Roger Waters
Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and The Final Cut (1983). By the early 1980s, they had become one of the most acclaimed and commercially successful groups in popular music.
Amid creative differences, Waters left in 1985 and began a legal dispute over the use of the band's name and material. They settled out of court in 1987. His solo work includes the studio albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Amused to Death (1992), and Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017).
In 2005, he released Ça Ira, an opera translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils's libretto about the French Revolution.
In 1990, Waters staged one of the largest rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin. As a member of Pink Floyd, he was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Later in 2005, he reunited with Pink Floyd for the Live 8 global awareness event, their only appearance with Waters since 1981.
He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999. He performed The Dark Side of the Moon for his world tour of 2006–2008, and The Wall Live, his tour of 2010–2013, was the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist at the time.
Waters incorporates political themes in his work, many of them considered radical. He supports socialism, has defended Vladimir Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and has been ruled by a court to have made defamatory comments. Waters is a prominent supporter of Palestine in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and Gazan genocide.
He supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and describes Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Elements of his live show and some of his comments, such as his likening of Israel to Nazi Germany, have drawn accusations of antisemitism, which Waters has dismissed as a conflation with anti-Zionism.
Waters has been dropped, banned or sanctioned by a wide variety of entities in reaction to his comments, including Major League Baseball, BMG Rights Management, the German city of Frankfurt, multiple Argentine hotels, and the country of Poland. Waters has contributed to financing a land deal that returned 4.5 acres of private property to the Shinnecock Nation. The land includes the Shinnecock Nation's ancestral burial grounds.
Early years
Waters was born on 6 September 1943, the younger of two boys, to Mary (née Whyte; 1913–2009) and Eric Fletcher Waters (1913–1944), in Great Bookham, Surrey. His father, the son of a coal miner and Labour Party activist, was a schoolteacher, a devout Christian, and a Communist Party member. His older brother, John, predeceased him.
In the early years of the Second World War, Waters's father was a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance during the Blitz. He later changed his stance on pacifism, joined the Territorial Army and was commissioned into the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant on 11 September 1943. He was killed five months later on 18 February 1944 at Aprilia, during the Battle of Anzio, when Roger was five months old.
He is commemorated in Aprilia and at the Cassino War Cemetery. On 18 February 2014, Waters unveiled a monument to his father and other war casualties in Aprilia, Italy, and was made an honorary citizen of Anzio. Following her husband's death, Mary Waters, also a teacher, moved with her two sons to Cambridge and raised them there. Waters's earliest memory is of the V-J Day celebrations.
Waters attended Morley Memorial Junior School in Cambridge and then the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College) with Syd Barrett. The future Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour lived nearby on Mill Road and attended the Perse School. At 15, Waters was chairman of the Cambridge Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (YCND), having designed its publicity poster and participated in its organisation.
He was a keen sportsman and a highly regarded member of the high school's cricket and rugby teams. He was unhappy at school, saying: "I hated every second of it, apart from games. The regime at school was a very oppressive one ... The same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers."
Waters initially considered a career in mechanical engineering. In 1962, after a series of aptitude tests suggested he was suited to architecture, he enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture, London, where he met his future Pink Floyd bandmates Nick Mason and Richard Wright.
1965–1985: Pink Floyd
Formation and Barrett-led period
By September 1963, Waters and Mason had lost interest in their studies and moved into a lower flat in Stanhope Gardens, owned by Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Waters, Mason and Wright first played music together in late 1963, in a band formed by the vocalist Keith Noble and bassist Clive Metcalfe.
They usually called themselves Sigma 6, but also used the name the Meggadeaths. Waters played rhythm guitar, Mason played drums, Wright played any keyboard he could arrange to use, and Noble's sister Sheilagh provided occasional vocals. In the early years the band performed during private functions and rehearsed in a tearoom in the basement of Regent Street Polytechnic.
When Metcalfe and Noble left to form their own group in September 1963, the remaining members asked Barrett and the guitarist Bob Klose to join. Waters switched to the bass. By January 1964, the group became known as the Abdabs, or the Screaming Abdabs. During late 1964, the band used the names Leonard's Lodgers, Spectrum Five and, eventually, the Tea Set.
In late 1965, the Tea Set had changed their name to the Pink Floyd Sound, later the Pink Floyd Blues Band and, by early 1966, Pink Floyd.
By early 1966, Barrett was Pink Floyd's frontman, guitarist, and songwriter. He wrote or co-wrote all but one track of their debut LP The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967. Waters contributed the song "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" (his first sole writing credit) to the album. By late 1967, Barrett's deteriorating mental health and increasingly erratic behaviour rendered him "unable or unwilling" to continue in his capacity as Pink Floyd's songwriter and lead guitarist.
In early March 1968, to discuss the band's future, Barrett, Mason, Waters, and Wright met with the band's managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King, of the rock music management company they had all founded, Blackhill Enterprises. Barrett agreed to leave Pink Floyd, and the band "agreed to Blackhill's entitlement in perpetuity" regarding "past activities".
Their new manager, Steve O'Rourke, made a formal announcement about the departure of Barrett and the arrival of Gilmour in April 1968.
Waters-led period
After Barrett's departure in March 1968, Waters began to chart Pink Floyd's artistic direction. In 1970, he composed—in collaboration with Ron Geesin—Music from The Body, a soundtrack for Roy Battersby's documentary The Body.
Waters said he wanted to "drag [Pink Floyd] kicking and screaming back from the borders of space, from the whimsy that Syd was into, to my concerns, which were much more political and philosophical". He became a dominant songwriter and the band's principal lyricist, sharing lead vocals with Gilmour and sometimes Wright.
Throughout the late 1970s, he was the band's dominant creative figure until his departure in 1985. He wrote most of the lyrics to the five Pink Floyd albums preceding his departure, starting with The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and ending with The Final Cut (1983), while exerting progressively more creative control. Every Waters studio album from The Dark Side of the Moon onwards has been a concept album.
With lyrics entirely by Waters, The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most successful rock albums ever. It spent 736 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart—until July 1988—and sold over 40 million copies worldwide. As of 2005, it continued to sell over 8,000 copies a week. According to the Pink Floyd biographer Glenn Povey, Dark Side of the Moon is the world's second-bestselling album and the United States' 21st-bestselling album.
In 2006, asked if he felt his goals for Dark Side had been accomplished, Waters said his wife wept the first time he played it for her: "You then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else. And at that point I thought to myself, 'Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work,' and I had every confidence that people would respond to it.
Waters's thematic ideas became the impetus for the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979)—written largely by Waters—and The Final Cut (1983), written entirely by him. The cost of war and the loss of his father became a recurring theme, from "Corporal Clegg" (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968) and "Free Four" (Obscured by Clouds, 1972) to "Us and Them" from The Dark Side of the Moon, "When the Tigers Broke Free", first used in the feature film The Wall (1982), later included with "The Fletcher Memorial Home" on The Final Cut, an album dedicated to his father.
The theme and composition of The Wall was influenced by his upbringing in an English society depleted of men after World War II.
The Wall, written almost entirely by Waters, is largely based on his life story. Having sold over 23 million RIAA certified units in the US as of 2013, is tied for sixth-most certified album of all time in America. Pink Floyd hired Bob Ezrin to co-produce the album and cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to illustrate the sleeve art.
They embarked on The Wall Tour of Los Angeles, New York, London, and Dortmund, Germany. The last Pink Floyd performance of The Wall was on 17 June 1981, at Earls Court London, and this was Pink Floyd's last appearance with Waters until the band's brief reunion at 2 July 2005 Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park, 24 years later.
In March 1983, the last Pink Floyd album with Waters, The Final Cut, was released. It was subtitled, "A requiem for the post-war dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd". Waters wrote all the album's lyrics and music. His lyrics were critical of the Conservative Party government of the day and mention Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by name.
At the time Gilmour did not have any new material, so he asked Waters to delay the recording until he could write some songs, but Waters refused. According to Mason, after power struggles within the band and creative arguments about the album, Gilmour's name "disappeared" from the production credits, though he retained his pay. Rolling Stone gave the album five stars, with Kurt Loder describing it as "a superlative achievement" and "art rock's crowning masterpiece". Loder viewed the work as "essentially a Roger Waters solo album".
Departure and legal battles
Amidst creative differences, Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and began a legal battle with the band regarding their continued use of the name and material. In December 1985, Waters issued a statement to EMI and CBS invoking the "Leaving Member" clause in his contract. In October 1986, he initiated High Court proceedings to formally dissolve the Pink Floyd partnership.
In his submission to the High Court he called Pink Floyd a "spent force creatively." Gilmour and Mason opposed the application and announced their intention to continue as Pink Floyd. Waters said he had been forced to resign like Barrett had been years earlier, and decided to leave the band based on legal considerations, saying: "If I hadn't, the financial repercussions would have wiped me out completely."
Waters did not want the band to use the name Pink Floyd without him. He said later: "I would be distressed if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr made records and went on the road calling themselves the Beatles. If John Lennon's not in it, it's sacrilegious ... To continue with Gilmour and Mason, getting in a whole bunch of other people to write the material, seems to me an insult to the work that came before." In December 1987, Waters and Pink Floyd reached an agreement.
Waters was released from his contractual obligation with O'Rourke, and he retained the copyrights to the Wall concept and the inflatable Animals pig. Pink Floyd released three studio albums without him: A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994) and The Endless River (2014).
According to a 1999 interview with Gilmour, Waters declined an invitation to perform The Dark Side of the Moon with Pink Floyd at Earls Court, London.
In 2005, Waters said the period of his departure had been a "bad, negative time", and that he regretted his part in the negativity: "Why should I have imposed my feeling about the work and what it was worth on the others if they didn't feel the same? I was wrong in attempting to do that." In 2013, Waters said he regretted the lawsuit and had failed to appreciate that the Pink Floyd name had commercial value independent of the band members.
1984–present: solo career
1984–1989: The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking and Radio K.A.O.S.
In 1984, Waters released his first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, which dealt with Waters's feelings about monogamy and family life versus "the call of the wild." The protagonist, Reg, finally chooses love and matrimony over promiscuity. The album features the guitarist Eric Clapton, the jazz saxophonist David Sanborn, and artwork by Gerald Scarfe.
Kurt Loder described The Pros And Cons of Hitch Hiking as a "strangely static, faintly hideous record". Rolling Stone rated the album a "rock bottom one star". Years later, Mike DeGagne of AllMusic praised its "ingenious symbolism" and "brilliant use of stream of consciousness within a subconscious realm", rating it four out of five.
Waters toured the album with Clapton, a new band, and new material; the shows included a selection of Pink Floyd songs. Waters débuted his tour in Stockholm on 16 June 1984. The tour drew poor ticket sales and some performances at larger venues were cancelled; Waters estimated that he lost £400,000 on the tour. In March and April 1985, played a tour of smaller venues in North America on a tour called "Pros and Cons Plus Some Old Pink Floyd Stuff".The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking was certified gold in the US.
In 1986, Waters contributed songs and a score to the soundtrack of the animated film When the Wind Blows, based on the book by Raymond Briggs. His band, featuring Paul Carrack, was credited as the Bleeding Heart Band. In 1987, Waters released Radio K.A.O.S., a concept album based on a mute man named Billy from an impoverished Welsh mining town who has the ability to tune into radio waves in his head.
Billy learns to communicate with a radio DJ, and eventually to control the world's computers. Angry at the state of the world in which he lives, he simulates a nuclear attack. Waters followed the release with a tour.
1989–1999: The Wall – Live in Berlin and Amused to Death
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and in July 1990 Waters staged one of the largest and most elaborate rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, on the vacant terrain between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. The show reported an attendance of 200,000, though some estimates are as much as twice that, with approximately one billion television viewers.
Leonard Cheshire asked Waters to perform the concert to raise funds for charity. Waters's musicians included Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, Bryan Adams, Scorpions, and Sinéad O'Connor.
Waters also used an East German symphony orchestra and choir, a Soviet marching band, and a pair of helicopters from the US 7th Airborne Command and Control Squadron. Designed by Mark Fisher, the wall was 25 metres tall and 170 metres long and was built across the set, and Scarfe's inflatable puppets were recreated on an enlarged scale.
Many rock icons received invitations to the show, though Gilmour, Mason, and Wright did not. Waters released a double album of the performance, which has been certified platinum by the RIAA.
In 1990, Waters hired manager Mark Fenwick and left EMI for a worldwide deal with Columbia. He released his third studio album, Amused to Death, in 1992. The record was influenced heavily by the events of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Gulf War, and a critique of the notion of war becoming the subject of entertainment, particularly on television.
The title was derived from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Patrick Leonard, who worked on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, co-produced the album. Jeff Beck played lead guitar on many of the album's tracks, which were recorded with a cast of musicians at ten different recording studios.
It is Waters's most critically acclaimed solo recording, garnering comparison to his work with Pink Floyd. Waters described the record as a "stunning piece of work", ranking it alongside Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as one of the best of his career. The song "What God Wants, Pt. 1" reached number 35 in the UK in September 1992 and number 5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the US. Amused to Death was certified Silver by the British Phonographic Industry.
Sales of Amused to Death topped out at around one million and there was no tour in support of the album. Waters first performed material from it seven years later during his In the Flesh tour. In 1996, Waters was inducted into the US and UK Rock and Roll Halls of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd.
1999–2004: In the Flesh tour and Wall Broadway production
In 1999, after a 12-year hiatus from touring and a seven-year absence from the music industry, Waters embarked on the In the Flesh tour, performing both solo and Pink Floyd material. The tour was a financial success in the US; though Waters had booked mostly smaller venues, tickets sold so well that many of the concerts were upgraded to larger ones.
The tour eventually stretched across the world and spanned three years. A concert film was released on CD and DVD, In the Flesh – Live. During the tour, Waters played two new songs "Flickering Flame" and "Each Small Candle" as the final encore to many of the shows. In June 2002, he completed the tour with a performance in front of 70,000 people at the Glastonbury Festival of Performing Arts, playing 15 Pink Floyd songs and five songs from his solo catalogue.
Miramax announced in 2004 that a production of The Wall was to appear on Broadway with Waters playing a prominent role in the creative direction. Reports stated that the musical contained not only the original tracks from The Wall, but also songs from Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and other Pink Floyd albums, as well as new material.
On the night of 1 May 2004, recorded extracts from the opera, including its overture, were played on the occasion of the Welcome Europe celebrations in the accession country of Malta. Gert Hof mixed recorded excerpts from the opera into a continuous piece of music which was played as an accompaniment to a large light and fireworks display over Grand Harbour in Valletta.
In July 2004, Waters released two new tracks online: "To Kill the Child", inspired by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and "Leaving Beirut", an anti-war song inspired by his travels in the Middle East as a teenager.
2005: Pink Floyd reunion and Ça Ira
In January 2005, following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and subsequent tsunami disaster, Waters performed "Wish You Were Here" with Eric Clapton during a benefit concert which aired on the American network NBC. In July that year, Waters reunited with Mason, Wright, and Gilmour for their final performance together at the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park.
This was Pink Floyd's only appearance with Waters since their final performance of The Wall at Earls Court London 24 years earlier. They played a 23-minute set consisting of "Speak to Me/Breathe"/"Breathe (Reprise)", "Money", "Wish You Were Here", and "Comfortably Numb". Waters told the Associated Press that while the experience of playing with Pink Floyd again was positive, the chances of a bona fide reunion would be "slight" considering his and Gilmour's continuing musical and ideological differences.
Though Waters had differing ideas about which songs they should play, he "agreed to roll over for one night only". In November 2005, Pink Floyd were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame by Pete Townshend of the Who.
📚 Source: Wikipedia
