Pink Floyd's Longtime Feud Moves to Twitter

For a band known for tunes you can chill and zone out to, Pink Floyd often finds itself in the middle of a lot of high-tension drama. Last month, the prog-rock group found itself inadvertently inserted into a debate about rainbows. Now, a more internally driven battle is underway, not surprisingly featuring the band's two leaders, who've been feuding for decades. The latest bout of discord seemed to begin Monday, when writer and lyricist Polly Samson—who also happens to be Pink Floyd guitarist/singer David Gilmour's wife—put up a scathing tweet about Roger Waters, the band's other frontman, who left the group in the mid-'80s amid creative differences.

"Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core," Samson wrote. "Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching,misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac." She capped that all off with: "Enough of your nonsense." Her husband soon weighed in as well, retweeting her post and adding, "Every word demonstrably true." HuffPost notes it's not clear what prompted Samson's rant against Waters, but the outlet speculates it may have been a recent interview Waters did with a German newspaper that compared Israel to Nazi Germany (Waters has long defended Palestinian rights). Waters has also slammed Ukraine for the war there, as well as its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, while Pink Floyd, now led by Gilmour, put out its first single in nearly three decades last year to raise money for war-torn Ukrainians.

Shortly before Gilmour's backing of his wife's tweet, Waters responded to Samson on Twitter, albeit indirectly, calling her remarks "incendiary and wildly inaccurate." He noted in his post that he's "currently taking advice as to his position." The development is the latest in the decades-long contentiousness between Gilmour and Waters, which was briefly put on the back burner for a Pink Floyd reunion at 2005's Live 8 charity concert, then again in 2011, when Gilmour and Floyd drummer Nick Mason took the stage with Waters during one of the latter's concerts. The band's original keyboardist, Richard Wright, died in 2008. (More Pink Floyd stories.)