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Roger Waters Radio Interview.
09.03.2007: Roger Waters gab
am 20. Februar einer Kolumbianischen Radiostation anlässlich seines
bevorstehenden Konzerts in Bogota ein ausgiebiges Interview. Die
beiden Moderatoren scheuten dabei kein Fettnäpfchen. Eine der
schlimmsten Fragen die man Roger Waters stellen kann: Werden Sie bei
ihrem Konzert in Bogota die Filme der Division Bell Promotion verwenden?
Waters konnte die Frage kaum glauben und meinte, dass er all das Zeug
haßt.
Das 45minütige Interview
kann unter folgenden link gehört werden:
Roger Waters Interview.
Infoquelle:
A
Fleeting Glimpse. Thanx to Natalie Lyons für die
Interview Niederschrift.
Alejandro: Such a pleasure to have you with us I mean this is
unbelievable man. The two of us, Julio and me, my name’s Alejandro,
we’ve been such big fans of you over the years. It’s great to have you
on the line.
ROGER WATERS:
Thanks, Alejandro
Mr Waters, I would like to begin by, just because there are so many
fans of you here in Colombia, and you are on your way to this country,
basically by asking you what happened with Pink Floyd? When did it all
end for you? When did you just say it was time to call it quits?
ROGER WATERS: Well, Alejandro, this is a very, very old story.
Yep, I know it is, but you know...
ROGER WATERS: I can’t go in to any details about that but I finally, I think,
officially left the band in 1985. Which if we do our maths is 22 years,
so it’s a long time ago. Though as you probably know we did get back
together one day a couple of summers ago for Live 8 and played a few
songs together, the four of us. And that was great. And who knows, that
might even happen again in the future. We would never say never, but…
What else can I tell you?
After the whole Live 8 thing…
ROGER WATERS: I think it’s great…
…are you guys keeping in touch?
ROGER WATERS: Well Nick Mason and I were always close friends when we were both
in Pink Floyd, and after all the problems in the 80s we sort of… our
friendship was lost. But we met each other again and rekindled it so
that’s a very good thing. I was never very close with either David or
Richard, so… Who knows? Who knows what might happen in the future, I
have no idea.
Why did you choose to come with The Dark Side of the Moon to
Colombia? Why not, I don’t know, The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking and
the old Roger Waters repertoire?
ROGER WATERS: Well, sometime, like, two winters ago I thought of touring, you
know doing a few gigs in Europe and I’d sort of decided not to, when
Formula One, you know, the motor racing organisation in France, decided
they wanted a gig at the same time as the Grand Prix. They called up
different agencies, asked if Pink Floyd would play Dark Side of the
Moon, and they got told, “No, they won’t”. And so they said, “Well what
about Roger Waters, would he come and play Dark Side of the Moon?” And
so they approached me and I was very surprised and I thought about it
for a bit and I thought “Well why not?” I think it’s a great piece of
music and I hadn’t played it since 1974. So I thought about it and I
said, well, you know, “What are the numbers?” And they came up with a
big number and I said, “Well, maybe we could.” And then, you know, my
agent said, “You could do a couple of festivals, and you could do this”.
So we decided to do half a dozen shows in Europe last summer and it very
quickly turned into twenty two shows in Europe and twenty two shows in
North America. And by the end of it I was really enjoying it. Dark Side
of the Moon we do in the second half of the show and then we do some
encores after that, and the first half of the show is a fairly a
representative set of my work, with songs that go back as far as ’68 and
some of my solo work up to the present, so that’s what we do, and since
then I’ve been working on the show and the visuals and so on and so
forth, and it’s just a very enjoyable set to do. And the people, you
know, the audiences, so many of them know Dark Side of the Moon so well,
and I think it’s a piece of work that has as much meaning for
twenty-year-olds today as it did for twenty-year-olds forty years ago
when it was written.
Even though most of the songwriting in Pink Floyd is yours,
some of course is accompanied by Mr. Gilmour in some cases, but most of
it is yours. Are there any legal issues when it comes to your playing
Dark Side of the Moon or anything from the old Pink Floyd catalogue, or
vice versa, are there any legal issues when it comes to David Gilmour,
Nick Mason and Rick Wright playing those songs?
ROGER WATERS: No, there are no legal issues. I think when we split up they
exceeded, although we were going through very difficult times, that it
was really my work. And so I don’t think you’ll ever hear them playing…
I think they’re allowed… I think in the agreement they’re allowed to
play Comfortably Numb and something else, I can’t remember what.
They do play Another Brick in the Wall as far as I know.
ROGER WATERS: No they don’t. They don’t, they’ve never played it.
They do play it in Pulse.
ROGER WATERS: Another Brick in the Wall Part Two?
Yes sir, they did, it’s actually in the DVD.
ROGER WATERS: Well that’s very interesting you should say that, I’ll have to
check on it. Anyway, whether they do or they don’t it’s all cool, there
are no problems about any of that stuff.
What would you say is the big difference in conceptual terms
between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall?
ROGER WATERS: Well Dark Side of the Moon is a far more generally directed work,
whereas The Wall is much more autobiographical and personal.
It’s much more personal. In this case Dark Side of the Moon
was about somebody who was losing his mind or…?
ROGER WATERS: No, Dark Side of the Moon is a more general piece. It describes
more generally issues that people may have when they discover that
they’re growing up and there is [can’t hear] on their lives like, I
don’t know, organised religion and economics and so on and so forth.
Whereas The Wall is an autobiographical work, really. Largely about my
life but with, maybe drawn on a couple… it’s largely about Syd, but it’s
really not much about anybody else. It’s a first person, you know,
narrative.
Mr. Waters, I would like to know, how is that so long ago, so
many years ago you decide to drop your career and get completely into
music?
ROGER WATERS: You mean when I was studying architecture?
Yes.
ROGER WATERS: Well we were offered a recording contract. And it had always been
my dream to live, you know, that sort of life, as I imagined it might
be, of being in a band and doing gigs. And I decided to give it a shot
and so I left the college where I was studying architecture and turned
pro February 1967 and that was the end of my career as an architect.
Mr. Waters, what is it you remember the most about Syd
Barrett?
ROGER WATERS: I think, you know, the years after we both went up to college in
London, which would have been sixty… well I went up in ’62 and he
arrived in ’64. So then those years when we were working together in
Pink Floyd and when he was writing a lot and when we were very young,
you know, students together in London, working with the band. He was
extraordinarily creative. It was a great time for all of us. Though
funnily enough, you having said that, I always remember before we left
Cambridge, one night, very drunk, having a race with somebody, a friend
of ours, owned a car. I remember we gave him a start. There was a famous
roundabout outside Cambridge at the end of what was called the Hawkstone
half-mile. It was about ten miles out of town. We gave this guy a big
start and then Syd and I climbed on, I had an old Norton motorcycle at
the time. And I drove the motorcycle with Syd on the pillion as fast as
I could to this roundabout and back. And we got back and as we drove
into the front drive of his mother’s house, just as he was getting off
the back tyre went bang and there was a puncture, there’d been a big
split in the rear tyre so it was only by a hair’s breadth that Pink
Floyd ever existed at all ‘cos Syd and I could so easily have been
killed together that night on that motorcycle doing that stupid childish
thing. I don’t know why I told you that, it just popped in to my mind as
a memory.
That’s a wonderful memory that you share with us and you’re
sharing with our listeners, we appreciate it. I want to talk about Syd
Barrett. What was it exactly that happened to Syd Barrett? I mean, was
it drugs, was it a mental condition, was it a bit of both?
ROGER WATERS: People still don’t… they’re just beginning really now to think
that they may have discovered what Schizophrenia is and where it resides
and to isolate the genes that cause it. But up until very recently
Schizophrenia, which is what Syd suffered from, it’s a noun to describe
[phone rings]… Laurie could you…? …specific symptoms and certainly Syd
had a lot of those symptoms. You know, he had delusions, he heard
voices, and so on. Now, it’s also true that, Schizophrenia, the symptoms
are exacerbated by any kind of psychotropic drug, whether it be
marijuana or LSD, and there’s no question that Syd took quite a lot of
LSD. So I think the drugs were a contributing factor, I think, to his
psychosis, but I don’t think they were the root cause or it. But I’m not
an expert nor a neurologist so that’s just my view.
In the process of making albums such as The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn, the soundtrack to More, The Dark Side of the Moon, was
there a lot of drug consumption involved, were you guys into drugs a
lot, do you think that it helped, I don’t know, the inspirational
process, did that wake the muse up?
ROGER WATERS: There were few years when we smoked a fair bit of dope, but
nothing more than that. I mean in my case, certainly, that was only
because, and I’m talking about maybe 1970… I don’t know maybe’70, part
of ’73, ’74, ’75, those kind of years. But that was because I was trying
to give up smoking cigarettes, so one of the ways I did that was by
rolling joints with hash in them and tobacco but it wasn’t kind of an
addiction to the hash, it was an addiction to the tobacco. So I
convinced myself that I’d given up smoking cigarettes by only smoking
joints. I was quite high at this time, for those few years, which I
regret, because I think marijuana really, I don’t think it’s very
dangerous, personally, but it certainly doesn’t help in the creative
process, in my view, when I had it, it just kind of fogs you up and
slows everything down. I think it, you know, marijuana is much better
for being an audience than for being a performer.
Was this…
ROGER WATERS: Or creative.
Excuse me, please, keep talking.
ROGER WATERS: No, I mean, I wouldn’t recommend the taking of any drug if the
person wants to be creative. It’ll by and large just fog you up and slow
you down.
Ok, so back in those years, I would like to know, did the
image of Pink Floyd, The Wall, The Dark Side of the Moon, you know, the
image, the photographs, were the drugs an influence on the image of Pink
Floyd, how was it that you took, you know, a huge part of the image of
Pink Floyd and decided to take it that way?
ROGER WATERS: Well what are you talking about specifically?
Specifically, we just want to talk about the image of Pink
Floyd…
ROGER WATERS: What do you mean, the image?
We’re talking about the visuals, the art, the albums…
ROGER WATERS: What visuals?
We’re speaking about the covers, we’re speaking about the
photographs…
ROGER WATERS: Which covers?
The photograph, the cover of Dark Side of the Moon, for
example.
ROGER WATERS: You would need to ask Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell about
that, they’re the guys that designed the cover.
But the relationship with Storm Thorgerson, was there a
relationship, a close link between you and him in order to get those
ideas on the cover or was it just the concept…
ROGER WATERS: No, for Dark Side of the Moon… I mean, I knew Storm very well, he
came… in fact he came when he was ten-years-old he came and live in our
house with my mother and my brother and myself for a year in Cambridge
when his family were moving to Cambridge and his parents hadn’t arrived
yet, so he’s a very old friend. But he and Po came up with half a dozen,
or maybe more, maybe eight designs for a record sleeve for Dark Side of
the Moon, and we put them on the floor of the studio, at Abbey Road EMI
Studios in London, and they said, “Well, what do you think?” and we all
went, “That one”. So it was as simple as that, there’s nothing
mysterious about it, it just looked good.
OK.
ROGER WATERS: You could go, obviously, there’s a lot in the work they did
later, in fact they did all the covers then up until Animals, which they
didn’t do, but they did all the covers then. And they’re obviously great
devotees of the surrealist movement in general, and Rene Magritte in
particular, all that seeing through things. And they were very in to
conceptual ideas for the covers. So that’s where a lot of that stuff,
the cover for Wish You Were Here and so on, it comes from that.
Fans of Pink Floyd all around the world have always had this
whole concept of ‘the package’, the entire package, and not only the
musical side, but also the whole visuals, especially because of The Wall
with Alan Parker, and the hammers, and you were having a lot to do with
that concept in particular.
ROGER WATERS: Well I had a lot more to do with that, yeah. Because I worked
with Gerry Scarfe, so by this time Hipgnosis were out of the picture,
well, from Animals onwards, nobody else really had anything to do with
Animals or The Final Cut, or The Wall, or obviously any of my solo work.
In 1973 when you guys previously, I mean the year before,
when you guys were working on The Dark Side of the Moon, was there an
intention to make such a great record, I mean musically speaking and
lyrically speaking, were you thinking about making that impact at that
time or did it just pop out?
ROGER WATERS: Everybody’s always thinking of that, you know, anybody who’s in a
band anywhere in the world is always thinking they’re gonna do something
important, or I assume they are. People are always trying to do good
work, and it’s always a struggle. That was always our intention, yeah.
In the early 70s we were struggling a bit to find a direction. After Syd
went crazy and we lost our, kind of, main creative input in terms of
writing we were… it was a struggle to find a direction.
When Syd goes through this breakdown, how did you decide you
would move on without him, how do you gather…
ROGER WATERS: Everybody starts trying to write, that’s all that happens.
Bands live and die by whether they have someone, or more than one person
who can write. Writing is the fundamental cornerstone of any music. It
has to be written, and if you haven’t got somebody in the band who can
write it’s gonna be a very short-lived enterprise. So we had to find out
whether we did. And we did, and so it became a long-lived enterprise.
What was it like to be back with this line-up of Pink Floyd in Hyde
Park, in 2005 at Live 8?
ROGER WATERS: I felt it was very moving. I thought it was great that we
did that. And so did the audience I think, so many people have spoken to
me about it, how good it was to see that line-up together again.
We spoke to Sir Bob Geldof a couple of weeks ago, and asked him about
your getting together for this special event, and how he managed to
convince you and persuade you to do this, and he said, “With great
difficulty”. Was it really that difficult to get you guys together?
ROGER WATERS: It was hard until he asked me, and then it was easy.
Why was it so hard, why were you guys so angry at each other?
ROGER WATERS: Well because he asked Dave and Dave said no. On several
occasions.
Why was there such a big difference between you and David Gilmour?
ROGER WATERS: Well because I was the only person who could have got Dave
to do it.
Mr. Waters, what was it like to be onstage in that huge concert Pink
Floyd did in Potzdamer Platz in the 90s, 1990 I think. What was it like
being onstage?
ROGER WATERS: It was very energising and terrifying at the same time. It
was quite extraordinary, I mean, I’ve never seen that many people all in
one place, and probably never will again. Yeah, I think we had 320,000
people, they did a head count. And it was extraordinary, they came from
all over the world, and they all gathered there in one place, very
symbolically. And it was an extraordinary experience.
Going back to 2005, there was a lot of speculation about your getting
on to the stage with the other members of Pink Floyd and record labels
coming up to you and proposing large sums of money for a new record
contract, a new record deal.
ROGER WATERS: No.
Did it happen?
ROGER WATERS: No.
For this year, 2007, and for the Columbia show, what’s the show gonna
be like, I mean, how big is it gonna be? What are we to expect?
ROGER WATERS: Well, it’s very coherent, it’s… not to give too much away…
it’s kind of a narrative about a kid listening to a radio in his
bedroom, which is an experience which we can all share, maybe not now,
now everybody’s got iPods, but certainly many generations, the radio
would be your friend, because that’s where ideas come from, that’s where
the music you attach to came from. And so to describe the show visually
we have an LED screen, which is very bright, and very beautiful I think.
I’m not sure what size it’ll be in Columbia, I think probably the one
we’re using the size is 50 foot by 25 foot, it might be bigger, I don’t
even know what size gig we’re doing there. And that is sitting there
when the audience comes in and I use the screen, that simple device of
the screen, and very simple lighting a lot, through the whole show.
Through the first half and through Dark Side of the Moon and through the
encores. Now I believe in South America we have a new, what we call a
‘gag’, a theatrical event which will not have been seen before. We won’t
have finished building it until the gigs in Mexico. And that, I will use
that in Dark Side of the Moon. And that should be quite spectacular I
think.
You’re gonna be using that?
ROGER WATERS: And you know, we have our old friend the pig and a few
other bits and pieces that will be used, and we use some pyro. I don’t
know… you’ll have to come and see. I think it’s a very coherent show.
And all the images that Pink Floyd used, during, I don’t know, 1994
on, from the Division Bell album promotion, all those images, all those
things, are they gonna be included?
ROGER WATERS: [Laughs] You must be joking.
It is just that we have never had such a big show.
ROGER WATERS: I hate all that stuff.
You do?
ROGER WATERS: I think that stuff is crap. Anyway…
OK.
ROGER WATERS: Why would I use any of that?
I don’t know…
ROGER WATERS: What a weird question to ask.
I know, it’s a very weird question, but we don’t know really how big
this show is gonna be and there’s a lot of expectation round it. We know
that obviously none of that was your work, in 1994, but we just
basically wanted to know…
ROGER WATERS: They made it very big but it’s not coherent. It wasn’t
about anything, because they never really understood what any of it was
about anyway.
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