Interviews » Roger Waters

30.06.2006 The Times: Roger Waters opens up to Pete Paphides about himself, his battles and the Floyd 

As Tim Henman claws his way back into contention against Robin Soderling on Court One, Roger Waters gazes on and ponders: “If there’s anything we British love more than a winner, it’s a heroic loser.” 
You wonder if you should venture an exception to that rule. In 1986 Waters’s popularity rating hardly improved after a bitter fight to wrest the name Pink Floyd from his old bandmates. But then you remember that Waters has terminated interviews for gentler lines of inquiry. So we move to the seating area, where he suggests I sit between him and the TV so he can talk while monitoring Henman’s progress. Mercifully, he soon loses interest in the tennis — as, of course, Henman does too, in the next round. 

A few hundred yards from Waters’s hotel, in Hyde Park the fences have already been erected in anticipation of Saturday, when he will play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Last week he did just that in the “symbolic” Israeli community of Neve Shalom, where Jewish and Palestinian families live and work among each other. “In the pitch black night, 55,000 people there, amazing.” 

Indeed, more than any other album of the era, Dark Side is a record that seems purpose-built for vast open spaces — and the people who, in another century, would flock to fill them. Yet, back in 1974, that wasn't the manner in which Pink Floyd’s seventh album first took to the road. 

“It was all theatres,” recalls the 62-year-old. “And, of course, back in those days we were authoritarian about what we would and wouldn’t do. So, in the first half of the set you had the previous album. Then we would come back on and do the new album, and that’s it. No requests. F*** you all.” 

“F*** you all” — it’s a phrase that increasingly summed up the tension between what Waters has often wanted to do and his audience’s expectations. If ever an artist had a dysfunctional relationship with his fans it was the former Pink Floyd frontman. 

At a show in Montreal in 1977 he spat on a fan who attempted to scale the stage. The episode inspired him to write The Wall — an album about building a wall between himself and his audience. Later, his Floyd colleague David Gilmour came to describe the record as “one of the luckiest people in the world issuing a catalogue of abuse and bile against people who’d never done anything to him”. 

Surprisingly, Waters concurs. “I was quite separated from myself and in consequence, quite separated from anyone else.” For the famously bullish Waters that constitutes some admission. Self-awareness, he says, hasn’t come naturally to him. These days, however, he can take a compliment without thinking less of the person paying it — something, he says, to do with “getting rid of the judge that sits on your shoulder telling you you’re an a***hole. I mean, my judge was a powerful figure for my whole life. That’s why 30 years ago I was so hard on everyone else.” 

Come tomorrow it surely won’t fail to escape his attention that he was in the same place on the corresponding Saturday in 2005. After the two decades of enmity that followed the Waters-less Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd’s show-stealing 23 minutes at Live 8 allowed fans to imagine that a full-on re-formation was possible. In the aftermath of Live 8, a conciliatory Waters said he was open to the idea of a tour. Gilmour, it transpires, was less keen. 

A year on, the situation remains unchanged. “From my point of view there is no impediment to doing more work together,” Waters says. “There would have to be some kind of emotional negotiation that would need to take place for us to do that, and I’m not sure that Dave wants to go down that road. He’s had this baby for 20 years and he doesn’t want to relinquish his grip on it.” 

It’s a conundrum. Gilmour clearly feels that Pink Floyd belongs as much to him as anyone. At the recent opening night of Tom Stoppard’s Floyd-referencing play Rock’n’Roll, it was Gilmour and not Waters who walked the red carpet. The urbane guitarist is legally entitled to make a Pink Floyd album — yet he no longer seems to want to. Waters is forbidden, and yet he seems more open to the idea. 

Inevitably, it is a source of tension. When Gilmour picked up an award on Pink Floyd’s behalf at the 2005 UK Hall of Fame awards, he made a point of thanking everyone — from the group’s famously troubled first frontman Syd Barrett to Waters — who had come along for this crazy ride. Gazing down at Gilmour from a large screen, an enormous Waters took exception to the notion that he had been a mere “passenger” in Pink Floyd’s odyssey. 

In fact, he insists that he hasn’t taken a close interest in their Waters-less guise, which might account for his surprise when I tell him that next month’s release on DVD of Pulse (from their 1994 tour) contains their performance of Dark Side of the Moon. 

“Is that the case?” he smiles. “I didn’t know. I gave up after I heard a reggae version of Money on (the 1988 live album) The Delicate Sound of Thunder. I remember lying on the floor howling with laughter with my feet in mid-air.” 

Clearly, Waters hasn’t heard Easy Star All-Stars’ 2003 reggae tribute, Dub Side of the Moon? “I didn’t know about that,” he chirps. “But there’s a country and western version of The Wall by a band called Luther Wright and the Wrongs. I can thoroughly recommend it.” 

While Waters can make time for comedy versions of his old songs (whether by ex-colleagues or people he has never met), he says his interest in other groups is minimal. Asked about Radiohead — whose Thom Yorke seems to harbour similarly complex feelings towards the Government and his fans — he shrugs. “I heard one album. Was it Oh Computer? It didn’t make an impression.” 
I put it to Waters that, for many people, it was the Dark Side of the Moon of its generation — a portent of a brave but alienating new world. Waters says that he would quite simply prefer to hear the same sentiments from the mouths of his contemporaries, maybe John Lennon or Nick Drake — “but they’re a bit on the dead side, sadly”. 

Operating on a hunch, I ask him if he has ever heard Abba’s bonkers final album, The Visitors — a record whose Bergmanesque shadow-world is surprisingly redolent of Pink Floyd’s 1977 opus Animals. Waters looks at me as though I’ve just been sick in his wardrobe. “The title track,” I continue, “is written from the point of view of a Russian dissident waiting for the fatal knock on the door. Very you, that.” 

His reply is also very him. “Abba?” He rolls those two syllables around his mouth with Paxmanesque disdain. “From the first bar I ever heard by them, I was an ex- listener.” 

In fact, the last album Waters bought was Living with War, the album Neil Young recorded in a two-week fit of rage at the US Government’s foreign policy. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, given the distrust of authority Waters inherited from his communist mother. He says he has also written no shortage of songs in a similar vein but, with 13 years elapsed since his most recent solo album, Amused to Death, he advises against holding our breath. 

How can an album take 13 years to record? “Well, it just does. I maybe get some enthusiasm for it and then I do something else, like Ça Ira (his opera from last year, set in the early days of the French Revolution). Then, a few years ago, I got divorced — which also provides an interruption.” 

Life, in other words, has overtaken work. Since the demise of his third marriage (to the actress Priscilla Phillips) Waters has moved from his Hampshire pile to Manhattan, where he and his American fiancée Laurie During spend most of their time. “You would be surprised how many golf clubs are in striking distance of New York.” 

As befits a relationship in its first flourish, Waters and During “go out all the time”. After three years there, the only dinner party they have thrown has been in honour of the American economist Geoffrey Sachs, whose book The End of Poverty provided the ideological impetus for Live 8. 

Waters says that his friendship with Sachs has further changed his outlook. “I’ve put my money where my mouth is and decided to support a village in Senegal. Single-handedly? Well, yes, but really it’s just a matter of committing lots of money for the next five years and putting tons of fertiliser into the ground and buying nets for mosquitoes.” 

I suggest to Waters that something as practical as subsidising a Senegalese village must be more psychically calming than years of therapy. “Well, I don’t go to therapy any more,” he smiles. “But, you know, it’s no one act that makes you feel happier. I’ve been through a personal journey of transformation — with parenthood and failed relationships and all the rest of things that change you.” 

If Roger Waters is at relative peace, I tell him it’s a shame that lifelong friendships should have been extinguished before he got a chance to share some of that peace with them. The usually outspoken singer moves to respond, only to realise that, for once, he has exhausted his stock of opinions. “Is it?” he shrugs, “I really don’t know. I’m enjoying my life. Perhaps that’s enough.” 

Roger Waters plays Dark Side of the Moon as part of Hyde Park Calling, tomorrow from 2pm (0870 4000688)