HOWZAT

According to Gilmour, Waters proceeded to take it out on him. “I was the new boy, not only that I was two years younger than the rest of them, and you know how those playground hierarchies carry over. You never catch up. Roger was not a generous-spirited person. I was constantly dumped on.” On the first album he played on, Gilmour rang Waters to ask him to write some lyrics. Waters just said “no” and put the phone down.

Throughout the Floyd’s glory years — the 1970s — the two men fought for artistic control of the band. According to Mason, the group’s resident diplomat, the arguments usually boiled down to “David’s desire to make music, versus Roger’s desire to make a show.” Gilmour considered himself the superior musician. (“I remember thinking when I joined I could lick them into shape.”) But it was Waters who had the big ideas that could turn a collection of Pink Floyd tunes into a “concept” album, such as Dark Side of the Moon or the 1975 extended elegy for Barrett, Wish You Were Here.

Spookily, the damaged genius none of them had seen for more than five years suddenly reappeared in Abbey Road studios while they were recording the album about him. Now 16 stone and completely bald, Barrett wandered around the mixing console brushing his teeth and offering to help out with guitar solos, only to be told that these had already been taken care of. To date, this was the last time the original members of Pink Floyd sat in a room together. It was a traumatic meeting for all concerned — and it didn’t help the growing rift between two of Barrett’s oldest friends.

During the making of the Floyd’s next album, Animals, in 1976, Waters and Gilmour engaged in a lengthy wrangle about the album’s publishing royalties — arguing over who had written what — which took 10 years to settle. With the next album, The Wall, relations broke down completely as Waters appeared to treat Pink Floyd as a one-man band: his.

He fired the keyboard player, Rick Wright, and threatened to get rid of Mason — who as well as playing the drums was godfather of his son Harry. “Both Nick and Rick were pretty catatonic in terms of their playing ability after The Wall,” Gilmour said later. “They’d been destroyed by Roger.”

The indestructible Gilmour, however, found that “to get my point across I had to make increasingly histrionic, stubborn gestures”, and he later dismissed The Wall, a thinly veiled account of Waters’s own childhood including the death of his father at Anzio in the second world war and his own problems in later life as an alienated rock star.

Gilmour’s view of the album was that Waters had been “one of the luckiest people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who’d never done anything to him”. By then he and Waters were doing most of their talking through their lawyers.

And that was the way it looked set to stay. Not even the death last year of the band’s manager, Steve O’Rourke, could reunite Pink Floyd. Waters was not present at the funeral service in Chichester Cathedral when the other three played Wish You Were Here. “Roger still had some differences with Steve,” Mason said. “So he wasn’t asked.”

Whatever prompted last week’s dramatic rapprochement, it wasn’t any apparent desire on the part of either Waters or Gilmour to re-form Pink Floyd beyond Live 8. Both men have solo albums imminent. This autumn Waters is set to release Ca Ira, a musical history of the French Revolution. Next year Gilmour plans to tour in support of the album he has been recording at his home studio in West Sussex. Since the show Gilmour has turned down a reported offer of $200m for Pink Floyd to tour America, and has announced he will be donating his share of the royalties from the huge upsurge in sales of the band’s albums since Live 8 to charity.

“David was unenthusiastic when Bob Geldof first approached him about Live 8,” says Mason. “He sees it as a distraction from his solo work, which it is. He is bound to suffer a backlash from Floyd fans shouting for the old numbers when he plays his new stuff.”

So what, if not the legendarily persuasive Geldof, could have made him change his mind? Only two people know for sure and neither of them is speaking publicly about it. Mason, however, confirms there was one telephone call from Waters to Gilmour that clinched the deal.

Could this have been the moment when the older man finally climbed off his high horse and addressed his former bandmate as an equal rather than a young upstart? Might he even have apologised? That would certainly explain why Waters seemed so overcome in Hyde Park last weekend singing, or trying to, about Syd Barrett, the man without whom there would have been nothing for him and Gilmour to argue about.