Roger Waters was six months old when a father Eric died at the Battle of Anzio in Italy. His father was a Christian and a communist and at the beginning of the Second World War he was an ambulance driver because he refused to do military service. But he changed his mind, joined the infantry and was killed in February 1944.
Roger Waters never got over the death of his father. The entire Pink Floyd album The Final Cut (1983) is about it. The opera “Ca Ira” (2005) is about it. Roger Waters’ life is about it, his militant pacifism, his quest for justice, his rage. While every legendary musician of his celebrity still walks into the mild sunset with applause, Waters grows more angry and radical with each passing year. His tirades against television, the political class, capitalism, and later against Israel and Ukraine – to put it simply – are legion. He had power plants built, pigs could fly and he kept building this wall, an inner wall that separates him from the world.
The paradox of Roger Waters is that he is always reflecting on what constitutes success and money – and yet he is disconnected from the world. He’s a man who argues with a cab driver in New York. He just won’t give in.
With Nick Mason and Richard Wright he founded the band Sigma 6 in 1965, at that time he played guitar instead of bass. Then along came Syd Barrett, maybe a better songwriter, definitely a bigger fantasist. The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut, is Barrett’s album. Waters fought back on A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968). Barrett became increasingly comical and erratic. At some point he was not picked up by the band bus before a concert. David Gilmour came in 1968. Gilmour was even better at playing the guitar.
Gilmour released the biggest albums of the 1970s, The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977) and The Wall (1979). You can find it all pretentious and megalomaniac, you can find that Waters only ever had three themes (father, Barrett, alienation) – but therein lies, how to put it?, the grandeur of this work.
Ever since Waters has been performing these songs with a full ensemble without Pink Floyd – around 2000 or so – it all sounds even nicer because the technique is so much better. And Gilmour performed the songs with Mason and Wright. Waters wrote all of the songs on “The Final Cut” and arranged them with orchestra leader Nick Kamen. 1984 saw the release of his first solo album, The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, a concept album that ranks among the oddities of his career.
In 1990 he built the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and staged “The Wall” with Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, Bryan Adams, Garth Hudson and the Scorpions and Ute Lemper as German representatives. He liked Neil Postman’s study Amused To Death so much that he recorded Amused To Death in 1992. In 2015 he performs “The Wall” again in its entirety. His most recent record, Is This The Life We Really Want?, was released in 2017. The 2020 concert film Us + Them brings the whole Waters together in one powerful rant.
It’s fair to say that Roger Waters never shied away from an argument. On Wednesday (September 6th) he will be 80 years old. Careful with that axe, Roger!