Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd (2001) – A Final Compilation Shaped by Post-Waters Tensions

Released in 2001, Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd was the band’s first career-spanning compilation since the 1983 Works cash‑in, but it arrived under very different circumstances. By then Pink Floyd was effectively a Gilmour‑Mason operation; Roger Waters had been gone since 1985 and the band had put out only one new studio album (1994’s The Division Bell). The compilation was assembled by David Gilmour and Nick Mason (without Waters’ input), and the track selection makes that power dynamic painfully obvious.

The set leans heavily on Gilmour‑era material, giving generous space to The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall, but it completely excludes any song from Waters’ solo work or his 1996 Ça Ira opera. More tellingly, it omits Atom Heart Mother, More, Obscured by Clouds, and nearly all of The Final Cut (Waters’ last album with the band). Even within The Wall, the chosen tracks are the ones Gilmour sings or co‑wrote (“Comfortably Numb,” “Run Like Hell”) while Waters’ iconic “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” appears only in a shortened single edit. The underlying message: this is the story of the band as Gilmour