The Worst of Pink Floyd

compiled by Mike McInnis

Waters: "I don't want to go back to those times at all. There wasn't anything 'grand' about it. We were laughable. We were useless. We couldn't play at all so we had to do something stupid and 'experimental'." - Q Magazine, November 1992

Mason: "I mean, we were incredibly awful, we were a dreadful band, we must have sounded frightful..." "Shades of Pink" from The Source with host Charlie Kendall, 1984

Wright: "I'm still very aware of what we were doing back in the late Sixties. We were very experimental and, because we were, we were playing a lot of bad things, too; I mean not good music." - Saturday Live, BBC Radio One, October 15, 1994

Norman Smith: "When I look back I wonder how we ever managed to get anything done. It was sheer hell. There are no pleasant memories. I always left with a headache." - Mojo Magazine, September 1996

Alan Parsons: "I must say that when I first heard their music, I wasn't terribly impressed. I was working at Hayes [for EMI] and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn album came to me for duplication, and I was thinking if this was to be the music of the future, I wasn't looking forward to it."

Waters: "I listened to Piper again the other day. Dated isn't quite the word. I just don't think much of it'll last, that's all."

Gilmour: "It seems ridiculous now, but I thought the band was awfully bad at the time when I joined. The gigs I'd seen with Syd were incredibly undisciplined. The leader figure was falling apart, and so was the band." - Rolling Stone, November 19, 1987

Mason: "We didn't know what we wanted, our aspirations were to record, become successful. The band didn't have 10% of the independence it now has. We did everything we were told. At press conferences, we posed as a band and jumped for the photographers. Now we think of it as ridiculous. But we were so naive... and so bad.
interviewer: "Was the entire band really bad?"
Mason: "All of it. That was important in the way we progressed. We could only play in London, because there the audience was more tolerant and was willing to withstand ten minutes of shit to discover five minutes of good music." - interview with Jean-Marie Leduc, March 1973

interviewer: "When you started out with Pink Floyd in the sixties, you made use of an attitude of rebellion."
Gilmour: "We were rebellious youths who didn't like the Establishment and had not mastered their instruments."
interviewer: "And the fans liked that?"
Gilmour: "Yes, in London. People were using drugs, and they joined in everything. An hour of guitar feedback--no problem, they loved it."
interviewer: "And outside London?"
Gilmour: "Outside London people threw bottles at us or left the concert."
interviewer: "How long would it have taken you, on a good evening, to drive everyone away?"
Gilmour: "On a good evening, twenty minutes." - interview in Der Spiegel, June 1995

Wright: "We didn't really like the film. It's hard to say what I thought of our music in More since I didn't hear it with the film, but apparently it works quite well. As an album I don't really much like it."

Mason: "We were waiting to find the same spirit of trust in Antonioni, but, in fact, the collaboration was really terrible. Antonioni is a tyrannic eremite." - interview with Jean-Marie Leduc, March 1973

Waters: "Nobody else in the band could write lyrics, there were no other lyricists after Syd left. David's written a couple of songs but they were nothing special. I don't think Nick ever tried to write a lyric and Rick probably did in the early days but they were awful." - interview with the Washington Post's Richard Harrington, 1993

Gilmour: "I'd say that [Atom Heart Mother] was the worst record we've made. I didn't like it and I don't like it much now. I'm not very keen on Ummagumma either." - New Musical Express, November 23, 1974

Gilmour:: "'Seamus' was fun but I don't know whether we ought to have done it in the way we did it on that album really, 'cause I guess it wasn't really as funny to everyone else as it was to us."

Adrian Maben: "People who liked Pink Floyd music loved it. People who didn't like Pink Floyd music hated it." - interview for the director's cut of Pink Floyd Live in Pompeii

Mason: "I don't think we perhaps took quite the interest in it [Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii] that we should have done.... It's not bad, but I'm not entirely happy with it."

Gilmour: "Pink Floyd is not some sacred or hallowed thing that never made bad or boring records in the past." - Penthouse Magazine, September 1988.

Gilmour: "He [Roger Waters] gave us all a cassette of the whole thing [The Wall], and I couldn't listen to it. It was too depressing, and too boring in lots of places."

Waters: "I think as well--to be honest with you, I like a lot of the songs on Radio KAOS, but I think that road I went down working with Ian Ritchie, who I produced the record with, and I kind of regret the path that we went down there where a lot of it was sequenced before we put anything else on it. And I think I allowed myself to be sucked into a room where there was more machinery than I naturally feel comfortable with. - SFX interview with Jim Ladd for the premiere of In the Flesh, November 8, 2000