FEARLESS
IN JULY 1978, THE MEMBERS OF PINK FLOYD gathered at britannia row, their studio in north london. It had been almost exactly a year since the conclusion of the group’s In The Flesh tour, which ended with a miserable show at montreal’s olympic Stadium, where a group of rowdy fans near the stage had annoyed roger waters to the point that he spat at one of them, while David Gilmour refused to take the stage for the encore. at the studio, waters presented Gilmour, rick wright, and nick mason with two new ideas for their next album. one was a set of songs about a man’s dreams over the course of one night – dealing with marriage, sex, and his struggles with monogamy. The other was a 90-minute demo that had its roots in his feelings of alienation and disconnection that night in montreal and how they related to his father’s death in the Second world war while roger was still an infant; this project had the working title bricks In The wall. “Funnily enough,” says waters, “Steve o’rourke, who was the manager, wanted to do [the first idea]. but they were all of one mind about what they heard in the demo. In no articulate way, just ‘That one.’ “People are fond of relating, ‘oh, roger’s demo was unlistenable, it was awful.’ all right, whatever, but they were pretty clear that they wanted to make that record.” we all know what happened next. The Wall went on to become one of the biggestselling albums of all time and continues to live on, decades later, in various multimedia manifestations and extensions. but when the Floyds made their selection, waters held on to the other concept; he returned to it in 1983, in the midst of Pink Floyd’s protracted break-up, and developed it into his first solo album, The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking. That album had quite a different trajector y. In rolling Stone, kurt loder called it a “strangely static, faintly hideous record, on which waters’ customary bile is, for the first time, diluted with musical bilge.” It didn’t crack the Top 10 in the uk, and peaked at number 31 on the uS charts. There had been talk of a film based on the narrative – a press release announced that an adaptation had been completed – but nothing further came of it. waters’ next album, 1987’s Radio K.A.O.S., was an elaborate metaphor about politics and monetarism, and performed even worse. while his former bandmates were touring under the Pink Floyd name and selling out stadiums, waters was playing to “4,000 people in 12,000-seat halls.” but today, sipping a latte in a recording studio high above the southern end of manhattan’s madison Square Park, the 73-year-old waters claims to have no real memory of the way these projects were received. In fact, he says that he was just thinking about some of the lyrics on The Pros And Cons… the day before. “I really enjoyed doing those tours with eric Clapton and that band,” he says. “The show that we did, although we never filmed it, it was kind of cool. So I don’t know… I think it lives its own life. People come up to me and say, ‘oh, my favourite is Pros And Cons, or Final Cut, or this or that’ – it doesn’t really matter. That the pieces have some value is good enough for me.” waters turns his head away slightly, and his voice – already a low murmur – gets even quieter. “I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to vent some of my spleen and give some of my love publicly, in some kind of big way that’s really satisfying. Particularly because my father didn’t come home and so I was a kid turning somersaults whenever a man came into the room, because I was in such desperate need for that support. I needed that pat on the head, I needed someone to tousle my hair and make me laugh again. So I had to find that somehow, and I did.”
THERE WAS ONE MORE SOLO ALBUM, AMUSED TO Death in 1992, which was widely celebrated as a return to form. and then no more new records from roger waters – no new music at all, in fact, beyond Ça Ira in 2005, an opera based on the French revolution, and the song hello (I love You) for the 2007 sci-fi film The last mimzy. after a lengthy hiatus, he began touring again in 1999, and has consistently stayed on the road, with more emphasis on the Pink Floyd material, increasingly elaborate staging, and greater and greater success. From 2010 to 2013, he took The wall live tour around the globe, performing 219 shows and grossing $458 million – the most successful tour by a solo musician in history. but now, after 25 years, waters has returned with Is This The Life We Really Want? Produced by nigel Godrich (radiohead, beck, Paul mcCartney), the 12 songs conjure the epic sweep of classic Pink Floyd, with waters’ typically acerbic worldview and political outrage resolving in a plea for love. For something as momentous as a return to recording after all these years, the album seems to have gradually stumbled into focus. “when I was on the road doing The wall,” says waters, “I wrote this song, which has become [opening track] Déjà Vu, and I sort of liked it. I taught it to some of the guys in the band sitting around a table. and then I had an idea and made a piece that was a radio play and had lots of songs in it.” For the 2014 documentary/concert film roger waters: The wall, co-director Sean evans brought in Godrich to work on the sound. waters played Godrich his new demos. “he went, ‘Yeah, that’s really good, but it’s not really a record – it’s a radio play.’ So we talked about the possibility of making a record. “nigel went, ‘I really like this bit and I really like that bit. Fuck the rest of it.’ all right, so let’s start with those two bits then, and we moved on from there.” Godrich put together a band and brought waters into the studio. “he’d say, ‘Play the bass!’ ‘well, I don’t really want to.’ ‘but that’s what you do!’ ‘well, it’s one of the things I do…’ So I did play the bass a bit, and then I liked what we had done, so I started writing songs over the stuff we were playing.” waters dug up a “long, ranty” poem he had written in 2008 called Is This The life we really want? and began chopping it up into lyrics for some of the songs they were constructing.
As an album started taking shape, songs materialised from other sources. “The most beautiful Girl had a life of its own,” says waters. “I had no idea what it was about, I just sort of liked the metre of some of the lines, and I loved the music, which keeps changing key. “I had developed a big attachment to this particular Yemeni girl who’s in a documentary called Dirty wars. I became somewhat obsessed with this girl, so I thought maybe I’ll take that song and make it about her, and about her being killed – about the potential relationship between a sailor on a warship and some little girl who’s several hundred miles away, who he
kills. What that feels like, to everybody involved, and what does it mean, and what’s the point of it and why would you do that?” The closing, three-song mini-suite, built around the song Wait For Her, was inspired by less worldly matters. “I had a love affair a couple of years ago,” says the four-times-married Waters, “which was very short-lived but very passionate, and that kicked me to a different place. So that was the idea that love could be transcendentally experienced and you can dispense with a lot of negative aspects if you are prepared to embrace love. Whether it’s love for a woman or for liberty, or empathy for a little girl, it’s hugely important.” Pulling these strands together into a cohesive work meant collaborating with Godrich and allowing himself to be produced after all this time. “It was hard, but great, “he says. “Nigel and I have a joke between us because I would say, You may well be right. And as Nigel rightly points out, that’s another way of saying, ‘Don’t be fucking stupid.’ But actually I mean it – I disagree with you, but you may be right, who knows?” Waters illustrates his willingness to defer to Godrich by pointing out a final verse of Déjà Vu – a pensive, slow-building ballad with the repeated set-up “If I had been God” – which he allowed to be cut. He assumes the verse was dropped because it was too directly political; Waters has long been a passionate defender of the Palestinian cause, who has lost sponsorships and airplay because of his support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement protesting Israel’s policies. “It doesn’t mention the Israel-Palestine thing, but it does use the word ‘chosen’, which is a very difficult word,” he says, before
reciting the edited lines: “If I had been God/I would not have chosen anyone/I would have laid an even hand on all my children, every one/I would have been content to forego Ramadan and Lent/Time better spent in the company of friends/Breaking bread and mending nets.” “It has all kinds of Biblical references, and it has all the Judaic religions at least alluded to,” he says. “I like it as a lyric, and it’s also got a huge dollop of blasphemy over the top of it as well, so it’s very provocative but also very inclusive and loving. But it’s not on the record, and that’s OK. “He’s his own man, Nigel, and he’s very headstrong, but not in a stupid way. He’s just very focused on what he hears and he wants it to be the best it possibly could be. So he’s a really good guy to work with and I think he’s made – and I say he’s made – a really good record, and I thank him for it.” With its fury about militarism, the plight of refugees, and the environment, Is This The Life We Really Want? seems to plant its flag specifically in this moment in histor y. But Waters maintains that the landing of the album in the Trump/Brexit era is simply a happy – or, more accurately, unhappy – coincidence. “None of this shit is going to change in the next hundred years,” he says. “This bullshit is going to go on and on. We’re not going to suddenly develop a sixth sense where we go, ‘Ah, I get it – if we’d only co-operated and showed each other empathy and stopped all this bullshit about how awful foreigners are and retreated from our ideas about national or racial supremacy, everything would be all right. Or at least better.’ Where’s that going to come from?”
IS TOURING BAND HAS JUST ARRIVED IN NEW YORK, and Waters will head straight from our interview to meet them and begin preparations for the us & Them tour. “There’s no time – less than a month,” he says. “We’ve got about 12 days of rehearsal and then production rehearsals for 10 days, and then boom. It’s all done with no time to spare, which is scary as hell but really energising.” The first leg of the tour calls for 50 dates in the uS and Canada between May and October. The show’s visual concept initially took shape for last fall’s desert Trip festival in California, where Waters closed the final night of the ‘Oldchella’ dream-team line-up that turned into the most lucrative music festival of all time. “Paul Tollett [the event’s promoter] said, ‘Will you come be Pink Floyd at desert Trip?’ and I said, What the fuck are you talking about?” Waters recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve got this idea to do a weekend that’s sort of The Beatles, The rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd, and then we’ll throw in Bob dylan, Neil Young, and The Who.’ I said, Sounds good to me! “I confess that I was very chuffed to be offered that mantle to wear, even for one gig like that. It was a big honour, and a big pleasure as well. I don’t take it lightly. And we did a good job. But now I’ve had to figure out how the hell can you do something like the desert Trip thing indoors? And I think I figured it out. I know I did – well, you don’t know, but I’m pretty sure.” For most of Waters’ tours, he has built his show around single albums, but the us & Them performances will be more of a career retrospective, without a particular emphasis on Is This The Life… “I’m working in four songs, but I’m not doing the whole album,” he
says. “It would be counter-productive. You need a unique kind of bravery to do what Neil Young does, to go out and play a whole new record. And I can’t do it – I admire it, but I can’t do it; partly because I actually don’t want to go to that show. I want to hear Old Man or After The Gold Rush as well as some new stuff.” The Desert Trip show, and a one-off concert in Mexico City that followed, were visually breathtaking; at this point, the ever-escalating staging of his tours is a Roger Waters signature. But does the need to top himself become its own goal, and is the sheer scale of a production enough of a creative challenge? “What excites me,” he says, “is that there are moments in the show where you go (gasp) and it hits you. It hits you in a way that in The Wall show, you got hit in Vera, when you saw that girl get up and greet her father. I watched the audience every night and you could see them all go (mimes a teardrop rolling down his face). Because it’s really, really moving and that’s what I’m after. I want people going ‘Yeah, yeah, rock’n’roll!’, but occasionally I want them going ‘Wow, that’s heavy’ or ‘That’s moving’, moments that stir you, at the deepest level, stir your capacity for compassion.” Meantime, The Wall abides, constantly extending into different platforms. Most recently, it was staged as an opera – premiered, ironically enough, in Montreal, the city where the album’s wheels were first set in motion. “I went to the opening and it was really interesting,” says Waters. “It was big and very full of images, and it’s very impressive. I want to see it again. It’s indescribable.” For decades, there has been talk of developing The Wall as a musical theatre piece, and Waters continues to work with director Simon McBurney to bring it to the stage. “We’ve worked in a rehearsal space with seven or eight actors and 14 music students, one bloke playing the piano, no costumes or whatever,” he says. “And we do Bring The Boys Back Home and the people sitting and watching are literally weeping. It doesn’t need all the panoply and spectacle – there is something about some of the music, and some of the story, that is deeply moving, and it’s all you need.” Waters is also digging back into the Floyd days by self-publishing In The Pink, written by his late friend Nick Sedgwick. The book’s first half is a quasi-fictional account of a summer that Sedgwick spent with Waters and his first wife Judy, as their marriage unravelled. The remainder of the book chronicles the 1974 Pink Floyd tour that followed the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon, capturing the early stirrings of the disconnection and frustration that would eventually prove the group’s undoing. “Nick had a cassette recorder, and every word you see written down is on cassette,” says Waters (the deluxe edition of the book will include a thumb drive containing these recordings). “It’s so dysfunctional, and it’s really interesting and entertaining. We come out of it looking like shit – we treat people badly and treat each other in weird ways and we’re human. It’s the reality of what we were actually like during that period of our lives, which I think is fascinating. Because people build up all kinds of fantasies about what life is like in a rock’n’roll band, and this is what it’s really like.” Waters initially announced plans to publish the book following Sedgwick’s death in 2011, but David Gilmour blocked those efforts. “He doesn’t think he gets enough credit,” says Waters. “We all have different ways of seeing what happens in and around us, and he felt it wasn’t a true depiction of the reality of our lives and the way the band was. And probably still thinks that. “The only thing I’ve heard him say is that it should be called My Friend Roger, not In The Pink. He feels that it’s somehow a very biased account. Well, OK, write yourown book, if you know what I mean – I’m not being snotty, but I think it’s a good document. I want to see it published in Nick’s memory. He was a very good writer and a very good friend and I loved him and I misshim desperately.” Despite the never-ending tensions that surround Pink Floyd, Roger Waters made his peace with the group’s musical legacy long ago: “The work we did together – David and Rick and Nick and I – was really special,” he says. Of course, that’s not the same as escaping its shadow, as Waters was reminded when the new album’s deadline fast approached. “Towards the very end of the process, there were some musical gaps left,” he says. “In Déjà Vu, there’s a middle section that didn’t exist until 10 minutes ago. Nigel would go, ‘Well, just write something for this bit.’ ‘But what goes in between?’ He said, ‘You’ve got to write something like “two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl”.’ I said, Fuck off! “I mean, I get what he’s saying, but I wrote the whole song Wish You Were Here – not the guitar riff, that’s Dave’s, but the chords and the melody and all the words – in an hour. Where does that come from? Who knows? You can’t conjure anything like that on demand. You are in a confluence of feeling that you’ve had about all kinds of things that you’ve felt your whole life, and if you’re a writer, they pop out, maybe, if you’re lucky. And then a couple of days later you go, ‘Actually, that’s quite good.’”