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Roger Waters Previews Dark Side of the Moon Re-Recording with “Us and Them”

Roger Waters celebrated the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with a video preview of his upcoming solo re-recording of the seminal 1973 album.

In the brief clip, Waters puts the “me” back into “Us and Them” by stripping the beautifully-layered, late-album epic down to the bassist’s isolated vocals and spare accompaniment. Luckily though, as he quite literally points out in the video, the song’s dramatic orchestral breaks have remained intact.

Waters paired the video with a statement (via Twitter) that further explained the origins of his surprise full-length reimagining after recording the stripped-down Lockdown Sessions during the early pandemic era. Positioning the new take as a “tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album,” he recalled that there was a fair bit of “giggling and shouting ‘You must be fucking mad’” between his collaborators before taking on the endeavor.

“It’s not a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable,” he shared. “It is a way for me to honor a recording that [Pink Floyd members] Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of.” Watch the “Us and Them” preview from Roger Waters’ Dark Side of the Moon solo project, and read his full accompanying statement, below.

The outspoken Pink Floyd lyricist introduced the album with a messy Telegraph interview in which he moaned about “all this ‘we’ crap” surrounding the band’s songwriting credits while declaring that his former bandmates “are not artists.” He courted more controversy recently after speaking on Russia’s behalf at a UN Security Council meeting and was also identified by Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson as a “misogynistic, antisemitic Putin apologist.”

Meanwhile, the band’s fully authorized 50th anniversary box set for Dark Side of the Moonone of the greatest albums of all time — has been slated to arrive on March 24th. It will drop simultaneously with the archived performance release The Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley Empire Pool, London, 1974 and a standalone hardcover book.