to get on with my life.”

Under the terms of the deal, Gilmour secured rights to use the name in return for various ongoing payments to Waters. Both men’s bank balances swelled, but the bitterness still lingers. “I would have preferred that they didn't play my songs in football stadiums,” says Waters now, “but I couldn't stop them legally and so they did do that. But … the work and what we'd done together meant so much to me. So it was an affront to me that it should continue.”
(Source : not known)