In The Flesh
A Mojo Magazine Interview
with Roger Waters

Roger:

I've got involved with a guy who's been working with Israeli refuseniks; Israeli youths who've refused to join the army. Because of the work that I've done over the past 30 years or so, there are people looking for different options from the obvious ones - the military, nationalistic, self-interested, economically defined options that you tend to hear from Bush and Blair and (Arial) Sharon. There are people who are trying to see through that fog,; to find out whether there are any possibilities to move beyond all that using other tools. And those people tend, sometimes, to gravitate towards me.... I guess because those kind of feelings provide a central part of my own development. So if I can be a meeting point for anybody who's got any idea as to what to do, I'm very happy to do that.

Mojo:

Going way back, what exactly did a Communist upbringing involve?

Roger:

Both my parents were Communists - my mother lasted until 1956, when the Russians invaded Hungary. I don't remember that myself, but I became aware of it later on. That was a breaking point for a lot of people. But she was very hostile towards America. Not Americans themselves - she spent time in the USA when she was young and said that she had a tremendous amount of empathy with the people she met - but America's economic system and their role in the world. I can remember meetings of the British-Chinese Friendship Association and a lot of gatherings at the Quaker Meeting House in Cambridge. And though my mother left the Communist Party, her politics have remained pretty constant. She's 91 now and she's a member of the Labor Party. I completely took it on lock, stock, and barrel. Unquestioningly. I think that's the nature of one's relationship with one's parents' politics. That's the one thing that youthful rebellion actually leaves in place. I was involved in the Young Socialists.

Mojo:

In terms of the way you looked at authority and officialdom, did the death of your father make you skeptical, resistant, even?

Roger:

I don't necessarily know who I blamed for my father's death. A lot of my blame was focused on the Germans. The enemy. But I think if you look at my behavior at school, it may be that there was an element of not having a male authority figure in my home life, and therefore resisting the idea of anyone else taking on that role. That was probably a factor.

Mojo:

What are your first musical memories? What made you want to pick up the guitar?

Roger:

I can remember listening to Gilbert and Sullivan. And for a while I really liked Frankie Laine - Champion The Wonder Horse. And then, later on, Dixieland Jazz, Leadbelly. When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing. I took a few lessons from a woman in Cambridge who used to keep her guitar in her bed, as if it was a sexual thing [laughs]. British musicians? Well, all that Larry Parnes stuff was obviously pap; Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Eager. There wasn't much to it at all. The Beatles and the Stones were very different. The simple fact of their success set them apart, but that first Beatles LP is stuffed with very tight, infectious songs. And those early Stones singles were very impressive. I learned to play things from those kind of records. Once you'd learned Money -not my Money, The Beatles' track - you were off [sings part]. It was one step up from Peter Gunn, but if you could do that you were somebody [laughs].

Mojo:

At what point did being in a group enter your head?

Roger:

Having known Syd since I was six years old, we resolved to play in a group together once we got to London. But he was a little ahead of me; he'd played in a couple of groups in Cambridge, and I was very much on the periphery. I can remember designing posters for Geoff Mott and the Mottoes, wanting to be a bit further towards the center of things. And obviously, quite quickly, that's what happened.

Mojo:

Given Floyd's early ties to what became known as the Underground, did you feel as if you belonged to that world?

Roger:

No. Not at all. The gigs that we played thanks to all that, were great tremendous fun - going on at the Tabernacle in Powis Square and playing Louie Louie for 15 minutes. There were a couple of Syd's early songs in there, but a lot of what we did then came from the length of time we were expected to be on-stage; sometimes we'd play three sets in a night. But I never really knew any of those people that well. And to this day, I still don't know exactly what a lot of that stuff was actually about. You'd hear the odd thing about revolution, but it was never terribly specific. I don't know... I read the International Times a few times. But what was the Notting Hill Free School all about? What was it meant to do? [laughs}

Mojo:

What about the druggier aspect of all that?

Roger:

I did acid a couple of times, and I didn't not do it again because I had a bad time... it was more to do with how powerful it was. I've since heard my kids talk about taking acid and going out, and I was thinking, GOING OUT? You don't go out? Acid came out of the bottle. It was very much the case of taking your 600 milligrams or whatever and making sure that you stayed in. It was a sufficiently powerful experience that that was your only option.

I took it for the first time on holiday in Greece. There was a crowd of us - Rick Wright came on that trip. I was meant to drive in this car I'd picked up for 25 quid. The transmission went out before I got to Greece, but I had one of those AA 5-star insurance policies, which paid the rest of our travel costs. Anyway, there we were in this rented house. I took it, and thought I was coming out the other end, and went to the window in the room where I was - and I stood on that spot for another 3 hours [laughs]. Just Frozen. That's the kind of experience it was. When was that? It must have been 1966.

Mojo:

Your working lives at that time seem really schizophrenic; playing at places like UFO, and then venturing out on the provincial ballroom circuit...

Roger:

Well, we'd go anywhere. You'd get in the van and look forward to the 50 quid. And it was hard work. I can remember a run of gigs that started in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, and then went on to Norfolk, and the next day we were playing in Elgin in Scotland. They could be vicious gigs too., with balconies that overlooked the stage, and people dropping pints of beer on us. And of course, they'd all want to hear See Emily Play. We often refused to play it [laughs].

Mojo:

When I spoke to you in 2003, you said; "I was that guy in the black t-shirt and jeans standing in the corner in dark glasses, smoking cigarettes and scowling at people, not wanting to have anything to do with anyone, cause I was so frightened." What were you frightened of?

Roger:

Oh... I think a lot of it came down to a fear of being exposed, being found out. Mainly sexual exposure. The black clothes thing is a very common sign of feeling terribly defensive, and I suppose a lot of it came down to sex. Having grown up in the 1950's as an English teenager, there was a tremendous amount of repression hanging over all that stuff. I was too ashamed to think about going into a barber shop and asking for a packet of condoms; I'd rather have died. It seems fucking ludicrous, but that's how it was. So you had this mixture of embarrassment, and the fear of pregnancy hanging over you, and it was hard to shrug a lot of that off.

Mojo:

When Syd started to become ill, what was your understanding of what was happening to him?

Roger:

Syd was a schizophrenic. It was clear to me that that was what was the matter with him. But not everybody would accept that. I had ties with Syd's family, and I can remember telephoning his brother and telling him he had to come and get Syd, because he was in a terrible mess. And the three of us sat there and, in effect, Syd did a fairly convincing impression of sanity. And his brother said, Well, Roger says Syd's ill, but that's not the way it seems to me.

I drove him round to [radical British psychiatrist] RD Laing's place once to see if he could give Syd any help, but Syd wouldn't get out of the car. And I'm not sure that was necessarily a bad thing. Laing was a mad old cunt by then... [pause] ...Actually "cunt" is a bit strong. But he was drinking a lot. And he was one of those people who seemed to be claiming that insanity might be a very subjective idea, that perhaps madness might give people some kind of greater insight. That seemed to be barking up the wrong tree. I never really liked that kind of thinking.

Mojo:

There's a huge contrast between Syd's whimsy and the lyrical approach you took from "Echoes" onwards. At the time you were playing them, how did you feel about songs like "Bike" and "The Gnome"?

Roger:

[Emphatically} Oh, I liked them a lot. They had a great deal of charm. And they were very clever. A great deal of Syd's work was obviously brilliant. And even after his time in Pink Floyd... I mean, something like "Dark Globe" is a very very accomplished piece of work. Interestingly enough, once I went to see R.E.M. and for the encore, Michael Stipe came on alone and sang "Dark Globe," which was a bit strange. And in the band room afterwards he wouldn't speak to me. It was a bit like; "Wanker! Syd was the true genius" [laughs]. I could imagine that Michael Stipe would be a bit like that.

Mojo:

What were your memories of the fleeting five-piece line-up of Pink Floyd?

Roger:

My main memory is the "Have You Got It Yet" story. The four of us standing in a circle around Syd, and him going through this new song: [sings] "Have you got it yet, duh-duh ... Have you got it yet, duh-duh." We'd say, "Oh, OK. We'll try to play it now." And each time it got to those words, it would change again. I actually thought there was something rather brilliant about it, some clever kind of comedy. But eventually I said, "Oh, I've got it now", and put my guitar down and walked away.

Mojo:

When it came to your artistic life without Syd, did you feel much trepidation?

Roger:

No. I'd been trying to write songs for a while, and a couple of them were pretty good. I mean, "Corporal Clegg" is a good piece of work. There were things I wrote very early on, like a song called "Walk with me Sidney," which I wrote about Syd. [sings a brief except]. Juliette Wright, who was then Rick Wright's girlfriend, sang some of it. It exists on tape somewhere, it might eventually come out. The other thing was, once you were in a rock'n'roll band, you weren't going to stop. That would have meant going back to architecture.

Mojo:

The Royal Albert Hall, 1969; Pink Floyd are sawing up bits of wood on-stage to make a table. What was going through your mind at that time?

Roger:

[Enthusiastically] Oh, I really liked that. I lived on Goldhawk Road at the time, and if you got the tube, just after Goldhawk Road station, there was this inspired bit of graffiti. Get up, go to work, do your job, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work... It was on this wall, and it seemed top go on forever, and as the train sped up, it would go by quicker and quicker until - bang! - you suddenly went into a tunnel. I just thought it was a brilliant work of art. Some of what we did at the Albert Hall was inspired by that. The wood part was meant to represent work. There was another element that involved switching on a transistor radio and putting it through the PA. Whatever was on would just blast out. The audience loved it. I'm not sure bands now would even think about doing something like that.

Mojo:

The band did a lot of press during that period. Reading through it, there's a lot of talk about the process of making music, but no clear sense of what the band is for...

Roger:

They still don't know. They'd no fucking idea what the band was for... sorry, carry on. I was having a bit of a rant there...

Mojo:

I suppose that answers some of the question. I was wondering how you felt about all that...

Roger:

Well, you know... Rick used to do interviews, and say that he didn't really care about lyrics. I used to read this stuff and think, "Well, speak for yourself". That did get frustrating. I think he liked to think of himself as a kind of musical purist. As did Dave. And part of the problems Dave and I encountered later on, and the reason that we couldn't work with each other any longer is that Dave also saw music as a simple and pure thing, and he rather objected to the fact that I wanted to smear philosophy and politics all over it, and it wasn't the correct vehicle for my rantings and ravings. It wasn't until we split up and I left the group that he started thinking that he couldn't continue without at least attempting something similar to what we'd done when we were together. But that's another story.

Mojo:

When you went back through Dark Side... for it's re-release last year, did you think there was anything you'd have changed, given the chance?

Roger:

No. I was very happy with the way it sounded. The only dialectic that came up was a suggestion from Dave Gilmour that perhaps the spoken word elements should have been quieter - which is exactly what you would have expected. I thought it sounded great.

Mojo:

Between the success of Dark Side... and the writing of songs like "Have a Cigar" and "Welcome to the Machine," a great deal of that success seems to have turned very sour, very quickly. Do you recall that being a rapid process?

Roger:

Oh, yeah. First of all, if I'm honest, I have to accept that, at that point, I became a capitalist. You can call yourself what the fuck you like, but if you suddenly get a lot of money, the impression is that you're a capitalist. You can't pretend... you can still espouse humanitarian ideas, which I still do, but things are that bit more complicated. Did that trouble me? Only to the point that I had to decide whether to give it away to poor people or invest it. I decided to give some away to poor people and invest the rest. I was faced with that dilemma, coming from the background I did. I could no long pretend that I was a true socialist, but 25% of my money went into a charitable trust that I've run ever since. And 35% goes to the government in tax, so I keep 40 % of whatever it is. I'm glad I give some of it away. I don't make a song and dance about it. One of the good things about being a capitalist, is that you become a philanthropist, to a certain extent.

Mojo:

Animals is particularly fascinating in its historical context. It uses similar vocabulary to the one you could hear in punk.

Roger:

Does it? I never really listened to much punk music, I have to say.

Mojo:

Well, it's a little bit nihilistic, quite misanthropic. It has that Year Zero quality to it.

Roger:

It does yeah.

Mojo:

Did you feel any sense of common cause with the punks, or understand why they were doing what they did?

Roger:

Do you know, I've never been very interested in modern music. I might find some of it enjoyable, but it's never really been interesting. I never heard The Clash, and certainly not the Sex Pistols, so I can't really answer that question. As I still am now, I was listening to Neil Young when all that happened. It passed me by. I'll always listen to a new Dylan album. But it takes an awful lot of something for anyone else to break in to what I listen to.

Mojo:

On Animals, were you being deliberately confrontational, trying to elicit a reaction? Or was it more spontaneous than that? You use phrases like "Fucked up old hag..."

Roger:

Yeah, that was aimed at Mary Whitehouse. I was incensed by Mary Whitehouse, as I am by all book-burners and bible-pushers; people who foster that sexual guilt and shame, who try and deny people any opportunity to fulfill their sexual destiny.

Mojo:

By the time you toured that album, and you got to that legendary Montreal spitting incident, would a word like 'despair' fit how you were feeling?

Roger:

[Decisively] Yes. There's an exhibit based on The Wall at the Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and they asked me for a quote to put up as graffiti on it. And this is what I wrote: "In the old days, pre-Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd played to audiences which, by virtue of their size allowed an intimacy of connection that was magical. However, success overtook us and by 1977 we were playing in football stadiums. The magic crushed beneath the weight of numbers, we were becoming addicted to the trappings of popularity.

I found myself increasingly alienated in that atmosphere of avarice and ego until one night in the Olympic Stadium, Montreal. Some crazed teenage fan was clawing his way up the storm netting that separated us from the human cattle pen in front of the stage, screaming his devotion to the "demi-gods" beyond his reach.

Incensed by his misunderstanding and my own connivance, I spat my frustration in his face. Later that night, back at the hotel, shocked by my behavior, I was faced with a choice. To deny my addiction and embrace that "comfortably numb" but "magic-less" existence or accept the burden of insight, take the road less traveled and embark on the often painful journey to discover who I was and where I fit. The Wall was the picture I drew for myself to help me make that choice."

That's a good summation of it.

Mojo:

Did you ever listen to "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and "The Division Bell"?

Roger:

Yeah, just once on each occasion. I mean, if you read that part of Timothy White's Rock Lives that's devoted to that story, it's all there. The fact that he (Gilmour) went through 14 different writers and so on. He was ringing round everyone in the industry, saying, "It's got to be a Pink Floyd record, it's got to have a central concept." There wasn't much there. Maybe the odd moment when I heard something I thought, well, maybe I'd have done something with that.

I was slightly angry that they managed to get away with it. I was bemused and a bit disappointed that the 'Great Unwashed...' couldn't tell the fucking difference. Well, actually they can. I'm being unkind. There are a huge number of people who can tell the difference, but there were also a large number of people who couldn't.

And then when the second one came out... well, it had got totally Spinal Tap by then. Lyrics went written by the new wife. Well, they are! I mean, give me a fucking break! Come on. And what a nerve to call that Pink Floyd. It was an awful record.

Mojo:

Is Nick Mason's book any good?

Roger:

Yes. It's a very nice, light read. And it's got a lot of facts in it. I would recommend it to anybody - but you know, don't take it too seriously. He's very good on the archive side of things and it's packed with great pictures. It doesn't tell the truth... [laughs] or the bits of the truth that I'd have told. There's a lot of, "We did this" and "We came up with that", which doesn't seem quite right. It's a bit bland. With any rock biography, you'd usually expect there to be some stuff about sex, and he doesn't go near that, which I found quite strange. Nick and I are very close friends now... maybe this interview will create a new schism, but I hope not. We've agreed to disagree on a lot of things. That's been very important.

Mojo:

Do you anticipate any thaw between you and Pink Floyd in the future?

Roger:

What, do you mean between me and Dave? I can't think why. I don't miss him, put it that way. I think we're both quite truculent individuals, and I don't think that's going to change.