Neues Roger Waters Interview.

01.03.2006: Auf der Roger Waters 2006 Homepage wurde heute ein neues Waters Interview veröffentlicht. Waters erzählt das er daran denkt den Song "Leaving Beirut" erstmals live auf der kommenden Tour zu spielen! 

Exclusive interview of Roger Waters. 

Can I ask you to pick one card please?

ROGER WATERS: (Reads… Laughs…) “When was the last time you were violent?”… “Were you in the right?” Very funny! 

Does it remember something to you? 

ROGER WATERS: Yeah of course! Those are some of the questions that. I wrote for the people when we were making The Dark Side Of The Moon.
And the answers were fabulous as we know because they’re on the record. My favourite story about that is Henry Mc Cullough who was in the Wings at the time … I gave him cards like this as you’ve just given me, and so he’s the voice on the record that goes “I don’t know I was really drunk at the time” I did the same thing with his wife and they gave the same answers they were both completely drunk!! I thought that was really sweet. 

Nick Mason wrote that previous albums were conceived in an air of desperation, rather than inspiration. Do you agree? 

ROGER WATERS: I’m not sure that Nick – great friend of mine as he was and has since become again since we reconcilied our differences – is really in a position to declame upon inspiration or whatever about Pink Floyd and what we did or didn’t. There’s a lot of “we” in his book that I didn’t recognize as being kind of in line with the reality of what actually went on. I don’t remember much “we” about this… but you know we all have very different memories of life and we know that the human memory is a very unreliable with idiosyncratic device. 
So we also know that the human brain will invent memories that suit the ego of the person who owns the brain… And so there’s no reason really to suppose that my memories are any more accurate than his are. It’s just a question of faith I suppose! 

Do you think that The Dark Side of the Moon was the end, or the beginning of something?

ROGER WATERS: Well I think it was both. I think it was the end of us sort of working together in a truly, cooperative way. So it was the end of that and the beginning of the final end I think of Pink Floyd. After that we found out how to part, and it took a few albums and a lot of arguing and fighting and whatever… 

Does it mean something special to you to play in France? 

ROGER WATERS: (Thinks…) When I got a call about this gig, I was asked if I would do The Dark Side Of The Moon and I thought “why not ?” But to be honest with you if it had been the Italians 
I think it would have been sort of the same!… Although historically, certainly in the early days particularly, the french role embraced the Pink Floyd and the work we did more enthusiastically than any of the other european countries. 

My attachment is really to Philippe Constantin and Etienne Roda-Gil and my other friends in France. 

And through them I’ve discovered the French allow cross-references between different parts in their culture in a way that we don’t in England. Roda-Gil is an excellent example of that: 
he was allowed to write lyrics for Johnny Hallyday, Julien Clerc and Vanessa Paradis and to write articles for Liberation and to write novels… and so there is a largesse in french society that allows more latitude to its artists and that’s something that attracts me greatly. 

Was music a way to develop your lyrics, or your lyrics a way to develop music? 
I think it’s unlikely that I would have started writing poetry if I hadn’t been in a rock’n’roll band… 

ROGER WATERS: I think I was encouraged to start writing by the fact that Syd went crazy and somebody had to start writing songs! Cause I had always been told as a young man at school that it was useless and I should never attempt to express myself in any way. 

So it’s a kind of revenge? 

ROGER WATERS: Yeah… A good revenge! 

You’ve done a lot of different things, created concepts… Do you lack something? What could you find new musically speaking?

ROGER WATERS: Trust me, if I think of something to do, if I have a vision and try to express it I will do it and you’ll find out when I’ve done it. For instance, on this tour, my plan is to rehearse and 
to perform a song that I put out on the website, before the last american elections – so it was a couple of years ago now – which is a short-story with a song applied over the top of it… I want to do it because it has strong, political opinions that are inherent in the telling of the story. It remains to be seen whether it will succeed or not, because it will be a 13 minute-long piece, 8 minutes of which is somebody reading a story! 

What can Roger Waters dream about today?

ROGER WATERS: A dream?… You mean as in “I have a dream”?! (thinks). Well I think Martin Luther King’s dream would do. If you listen to his speech, what else is there to dream? He was obviously deeply humane, he was acumenical. He has spoused all the fundamentally good things that are enshrined in the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme and the american Declaration of Independence. I see no reason to deviate from that basic, fundamental humanist. 
The only way that Martin Luther King deviates is because of his attachment to Christ. 
I like to think that we should be good to each other on pragmatic grounds rather than because God tells us to be.

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