From Roger Waters Website
A Roger Waters Interview by his fans

Roger Waters:

I feel good. Strong! I'm ready, the band is ready, and we are ready.

Question:

In a recent interview, you mentioned that you were interested in injecting some humor into your next rendition of The Wall. Would you mind elaborating on that?

Roger Waters:

Humor is a big part of my life and it's a big part of my story. And there wasn't any in "The Wall", particularly in the movie. There was this certain amount I guess in the album but not very much, and consequently the movie was dour, to my taste. And so if I rewrite The Wall for Broadway, which is something that I've started, a piece of work that I've started and like to come back to from time to time, there will be lots in it.

Question:

Andrew from Virginia writes, are you encouraged or discouraged by the state of popular music today, whether it is musically, lyrically or both?

Roger Waters:

Uhm, well to be honest with you Andrew, I don't listen to any, except I did just get The new Randy Newman album, which I have listened to once, which I think has some wonderful songs on it. But by and large, I don't listen to music. I mean, I don't listen to the radio. I can't, there aren't any radio stations that I'd like to listen to really, and I can't watch MTV. I can't really answer your question because I don't really know enough about it.

Question:

What did you think of the contemporary rendition of "Another Brick In The Wall, Part II" ?

Roger Waters:

What, you mean by The Faculty? Oh it was great, (Did you like it?) yeah, I thought it was really Good, I liked the way they treated the line "All in all it's just an another brick in the wall", without any gaps in it, just running one line into the next, I thought that was really cool.

Question:

Many of your songs express disillusionment with the capitalist system... "Money", "Have A Cigar", "Dogs", "Pigs", and much of your solo work comes to mind. Do you still feel, yourself, skeptical of our modern principles and priorities, and do you feel that music can make a big difference in enlightening people to social issues?

Roger Waters:

Sure, the free market isn't the whole answer socially speaking. My hope is, that mankind will evolve into a more cooperative and less competitive beast as the Millennia pass, and if he doesn't, we'll kind of disappear into a puff of smoke.

Question:

What do you think of the new methods of music distribution by computer, such as the MP3 format, and do you think that will have an effect on how you sell music in the future?

Roger Waters:

I don't know what that is, but if it's something to do with downloading from the Internet, yeah, I'm sure it will have enormous effect in the future. You know it's like, ...it's kind of, yeah it's inevitable and it will have a big affect. Well I mean what that effect will be I don't know. There is something that people liked in the past, was like having an object, like owning a vinyl record or even owning a CD which had a package, and had you know, paper, something tangible that you can touch, and some of us enjoy that. And obviously it's much more convenient to go to your computer terminal and say, OK I would like to buy that and load it on to your hard drive. But, there is a big but there as well, there is an enormous pleasure in record collections, I think.

Question:

Can you tell us anything about your next rock project? Anything you are working on, and can you give us a time frame?

Roger Waters:

Yeah, ...I've actually been rehearsing one song with the band, just written but not yet done. Because we learned all the songs that we were gonna do in the show, and so I thought it would be good maybe to do one new song. So I have been working on that. Whether we actually will perform it or not, I don't know. But I have some studio time set aside next February, and I've got a number of songs in the pipeline, so I'm gonna start working on the new album in February.

Question:

There's been a rumor floating around for some time now that a Pink Floyd BBC sessions album would be released. Is there any truth to this rumor?

Roger Waters:

Yeah that, I've heard that rumor. In fact that has been mentioned by some of my ex-colleagues I think, to release something, and I think they sent me... they sent me a cassette from those sessions. And my vote was no, don't release it. I just didn't like it. I thought it was not well played, and I don't think it would have added anything to anything really, but then I'm not a collector.

Question:

Do you have any plans of releasing "Lost Boys Calling" or your version of "Knocking' on Heavens Door" on an upcoming album?

Roger Waters:

I doubt "Knocking On Heaven's Door," but I think that the..., yeah, the record company will be releasing "Lost Boys Calling" and they will put together a soundtrack album for Giuseppe Tornatore movie, which is... now it's being called "The Legend of 1900" I think in it's English version, because Tornatore has finally agreed to edit it down from however long it was. It was very long in it's first cut, and I think he is editing it down to like 2 hours, and so it will get re-released. The movie will now be a released in North America, and when it does, Sony will put out the soundtrack album and that song will be on it.

Question:

Is there any possibility that you will be releasing a live concert album or video from this tour?

Roger Waters:

Uhm, yes there is. Not from this leg, but there is a real possibility that I may film it when I do some more gigs.

Question:

How do you feel about the early 1970's live shows of Pink Floyd. They are now considered by many Pink Floyd fans as the best of your entire career because you guys were obviously playing as a tight unit.

Roger Waters:

Ah, yeah I think that's a fair comment. You know it's what I've... it's what I talk about often. I talk about how the magic in those early days was overwhelmed by the weight of the numbers as we became more and more popular in those..., we played at bigger and bigger venues and it became less and less about those magical moments of communication between the musicians and the audience, and less and less about that, and more and more about money and numbers and ego and all of that. So, yeah I think you're probably right. Having said that, I think "The Wall" shows in 1980 were pretty special. But that was a different thing because clearly that was much less of a band project and much more of my project. So as far as the band, yeah, cooperating and working together, yeah I think the pre-Dark Side of the Moon shows were, some of them were very special. We were being very experimental and we were all kind of working together towards the same, towards a common goal.

Question:

It's been quite a few years since your last tour. Would you consider this to be a farewell tour or can you see yourself touring again in the future?

Roger Waters:

I think this is a real awakening of something in me. It's certainly, I mean we haven't done the first gig yet but it feelsÉ, the rehearsals felt very positive and I'm really enjoying the whole process of putting the show together, you know, working with all the musicians and rehearsing with the band, doing all that stuff, it was something I have always enjoyed doing and I'm really having fun.

Question:

Where and how long did you practice the upcoming tours' songs with the rest of your band?

Roger Waters:

We met on July, the afternoon of July the 1st and we did a..., ah, we worked July 2nd through July 11th I think. So we did 9 days but we had a day off in the middle of that, so we did 8 days in Hampton Bay's High School on Long Island. And then when we moved the equipment, so we had another day off. Than we moved to Calvington (?) Naval Base in Riverhead Long Island into a hangar, and we worked there from the 12th or 13th until ah... yesterday. They stopped rehearsals ... yesterday, so that was... what day is it today? It's the 20th is it? (Yeah), So we worked until the 19th... so we did a week of production and rehearsals and than we've got 2 days off for kind of production rehearsals in the gig, doing all that stage work with projections before we do the first show. We will be ready

Question:

Is there anything left in this world that is appealing or troubling enough that you feel compelled to write about?

Roger Waters:

Well, the song that I may perform live on this tour has a chorus. And the line that's central to the chorus is "Each small candle lights the corner of the dark" and so, I guess..., yeah the thing that is, that I'm feeling compelled to write about it, is the idea of personal responsibility and personal worth and personal power, and that you know, everybody counts, I think. I mean, that May seem pretty self evident to a lot of people but it struck me. It is very easy for us to see groups rather than individuals, nationalities and creeds, rather than individuals, and responsibility lies with the individual not with the nation.

Question:

We received many, many questions regarding sound and whether you plan on re-releasing albums in surround sound or DTS or the new DVD format. What's your feeling on the whole audiophile scene and we know you are very keen on sound reproduction using effects such as QSound.

Roger Waters:

Uhm, that "The Wall" (the movie) is coming out as a DVD quite soon, I think that might be quite interesting. I have done some interviews for it, I have done a commentary. Jerry Scarfe and I did the commentary through the whole movie and we have done some things to introduce things, and James Guthrie has remixed the sound. I'm not really very interested in any of that, I mean I think it's great that they are doing that, and I'm sure that these things are wonderful, but I don't really have time to focus on any of that. I actually don't really care about technology at all. I like QSound because you get... you know, a dog barking in the next room and it's cool, but I'm not really interested in the technology. It's only a means to an end, and I'm certainly not an audiophile.

Question:

You are touring the East Coast this year and planning the West Coast next year. Do you have any plans for the rest of the world... Europe, Asia, Japan?

Roger Waters:

At the moment, yeah because these... you know that it feels so good working with this band, and that I've been thinking, hey yeah, why don't we play Europe. But beyond that I haven't really thought. But I certainly... I have a feeling that when we hit Atlanta on the 22nd of August, it won't be enough, we'll all be wanting to do more and we will I think.

Question:

In 1975, you were quoted as saying in regards to Wish You Were Here being a sad album, "I think the world is a very, very sad fucking place and I find myself at the moment backing away from it all." How are you feeling now about the subject, and how are you?

Roger Waters:

Uhm, I'm actually in a very good positive frame of mind. I feel I worked through a lot of my own issues in the last ten to twenty years, and I now feel more at peace inside of myself. Now I feel more me than I ever have. And as regards to the state of the Globe, I'm encouraged by the noise that Green Peace and other movements, Amnesty, and like minded people are making. And I notice that it is being taken more and more seriously, so that it's a kind of magic. But also the work that is being done in the field of human physiology in terms of personal relationships. And you know I think individuals are getting a better chance to break the cycle of a... that tends to run from one generation too the next, because we have more information about how our emotions work, what makes us do things the way we do, that we didn't, say... twenty years ago, so I'm generally optimistic that things are moving in the right direction. At least down one road and maybe part of one less traveled but it is being traveled and that gives me hope.

Question:

In a recent interview, you were explaining going through your back catalogue and having a set list that would have the concert run at 5 1/2 hours. How did you eliminate some of your choices from the song selection, and what songs did not make the final cut?

Roger Waters:

I couldn't list all of that you know, I'm just makingÉ I made the choices by listening to the stuff over and over again and sitting with bits of paper, writing out a list with a pencil, and crossing things out and kind of re-timing it. And I'm trying to get something balanced and something that would make a coherent piece of musical Theatre when performed. It would have been very easy to, you know, consult the radio stations and say, what do the people like to hear most? you know, then I would have ended up with probably twenty of the most popular songs, but it wouldn't have... that's what it would have been, it would have been the list of my popular compositions rather than a concept.

Question:

Can you tell us anything about the production values of the concert?

Roger Waters:

Actually I had an idea before we started it all of this. In fact, it was the idea that I had that I was gonna use for Amused to Death, if we had toured Amused to Death, which was to use front projected still images. Well, they are not completely still, they can drift slowly from right to left or left to right. And using a minimal of lights, with no kind of lighting truss over the stage. We have a bit of high stage lighting to the left and right of the stage, but not lot of light on the stage. And then this big kind of hung gray material which I use as a screen and that's what I have been doing the last 2 days, is programming the lights and the projectors with the lighting designer and the show director and the guys have been working with the computers that work these projectors. They're called Piggy projectors, and some of it, I have to say, are stunning. I'm really happy about it because it was a bit of a punt in the dark as to weather this would work or not, but it does, it looks great. And I'm carrying a Quad system as well.

Question:

It has been said that you might possibly be one of the best lyricists of all time. If things hadn't gone the way they did in the early days with Syd and the success of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, do you think you'd still be into music and recording if you hadn't been as popular or well-received? Because it was stated that if you hadn't been offered a recording opportunity that you were all going to go on to your respected careers such as architecture.

Roger Waters:

I don't... I certainly don't remember that. I think we had a lot more, we had a lot of, you know, desire and energy at that point left in us. We would have gone on for years I think, in one form or another. You know, trying to break into the world of recording. So I don't know. I mean, that's very... you know, it's difficult to... it's kind of hard to answer that question. I don't really know.

Question:

Can you tell us a little bit about your band members, such as Jon Carin, and tell us how they are doing right now, are they excited...

Roger Waters:

I think that, they all are very excitedÉ yeah the band is really working together very well, and you know, Jon is great. He knew some of the songs because he's been on the road with Gilmour, and he is a big fan. And say, he knows the stuff pretty intimately and he is very good at it. He uses a Kurtzwell and he is very good at programming it and being able to create, to recreate rather, the authentic sounds from past songs. Which is really useful, because there is a nice warm feeling about the song starting it, you know, and you recognize the introduction because it sounds right you know. After all, that's specifically what makes "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", which I'm doing for first time. Well, I guess it's the first time it's been performed since the Animals Tour. Because we did "Wish you were here" and Animals in '77. And so he is great, and we have a another keyboard player, he is a young English bloke called Andy Wallace. And Andy Fairweather Low is of course in the band, and is indescribably wonderful. Snowy White, he is playing lead guitar, as is Doyle Bramhall II, who is great. And he is also singing quite a lot of the Gilmour parts. Pat Arnold and Katie Kissoon are singing backgrounds, and they are wonderful, and Graham Broad is drumming and that ads up to nine. That's all of us.

Question:

There was supposedly a recent interview in which you said that you were very supportive of the education field and teaching. Would you consider being involved or starting a public music education awareness program, as we desperately need to remember the foundation of our musical creativity.

Roger Waters:

I didn't hear the beginning of that question but the answer is no. I would support that emotionally, and but not with my time or energy. I need my energy and my time to do the work that I do. And I need... I haven't arrived to the point yet where I have... my energy is being begged by my work from me if you see what I mean. I'm not ready to go and build a rehab clinic, if you what I mean. Eric (Clapton) is doing something like that for instance now. And he is putting most of his energy into that and not much of his energy into his music. Good luck to him and I applaud him for that but he is doing that because that's what he feels he wants, or needs to do. And his energy is being drawn into that arena because this is what's there for him now. What this lady was describing is not what's there for me now.

Question:

Is there anything you'd like to leave the fans with? Parting words?

Roger Waters: