Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Said John Lennon Was ‘Snotty’ When They Met

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters looked up to John Lennon. The Beatles inspired many artists to start making music, and Waters wanted to emulate one of Lennon’s albums with Pink Floyd. Still, his first meeting with the music legend was a bit rocky. According to Waters, Lennon was not on his best behavior, though he admitted that he wasn’t either.

Roger Waters said John Lennon was a bit rude when they met

Both The Beatles and Pink Floyd recorded at Abbey Road.

“‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn,’ we were doing that in number three studio at Abbey Road, and The Beatles were doing ‘Sgt. Peppers’ in number two,” he said on the podcast WTF With Marc Maron. “And I made records in number two later, we made stuff in there as well.”

Waters looked up to Lennon, but he only met him once. Unfortunately, they didn’t hit it off.

“I only met John Lennon once, to my huge regret, and that was in the control room number, and he was a bit of a … He was quite snotty, so was I.”

Roger Waters wanted to emulate a John Lennon album

While working on The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour said he clashed with Waters on the way it should sound. Waters hoped to emulate John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, his first album without The Beatles. 

“Chris Thomas came in for the mixes, and his role was essentially to stop the arguments between me and Roger about how it should be mixed,” Gilmour told Guitar World in 1993 (via Far Out Magazine). “I wanted Dark Side to be big and swampy and wet, with reverbs and things like that. And Roger was very keen on it being a very dry album. I think he was influenced a lot by John Lennon’s first solo album, which was very dry.”

Ultimately, Gilmour said his vision won out.

“Of course, on the first day, I found out that Roger sneaked in there, so the second day I sneaked in there,” he said. “From then on, we both sat right at Chris’ shoulder, interfering. But luckily, Chris was more sympathetic to my point of view than he was to Roger’s.”

Another artist had an unpleasant first meeting with the former Beatle

Lennon made a bad impression on more people than just Waters. In the 1970s, he invited Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to a jam session but was drunk and irritable by the time they arrived. He continually stopped Simon from playing, saying he was jumping in too early, before telling him to stop altogether. Simon walked into the control booth in frustration.

“He went into the f***in’ control booth, and I could see him f***in’ around in there,” Lennon told his girlfriend May Pang, per her book Loving John. “I could see him mumblin’ to himself. Dennis [Ferrante] told me he was so pissed off, he says, ‘He may be one of the Beatles, but I’m Paul Simon.’”

Rather than letting Simon cool off, Lennon followed him into the control booth.

“I f***in’ went in there because I could see Dennis gettin’ a little uptight and I could see Paul gettin’ uptight, and I wanted to smooth it out — to clear the air — and I asked him what was wrong,” Lennon said. “The man was just fumin’. He said, ‘I’m not doing anything.’ Then I told him he was a f***in’ twerp!”

The night reportedly ended in a screaming match between the two musicians.