Roger Waters Recalls the Argument That He and David Gilmour Had Over the Song ‘Comfortably Numb’

In 2011, Roger Waters sat down with Absolute Radio host Russ Williams for an honest interview. One of the subjects that came up was an argument between himself and David Gilmour over the iconic Pink Floyd song “Comfortably Numb”. According to Waters, they each had very strong opinions about how the song should be played. Each had their own version of the song that they felt was better than the other. Eventually, a negotiation was made and a compromise was reached with a legendary result.

While David and I were in the South of France recording ‘The Wall’, we had a quite serious disagreement about the recording of ‘Comfortably Numb’…It’s one story where his memory and my memory are almost exactly the same.

In 2012, David Gilmour sat down with Paul Rappaport of FMQB Productions and talked about recording The Wall and explained how he was inspired to write what he did.

Here’s Gilmour’s guitar demo of the song.

And here’s the band’s demo for “The Doctor”, which was later to be re-written as “Comfortably Numb”.

via Open Culture

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.