Roger Waters

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dark Side of the Moon, with lyrics written entirely by Roger Waters, spent 736 consecutive weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, a run that lasted until July 1988. Waters is an English singer-songwriter, musician and political activist, born on the 6th of September 1943. In 1965 he co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd as its bassist. By the early 1980s the group ranked among the most acclaimed and commercially successful names in popular music. Yet today his name turns up as often in stories about cancelled concerts and court rulings as in stories about records. How did a boy raised in postwar Cambridge become the mind behind Pink Floyd's biggest albums? Why did he walk away from the band and then fight over its name? And why do his shows and public statements keep drawing both huge crowds and official bans?

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• 2. A Fatherless Childhood

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  On the 18th of February 1944, Eric Fletcher Waters was killed at Aprilia during the Battle of Anzio. His younger son, Roger, was five months old. Eric was the son of a coal miner and Labour Party activist. He worked as a schoolteacher, was a devout Christian, and belonged to the Communist Party. Early in the Second World War he was a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance during the Blitz. Later he abandoned pacifism, joined the Territorial Army, and on the 11th of September 1943 was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers. He is commemorated at Aprilia and at the Cassino War Cemetery. On the 18th of February 2014, his son unveiled a monument in Aprilia to him and other war casualties, and was made an honorary citizen of Anzio.

  Roger was born in Great Bookham, Surrey, the younger of two boys. His mother, Mary, was also a teacher, and after her husband's death she took both sons to Cambridge and raised them there. His older brother, John, died before him. Waters's earliest memory was of the V-J Day celebrations.

  In Cambridge, Waters attended Morley Memorial Junior School and then the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, now Hills Road Sixth Form College. Syd Barrett was a schoolmate there. David Gilmour, the future Pink Floyd guitarist, lived nearby on Mill Road and went to the Perse School. At 15, Waters was chairman of the Cambridge Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, having designed its publicity poster and helped organise its work. He was a keen sportsman and a highly regarded member of the school's cricket and rugby teams. The classroom was another matter. "I hated every second of it, apart from games," he said.

  He first thought about a career in mechanical engineering. In 1962, aptitude tests suggested architecture suited him better, and he enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture in London. There he met two men who would shape the rest of his life, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.

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• 3. Becoming Pink Floyd

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  By September 1963, Waters and Mason had lost interest in their studies and moved into the lower flat at Stanhope Gardens. The building belonged to Mike Leonard, a part-time tutor at the Polytechnic. In late 1963, Waters, Mason and Wright first played music together, in a band formed by the vocalist Keith Noble and the bassist Clive Metcalfe. They usually called themselves Sigma 6, though they also used the name the Meggadeaths. Waters played rhythm guitar, Mason played drums, and Wright played any keyboard he could arrange to use. Noble's sister Sheilagh sang occasionally. They played private functions and rehearsed in a tearoom in the basement of the Polytechnic.

  When Metcalfe and Noble left to form their own group, the remaining members invited Barrett and the guitarist Bob Klose to join. Waters switched to bass. By January 1964 the group was known as the Abdabs, or the Screaming Abdabs. Later that year came Leonard's Lodgers, Spectrum Five and finally the Tea Set. In late 1965 they became the Pink Floyd Sound, then the Pink Floyd Blues Band, and by early 1966 simply Pink Floyd.

  By then Barrett was the frontman, guitarist and songwriter. He wrote or co-wrote every track but one on the debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, released in August 1967. The exception was "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk", Waters's first sole writing credit. By late 1967, Barrett's deteriorating mental health and increasingly erratic behaviour had left him "unable or unwilling" to keep working as songwriter and lead guitarist.

  In early March 1968, Barrett, Mason, Waters and Wright met the band's managers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King. The two men ran Blackhill Enterprises, the management company they had all founded together. Barrett agreed to leave, and the band "agreed to Blackhill's entitlement in perpetuity" over "past activities". Their new manager, Steve O'Rourke, formally announced Barrett's departure and Gilmour's arrival in April 1968. O'Rourke would later become the centre of a contract fight with Waters.

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• 4. The Concept Albums

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  Waters later described what he wanted to do with the band: "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". In 1970 he composed Music from The Body with Ron Geesin, a soundtrack for Roy Battersby's documentary The Body. He became the dominant songwriter and principal lyricist, sharing lead vocals with Gilmour and sometimes Wright. He wrote most of the lyrics on the five albums from The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973 to The Final Cut in 1983, taking steadily more creative control. Every Waters studio album from The Dark Side of the Moon onwards is a concept album.

  The Dark Side of the Moon went on to sell over 40 million copies worldwide. As of 2005 it still sold more than 8,000 copies a week. The Pink Floyd biographer Glenn Povey ranks it as the world's second-bestselling album and the 21st-bestselling in the United States. Asked in 2006 whether the album had met his goals, Waters recalled that his wife wept the first time he played it for her. Hearing it through fresh ears, he thought, "Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work."

  The cost of war and the loss of his father run through the catalogue. They surface in "Corporal Clegg" on A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968 and in "Free Four" on Obscured by Clouds in 1972. "Us and Them" carries the theme on The Dark Side of the Moon. "When the Tigers Broke Free" first appeared in the 1982 film The Wall, then joined "The Fletcher Memorial Home" on The Final Cut, an album dedicated to his father.

  The Wall, written almost entirely by Waters, is largely based on his own life story. Its themes were shaped by growing up in an English society short of men after the war. It has sold over 23 million RIAA-certified units in the United States as of 2013, tying it for sixth among the best-certified albums of all time there. The band hired Bob Ezrin to co-produce and the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to illustrate the sleeve. The Wall Tour played Los Angeles, New York, London and Dortmund. Its last Pink Floyd performance came on the 17th of June 1981 at Earls Court in London.

  In March 1983 came The Final Cut, the last Pink Floyd album with Waters. Its subtitle read "A requiem for the post-war dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd". He wrote every word and note. The lyrics attacked the Conservative government of the day and named Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Gilmour had no new material and asked Waters to delay recording until he could write some songs. Waters refused. According to Mason, after power struggles and creative arguments, Gilmour's name "disappeared" from the production credits, though he kept his pay. Rolling Stone gave the album five stars. Its reviewer, Kurt Loder, called it "a superlative achievement" and "essentially a Roger Waters solo album".

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• 5. Break With the Band

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  In December 1985, Waters sent a statement to EMI and CBS invoking the "Leaving Member" clause in his contract. In October 1986 he started High Court proceedings to formally dissolve the Pink Floyd partnership, calling the band a "spent force creatively." Gilmour and Mason opposed him and announced they would carry on as Pink Floyd. Waters said he had been forced to resign, just as Barrett had been years earlier. He said he left on legal advice: "If I hadn't, the financial repercussions would have wiped me out completely."

  The name itself was the sticking point. Waters said he would be distressed if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr made records as the Beatles. "If John Lennon's not in it, it's sacrilegious," he said. Continuing with Gilmour and Mason, and bringing in other people to write material, struck him as an insult to the work that came before.

  In December 1987, the two sides reached an agreement. Waters was released from his contractual obligation to O'Rourke. He kept the copyrights to the Wall concept and to the inflatable Animals pig. Pink Floyd then released three studio albums without him: A Momentary Lapse of Reason in 1987, The Division Bell in 1994 and The Endless River in 2014. According to a 1999 interview with Gilmour, Waters turned down an invitation to perform The Dark Side of the Moon with the band at Earls Court.

  Years later his tone softened. In 2005 he called the period a "bad, negative time" and said he had been wrong to impose his view of the work on the others. In 2013 he said he regretted the lawsuit and had failed to see that the Pink Floyd name had commercial value apart from its members.

  That same July 2005 brought a brief truce. Waters joined Mason, Wright and Gilmour at the Live 8 concert in London's Hyde Park for a 23-minute set. They played "Speak to Me/Breathe" with its reprise, "Money", "Wish You Were Here" and "Comfortably Numb". Waters told the Associated Press the chance of a true reunion was "slight", given his continuing musical and ideological differences with Gilmour. He said he had agreed to "roll over for one night only". The quarrel resumed in 2021, when Waters publicly accused Gilmour of distorting the truth over reissues and credits.

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• 6. Solo Spectacles

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  Waters's first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, arrived in 1984. It weighs monogamy and family life against "the call of the wild", and its protagonist, Reg, finally chooses love and marriage. Eric Clapton and the jazz saxophonist David Sanborn played on it, and Scarfe supplied the artwork. Kurt Loder called it a "strangely static, faintly hideous record", and Rolling Stone gave it one star. Years later, Mike DeGagne of AllMusic praised its "ingenious symbolism" and rated it four out of five.

  The tour opened in Stockholm on the 16th of June 1984, with Clapton in the band. Ticket sales were poor, and some shows at larger venues were cancelled. Waters estimated he lost £400,000. In 1986 he supplied songs and a score for the animated film When the Wind Blows, based on Raymond Briggs's book. In 1987 came Radio K.A.O.S., about a mute man named Billy from an impoverished Welsh mining town who can tune radio waves in his head.

  In July 1990, eight months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Waters staged The Wall - Live in Berlin on vacant ground between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Reported attendance was 200,000, though some estimates run to twice that, with roughly one billion television viewers. Leonard Cheshire had asked him to raise money for charity. Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper, Bryan Adams, Scorpions and Sinéad O'Connor took part. So did an East German symphony orchestra and choir, a Soviet marching band, and two helicopters from the US 7th Airborne Command and Control Squadron. The wall, designed by Mark Fisher, stood 25 metres tall and 170 metres long. Gilmour, Mason and Wright were not invited.

  Amused to Death followed in 1992. Shaped by the Tiananmen Square protests and the Gulf War, it criticised the way war becomes television entertainment. Its title came from Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Jeff Beck played lead guitar on many tracks, recorded at ten different studios. It is Waters's most critically acclaimed solo recording. "What God Wants, Pt. 1" reached number 35 in the UK and number 5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. Sales topped out around one million, and there was no tour.

  The In the Flesh tour began in 1999, after a 12-year break from touring. Ticket demand was so strong that many concerts moved to larger venues. In June 2002 he ended it at the Glastonbury Festival before 70,000 people, playing 15 Pink Floyd songs and five solo songs. In September 2005 he released Ça Ira, an opera in three acts about the French Revolution, adapted from the late Étienne Roda-Gil's libretto, which Roda-Gil co-wrote with Nadine Delahaye. Waters had begun rewriting it in English in 1989. The singers included Bryn Terfel, Ying Huang and Paul Groves, and it reached number 5 on Billboard's classical chart.

  The Wall Live tour ran from 2010 to 2013 and sold more than 1.4 million tickets by the first half of 2012. By 2013 it was the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist. On the 12th of May 2011 at London's O2 Arena, Gilmour and Mason joined him on "Comfortably Numb" and "Outside the Wall". His first solo album in nearly 25 years, Is This the Life We Really Want?, appeared on the 2nd of June 2017, produced by Nigel Godrich. Then, on the 6th of October 2023, he released The Dark Side of the Moon Redux. It has spoken-word passages and no guitar solos. Waters wrote that the original's message clearly had not stuck, so he wondered what the wisdom of an 80 year old could add.

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• 7. Bass and Words

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  Waters said in 1992 that he was "never a bass player" and was "not interested in playing instruments". Gilmour described his bass style as limited and simple, and said he had played many of the bass parts on Pink Floyd records himself. According to Mason in 2018, Waters believes everything should be judged on the writing rather than the playing. Guy Pratt, who has played bass with Pink Floyd since Waters left, saw him as the band's "grand conceptualist".

  His instruments have a history of their own. Waters briefly played a Höfner bass, then a Rickenbacker, which was stolen in New Orleans in 1970 along with the rest of the band's equipment. He had started using Fender Precision Basses in 1968, and a black one became his main stage instrument in April 1972. On the 2nd of October 2010 it became the basis for a Fender Artist Signature model. He experimented with the EMS Synthi A and VCS 3 synthesisers on "On the Run", "Welcome to the Machine" and "In the Flesh?". A Binson Echorec delay shaped his bass lead on "One of These Days". At concerts he plays trumpet on "Outside the Wall".

  His private life has been as eventful as his career. In 1969 he married his childhood sweetheart, Judith Trim, a schoolteacher and potter. She appeared on the gatefold sleeve of Ummagumma, though her image was cut from CD reissues. They divorced in 1975. In 1976 he married Carolyne Christie, and they had a son, Harry, and a daughter, India. Harry has played keyboards in his father's touring band since 2002. In 1993 Waters married Priscilla Phillips, and they had a son, Jack Fletcher. On the 14th of January 2012 he married the actress and filmmaker Laurie Durning, and in October 2021 he married Kamilah Chavis. He has homes in Long Island and Hampshire, and he is an atheist.

  The Pink Floyd critic Mike Cormack wrote that Waters is "surely the greatest lyricist in all of rock music". Cormack praised the trochaic tetrameter in the refrain of "Time" and the "exquisite phrasing" of "Your Possible Pasts". He judged the words of "Comfortably Numb" to be "the greatest ever in rock music". Waters has also used his words and stages for causes far from music.

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• 8. Politics and Backlash

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  In 2006, Waters first saw the West Bank barrier, at the request of Palestinian supporters, while scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv. He moved that concert to Neve Shalom and called for the barrier's removal. "The wall is an appalling edifice to behold," he said. He joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel and has repeatedly described Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. In 2023 he was a principal signer of an open letter called Artists Against Apartheid.

  In 2013, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center accused Waters of antisemitism over a giant pig balloon bearing a Star of David at his concerts. Waters replied that it was one of several religious and political symbols in the show, not an attempt to single out Judaism. In December 2013, in an interview with CounterPunch, he compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany. The Anti-Defamation League called his remarks antisemitic. Waters has said that supporters of Israel often use such charges as a "diversionary tactic", conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

  On the 25th of February 2023, the German city of Frankfurt cancelled one of his shows, citing his support for BDS and the imagery at his concerts. A German court overturned the cancellation, saying the concert should be viewed as a work of art. That May, German police opened an investigation into the Nazi-style uniform he wore in Berlin, since Nazi symbolism is banned in Germany with exemptions for artistic and educational purposes. In The Wall, the protagonist hallucinates himself as a fascist dictator. Waters said the imagery stood in opposition to fascism and that he had used such uniforms since 1980. The US Department of State called the performance "deeply offensive to Jewish people".

  Other consequences followed. In 2020, Major League Baseball stopped advertising his This Is Not a Drill concerts after criticism from Jewish advocacy groups. In November 2023, two Buenos Aires hotels, the Faena and the Alvear Palace, cancelled his reservations without giving a reason. In January 2024, BMG cancelled a publishing agreement with him over his comments on Israel, Ukraine and the United States.

  A week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Waters told an interviewer from RT that talk of an invasion was Russophobic propaganda. Afterwards he said Russia was responding to NATO provocations. On the 5th of September 2022, he published an open letter to Olena Zelenska, the First Lady of Ukraine, urging her husband to end the war. His This Is Not a Drill concerts in Poland were cancelled after local outrage. In February 2023, at Russia's request, he addressed the UN Security Council. He called the invasion illegal but "not unprovoked". Ukraine's UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called him "another brick in the wall" of Russian propaganda. Gilmour and Polly Samson called Waters a "Putin apologist".

  Some of his causes have drawn less dispute. He sets aside a block of tickets for veterans at his shows, which he partly attributes to his father's death. In 2012 he led a benefit called Stand Up for Heroes. In 2007 he became a spokesman for Millennium Promise, an organisation fighting poverty and malaria. In 2019 he spoke at a rally outside the Home Office calling for the release of Julian Assange. He also helped finance a land deal that returned 4.5 acres to the Shinnecock Nation, including its ancestral burial grounds.

  In September 2023, the Campaign Against Antisemitism released The Dark Side of Roger Waters, directed by John Ware. Waters said the film misrepresented his views. Ware later sued Waters and Al Jazeera Media Network for libel over remarks Waters made about him in a February 2024 interview. On the 25th of February 2025, Mrs Justice Eady found the statements defamatory at common law. She ruled that calling Ware a "cheerleader" for genocide would be understood as a statement of fact. The case was allowed to proceed.

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