Recycled Floyd
interviewer: "At the dawn of Pink Floyd, Nick was quoted as saying your ambition was to establish yourselves playing rhythm and blues. That obviously changed very early on. When and why?"
Mason: "We probably realised there wasn't any future in recycling R&B." - New Musical Express, July 9, 1988
Waters: "We could go on doing the same old numbers, which are very popular, and we would enjoy doing that. But that's not what the Pink Floyd is all about. It's about taking risks and pushing forward." - Melody Maker, May 3, 1968
Gilmour: People tend to say we play the same old stuff, that we do the same numbers for years. We don't. We are playing all new numbers now, except for "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun". The Who are still playing "My Generation", and nobody complains about that. We can take criticism when it's valid. But we are only human and we can only do so much." - Melody Maker, May 17, 1973
Mason: "Roger will happily reuse the same piece of music four times, with different lyrics to make a new point in the story. Which is sort of corner-cutting in a way... Whereas Dave would probably try and find four different pieces of music--and hang the same lyric on it!" - Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, by Nicholas Schaffner, p. 258
Waters: "[What God Wants] is interesting, because it's the same bassline as 'Another Brick'; listen to it." - Musician, December 1992
Wright: "But there were some things [on The Wall] where I thought, 'Oh no, here we go again--its all about the war, about his mother, about his father being lost.' I'd hoped he could get through all of this and eventually he could deal with other stuff, but he had a fixation... Every song was written in the same tempo, same key, same everything." - MOJO Magazine, December 1999
Gilmour: "Songs that we threw off The Wall, he brought them back for The Final Cut--same songs. Nobody thought they were good them; what makes them so good now?" - Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey, by Nicholas Schaffner, p. 257
Gilmour: "We don't consider Pink Floyd techniques or recipes that we've used before; we just get on with making a record and doing the best tour we can do." - Creem magazine, February 1988
Even the old props in the current Floyd show, Waters insisted, were originally his idea. "That's my pig up there," he said. "That's my plane crashing." He snickered and added, "It's their dry ice." - Rolling Stone, November 19, 1987
Gilmour: "I don't think I could handle another tour doing the same material. And having moved from a Pink Floyd that did basically the newest album on all our old tours to a sort of greatest-hits show last time, I couldn't do that same show. " - Musician, August 1992
Gilmour: "I enjoy the newer material. At the same time, I realize that you have to achieve a balance between playing all the stuff that you'd want to play and playing stuff you know the audience wants to hear. I don't harbor any resentment against the audience for wanting to hear our older material." - Guitar World, September 1994
interviewer: "It does seem to me that, guitar-wise, this [The Division Bell] is a very ambitious record. Sonically, almost every song has something a little different to offer."
Gilmour: "I'm glad someone thinks so. [laughs] Lots of people think we're merely retreading old ground." - Guitar World, September 1994
Gilmour: "Going out and cashing in, playing all the old songs again, isn't really what I'm into, or ever have been." - Classic Rock #48, December 2002
Wright: "The fact that people still know us is, in my opinion, a result of our music and of the big money that runs the music industry today. The people who control the industry are accountants who recycle everything in new, nostalgic packages, and everything else, to make more money." - interview by M. Kriteman, 1996