David Gilmour Once Refused To Sing Vocals on This Classic Pink Floyd Song

Years before Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters would say he came to “regret” one of the band’s most distinctive cuts, guitarist David Gilmour went so far as to refuse to sing it in the first place. Ironically, both musicians’ problems have to do with the song’s overall feel and sentiment. In the mid-1970s, Gilmour struggled to empathize with Waters’ dark, sardonic lyricism.

Decades later, Waters faced his own hurdles with the song. Back in 1975, with Gilmour unwilling and Waters unable to sing the song, the band asked friend and colleague Roy Harper to track the vocals instead. Waters later said this was a mistake that muddied the song’s original sentiment.

Why David Gilmour Refused To Sing Vocals On This Pink Floyd Song

For the most part, David Gilmour and Roger Waters shared the vocal responsibilities of their psychedelic rock band, Pink Floyd. Gilmour’s vocals were more rock-friendly, with a wide range and radio-ready grit. Waters’ voice was a little more distinct, creepy, or sinister even, which lent itself well to some of Pink Floyd’s moodier songs. However, when Waters wrote “Have a Cigar” in the mid-1970s, he effectively wrote himself out of the running to sing it by adding in soaring lines at the top of a tenor-baritone’s range. Normally, Gilmour would take the lead in a situation like this.

But according to Mark Blake’s Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd, Gilmour struggled to connect to Waters’ lyrics. “Have a Cigar” was a tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic ode to the aloof nature of music industry executives. By the way, the narrator quips, imitating a clueless “suit,” which one’s Pink? It’s hardly a glamorous account of the music business, offering instead a more bitter perspective about the disconnect between the corporations that sell music and the artists who make it.

Gilmour “felt uncomfortable singing Waters’ words,” Blake wrote, “claiming not to feel sufficient empathy with the lyrics.” The cognitive dissonance between Gilmour and Waters was just one small part of a much larger fissure that was growing between the two musicians. Given how differently they thought about virtually everything else in life, it wasn’t surprising that Gilmour might not share Waters’ chipped-shoulder perspective of an industry that, for all intents and purposes, had been reasonably kind to the band. The album they had released a couple of years prior, Dark Side of the Moon, had been their most commercially successful to date. They were riding that gravy train all the way to the tops of the charts around the world.

The Band Decided To Use Someone Else Instead

Try as Roger Waters might, he wasn’t able to deliver a record-worthy performance of “Have a Cigar” for the band’s 1975 record, Wish You Were Here. With David Gilmour out of the equation, the band opted to ask a friend and colleague who was working nearby, Roy Harper. Pink Floyd and Harper had worked together since the late 1960s when they were splitting bills at free festivals in Hyde Park. “Roy was in and out of the studio all the time,” Waters told Blake. “I can’t remember who suggested he sing it—maybe I did, probably hoping everyone would go, ‘Oh, no, Rog, you do it.’ But they didn’t. They all went, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a good idea.’”

Waters later said he regretted the decision to have Harper sing it, “and that’s not ‘cause I’ve got anything against Roy. I haven’t, you know. To me, it doesn’t feel very natural, him doing it. I think if I’d persevered with it, I would have done it better. It would be more vulnerable and less cynical than the way he did. It’s like he was singing a sort of parody, which I don’t like.”

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