Roger Waters
George Roger Waters is an English singer-songwriter, musician and political activist. In 1965, he co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd as the bassist. Following the departure of the band's main songwriter Syd Barrett in 1968, Waters became Pink Floyd's principal lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1985.
Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and The Final Cut. 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, Radio K.A.O.S., Amused to Death, and Is This the Life We Really Want?. 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, with an attendance of 450,000. 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 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.
Early years
Waters was born on 6 September 1943, the younger of two boys, to Mary and Eric Fletcher Waters, 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 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, 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 the lower flat of 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" 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 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 and ending with The Final Cut, 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, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall — written largely by Waters — and The Final Cut, written entirely by him. The cost of war and the loss of his father became a recurring theme, from "Corporal Clegg" and "Free Four" to "Us and Them" from The Dark Side of the Moon, "When the Tigers Broke Free", first used in the feature film The Wall, 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".