2012/03/31
2012/03/30
2012/03/29
Roger Waters Interview - BBC Radio 4 (2010)
When Pink Floyd star Roger Waters was five months old, his father was killed in the Second World War.
Years later as Roger enjoyed amazing success, he was haunted by a recurring dream about murdering someone, which he only began to understand when he was much older.
Roger Waters was talking to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs broadcast on Sunday 29 May 2010 at 1115 BST on BBC Radio 4, repeated 0900 BST on Friday 3 June 2010
2012/03/28
Pink Floyd: making of "Brain Damage"
Rare clip of the group in the studio discussing the music, production and themselves. Some great effects by Gilmour!!! (Does not include "Eclipse")
PINK FLOYD - Brain Damage
Brain Damage lyrics
(Waters)
The lunatic is on the grass.
The lunatic is on the grass.
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.
Got to keep the loonies on the path.
The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
"I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvelous! HaHaHa!"
PINK FLOYD - Brain Damage
Brain Damage lyrics
(Waters)
The lunatic is on the grass.
The lunatic is on the grass.
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.
Got to keep the loonies on the path.
The lunatic is in the hall.
The lunatics are in my hall.
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
The lunatic is in my head.
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear.
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.
"I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvelous! HaHaHa!"
2012/03/26
Roger Waters interview for Absolute Radio: The Wall 2011
Roger Waters chats with Absolute Radio's Russ Williams about his latest 'The Wall' tour in 2011. Roger discusses the history of the making of the album, falling out with his band mates, and using modern technology to create The Wall. Watch more great video interviews right now at www.absoluteradio.co.uk
2012/03/25
Roger Waters - We Shall Overcome
"Over the new year 2009-2010, an international group of 1500 men and women from 42 nations went to Egypt to join a Freedom March to Gaza. They did this to protest the current blockade of Gaza. To protest the fact that the people of Gaza live in a virtual prison. To protest the fact that a year after the terror attack by Israeli armed forces destroyed most of their homes, hospitals, schools, and other public buildings, they have no possibility to rebuild because their borders are closed. The would be Freedom Marchers wanted to peacefully draw attention to the predicament of the Palestinian population of Gaza. The Egyptian government, (funded to the tune of $2.1 billion a year, by us, the US tax payers), would not allow the marchers to approach Gaza. How lame is that? And how predictable! I live in the USA and during this time Dec 25th 2009-Jan3rd 2010 I saw no reference to Gaza or the Freedom March or the multi national protesters gathered there. Anyway I was moved, in the circumstances, to record a new version of " We shall overcome". It seems appropriate."
Roger Waters
Lyrics
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Deep in my heart
I do believe
That we shall overcome
Some day
And we'll walk hand in hand
we'll walk hand in hand
we'll walk hand in hand one day
Deep in my heart
I do believe
That we'll walk hand in hand
One day
And we'll break down the prison walls
We will tear down those prison walls
Together we will tear down the prison walls on that day
Deep in my heart
I do believe
That we will tear down all those prison walls
On that day
Deep in my heart
I do believe
That we will tear down those prison walls
On that day
And the truth will set us free
The truth will set us free
The truth will set us all free
On that day
And deep in my heart
I do believe
That the truth will set us all free
And we shall overcome
On that day
2012/03/24
Interview for Rolling Stone Magazine - December 16, 2011
"Roger Waters Talks Arab Spring, Obama and the Future of 'The Wall' Tour"
By ANDY GREENE
DECEMBER 16, 2011 11:55 AM ET
Roger Waters has spent the last year traveling the world on his Wall tour, all the while marveling at the massive protest movements popping up all over the planet. With 2011 winding down, we checked in with the former Pink Floyd to hear his hopes and fears about the future of the Middle East and America, his disappointment in Obama and his plans for the stadium leg of The Wall tour hitting American baseball stadiums this summer.
(Q)You've traveled the world this year on your Wall tour. Have you seen things that have made you optimistic about the future?
Roger Waters: I tend to see it more sitting at my Mac at home. I check out bbc.co.uk and I see what's news and who's doing what. What makes me optimistic, to the extent that I am, is it seems that people are getting more of a voice and it's harder to isolate and crush protest than it used to be. In consequence, it's much harder for the 1 percent here to make the Occupy Wall Street movement go away. I think they will find it harder to crush that genuine outpouring of dissatisfaction with the system in this country, just as it's harder to crush protest in Tunisia or Egypt or Iran or Syria, or anywhere else in the world where the people believe that their government is not giving them a fair crack at the whip.
(Q)Are you disappointed in the Obama presidency?
I'm very, very disappointed by his foreign policy. It obviously goes against everything that I believe. Having said that, it seems that the alternative to re-electing Obama would be such a heinous disaster for this country if you look at the candidates on the other side. I find it hard to find any value in any of them. They are lackeys for the grossest machine . . . to a man and to a woman.
So, I support Obama's attempt to become re-elected. But I hope he will develop bigger cojones and start governing in the way that I, and many of the people who supported him in the last election, would want him to. Just this morning I was looking at some clips on YouTube of the FDR speech in 1936 at Madison Square Garden. It was one of the most engaging and illuminating and stirring pieces of oratory that any of us have ever heard. He stood up and said that he is the most hated man in the world by the military industrial complex.
(Q)Is that the one where he said "I welcome their anger, I embrace their anger!"
He said "I welcome their hatred." He made that wonderful speech about having rolled up his sleeves and actually doing some work. Please, Barack Obama, roll your sleeves up and do something and stop trying to pander to everybody. I think this idea of ruling by consensus and keeping Republicans happy was an enormous mistake.
In these first three years, I think that the surge in Afghanistan was an enormous mistake. I am hopeful that in the next 50 years, successive administrations, particularly if you don't elect the Republicans, may discover that there are new ways for America, declining as it is as an imperial power, to relate to all the other people in the world in a way that will lessen the impact of the "us and them" mentality that has been so obvious in the last century and in the beginning of this century.
(Q)I think of your writings about greed 35 years ago [on Animals]. Things feel so much worse now.
Yeah, so it is. But I think that the bullies who pose and fiddle on the Hill are increasingly becoming exposed. So long as we defend to our last drop of blood the right to protest . . . Well, I say "we," but I'm not an American citizen. But as long as you defend to the last drop of blood your rights under the First Amendment, things could be good.
Also, we mustn't forget about Bradley Manning rotting in prison somewhere for standing up and doing the right thing. We hope that the guy who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib survives, because the death threats were many and he had to change his identity and go live somewhere else. This man is a hero in my book. We have to understand that we're all flawed and the United States needs to be capable of looking at itself in a more realistic way that is has done in the last hundred years.
(Q)The Obama administration has been really focusing some of their efforts on these drone plane attacks, seemingly much more so than Bush ever was.
In 1992 I made an album called Amused To Death that actually talks about that in a prescient way, except that I was using it as a symbol. I sing, "Uncle Sam feeds 10 trillion in change/Into the total entertainment video game." These kids, who are sitting in Idaho or wherever, direct these drone attacks. It's like a video game gone crazy. And the fact that they killed 20 Pakistani troops a few days ago and nobody seems very finally concerned is weirdly callous and can do nothing but enormous harm to your country.
(Q)The calculation is that putting them on trial causes all sorts of political problems, so it's easier just to kill them.
The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights, or that there should be an international court of criminal justice. I think it may be the only country left that does not recognize the idea of an international court of justice, so no American can ever be held accountable for a war crime should he commit one.
But these things are becoming more more transparent. What's going on in Gaza and the West Bank and the Israeli foreign policy, which is propped up by successive U.S. administrations, is beginning to come under scrutiny as well. The fact of that matter is that a large majority of American citizens do not support the United States vis-a-vis Israel, but nobody is allowed to say so, because if they do, the whole weight of the Anti-Defamation League and the Alan Dershowitzes of this world come down on you and people are scared to speak out, I think.
(Q)Twenty years in the future, when people look back at 2011, what will stand out?
What pops into my head is the Arab Spring. Also, it's the fact that information is becoming more available to us. I think that the negative influences who would keep information from us are weakening, and the forces that are trying to get information out are strengthening. So, you might take issue with personality issues with someone like Julian Assange, but we have to thank all of the whistle blowers everywhere who take the rest to bring us the information we should have. So that's one of the things that has changed this year. Wikileaks is a fundamentally important thing, and we should not allow it to go away.
(Q)Moving onto music, is the stadium leg of the Wall tour going to be very different than the indoor legs?
I desperately wanted to bring this tour to South America, but they don't play basketball or ice hockey down there, and consequentially they don't have arenas. So you can play in a club or a soccer stadium. I'm playing in soccer stadiums, and I've decided that the arena show that I produced of The Wall is not inclusive enough to play in a soccer stadium. We'd made the wall a lot wider, so I've been working on the content. I've worked on ways that the audience can see that tiny bloke a long way way without it being the standard, "Let's put up a couple of IMAX screens and they can watch us singing and playing the guitar out of sync."
I'm really excited about the shows next year. In fact, when I finish this interview, I shall dash off to the editing suite where I go everyday to work on this stuff. In North America, I think we're doing nine baseball stadiums and 30 arena shows in markets that we weren't able to cover the last time we came through, so we're doing 40 shows. I'm really looking forward to it. The audiences were so amazing when I was here last year.
(Q)This has been a really long tour. Do you think it's going to be your last big tour?
I don't know. They wanted me to go back to Europe after I finish this August and I've said, "No, I'm not going to do that." But The Wall is an extraordinarily satisfying piece to perform, so it may well be that I go back to Europe in 2013. I have no idea whether it's the last big tour. I just don't know.
Fromwww.rollingstone.com
By ANDY GREENE
DECEMBER 16, 2011 11:55 AM ET
Roger Waters has spent the last year traveling the world on his Wall tour, all the while marveling at the massive protest movements popping up all over the planet. With 2011 winding down, we checked in with the former Pink Floyd to hear his hopes and fears about the future of the Middle East and America, his disappointment in Obama and his plans for the stadium leg of The Wall tour hitting American baseball stadiums this summer.
(Q)You've traveled the world this year on your Wall tour. Have you seen things that have made you optimistic about the future?
Roger Waters: I tend to see it more sitting at my Mac at home. I check out bbc.co.uk and I see what's news and who's doing what. What makes me optimistic, to the extent that I am, is it seems that people are getting more of a voice and it's harder to isolate and crush protest than it used to be. In consequence, it's much harder for the 1 percent here to make the Occupy Wall Street movement go away. I think they will find it harder to crush that genuine outpouring of dissatisfaction with the system in this country, just as it's harder to crush protest in Tunisia or Egypt or Iran or Syria, or anywhere else in the world where the people believe that their government is not giving them a fair crack at the whip.
(Q)Are you disappointed in the Obama presidency?
I'm very, very disappointed by his foreign policy. It obviously goes against everything that I believe. Having said that, it seems that the alternative to re-electing Obama would be such a heinous disaster for this country if you look at the candidates on the other side. I find it hard to find any value in any of them. They are lackeys for the grossest machine . . . to a man and to a woman.
So, I support Obama's attempt to become re-elected. But I hope he will develop bigger cojones and start governing in the way that I, and many of the people who supported him in the last election, would want him to. Just this morning I was looking at some clips on YouTube of the FDR speech in 1936 at Madison Square Garden. It was one of the most engaging and illuminating and stirring pieces of oratory that any of us have ever heard. He stood up and said that he is the most hated man in the world by the military industrial complex.
(Q)Is that the one where he said "I welcome their anger, I embrace their anger!"
He said "I welcome their hatred." He made that wonderful speech about having rolled up his sleeves and actually doing some work. Please, Barack Obama, roll your sleeves up and do something and stop trying to pander to everybody. I think this idea of ruling by consensus and keeping Republicans happy was an enormous mistake.
In these first three years, I think that the surge in Afghanistan was an enormous mistake. I am hopeful that in the next 50 years, successive administrations, particularly if you don't elect the Republicans, may discover that there are new ways for America, declining as it is as an imperial power, to relate to all the other people in the world in a way that will lessen the impact of the "us and them" mentality that has been so obvious in the last century and in the beginning of this century.
(Q)I think of your writings about greed 35 years ago [on Animals]. Things feel so much worse now.
Yeah, so it is. But I think that the bullies who pose and fiddle on the Hill are increasingly becoming exposed. So long as we defend to our last drop of blood the right to protest . . . Well, I say "we," but I'm not an American citizen. But as long as you defend to the last drop of blood your rights under the First Amendment, things could be good.
Also, we mustn't forget about Bradley Manning rotting in prison somewhere for standing up and doing the right thing. We hope that the guy who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib survives, because the death threats were many and he had to change his identity and go live somewhere else. This man is a hero in my book. We have to understand that we're all flawed and the United States needs to be capable of looking at itself in a more realistic way that is has done in the last hundred years.
(Q)The Obama administration has been really focusing some of their efforts on these drone plane attacks, seemingly much more so than Bush ever was.
In 1992 I made an album called Amused To Death that actually talks about that in a prescient way, except that I was using it as a symbol. I sing, "Uncle Sam feeds 10 trillion in change/Into the total entertainment video game." These kids, who are sitting in Idaho or wherever, direct these drone attacks. It's like a video game gone crazy. And the fact that they killed 20 Pakistani troops a few days ago and nobody seems very finally concerned is weirdly callous and can do nothing but enormous harm to your country.
(Q)The calculation is that putting them on trial causes all sorts of political problems, so it's easier just to kill them.
The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights, or that there should be an international court of criminal justice. I think it may be the only country left that does not recognize the idea of an international court of justice, so no American can ever be held accountable for a war crime should he commit one.
But these things are becoming more more transparent. What's going on in Gaza and the West Bank and the Israeli foreign policy, which is propped up by successive U.S. administrations, is beginning to come under scrutiny as well. The fact of that matter is that a large majority of American citizens do not support the United States vis-a-vis Israel, but nobody is allowed to say so, because if they do, the whole weight of the Anti-Defamation League and the Alan Dershowitzes of this world come down on you and people are scared to speak out, I think.
(Q)Twenty years in the future, when people look back at 2011, what will stand out?
What pops into my head is the Arab Spring. Also, it's the fact that information is becoming more available to us. I think that the negative influences who would keep information from us are weakening, and the forces that are trying to get information out are strengthening. So, you might take issue with personality issues with someone like Julian Assange, but we have to thank all of the whistle blowers everywhere who take the rest to bring us the information we should have. So that's one of the things that has changed this year. Wikileaks is a fundamentally important thing, and we should not allow it to go away.
(Q)Moving onto music, is the stadium leg of the Wall tour going to be very different than the indoor legs?
I desperately wanted to bring this tour to South America, but they don't play basketball or ice hockey down there, and consequentially they don't have arenas. So you can play in a club or a soccer stadium. I'm playing in soccer stadiums, and I've decided that the arena show that I produced of The Wall is not inclusive enough to play in a soccer stadium. We'd made the wall a lot wider, so I've been working on the content. I've worked on ways that the audience can see that tiny bloke a long way way without it being the standard, "Let's put up a couple of IMAX screens and they can watch us singing and playing the guitar out of sync."
I'm really excited about the shows next year. In fact, when I finish this interview, I shall dash off to the editing suite where I go everyday to work on this stuff. In North America, I think we're doing nine baseball stadiums and 30 arena shows in markets that we weren't able to cover the last time we came through, so we're doing 40 shows. I'm really looking forward to it. The audiences were so amazing when I was here last year.
(Q)This has been a really long tour. Do you think it's going to be your last big tour?
I don't know. They wanted me to go back to Europe after I finish this August and I've said, "No, I'm not going to do that." But The Wall is an extraordinarily satisfying piece to perform, so it may well be that I go back to Europe in 2013. I have no idea whether it's the last big tour. I just don't know.
Fromwww.rollingstone.com
2012/03/23
Next shows in March and April 2012
2012-03-25 – Roger Waters – Estádio Beira Rio – Porto Alegre – Brazil
2012-03-29 – Roger Waters – Estadio Olimpico – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
2012-03-31 – Roger Waters – Estádio do Morumbi – Sao Paulo – Brazil
2012-04-01 – Roger Waters – Estádio do Morumbi – Sao Paulo – Brazil
2012-04-27 – Roger Waters – Foro De Sol – Mexico City – Mexico
2012-04-28 – Roger Waters – Foro De Sol – Mexico City – Mexico
Roger Waters, Santiago, Chile 2012-03-03
2012-03-29 – Roger Waters – Estadio Olimpico – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
2012-03-31 – Roger Waters – Estádio do Morumbi – Sao Paulo – Brazil
2012-04-01 – Roger Waters – Estádio do Morumbi – Sao Paulo – Brazil
2012-04-27 – Roger Waters – Foro De Sol – Mexico City – Mexico
2012-04-28 – Roger Waters – Foro De Sol – Mexico City – Mexico
Roger Waters Interview w/Chris Salewicz, June 1987
Chris Salewicz: When was the last time you had a single out? It must have been "Another Brick In The Wall."
RogerWaters: No, it was the "Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking." And the only other significant single in my career was "Money" from Dark Side Of The Moon. That was the only other one that made any impact at all.
CS: What about the early hits, Arnold Layne and See Emily Play?
RW: Well, they were Syd's.
CS: Do you really look on them as that?
RW: Oh yes. They were his songs. Actually, we did release one of my songs as a Pink Floyd single short after he had left, a thing called "Point Me At The Sky." And there was a Syd Barrett failure before that called "Apples And Oranges." But I remember that by the time we reached the elevated heights that we did not long after, our sense of snotty purity (laughs) was so great that we wouldn't even have a single out.
CS: It was very 'uncool' in those days to release singles. Led Zeppelin always refused to put them out.
RW: Oh yes, it was very uncool. That's why we wouldn't do it. But we all get older.
CS: When did you asume the leadership of the Pink Floyd? Was it when Syd went?
RW: Yes, It was straight after we had split up with Syd. I'm sure you would get arguments about that from the other 'boys', but I simply took responsibility, largely because no-one else seemed to want to do it, and that is graphically illustrated by the fact that I started to write most of the material from then on, I'm perfectly happy being a leader. In fact, I know I can be an oppressive personality because I bubble with ideas and schemes, and in a way it was easier for the others simply to go along with me. We rarely used to see each other socially, although I used to get on with Nick Mason alright. For a limited time, in the early days of the group, we did mix socially. Because there is something rather appealing about a group together on the road. But that soon palls. And things like families make sure that cycle comes to an end.
CS: Was it difficult replacing Syd as a leader of the Pink Floyd? Did you feel very much in his shadow?
RW: Well, replacing Syd as leader of the Pink Floyd was OK. But Syd as a writer was a one-off. I could never aspire to his crazed insights and perceptions. In fact, for a long time I wouldn't have dreamt of claiming any insights whatsoever. But I'd always credit Syd with the connection he made to his personal unconscious and to the collective, group conscious. It's taken me fifteen years to get anywhere near there. But what enabled Syd to see things in the way he did? It's like why is an artist an artist? Artists simply do feel and see things in a different way to other people. In a way it's a blessing, but it can also be a terrible curse. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be earned from it but often it's also a terrible burden. In spite the fact that he was clearly out of control when making his two albums, some of the work is staggeringly evocative. Dave Gilmour and I worked with him on the first one [The Madcap Laughs]; there was a backlog of material he'd written before he flipped. It's the humanity of it all that is so impressive. It's about deeply felt values and beliefs and feelings. Maybe that's what Dark Side Of The Moon was aspiring to. A similar feeling. That's what I get from the musicians who I really care for: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young - that intense passion.
CS: What is Syd Barrett doing now?
RW: I last saw him about ten years ago. But my mother still lives in Cambridge and I get to hear about him from time to time. He's not doing very much at all.
What happened with Syd was that we were being managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner of Blackhill Enterprises, for whom I still have a very soft spot. When Syd flipped I had this theory that we could go on with Syd still being a member of the group if he could become Brian Wilson and simply be a backroom boy. But Syd had other ideas: he wanted to get in two sax-players and a girl singer. To which we resolutely said no!
But Peter and Andrew both thought it couldn't happen without Syd and stuck with him. Which is how the Pink Floyd came to be managed by Steve O'Rourke. Bryan Morrison was our agent when we were with Blackhill, and Steve O'Rourke was a booker who worked for him, Bryan Morrison wanted to sell the group to NEMS (Brian Epstein's Company), but we'd never had an official contract with him. So the night before the deal with NEMS was to go through, he persuaded us to sign a contract: "just a legality, boys - we won't be able to legally book the Amarican tour otherwise, so you'll never tour the States." The next day he sold the agency. One lives and learns. Steve O'Rourke went to NEMS as part of a package. He ran a management department at NEMS, and when we left NEMS we took Steve with us. After all, he was about ten times cheaper than a Robert Stigwood - those were the days when managers would try and get forty per cent of the gross.
And it all worked very well for quite a long time. Steve is an effective hustler, a man in a man's world. And we should be jolly pleased with each other. And to give him his due Steve O'Rourke never gave up his job of trying to get me to fill stadiums. But his attitude was rather summed up when I saw him giving an interview on TV, when he was still managing me. He'd taken on the task of managing a British Le Mans racing team. Steve said (adopts Arthur Daley-like voice), Management is management. It doesn't matter whether it's a pop group, a motor-racing team or biscuits. I thought, 'Oh, you arsehole.' He'd obviously got a little carried away with his role.
CS: Why do you think Dark Side Of The Moon was such a colossally successful record?
RW: It's very well-balanced and well-constructed, dynamically and musically, and I think the humanity of its approach is appealing. It's satisfying. I think also that it was the first album of that kind. People often quote S F Sorrow by The Pretty Things as being from a similar mould - they were both done in the same studio at about the same time - but I think it was probably the first completely cohesive album that was made. A concept album, mate! I always thought it would be hugely succesful. I had the same feelings about "The Wall". Towards the end of the studio work, at about the time I'd be putting the tracks together, there was a very good feeling of satisfaction on both records. You'd stand back from them and they'd each feel very complete.
But of course, Dark Side Of The Moon finished the Pink Floyd off once and for all. To be that succesful is the aim of every group. And once you've cracked it, it's all over. In hindsight, I think the Pink Floyd was finished as long ago as that.
CS: Apart from that, what were the main problems associated with such immense success?
RW: Mainly the one of what to do with all the money! You go through this thing where you think of all the good you could do with it by giving it away. But, in the end, you decide to keep it!
CS: How comfortable are you about making solo records? Does it concern you that you will probably not be as succesful pon the same immense scale as the Pink Floyd?
RW: Yes, but it's a concern I try to resist. But I confess that I harbour a fantasy that there might be enough in my writing - because my writing is so passive - that has something to do with some sort of group unconcious that I might make another record that would appeal to millions. I always feel it is a kind of extraodinary coincidence that it happened twice with the Pink Floyd, with Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall.
CS: You didn't see that as a logical continuation?
RW: Well, no . I mean, yes I do, I see it very much as a logical continuation in terms of the writing involved. But the fact that those records got to far more than the 8 to 14-year-olds that are supposed to be the record market, that they both reached some part of human beings that made them rush out and buy them in unbelievable quantities, is extraodinary. And you can't explain it simply by the fact that each had a hit single and that they had some good tunes. There are masses and masses of records that have good tunes.
But very occasionally you get a record that strikes some chord that transcends generation gaps. Rock 'n' Roll is growing up, and its original audience is getting older with it. And if you can provide stuff that is simulating enough for grown-ups to buy then they'll buy it.
CS: I find it interesting that you define your work as "passive": that certainly is one of its dominant qualities - it doesn't bludgeon you around the head.
RW: I wouldn't say the work is necessarily passive, but the act of the writing is extremely passive. And at certain points on each record that passivity seeps through. The activity is certainly passive. I never come steaming in here and say (Basil Fawlty- like voice), 'right, I'm going to write a song about Margaret Thatcher.' If I get up in the morning and I'm lying in the bath and I can feel myself going into a strange, detached, glazed- over state, then I know it's worth coming in here and sitting quietly with the biro and pad, and whatever instrument - well, it's always a piano or a guitar. And I just sit here until the song appears.
I can write at almost any time of day. But it's almost never late at night. It can be difficult for the people who are around you, because you have to be very blank as far as anyone else is concerned.
CS: You were talking about how your "passive" writing comes from the unconcious. Do you read much philosophy or psychology?
RW: No. I'm quite interested inthose areas but I was put off books early on, and I find it very difficult to read. As a child I never got into the habit of reading. I went through a period when I was a teenager of reading people like James Joyce, because it was hip to do so. Then I got a very basic grounding of what there was in literature that might be enjoyable. But now, if I'm sitting on the beach I'd rather be reading A Ship Must Die or something of the nature. I'm very fond of those very involved English Second World War naval stories in the Hornblower tradition.
CS: You studied Architecture. Were you good at Art?
RW: Not at school, no. Now I can draw a bit. I feel quite strongly about education. I went to school in Cambridge, one of those grammer schools that Thatcher is going to bring back, where I was considered without question to be a complete twat at almost everything, particularly English. And the Art teacher was so ineffectual that he was practically not there at all.
Most of the teachers were absolute swines, and the school was only concerned with University entrance, particularly Oxbridge. It was a real battery farm. I hated it. All they would do was look at your most obvious aptitude and cram you into that pigeon-hole. I found Physics and things like that quite easy to cope with and so I was pushed down that road. When I left school I was all set to go to Manchester University to do Mechanical Engineering. But suddenly the thought of another three years of the sixth form was more than I could stand. So I took a year off. My career choice was made by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology where I took a whole bunch of aptitude tests - so I was completely passive about that as well. They told me I would do well at Architecture, which didn't sound as dull as Mechanical Engineering. So I said OK. Then I had to learn to draw, because they wanted a portfolio of drawings for your interview.
CS: They didn't say anything about music?
RW: Oh no, they didn't spot that. But music is only mathematics anyway. It is another way of interpreting maths. Musical intervals are also mathematical intervals. If you double the frequency of a note it rises by an octave. We call it music, but our brain is going, Oh, that's twice as fast as that! But let me say that I never saw any music in maths. It was all complete drudgery to me. I was completely uninterested in it. I could never see the beauty of mathematical relationships. I started studying Architecture but they slung me out after two years for refusing to attend History of Architecture lectures. I was very bloshie. I must have been horrible to teach. But the History lecture that I came up against was very reactionary, so it was a fair battle. I said I wouldn't do exams because the guy refused to talk to me. He'd tell us to sit down and copy a drawing off a blackboard. And I asked him if he could explain why, because I couldn't see the point in copying something off a blackboard that he was copying of a testbook. It was just like school. I couldn't handle it. I'd hoped I'd escaped all that. When you go to university, you expect to be treated like little grown-ups.
But there are architects who are involved in natural materials and in domestic architecture, especially in America where there is that woodsy thing which has developed from the California A- frame mentality, which is very easy to sneer at but is actually very good.
I mean (he touches the wooden frame of the mixing desk), this piece of mahogany here, for example: it would be very nice to be in this house for twenty years and watch its wear and tear. You can derive great pleasure from looking at a piece of wood if you live with it all the time. That's what is so attractive about bread-boards hanging in kitchens - they really look very nice as they begin to gradually get hacked and worn. There's something very nice about the human body slowly eroding a piece of timber. I always like pieces of wood that are worn from having had horses tethered to them and that have become lovely and smooth, allowing you to see the grain.
CS: There's a rather obvious connection to be made here- the architecture student who went to compose The Wall...
RW: Well, maybe. Maybe the architectural training to look at things helped me to visualise my feelings of alienation from rock 'n' roll audiences. Which was the starting point for The Wall. The fact that it then embodied an autobiographical narrative was kind of secondary to the main thing which was a theatrical statement in which I was saying, "Isn't this fucking awful? Here I am up onstage and there you all are down there and isn't it horrible! What the fuck are we all doing here?"
CS: I thought that, as a theatrical work, The Wall was marvellous. When I saw it at Earls Court, I thought it was the first rock 'n' roll show I'd seen that made full and proper use of one of those arenas.
RW: I put it together with Gerry Scarfe, who designed all the puppets and made the animation with me, and of course with Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park, who did all the detailed design work of the set. They designed the brick; they built the wall; they designed the man lifts that went up and down at the back so that people could actually build the thing. Mark designed the way it fell over, and Jonathan did all the engineering, Gerry's puppets and animation were half of the show.
We were all working furiously up until the first night. And first time we had the wall up across the arena with some fil on it was four days before the first show. I went and walked all the way around the top row of seats at the back of the arena. And my heart was beating furiously and I was getting shivers right up and down my spine. And I thought it was so fantastic that people could actually see and hear something from everywhere they were seated. Because after the 1977 tour I became seriously deranged - or maybe arranged - about stadium gigs. Because I do think they are awful.
They are about statistics. For the public, it seems to me, the enjoyment comes from two things. I think it's partly that they are in the presence of the legend - whether it's Bruce Springsteen or another proven brand name doesn't really matter so long as it's the presence of someone you can identify as being 'legendary'. There's also the statistical thing of being able to say, Yeah, there were 85,000 of us here: you couldn't move. You couldn't get to the bar (guffaws with laughter). We all had to piss standing up, crushed together. It was fucking great!
And, of course, onstage and backstage all that's going on is, Do you know how much we've grossed, boys, how many T-shirts we've sold? That's absolutely it. That's all it's about - money. And you go down in the Guiness Book Of Records for having played before the biggest audiences ever blah-blah-blah. And...oh dear, fuck that, I mean, alright, I can understand that motivation. But I don't like it.
CS: When was the first time you ever played stadiums?
RW: 1977
CS: How did that actually feel? Which was the first one that you ever played?
RW: I honestly can't remember, (pause). We did Anaheim, JFK, Philadelphia...a whole load of them. And the final one was the Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Before that we did Soldiers' Field in Chicago. Before the gig started I went up and stood on the bleachers at the back of the stage and looked down at the audience. And Steve O'Rourke came up and stood beside me and he said, Guess how many people are in here? I said, I dunno. And he said, sixty-three thousand. But by this time I'd done enough big shows to know what sixty thousand people looked like, And I looked down and said, No. There's at least eighty thousand, if not a hundred thousand. He said, I'll go and check. And the box office told him it was completely sold out to an audience of sixty-three thousand.
So we immediately rented a helicopter, a photographer and a attorney and photographed it from the air, with affidavits from the helicopter pilot and the attorney, sworn, sealed and delivered. And it turned out that there were ninety-five thousand people there. So where were the thirty-two thousand people? Six hundred and forty thousand dollars!
CS: But I heard that the rest of the Floyd wanted to do The Wall tour in stadiums. And that was one of the reasons you ultimately knocked the Pink Floyd on the head...
RW: Yes, in 1980 when we finished in New York, Larry Maggid, a Philadelphia promoter - I remember him promoting us there at The Electric Factory when we were supporting Savoy Brown - offered us a guaranteed million dollars a show plus expenses to go and do two dates at JFK Stadium with The Wall. To truck straight from New York, where we'd been playing Nassau Collosseum, to Philadelphia. And (laughs) I wouldn't do it. I had to go through the whole story with the other members. I said, "You've all read my explanations of what The Wall is about. It's three years since we did that last stadium and I saw then that I would never do one again. And The Wall is entirely sparked off by how awful that was and how I didn't feel that the public or the band or anyone got anything out of it that was worthwhile. And that's why we've produced this show strictly for arenas where everyone does get something out of it that is worthwhile. Blah-blah-blah. And, I ain't fuckin' going!"
So there was alot of talk about whether Andy Bown could sing my part. Oh, you may laugh - this is what's happening now, isn't it? And in the end they bottled out. They didn't have the balls to go through with it at that point.
CS: So that was presumably a crucial incident in terms of the ultimate break-up of the group.
RW: Ummm...I didn't see it as that at the time. It was just the way the band was. I always made those decisions, so it didn't seem strange at all. Now, of course, you can see the irony of it. But at the time it seemed perfectly natural.
CS: In fact, the live Wall show did seem like a real piece of conceptual art, which would have been impossible to reproduce in a larger setting.
RW: Certainly that's how I saw it. There was an attempt made to put it on to video, and I have consistently stamped on any moves to get that video out because it does not do justice to what was a very theatrical event. Maybe in twenty years time, as sort of archive material, I might be prepared to release it. But I quite like the fact that the people who went to the shows copped it for what it meant to be, where it was meant to be, and nobody has been allowed to sell a third-rate, tacky version on video.
CS: Of course, almost from the very start the visuals, the total presentation, were part of the Pink Floyd's live presence.
RW: It's always been there. I remember the Games For May concert we did at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in May 1967. I was working in this dank, dingy basement off the Harrow Road, with an old Ferrograph. I remember sitting there recording edge tones off cymbals for the performance - later that became the beginning of Saucerful Of Secrets. In those days you could get away with stuff like chasing clockwork toy cars around the stage with a microphone. For Games For May I also made "bird" noises recorded on the old Ferrograph at half-speed, to be played in the theatre's foyer as the audience was coming in. I was always interested in the possibilities of rock 'n' roll, how to fill the space between the audience and the idea with more than just guitars and vocals.
CS: Then there was the giant inflatable pig in 1977 that slipped its moorings at Battersea Power Station and was spotted by an airline pilot at 40,000 feet.
RW: The pig was specifically for the concerts that went with the Animals record. Actually, I think the 'boys' thought I'd gone the way of Syd when I said that we needed a giant inflatable family and a load of inflatable animals.
CS: You've always been perceived as a bit miserable...
RW: I don't think the humour of the work has ever really escaped in the way it might have. The political subject matter on top of it has been generally dour. I suppose I have always appeared as a rather melancholy person. But I'm not. My situation is like the opposite of the cliche of the comedian who when he's not performing is a miserable sod.
Hopefully this Radio KAOS show will have a similar effect to The Wall. It's the same team, although Gerry Scarfe isn't involved in this one. I've toyed with the idea of playing in a legitimate theatre but I've shied away from it because I suspect that to me rock 'n' roll would seem just as uncomfortable in a 1,500 seater with a proscenium arch as it does in an 80,000 seat stadium. The arena feels like a good place to be. You can put a decent-sized sound system in and make it loud without hurting people. It's going to be a travelling radio show. So it will be like being in Radio KAOS with Jim Ladd providing links between all the songs, and my Bleeding Heart band being the live band inside the radio station. We hope to have a dialogue with the audience who'll be able to make calls to the stage from phone booths in the auditorium.
CS: What is the central theme of the Radio KAOS album?
RW: Included in this program is a map of the northern hemisphere, showing all the western listening devices, where they are and what they are, and including an exploded map of South Wales where BILLY, the main character, comes from, and an exploded map of LA, where he goes to. It's a bit like the map in the frontispiece of Winnie The Pooh, in that it has dotted lines showing Billy's route, where great-uncle David's house is, and where Radio KAOS is in Laurel Canyon. It is lend credence to the idea that in there somewhere is a story, if you care to search for it.
To answer your question of what the main themes of the record are, Ian Ritchie, who produced the record, is quite distressed that I didn't call it Home, which for a long time was the working title, because one of the things that the record is about is what home is. Is home keeping out of the weather? Being reasonably well fed? Being safe? Is home doing those things in the context of a family? We all think we understand what we mean by the idea of home. But is home the most important thing to a human being in the sense of belonging to a certain thing or person? Having that sense of security and the feeling you are not going to be moved on or blown to pieces? The feeling that you have the right to a continous existence within the context of the society to which you belong from the moment you are born to the moment you die in order to arrange yourself into a good shape to die in?
I don't know. I know there is a utopian idea that the possibility exists for communities to exist where people try to look after one another, and co-operate with one another, in the hope that they can get from the cradle to the grave, and at some point along the way feel fulfilled. And that we can reduce the percentage possibility of some truly appalling trauma, be it the Bomb, AIDS, a minor invasion, or simply being told you have no worth, we don't need you, piss off. I just feel we could be doing a lot better than we are if we off-load the idea that the only route to progress, the cause of human happiness, is competition.
I'am concerned with the idea in this piece that rampant, unrestricted market forces are trampling over everybody's fucking lives and making the world a horrible place to live in and also increasing the potential risk of us all blowing ourselves up because we've become so frustrated in our efforts to compete with each other. Which is why I have great concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and why I think it essential that Europe becomes a nuclear-free zone. Because one of these people who think they're not getting a fair slice of the cake is going to get hold of these weapons and fucking well let them off. What's Reagan going to do if one of his frigates is blown up by Gaddafi using a nuclear weapon? I hate to think. They've already gone out and quite happily bombed Tripoli. In the preamble to this record I talk about that, because one of the other parallel concerns in the record is the idea of politics as entertainment. The idea that by isolating the high- profile enemy like Gaddafi you can entertain the electorate into polling booths to put the X in the right place is what I call the soap opera of state.
CS: Your first record after Pink Floyd was The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking. How did that sell?
RW: The record sold six hundred thousand copies. But the Hitchhiker tour sold appallingly in Europe. Even in London I had to use almost all the money in advertising to get people to buy tickets. I cancelled loads of shows. And my budget was based on selling out loads of shows. So I was about four hundred grand down at the end.
CS: You had that tax problem with the Pink Floyd. Did that severely hit you?
RW: Oh yes, It was a company called Norton Warburg, run by a guy called Andrew Warburg. The idea was to take gross income and run it through a finance company to protect it from the immediate payment of tax on the grounds that it was being used to finance venture capital situation. It was all legal. But what Norton Warburg did was to move money from account to account and take huge management fees each time they moved it. We were going bankrupt. We lost a couple of million quid - nearly everything we'd made from Dark Side Of The Moon. Then we discovered the Inland Revenue might come and ask for us 83 per cent of the money we had lost. Which we didn't have.
So we had gone from fourteen-years-olds with ten quid guitars and fantasies of being rich and famous, and made the dream come true with Dark Side Of The Moon, and then, being greedy and trying to protect it, we'd lost it all. So on those grounds we decided to go abroad to make the next record, The Wall, and try and get some cash to pay this potential tax bill. Mind you, Rick Wright left in the middle of that, in mid-1979. That was the decision of all three of us. I see that he's back with the others now, to make it all seem kosher, like a proper group. But he's on a wage.
CS: There was a story that I heard that was used to illustrate the differences between yourself and the rest of the Pink Floyd. Supposedly, during the making of The Wall, the rest of the members were in the studio somewhere, whilst you stood on a hill in the south of France, playing your instrument which was bounced by satellite into the studio.
RW: That's apocryphal, I'm afraid.
CS: You say you felt very satisfied after completing Dark Side Of The Moon and The Wall. But do you generally feel reasonably pleased with what you've done?
RW: I think Radio KAOS is some of the best stuff I've ever done. Pros And Cons was bitty. The Wall I was very happy with. The Final Cut was absolutely misery to make, although I listened to it of late and I rather like a lot of it. But I don't like my singing on it. You can hear the mad tension running through it all. If you're trying to express something and being prevented from doing it because you're so uptight...It was a horrible time.
We were all fighting like cats and dogs. We were finally realising - or accepting, if you like - that there was no band. It was really being thrust upon us that we were not a band and had not been in accord for a long time. Not since 1975, when we made Wish You Were Here. Even then there were big disagreements about content and how to put the record together.
CS: When did you realise it was finally the end?
RW: Well, there are those who contend it's not over, of course (laughs wryly). But making The Final Cut was misery. We didn't work together at all. I had to do it more or less single-handed, working with Michael Kamen, my co-producer. That's one of the few things that the 'boys' and I agreed about. But no-one alse would do anything on it.
It sold three million copies, which wasn't a lot for the Pink Floyd. And as a consequence, Dave Gilmour went on record as saying, "There you go: I knew he was doing it wrong all along." But it's absolutely ridiculous to judge a record solely on sales. If you're going to use sales as the sole criterion, it makes Grease a better record than Graceland. Anyway, I was in a greengrocer's shop , and this woman of about forty in a fur coat came up to me. She said she thought it was the most moving record she had ever heard. Her father had also been killed in World War II, she explained. And I got back into my car with my three pounds of potatoes and drove home and thought, good enough.
CS: What was your favourite period of the Pink Floyd?
RW: It's hard to remember that far back. But I think probably pre- Dark Side Of The Moon. In those days it was a band. I'm sure that at that point we all agreed about the same things, like, We'll only play the new material. We won't play any of the old material anymore. We'll only do this album and the one before, and that's it. There was a certain integrity and what was important was the work. And that is still exactly how I feel now, although I do confess I do old tunes onstage now. Nevertheless I feel exactly the same about the work. I just don't (laughs) have to argue with anyone about it now. I can just get on with it.
CS: What is your artistic purpose?
RW: There is no purpose. We do whatever we do. You either blow your brains out or get on with something.
From: www.pink-floyd.org
2012/03/22
The Wall interview - song by song - 1979
Transcribed by Jeremy Crampton
Interviewer Tommy Vance.
P I N K F L O Y D -- T H E W A L L (Part I)
Tommy Vance: Where did the idea come from?
Roger Waters: Well, the idea for "The Wall' came from ten years of touring, rock shows, I think, particularly the last few years in '75 and in '77 we were playing to very large audiences, some of whom were our old audience who'd come to see us play, but most of whom were only there for the beer, in big stadiums, and, er, consequently it became rather an alienating experience doing the shows. I became very conscious of a wall between us and our audience and so this record started out as being an expression of those feelings.
TV: But it goes I think a little deeper than that, because the record actually seems to start at the beginning of the character's life.
RW: The story has been developed considerably since then, this was two years ago [1977], I started to write it, and now it's partly about a live show situation--in fact the album starts off in a live show, and then it flashes back and traces a story of a character, if you like of Pink himself, whoever he may be. But initially it just stemmed from shows being horrible.
TV: When you say "horrible" do you mean that really you didn't want to be there?
RW: Yeah, it's all, er, particularly because the people who you're most aware of at a rock show on stage are the front 20 or 30 rows of bodies. And in large situations where you're using what's euphemistically called "festival seating" they tend to be packed together, swaying madly, and it's very difficult to perform under those situations with screaming and shouting and throwing things and hitting each other and crashing about and letting off fireworks and you know?
TV: Uh-huh.
RW: I mean having a wonderful time but, it's a drag to try and play when all that's going on. But, er, I felt at the saem time that it was a situation we'd created ourselves through our own greed, you know, if you play very large venues...the only real reason for playing large venues is to make money.
TV: But surely in your case it wouldn't be economic, or feasible, to play a small venue.
RW: Well, it's not going to be on when we do this show, because this show is going to lose money, but on those tours that I'm talking about; the '75 tour of Europe and England and the '77 tour of England and Europe and America as well, we were making money, we made a lot of money on those tours, because we were playing big venues.
TV: What would you like the audience to do--how would you like the audience to react to your music?
RW: I'm actually happy that they do whatever they feel is necessary because they're only expressing their response to what it's like, in a way I'm saying they're right, you know, that those shows are bad news.
TV: Um.
RW: There is an idea, or there has been an idea for many years abroad that it's a very uplifting and wonderful experience and that there's a great contact between the audience and the perfomrers on the stage and I think that that is not true, I think there've been very many cases, er, it's actually a rather alienating experience.
TV: For the audience?
RW: For everybody.
TV: It's two and a half years since you had an album out and I think people will be interested in knowing how long it's taken you to develop this album.
RW: Right, well we toured, we did a tour which ended I think in July or August '77 and when we finished that tour in the Autumn of that year, that's when I started writing it. It took me a year, no, until the next July, working on myu own, then I had a demo, sort of 90 minutes of stuff, which I played to the rest of the guys and then we all started working on it together, in the October or November of that... October '78, we started working on it.
TV: And you actually ceased recording, I think, in November of this year? [1979]
RW: Yeah. We didn't start recording until the new year, well, till April this year, but we were rehearsing and fiddling about and obviously re-writing a lot. So it's been a long time but we always tend to work very slowly anyway, because, it's difficult.
TV: The first track is "In the Flesh"?
RW: Yeah.
TV: This actually sets up what the character has become.
RW: Yes.
TV: At the end.
RW: Couldn't have put it better myself! It's a reference back to our '77 tour which was called "Pink Floyd in the Flesh."
TV: And then you have a track called "The Thin Ice."
RW: Yeah.
TV: Now, this is I think, at the very very *beginning* of the character; call the character "Pink"...
RW: Right.
TV: ...the very beginning of Pink's [simultaneously] life?
RW: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. In fact at the end of "In the Flesh" er, you hear somebody shouting "roll the sound effects" da-da-da, and er, you hear the sound of bombers, so it gives you some indication of what's happening. In the show it'll be much more obvious what's going on. So it's a flashback, we start telling the story. In terms of this it's about my generation.
TV: The war?
RW: Yeah. War-babies. But it could be about anybody who gets left by anybody, if you like.
TV: Did that happen to you?
RW: Yeah, my father was killed in the war.
(IN THE FLESH)
(THE THIN ICE)
TV: And then comes "Another Brick in the Wall, Part I." Which is actually about the father who's gone?
RW: Yeah.
TV: Though the father in the album "has flown across the ocean..."
RW: Yeah.
TV: ...now the assumption from listening to that would be that he's gone away to somewhere else.
RW: Yeah, well, it could be, you see it works on various levels--it doesn't have to be about the war--I mean it *should* work for any generation really. The father is also... I'm the father as well. You know, people who leave their families to go and work, not that I would leave my family to go and work, but lots of people do and have done, so it's not meant to be a simple story about, you know, somebody's getting killed in the war or growing up and going to school, etc, etc, etc but about being left, more generally.
TV: "The Happiest Days of our Lives" is, er, a complete condemnation, as I see it, as I've heard it in the album, of somebody's scholastic career.
RW: Um. My school life was very like that. Oh, it was awful, it was really terrible. When I hear people whining on now about bringing back Grammar schools it really makes me quite ill to listen to it. Because I went to a boys Grammar school and although... I want to make it plain that some of the men who taught (it was a boys school) some of the men who taught there were very nice guys, you know I'm not... it's not meant to be a blanket condemnation of teachers everywhere, but the *bad* ones can really do people in--and there were some at my school who were just incredibly bad and treated the children so badly, just putting them down, putting them down, you know, all the time. Never encouraging them to do things, not really trying to interest them in anything, just trying to keep them quiet and still, and crush them into the right shape, so that they would go to university and "do well."
(ANOTHER BRICK: ONE)
(THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF OUR LIVES)
(ANOTHER BRICK: TWO)
TV: What about the track "Mother"? What sort of a mother is this mother?
RW: Over-protective; which most mothers are. If you can level one accusation at mothers it is that they tend to protect their children too much. Too much and for too long. That's all. This isn't a portrait of my mother, although some of the, you know, one or two of the things in there apply to her as well as to I'm sure lots of other people's mothers. Funnily enough, lots of people recognize that and in fact, a woman that I know the other day who'd heard the album, called me up and said she'd liked it. And she said that listening to that track made her feel very guilty and she's got herself three kids, and I wouldn't have said she was particularly over-protectice towards her children. I was interested, you know, she's a woman, of well, my age, and I was interested that it had got through to her. I was *glad* it had, you know, if you can... if it means...
(MOTHER)
TV: And then comes the track "Goodbye blue sky." What is actually happening at this stage in Pink's life?
RW: Since we compiled the album I haven't really clearly tried to think my way through it, but I know that this area is very confusing. I think the best way to describe it is as a recap if you like of side one. (This is the start of side two.) And you could look upon "Goodbye blue sky" as a recap of side one. So, yes, it's remembering one's childhood and then getting ready to set off into the rest of one's life.
(GOODBYE BLUE SKY)
TV: And then comes the track "What shall we do now." The assumption this would be when the emergent adult...
RW: That's right. Now that's the track that's not on the album. It was quite nice! In fact I think we'll do it in the show. But it's quite long, and this side was too long, and there was too much of it, it's basically the same as "Empty spaces" and we've put "Empty spaces" where "What shall we do now" is.
TV: Because without those words listening to the album....
RW: Yeah it makes less sense.
TV: Well it's not so much that it makes less sense it just means that there's a period in Pink's life that isn't indicated. I mean he jumps from the recap of side one immediately into "Young lust."
RW: Right. No, he doesn't, he goes into "Empty spaces" and the lyrics there are very similar to the first four lines of "What shall we do now?" But what's different really is this list--"shall we buy a new guitar, drive a more powerful car, work right through the night," you know, and all that stuff.
TV: "Give up meat, rarely sleep, keep people as pets."
RW: Right. It's just about the ways that one protects oneself from one's isolation by becoming obsessed with other people's ideas. Whether the idea is that it's good to drive...have a powerful car, you know, or whether you're obsessed with the idea of being a vegetarian...adopting somebody else's criteria for yourself. Without considering them from a position of really being yourself; on this level the story is extremely simplistic, I hope that on other levels there are less tangible, more effective things that come through. I think it's ok in a show, where you only hear the words, you probably won't hear the words at all the way rock and roll shows get produced.
TV: But they're there obviously if you need them?
RW: Yeah. That's why we didn't go into a great panic about trying to change all the inner bags and things, I think it's important that they're there so that people can read them. Equally I think it's important that people know why they're there, otherwise I agree it's terribly confusing.
TV: And then you come to this track which is called "Young lust." As far as Pink the rock and roll star, and Roger Waters the writer, was there ever a young lust section of your life?
RW: Well, yes, I suppose, actually, yes it did happen to me, that was like me. But I would never have said it, you see, I'd never have come out with anything like that, I was much too frightened. When I wrote this song "Young lust" the words were all quite different, it was about leaving school and wandering around town and hanging around outside porno movies and dirty bookshops and being very interested in sex, but never actually being able to get involved because of being too frightened actually. Now it's completely different, that was a function of us all working together on the record, particularly with Dave Gilmour and Bob Ezrin who, we co-produced the album together, the three of us co-produced it. "Young Lust" is a pastiche number. It reminds me very much of a song we recorded years and years ago called "The Nile Song," [?] it's very similar, Dave sings it in a very similar way. I think he sings "Young Lust" terrific, I love the vocals. But it's meant to be a pastiche of any young rock and roll band out on the road.
(EMPTY SPACES)
(YOUNG LUST)
RW: I think it's great; I love that operator on it, I think she's wonderful. She didn't know what was happening at all, the way she picks up on..I mean it's been edited a bit, but the way she picks up, all that stuff about "is there supposed to be someone else there beside your wife" you know I think is amazing, she really clicked into it straight away. She's terrific!
TV: And then comes "One of My Turns."
RW: Yes, so then the idea is that we've leapt somehow a lot of years, from "Goodbye Blue Sky" through "What Shall we do Now" which doesn't exist on the record anymore, and "Empty Spaces" into "Young Lust" that's like a show; we've leapt into a rock and roll show, somewhere on into our hero's career. And "One of My Turns" is supposed to be his response to a lot of aggro [aggression] in his life and not having ever got anything together, although he's married, well, no he has got things together, but he's been married, and he's just had a... he's just splitting up with his wife, and in response he takes another girl up to his hotel room.
TV: And he really is, "he's got everything but nothing."
RW: He's had it now, he's definitely a bit "yippee" now, and "One of My Turns" is just, you know, him coming in and he can't relate to this girl either, that's why he just turns on the TV, they come into the room and she starts going on about all the things he's got and all that he does is just turn on the TV and sit there, and he won't talk to her.
(ONE OF MY TURNS)
TV: Then comes a period in "Don't Leave Me Now" when he realizes the state that he's in, he still feels, if you like, aggressive, completely depressed, thoroughly paranoid, and very lonely, and but very lonely, to the point of suicide.
RW: Yeah, well, not quite... but yes it is a very depressing song. I love it! I really like it!
TV: There's this line in the song "to beat you to a pulp on a Saturday night."
RW: Yeah.
TV: Now that's just, I don't know how to phrase that, but it really is the depths, if you like, of deprived depravity.
RW: Well a lot of men and women do get involved with each other for lots of wrong reasons, and they do get very aggressive towards each other, and do each other a lot of damage. I, of course, have never struck a woman, as far as I can recall, Tommy, and I hope I never do, but a lot of people have, and a lot of women have struck men as well, there is a lot of violence in relationships often that aren't working. I mean this is obviously an extremely cynical song, I don't feel like that about marriage now.
TV: But you did?
RW: Er, this is one of those difficult things where a small percentage of this is autobiographical, and all of it is rooted in my pown experience, but it isn't my autobiography, although it's rooted within my own experience, like any writing, some of it's me and an awful lot of it is what I've observed.
TV: But there's also a lot of fundamental truth in it.
RW: Well I hope so, if you look and see things and if they ring true, then those are the kind of things, if you're interested in writing songs of books or poems or writing anything then those are the things that you try and write down, because those are the things that are interesting, and those are the things that will touch other people, which is what writing is all about, you know. Some people have a need to write down their own feelings in the hope that other people will recognize them, and derive some worth from them, whether it's a feeling of kinship or whether it makes them happy, or whatever, they will derive something from it.
(DON'T LEAVE ME NOW)
(ANOTHER BRICK: 3)
TV: "Another Brick: 3." "I don't need no arms around around me," he seems to be in a position whereby he's no longer confused, in other words he's more confident. Then comes the track "Goodbye Cruel World." What is happening here?
RW: Well, what's happening is; from the beginning of "One of MY Turns" where the door opens, there, through to the end of side three, the scenario is an American hotel room, the groupie leaves at the end of "One of My Turns" and then "Don't Leave Me Now" he sings which is to anybody, it's not to her and it's not really to his wife, it's kind of to anybody; if you like it's kind of men to women in a way, from that kind of feeling, it's a kind of very guilty song as well. Anyway at the end of that, there he is in his room with his TV and there's that symbolic TV smashing, and then he resurges a bit, out of that kind of violence, and then he sings this loud saying "all you are just bricks in the wall," I don't need anybody, so he's convincing himself really that his isolation is a desirable thing, that's all.
TV: But *how* is he in that moment of time, when he says "goodbye cruel world"?
RW: That's him going catatonic if you like, that final and he's going back and he's just curling up and he's not going to move. That's it, he's had enough, that's the end.
(GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD)
RW: In the show, we've worked out a very clever mechanical system so that we can complete the middle section of the wall, building downwards, so that we get left with a sort of triangular shaped hole that we can fill in bit by bit. Rather than filling it in at the top, there'll be this enormous wall across the auditorium, we'll be filling in this little hole at the bottom. The last brick goes in then, as sings goodbye at the end of the song. That is the completion of the wall. It's been being built in my case since the end of the Second World War, or in anybody else's case, whenver they care to think about it, if they feel isolated or alienated from other people at all, you know, it's from whenever you want.
TV: So it would be accurate to say that at that moment in time he's discovered exactly where he's at, and the wall is complete, ion other words his character, via all the experiences he's had, has finally in his eyes anyway, been completed.
RW: He's nowhere.
TV: And then comes the beginning of side three, which actually starts with a different song than on the sleeve.
RW: Yeah. Bob Ezrin called me up and he said I've just listened to side three and it doesn't work. In fact I think I'd been feeling uncomfortable about it anyway. I thought about it and in a couple of minutes I realised that "Hey You" could conceptually go anywhere, and it would make a much better side if we put it at the front of the side, and sandwiched the middle theatrical scene, with the guy in the hotel room, between an attempt to re-establish contact with the outside world, which is what "Hey You" is; at the end of the side which is, well, what we'll come to. So that's why those lyrics are printed in the wrong place, is because that decision was made very late; I should explain at this point, the reason that all these decisions were made so late was because we'd promised lots of people a long time ago that we would finish this record by the beginning of November, and we wanted to keep that promise.
TV: Well the guy is now behind the wall...
RW: Yeah, he's behind the wall a) symbolically and b) he's locked in a hotel room, with a broken window that looks onto the freeway, motorway.
TV: And now what's he going to do with his life?
RW: Well, within his mind, because "Hey You" is a cry to the rest of the world, you know saying hey , this isn't right, but it's also, it takes a narrative look at it, when it goes... Dave sings the first two verses of it and then there's an instrumental passage and then there's a bit that goes "but it was only fantasy" which I sing, which is a narration of the thing; "the wall was too high as you can see, no matter how he tried he could not break free, and the worms ate into his brain." The worms. That's the first reference to worms...the worms have a lot less to do with the peice than they did a year ago; a year ago they were *very* much a part of it, if you like they were my symbolic representation of decay. Because the basic idea the whole thing really is that if you isolate yourself you decay.
(HEY YOU)
RW: So at the end of "Hey You" he makes this cry for help, but it's too late.
TV: Because he's behind the wall?
RW: Yeah, and anyway he's only singing it to himself, you know, it's no good crying for help if you're sitting in the room all on your own, and only saying it to yourself. All of us I'm sure from time to time have formed sentences in our minds that we would like to say to someone else but we don't say it, you know, well, that's no use, that doesn't help anybody, that's just a game that you're playing with yourself.
TV: And that's what comes up on the track "Nobody Home," the first line being "I've got a little balck book with my poems in."
RW: Yes, exactly, precisely, yeah, after "is there anybody out there" which is really just a mood piece.
TV: So he's sitting in his room with a sort of realisation that he needs help, but he doesn't know how to get it really.
RW: He doesn't really want it.
TV: Doesn't want it at all?
RW: Yeah, well, part of him does, but part of him that's you know, making all his arms and legs, that's making everything work doesn't want anything except just to sit there and watch the TV.
TV: but in this track "Nobody Home" he goes through all the things that he's got: "he's got the obligatory Hendrix perm..." all the things that we know are pretty real in the world of rock and roll.
RW: There are some lines in here that harp back to the halcyon days of Sid Barret, it's partly about all kinds of people I've known, but Sid was the only person I used to know who used elastic bands to keep his boots together, which is where that line comes from, in fact the "obligatory Hendrix perm" you have to go back ten years before you understand what all that's about.
TV: Now when he says I've got fading roots at the very end...
RW: Well, he's getting ready to establish contact if you like, with where he started, and to start making some sense of what it was all about. If you like he's getting ready here to start getting back to side one.
TV: Which he does via the next track which is called "Vera," very much world war II...being born and created if you like in that era again.
RW: This is supposed to be brought on by the fact that a war movie comes on the TV.
TV: Which you can actually hear?
RW: Mentioning no titles or names! Which you can actually hear, and that snaps him back to then and it precedes, what is for me anyway, is the central song on the whole album "Bring the Boys Back Home."
TV: Why?
RW: Well, because it's partly about not letting people go off and be killed in wars, but it's also partly about not allowing rock and roll, or making cars or selling soap or getting involved in biological research or anything that anybody might do, not letting *that* become such an important and "jolly boys game" that it becomes more important than friends, wives, children, other people.
(IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?)
(NOBODY HOME)
(VERA)
(BRING THE BOYS BACK HOME)
TV: So physiologically what stage of the character Pink for the track "Comfortably Numb"?
RW: After "Bring the Boys Back Home" there is a short piece where a tape loop is used; the teachers voice is heard again and you can feel the groupie saying "are you feeling ok" and there's the operator saying, er, "there's a man answering" and there's a new voice introduced at that point and there's somebody knocking on the door saying "come on it's time to go," right, so the idea is that they are coming to take him to the show because he's got to go and perform that night, and they come into the room and they realise something is wrong, and they actually physically bring the doctor in, and "Comfortably Numb" is about his confrontation with the doctor.
TV: So the doctor puts him in such a physiological state that he can actually hit the stage?
RW: Yes, he gives him an injection, in fact it's very specific that song.
TV: "Just a little pinprick"?
RW: Yeah.
TV: "There'll be no more aaaaaaaaaaah!"
RW: Right.
(COMFORTABLY NUMB)
RW: Because they're not interested in any of these problems, all they're interested in is how many people there are and tickets have been sold and the show must go on, at any cost, to anybody. I mean I, personally, have done gigs when I've been very depressed, but I've also done gigs when I've been *extremely* ill, where you wouldn't do any ordinary kind of work.
TV: Because the venue is there and because the act's there...
RW: And they've paid the money and if you cancel a show at short notice, it's expensive.
TV: So the fellow is back in the stage, but he's very...I mean he's vicious, fascist.
RW: Well, here you are, here is the story: I've just remembered; Montreal 1977, Olympic Stadium, 80,000 people, the last gig of the 1977 tour, I, personally, became so upset during the show that I *spat* at some guy in the front row, he was shouting and screaming and having a wonderful time and they were pushing against the barrier and what he wanted was a good riot, and what I wanted was to do a good rock and roll show and I got so upset in the end that I spat at him, which is a very nasty thing to do to anybody. Anyway, the idea is that these kinds of fascist feelings develop from isolation.
TV: And he evidences this from the center of the stage?
RW: This is him having a go at the audience, all the minorities in the audience. So the obnoxiousness of "In the Flesh" and it *is* meant to be obnoxious, this is the end result of that much isolation and decay.
(THE SHOW MUST GO ON)
(IN THE FLESH)
TV: And then seemingly in the track "Run like Hell" this is him telling the audience...?
RW: No...
TV: Is this him telling himself?
RW: No, "Run like Hell," is meant to be *him* just doing another tune in the show. So that's like just a song, part of the performance, yeah...still in his drug-crazed state.
(RUN LIKE HELL)
RW: After "Run like Hell" you can hear an audience shouting "Pink Floyd" on the left-hand side of the stereo, if you're listening in cans, and on the right-hand side or in the middle, you can hear voices going "hammer" they're saying ham-mer, ham-mer...This is, the Pink Floyd audience, if you like, turning into a rally.
TV: And then comes the track "Waiting for the Worms," the worms in your mind are decay, decay is imminent.
RW: "Waiting for the Worms" in theatrical terms is an expression of what happens in the show, when the drugs start wearing off and what real feelings he's got left start taking over again, and he is forced by where he is, because he's been dragged out his real real feelings. Until you see either the show or the film of this thing you won't know why people are shouting "hammer," but the hammer, we've used the hammer as a symbol of the forces of oppression if you like. And the worms are, the thinking part. Where it goes into the "waiting" sections...
TV: "Waiting for the worms to come, waiting to cut out the deadwood"
RW: Yeah, before it goes "waiting to cut out the deadwood" you hear a voice through a loud-hailer, it starts off, it goes "testing, one two," or something, and then it says "we will convene at one o'clock outside Brixton Town Hall," and it's describing the situation of marching towards some kind of National Front rally in Hyde Park. Or anybody, I mean the National Front are what we have in England but it could be anywhere in the world. So all that shouting and screaming...because you can't hear it you see, if you listen very carefully you might hear, er, Lambeth Road, and you might hear Vauxhall Bridge and you might hear the words "Jewboys," er, "we might encounter some Jewboys" it's just me ranting on.
(WAITING FOR THE WORMS)
TV: Who puts him on trial?
RW: He does.
TV: He puts himself on trial?
RW: Yes. The idea is that the drugs wear off and in "Waiting for the Worms" he keeps flipping backwards and forwards from his real, or his original persona if you like, which is a reasonably kind of humane person into this waiting for the worms to come, persona, which is crack!, flipped, and is ready to crush anybody or anything that gets in the way...which is a response to having been badly treated, and feeling very isolated. But at the end of "Waiting for the Worms" it gets too much for him, the oppression and he says "stop." I don't think you can actually hear the word "stop" on the record, or maybe you can, anyway it goes "STOP," yeah, it's very quick, and then he says "I wanna go home, take off this uniform and leave the show," *but* he says "I'm waiting in this prison cell because I have to know, have I been guilty all this time" and then he tries himself if you like. So the judge is part of him just as much as all the other characters and things he remembers...they're all in his mind, they're all memories, anyway, at the end of it all, when his judgement on himself is to de-isolate himself, which in fact is a very good thing.
TV: So now it has really turned full circle.
RW: Almost, yeah. That kind of circular idea is expressed in just snipping the tape at a certain point and just sticking a bit on the front, that tune, you know this "Outside the Wall" tune, at the end.
TV: So the character in "outside the Wall" says "all alone, or in two's...mad buggers wall," and that really is the statement of the album.
RW: And which I have no intention of even beginning to explain.
(THE TRIAL)
(OUTSIDE THE WALL)
TV: Roger, what will it actually be like when we see "The Wall" in concert?
RW: Just like it normally is for a lot of people, who're all packed behind PA systems, and things, you know like, every seat in the house is sold so there's always thousands of people over the sie who can't see anything, and very often in rock and roll shows the sound is dreadful, because, because it costs too much to make it really good, in those kind of halls, you know, the sound will be good mind you in these shows, but the impediments to seeing what's going on and hearing what's going on will be symbolic, rather than real, except for the wall, which will stop people seeing what's going on.
TV: Is the wall going to remain there?
RW: No, not forever.
TV: Who's going to knock it down?
RW: Well, I think we should wait and see about that, for the live show, I think it would be silly really for me to explain to you everything that's going to happen in the live show that we put up, mind you, anybody with any sense listening to the album will be able to spot whereabouts in the show it is that it comes down!
TV: That's the physical wall, what about the physiological wall?
RW: Ah, well, that's another matter, whether we make any in-roads into that or not, is anybody's guess. I hope so.
TV: Roger Waters describing The Wall.
Transcribed by Jeremy Crampton
From: www.pink-floyd.org
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