It’s pretty safe to say the living members of Pink Floyd will never reunite.
The decades-long feud between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, the iconic rock band’s dueling leaders, took a deeply personal turn on Monday morning when the latter’s wife, acclaimed novelist Polly Samson, took a very public swing at Waters.
“Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac,” tweeted Samson, who became one of the band’s primary lyricists following Waters’ departure from the band in 1985. “Enough of your nonsense.”
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Gilmour liked the tweet, as users on the platform quickly noted. He later made his support more overt, tweeting: “Every word demonstrably true.”
Hours later, Waters’ camp posted to Instagram: “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely. He is currently taking advice as to his position.”
Samson’s broadside seems to have been in response to a recent interview in which the infamously outspoken Waters stood by previous comments likening the State of Israel to the Nazis, excused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and deemed it “really, really sad” that his ex-bandmates recorded a pro-Ukraine protest song under the Pink Floyd moniker.
The seemingly never-ending public feud between the two Floyd frontmen dates back more than 40 years, likely starting in the studio at the height of their fame but turning especially ugly in the 1980s amid the disputes over creative direction that led to Waters’ exit.
The bassist and co-lead vocalist sued his ex-bandmates in an attempt to formally dissolve the group and prevent them from continuing on with the Pink Floyd name. The suit was settled out of court in 1987, but the tensions continued—both in the press and behind the scenes. A brief respite from the bickering came in 2005 when the band reunited to perform a set at the Live 8 benefit concert in Hyde Park, London.
