Ice-T shares how he got Pink Floyd’s approval for ‘Comfortably Numb’ cover

Body Count performed their cover of Pink Floyd‘s ‘Comfortably Numb’ on The Tonight Show, with frontman Ice-T explaining how he managed to get Roger Waters and David Gilmour to approve the song.

In September, the US rap metal band shared their powerful rendition of the classic 1980 single – taken from Pink Floyd’s seminal 1979 album, ‘The Wall’ – with reworked lyrics and a feature from Gilmour himself.

Ice-T then sat down with Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday (December 4) to explain how he managed to get the track off the ground despite the long-standing dispute between Gilmour and Waters, who the rapper said “haven’t agreed on anything in 20 years”.

He said initially he was searching for old songs to either sample or rap over and was drawn to Waters’ bass on the Pink Floyd classic. “We lay it out and then I just don’t think about the politics. So they go, ‘Okay, you gotta send this to Pink Floyd to get it approved,’ and everybody’s like, ‘That’s not gonna happen,’” he explained.

After sending it to the band’s publishers and hearing an immediate “no”, he said it was “dead in the water” and he was “ready to trash the song”, until his manager reached out to Gilmour’s.

Gilmour was “blown away” by the new lyrics, which touch on concerns about the “scary” modern world: “Human animals, we roam the earth in search of blood / Hope for humanity? I don’t think there ever was / We’re in perpetual war, that’s the only law / Can I change it? I doubt it / So I write songs about it.”

“He said, ‘I totally approve it’” Ice-T told Fallon. The next step was getting Waters’ approval, which he gave after listening to the track and learning it was Ice-T singing on it.

“So now you’ve got two people on opposites sides that approved the song, which made me feel really good, ’cause that means that the song is honest and real,” the rapper said.

Watch Ice-T perform ‘Comfortably Numb’ with Body Count on Fallon below, which some have compared to Knocked Loose‘s recent performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

The US metalcore group were joined by Poppy for a ferocious rendition of their collaborative single ‘Suffocate’ on Kimmel, and performed some other tracks from their third and latest album, 2024’s ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’.

Some fans complained about the performance on social media – with one even calling on Kimmel to apologise for airing it, which frontman Bryan Garris has since addressed, saying: “If it scared you, good.”

Earlier this week, Waters went on the record to criticise Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood for their stance on the Israel-Palestine issue.