There aren't many celebrated so-called dinosaur rock bands from the 1970s who have managed to retain their dignity in the face of turmoil. Mention Pink Floyd to casual music fans and they will probably say five words back to you: Dark Side Of The Moon. Mention Pink Floyd to a Pink Floyd fan, and they will eventually refer you to the internal conflicts between the band's co-founder/former bass player, Roger Waters and the band's guitarist, Dave Gilmour - conflicts resulting in Waters leaving the prog rock giants and litigious action over the ownership of the band name.
While Waters - who recently announced details of his forthcoming In The Flesh 2002 world tour in London's Abbey Road, a recording studio as much associated with Pink Floyd's heyday as that of the Beatles - would have us believe that this conflict is over, there are signs that old cuts, once thought to be final, are still weeping. At the Abbey Road press conference, Waters derided Gilmour's initial suggestion (Some Of The Parts) for the title of Pink Floyd's newest compilation, Echoes - a title Waters says he himself put forward. So much for dignity, then.
Waters says that the music, the artistic endeavour of Pink Floyd, could be divided into three phases or periods - "The Syd Barrett period, my period and the period after I left.
"You can talk about any of those things without necessarily attaching the name of Pink Floyd to them. They're very divisible to my mind. The Final Cut Waters era: Pink Floyd's last album is the end of it, as far as I'm concerned. They've made a couple of records since, but they're totally different. In my personal view, they are not authentic because they were made in a completely different method by a huge team of people trying to recreate something that had happened and was made by four people."
Clearly, something isn't right. Or, as Rolling Stone's David Fricke put it in an RS article about the feud: "It was more like Martin Luther and the true meaning of the Cross". A man who has rarely, if ever, lacked the courage of his convictions, Waters comes across not as the megalomaniac he has been portrayed as in the past, but as a man who has, through his voluntary admission of the balm of psychotherapy, settled into a post-middle-aged (he's 58) period of creativity.
"As a young man, I was the one lurking in the corner, smoking a cigarette, saying don't come near me," he says. "That's changed." Preferring to concentrate on possible futures ("they flutter behind you, your possible pasts," he enigmatically quotes from one of his own songs, a comment possibly directed at the recent ending of his third marriage), he is also resigned to the inevitability of people focusing on what has gone before.
"The legacy of Pink Floyd isn't a burden in any way - it pays all the bills, which is good. I like that. I'm proud of the work I did, and that the rest of the guys did when we were working together; we all contributed in our different ways. But, as in Animal Farm, some of the animals were more equal than others. Nevertheless, we all made a contribution, it was good work, and I'm proud of it."
Has it ever come to a point where the constant questioning about Pink Floyd-this, David Gilmour-that, becomes too much? "I try and resolve it the best I can, but I accept it," he says. "I'm pretty relaxed about it."
Waters is generally regarded as the lyrical brain behind post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd, his Machiavellian musings on mental breakdown, alienation, disgust, frustration, parental loss ("Not exactly a man known for peace and love," Pink Floyd's drummer, Nick Mason, told Mojo magazine in 1999) forming the basis for some of the best-known and best-loved prog/space rock music.
"Songwriting comes from the empathy I feel for other people's conditions due to the pain I have experienced in my own life and been able to connect with," says Waters. . "I couldn't possibly do anything else - it's all I have aspired to, the expression of feeling. I just paint what I see. I might have been writing in the 1960s for another reason, but I quickly realised I couldn't do it. All you can do is say what you feel."
Yet through some of the most genuinely harrowing words in rock, some truly great music was made. From the psychedelic pop of Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, the psychoses of One Of These Days and Careful With That Axe, Eugene to The Great Gig In The Sky (a song about death that was recently voted the best song to make love to!), Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Comfortably Numb and Fletcher Memorial Home, Pink Floyd's legacy is a body of work that, by and large, has transcended decades of fashion and taste.
"People divine that some bands are not acting," reasons Waters on the band's more or less continued success. "That there is a construction of some kind, people expressing real feelings in a powerful way. That's what endures, and it does so because it's real. It's not a concoction, and people feel if it's false. That's what I wanted to say in Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall - that they were not contrivances." With the diverse likes of Marilyn Manson, Turin Brakes, Radiohead (whose one-time producer John Leckie engineered Pink Floyd's Meddle in 1971) and Kathryn Williams extolling the virtues of the band, it seems yet another generation will tune in, turn on and drop out. But not Rogers Waters, for whom the enlightening drug aesthetic of the music was rarely a comfort, and who early on was recognised as perhaps the most ambitious of the band.
Certainly, his background in architecture formed a fundamental logic for the band to build its soundscapes upon. "The sense of ambition was always there," he says. "I've always enjoyed the work; there's enormous satisfaction when you put on a show and it works. I like theatre, which is something, along with film or visual art, that I would have gone into if rock music hadn't worked out for me."
Of course, it did - with quite stunning results, although Waters's solo career is largely viewed as a disappointment. It's almost time to leave, but it would be churlish - nay, unprofessional - of me in the context of Pink Floyd not to bring up the topic of psychotherapy. It's something Waters has been engaging with for more than 20 years - why the need?
"One of my wives and I had stopped fucking each other, and that seemed to me to be a bad thing," he states, not unreasonably. "So I took the plunge, went through the yellow pages and started looking for some help. That was the start of the long journey. I've come a long way, but I still talk to somebody once or twice a week. For some people it's a luxury, but for me it's something of a necessity. I think it should be part of the National Health Service; we should all have access to somebody who we can unburden ourselves to once a week.
"We're all damaged, otherwise we would be God, wouldn't we? Maybe. Although you could make a case to say that God probably is insane."
As people get older, do they become more flinty, tougher, creative? "It depends how good their psychotherapist is."
Roger Waters's In The Flesh 2002 tour visits Dublin's Point theatre on June 24th. Tickets are currently on sale, priced £38 (€48.50) seated, £35.50 (€45) standing.
Echoes - The Very Best of Pink Floyd is released by EMI