David Gilmour has said that he finds it “boring” talking about former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters.
The musicians have been on frosty terms for a decades now, with Gilmour most recently attacking Waters with claims of anti-semitism earlier this year.
Now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Gilmour was asked about where things currently stand between the pair, with the publication noting how in 2010 they played a charity show together, before he made an appearance at Waters’ ‘The Wall’ tour in 2011 – yet now they are not on speaking terms.
“Well, it’s something I’ll talk about one day, but I’m not going to talk about that right now. It’s boring. It’s over,” the guitarist replied.
“As I said before, he left our pop group when I was in my 30s, and I’m a pretty old chap now, and the relevance of it is not there. I don’t really know his work since. So I don’t have anything to say on the topic.”
Relations between the pair have been particularly tense in the public eye over the last year, after Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson shared a tweet in which she accused Waters of being “anti-Semitic to [his] rotten core”.
She continued: “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”
Gilmour re-shared Samson’s tweet, adding that “every word [is] demonstrably true”.
Rolling Stone told the guitarist that they both “must known it was going to create an uproar” when they sent the tweets.
“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, and Polly felt she had to say her piece,” Gilmour replied. “I agreed with her piece and said so. Again, that’s all. I don’t really have anything extra to add to this, any other lights to shine on that.”
Every word demonstrably true https://t.co/KWk4I3bMTN
— David Gilmour (@davidgilmour) February 6, 2023
Shortly before Gilmour’s post, Waters issued a statement in which he called Samson’s comments “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” and said he “refutes [them] entirely”. He added that he is currently “taking advice as to his position” regarding the claims.
Their comments came after Waters was interviewed by German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, in which he discussed his views on Israel and the Russian-Ukraine war.
According to a translated version of the interview on Waters’ site, the musician was at one point asked if he still believed – as he had previously said – that the state of Israel was comparable to Nazi Germany. “Yes, of course,” he replied. “The Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period.”
Waters also discussed his views further in a 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, describing Israel as “a supremacist, settler colonialist project that operates a system of apartheid” for its continued occupation of Palestine.
He insisted he was “absolutely not antisemitic”, and argued that “saying Israel does not have a right to exist as an apartheid state, any more than South Africa did or anywhere else would, is not antisemitic”.
Last year, Gilmour also promoted a documentary on Roger Waters’ alleged anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, the guitarist is set to release a new album on September 6 titled ‘Luck and Strange’, his first album of new material in nine years.