From www.milenio.com
2012/04/29
2012/04/25
Roger Waters & Nick Mason Zigzag Interview - 1973
In 1973, just as The Dark Side of the Moon was about to eclipse the world, Zigzag magazine’s Connor McKnight cornered Roger Waters and Nick Mason for a rare interview. The topics: Syd Barrett, Marcel Proust, “crumpet” on the road, and much more besides…
Where did you get your name from?
RW: (groans) Oh no… you can make something up.
In an earlier Zigzag, we chronicled the early days of The Pink Floyd. The story was told from the point of view of Peter Jenner, one half of Blackhill Enterprises who discovered Pink Floyd and managed them for a few years. Was the story we ran about the meeting with Peter Jenner the way you remember it?
RW: Yes, as far as I can remember it. He must have come to a gig. Maybe it was one of those funny things at the Marquee. But had and [co-manager] Andrew King approached us and said, “You lads could be bigger than the Beatles”, and we sort of looked at him and replied in a dubious tone, “Yes, well, we’ll see you when we get back from our hols”, because we were all shooting off for some sun on the Continent. We like to think that we would have made it anyway, later on maybe. We definitely don’t believe in the myth of managers making bands.
Were you influenced by American bands, apart from the R&B stuff. For example, Interstellar Overdrive [from Floyd’s first album, 1967’s The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn] seems to me to have a very Velvet Underground feel to it?
NM: We never heard much of that.
RW: hat was nicked from Love wasn’t it? It was a cross between the theme to Steptoe and Son and that Love track on their first album, which I can’t remember.
NM: I’d never heard any of those bands. Someone in the band had Authentic R&B Volumes I to III – lots of Bo Diddley – but we never heard any of the other American stuff… It was a complete amazement to us when we did hear them in the States. There was such confusion. People would come over and talk about those far-out West Coast bands like Jefferson Airplane and Sopwith Camel, a whole string of names, half of which were bubblegum groups.
RW: And the others were country blues bands.
But you were listening to Love, they were pretty unknown at that time.
NM: We weren’t listening to Love. Peter Jenner was. We were listening to Cream and The Who, Hendrix. That was what turned me on to being in a band again.
Was it true, as Jenner was quoted as saying at the time, that he got you to drop the R&B stuff?
RW: No, that’s absolute rubbish. He had little influence over what we played at all. The idea that Peter Jenner steered us away from Roadrunner into a new realm of psychedelia is crap. As Syd [Barrett, Floyd’s original frontman] wrote more songs, we dropped others from the repertoire. But we went on doing Roadrunner and Gimme a Break and all that stuff for years.
What was the UFO Club like for you? Was it as magical as legend now has it?
NM: It’s got rosier with age, but there is a germ of truth in it, because for a brief moment it looked as though there might actually be some combining of activities. People would go down to this place, and a number of people would do a number of things, rather than simply one band performing. There would be some mad actors, a couple of light shows, perhaps the recitation of some poetry or verse, and a lot of wondering about and a lot of cheerful chatter going on.
RW: Mind you, there were still freaks standing at the side of the stage screaming that we’d sold out.
NM: Actually, Roger, that was usually the other band. One night we played with a band called The Brothers Grimm, and that night at least, it was either the band or their lady friends. I remember that well because it hit hard.
What about that other great legend, The Great Technicolour Dream [gig at Alexandra Palace, North London, 1967]?
RW: Oh that was a joke.
NM: That was the night we did East Dereham [in Norfolk] as well.
RW: I’ll never forget that night. We did a double header. Firs of all we played to a roomful of about 500 gypsies, hurling abuse and fighting, and then we did Ally Pally… There was so much dope and acid around in those days that I don’t think anyone can remember anything about anything.
What did you think of Pete Murray saying on Juke Box Jury that you were just a cult?
RW: Now he didn’t say that. This is where my memory doesn’t play tricks, because it will always remain crystal clear. (Menacingly) He said we were a con. He thought it was just contrived rubbish to meet some kind of unhealthy demand. Well… the man’s an idiot. A fifth-rate idiot, and always has been.
I remember David Jacobs – or maybe it was Pete Murray – saying, in tones of a magistrate, “I understand that there is a lot of this psychedelic stuff in America, but I very much hope that it doesn’t catch on here.”
NM: That’s fantastic. That programme obviously had a great impact on people. The nice thing is that we can all remember it after all these years, and see that they’ve all been made to look very stupid.
RW: But both our first two singles [Arnold Layne and See Emily Play] were so bloody innocuous, there was nothing difficult about either of them.
NM: But people still say that. You know: ‘I have to listen very carefully, and I can just about understand the music.’
You got hassled by the BBC a couple of times, didn’t you?
RW: We had to change all the lyrics in one song [the B-side to Arnold Layne] because it was about rolling joints. It was called Let’s Roll Another One, and we had to change the title to Candy and a Currant Bun and it had lines in it like…
NM: “Tastes right if you eat it right”.
RW: No, they didn’t like that at all.
Doesn’t that contradict the image of the underground band – that you agreed to change the line?
NM: Christ, no. We were a rock’n’roll band, and if you’re a rock’n’roll band and you’ve got a record that you want to be Number 1, you get it played, and if they say take something out or whatever, you do it. In fact what you do is exactly what was done – you make as much press out of it as possible. You ring up the Evening Standard and say: “Did you know that the BBC won’t play our record because it mentions your paper?”
RW: That line was changed to Daily Standard to appease the BBC, but nobody ever heard it because it was such a lousy record.
You used to slag off a lot of your own records at the time. You once described It Would Be So Nice [Floyd’s fourth UK single] as complete trash, and added that anyone who bought it needed their head looking at.
RW: (Laughing) I think that’s the truth.
NM: It was an awful record, wasn’t it? At that period we had no direction. We were being hustled about to make hit singles. There’s so many people saying it’s important, you start to think it is important.
Did you get upset by the failure of your subsequent singles?
NM: No, I can’t understand why actually, but we didn’t.
You never had a feeling that you were rubbish – that maybe they were right?
NM: We may have thought that we weren’t good musicians but we never thought that they were right. It’s funny, but I never did feel that we’d had it when two singles slumped horribly – that it was all over.
You applied for an Arts Council Grant in 1968. What on earth was that about?
NM: (Amid explosions of laughter) It was another of Peter Jenner’s ideas.
RW: It was a bloody good idea.
NM: But the Arts Council just aren’t into subsidising bands.
RW: Peter is just great for ideas – free bands, free festivals and so on.
NM: There’s much more to it that that. Whatever we say about the now, they did discover us, and to some extent they discovered T-Rex. They definitely have a talent in a way that other people don’t.
But what was the grant meant to be for?
NM: I don’t think anyone really knew – to put on a film or some show, mainly just to keep the finances running, I should think. We’ve been heavily in debt ever since we started – up until a few years ago – and Blackhill was at the height of our indebtness – our debt peak.
RW: At the end of the week we’d all go in to get our cheques, and week by week people would start to go in earlier and earlier. They’d collect their cheque, dash around to their band and have it expressed, because there wasn’t enough to pay everybody, so whoever got their cheque first got their money. Cheques were just bouncing all the time because there wasn’t enough money in the account, and if the bank manager wouldn’t let the overdraft get bigger, then you didn’t get paid.
NM: They were usually seven, eight, maybe nine thousand overdrawn, but they were usually owed a fortune too.
Were Floyd gigs in the early days scary?
NM: No, not really. We got jolly annoyed but we weren’t really scared. We just went on and on and on. We never said, “Damn this, let’s pack it in”.
RW: Where was it that we actually had broken beer mugs smashing into the drumkit?
NM: East Dereham, and the California Ballroom, Dunstable.
RW: The California Ballroom was the one where they were pouring pints of beer on to us from the balcony. That was most unpleasant, and very, very dangerous too.
How much were you getting paid for that?
NM: Two hundred and fifty pounds, because we were a hit parade group and we could draw people.
RW: Went down after that, though, to about a ton.
NM: No. It never went down that low, Rog – maybe £135 once or twice.
RW: Actually, I remember the worst thing that ever happened to me was at The Feathers Club in Ealing, which was a penny thrown at me, which made a bloody great cut in the middle of my forehead. I bled quite a lot. And I stood right at the front of the stage, glowering in a real rage, and I was gonna leap out into the audience and get him. Happily, there was one freak who turned up who liked us, so the audience spent the whole evening beating the shit out of him and left us alone.
Have you ever gone in for smashing hotels and things like that?
RW: No.
But what do you do on the road in America to combat the boredom?
RW: Unlike most other bands, we’re not heavily into crumpet on the road. What we’re heavily into is swimming pools and trips to see or do things. If we can get together any kind of activity, we’ll all be into it. We play football, go to American football matches.
NM: And we have crazes like Monopoly and Backgammon. We also tend to work almost daily, which is important because otherwise it is so boring, but none of us are smashers.
In the early days, though, you have toured with other bands?...
NM: We don’t know any other bands really. The nearest we got to that was The Who, where we did about three gigs with them. It’s a whole area of social life that we’ve missed out on.
RW: I think The Who are still my favourite band to meet on the road, because they’re the same kind of people as we are really. They’re not all smashers. Moony’s a smasher, but he’s a very sophisticated smasher – he’s got it down to a fine art. When he’s not smashing, he’s incredibly amusing.
NM: He’s very good company to have a drink with. A lot of people are just drunken maniacs, just lurching about, being boring.
RW: The Who like a good chat, except for Roger Daltrey.
NM: You’ve never recovered from the time he thought Rick [Wright] was Eric Clapton. It was in a band room somewhere.
RW: At the Fillmore.
NM: He came up to Rick and said, “Hello man, good to see you.” And Rick was thinking, “Shit, that’s funny”.
RW: And when he realised he slunk off, and we’ve never seen him since.
In around 1968, you were saying that you wanted to do a rock circus…
NM: The circus was quite advanced in the organisation stage. We actually did have a big top but there was some fantastic reason why the tent people pulled out.
RW: We got a bit of that feel at the Earls Court gigs last week. When we were setting up, I thought that it did look a bit like a circus with all these wires going into the audience. And the plane we used at Earls Court was very like those circus space rockets that people whip round and round in – it was silver and red and about six foot long, like a bloody great aluminium paper dart, flashing lights and smoke, amazing.
What do you feel is the role of sound effects on albums?
RW: Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit. Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant, because it doesn’t make any difference. We started on a piece a while ago which was carrying this to its logical extreme, or one of its logical extremes, where we don’t use any recognisable musical instruments at all – bottles, knives, anything at all, felling axes and stuff like that – which we will complete at some juncture, and it’s turning into a really nice piece.
What’s the lowdown on all this science fiction stuff and space music?
RW: Christ, I hardly ever read science fiction now. I used to read a lot but only occasionally now. I suppose the reason I liked to read science fiction novels was that they give the writer the chance to expound and explore very obvious ideas. Sticking something in the future, or in some different time or place, allows you to examine things without thinking about all the stuff that everybody already knows about, and reacts to automatically, getting in the way. Also, you get some bloody good yarns, and I like a good yarn.
How does that relate to the description on your music as space rock?
RW: Not very much.
NM: That was a convenient tag.
RW: Which was held over for so bloody long. People are still calling it space rock. People come and listen to The Dark Side of the Moon and call it space rock, just because it’s got moon in the title. The other thing that they do is say that we’ve gone from outer space to inner space, which is daft. We haven’t done many tracks that had anything to do with science fiction at all. It just depends on what you read into it. We did three songs, Astronomy Domine, Set The Controls… and Let There Be More Light.
A lot of writers have used analogies with painting to describe their feelings about your music. Do you share that at all?
RW: Maybe. I think that sometimes there may be something that isn’t inherently apparent in the piece because of the lyrics, so it becomes very easy to let your imagination go.
NM: People often listen to the music and come up with a visualisation about what it is about, and when they’ve had it they think they’ve got it, they’ve discovered the secret. Sometimes they even bother to write to us and say, “I’ve got it – I’ve got the answer. It’s cornfields, isn’t it?”
RW: And when they say it to us, we tell them the truth. We just say, “If that’s what it is to you, then that’s what it is.” But it can be whatever you want – it doesn’t matter what you visualise, it’s not important.
NM: And they’re invariably disappointed.
RW: The way our music impinges on your mind makes it very easy to conjure up some vision, very easy to imagine some scene. If you’re listening to John Cage or Stockhausen it’s very difficult, because the music is all squeaks and bubbles. It’s more like hard-edge, real, abstract painting. There are definite things in it like triangles and squares. It doesn’t give you an overall impression of The Battle of Waterloo or whatever, it’s triangles and squares, that you respond to in an intellectual way. Our music is non-intellectual, it is straight emotional response gear.
Why did Syd Barrett leave – what’s the true story?
NM: What true story would you like? Have you heard the one about how he threatened us with a gun?
RW: That’s a good one.
NM: Do you want the story behind the facts?
What were your feelings about it?
NM: We staggered on, thinking to ourselves that we couldn’t carry on without Syd, so we put up with what can only be described as an unreliable maniac. We didn’t choose to use those words, but I think he was.
RW: Syd turned into a very strange person. Whether he was sick in any way or not is not for us to say in these days of dispute about the nature of madness. All that I know is that he was murder to live and work with.
NM: Impossible…
RW: We definitely reached a stage where all of us were getting very depressed just because it was a terrible mistake to go on trying to do it. He had become completely incapable of working in the group.
NM: And it seemed his whole bent was on frustrating us.
Yet you helped him on his solo album?
RW: That was because – and I still believe this now – he is one of the three best songwriters in the world.
What’s he doing now?
RW: I don’t know. Not very much, that’s why we worked on the album. There was a great plan to expand the group, to get in two other geezers – some two freaks that he’d met somewhere or other. One of them played the banjo and the other played the saxophone. We weren’t into that at all, and it was obvious the crunch had finally come. One evening we went to UFO to do a gig and Syd didn’t turn up, so we did it alone and it was great. We went down well and we enjoyed playing together.
NM: That’s fantastic because I don’t think it’s true.
RW: Don’t you, didn’t you think it was good?
NM: No, I think you’re imagining a situation that never happened. Syd arrived, but his arms hung by his side, with the occasional strumming. That was the night of doing…
RW: …Saturday Club.
NM: Right, which was the breakdown, but that wasn’t the end of it all. That evening was something referred to four months later.
RW: Anyway, and Nick’s almost certainly right, because my memory’s a bit dodgy. It was more or less that we did a gig without Syd. He may have been on the stage but we really did it without him, he just stood there with the guitar hanging around his neck, which was something he was prone to do after that we realised we could manage.
NM: But we didn’t do anything about it for some months. We had a long think at Christmas.
RW: So it must have been over that Christmas that we got in touch with Dave (Gilmour) and said, “Whooaa Dave, wink wink!”
NM: So we were teaching Dave the numbers with the idea that we were going to be a five-piece. But Syd came in with some new material. The song went Have You Got It Yet, and he kept changing it so that no one could learn it.
RW: It was a real act of mad genius. The interesting thing about it was that I didn’t suss it out at all. I stood there for about an hour while he was singing, “Have you got it yet”, trying to explain that he was changing it all the time so I couldn’t follow it. He’d sing, “Have you got it yet” and I’d sing, “No, no”. Terrific.
What happened to the ballet Pink Floyd were supposed to be making? It was based on Proust, wasn’t it?
RW: It never happened. First of all it was Proust, then it was Aladdin, then it was something else. We had this great lunch one day, me, Nick and Steve [O’Rourke, Floyd’s manager], with Nureyev, Roman Polanski, Roland Petit, some film producer of other. It was to talk about us doing the music for a ballet, and Roland choreographing it, and Rudy being the star, and Roman Polanski directing the film, and making this fantastic ballet film. It was a complete joke because no one had any idea what they wanted to do.
But you said at the time that you’d just been out and bought the entire works of Proust to study.
RW: I did.
NM: But nobody read anything. David did the worst – he only read the first 18 pages.
RW: I read the second volume of Swann’s Way, and when I got to the end of it I thought, “Oh what, I’m not reading any more, I can’t handle it.” It just went too slowly for me.
NM: It just went on for two years, this idea of doing a ballet, with no one coming up with any ideas, us not setting aside any time because there was nothing specific, until in a desperate moment, Roland devised a ballet to some existing music, which I think was a good idea. It’s looked upon a bit sourly now.
RW: We all sat around this table until someone thumped the table and said, “What’s the idea then?” and everyone just sat there drinking this wine and getting more and more drunk, with more and more poovery going on around the table, until someone suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev started getting a bit worried. They talked about Frankenstein for a bit – I was just sitting there enjoying the meat and the vibes, saying nothing…
NM: Yes, with Roland’s hand upon your knee.
RW: …And when Polanski was drunk enough he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to end all blue movies, and then it all petered out into cognac and coffee, and then we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what happened after we left.
How did Floyd’s soundtrack to the Zabriskie Point movie come about?
RW: We went to Rome and stayed in this posh hotel. Every day we would get up at about 4:30 in the afternoon, we’d pop into the bar, and sit there until about seven. Then we’d stagger into the restaurant, where we’d eat for about two hours, and drink. By about halfway through the two weeks, the guy there was beginning to suss out what we wanted; we kept asking for these ridiculous wines, so by the end he was coming up with these really insane wines. Anyway, we’d finished eating – the crepes suzettes would finally slide down by about a quarter to nine.
NM: The peach Melba was good too. I used to start with sole Bonne Femme, followed by the roast leg of lamb cooked with rosemary, and then a peach Melba or a crepes suzettes… Or perhaps both.
RW: We’d start work at about nine. The studio was a few minutes walk down the road, so we’d stagger down. We could have finished the whole thing in about five days because there wasn’t much to do. Antonioni was there and we did some great stuff, but he’d listen and go – and I remember he had this terrible twitch – “Eet’s very beauteeful, but eet’s too sad” or “Eets too strroong”. It was always wrong consistently. There was always something that stopped it from being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell. He’d sit there and fall asleep every so often, and we’d go on working till about seven or eight in the morning, go back and have breakfast, go to bed, get up and then back into the bar.
What was your reaction to the review in Rolling Stone recently? [After years of their reporters not showing up for pre-arranged interviews, nor apologising, Floyd told RS to get lost when, in the wake of Dark Side…, they asked again. The paper carried a vitriolic attack on the band’s gig in New York in the next issue…]
RW: Well, I’m sure you know the story. [The magazine’s writer] never got into the band room – everybody else did, but we do draw the line at people from Rolling Stone. It’s hard to generalise about them all because I don’t know all of them, but from my experience of meeting people from there, they’re all a bunch of power-mad maniacs. They are completely carried away with the idea that the media surrounding rock’n’roll, or at least their corner of it, is more important than the actual thing. Though they did print a letter in the most recent issue from someone saying, “Dear Ed, if you didn’t’ like it then you were in the minority of one”, which is something the Melody Maker wouldn’t do in similar circumstances, I can assure you.
Why didn’t you attend the [Dark Side Of The Moon] press reception at the London Planetarium?
RW: Nicky and Dave and I thought that it was so daft that we tried to get it stopped, and when they refused to stop it, we refused to go to it. I think it was pathetic.
NM: The intention was to have the Planetarium with a quadraphonic mix, which I would have been into, but there wasn’t a quadraphonic mix, there was only a stereo mix, and they’d got the most terrible speakers. I heard that it was stereo, not very well done, with cold chicken and rice on paper plates.
RW: The only point of it was to make a really first-class presentation of a quadraphonic mix of the album, so that it was something special. We didn’t have time to do that, so we said, “You can’t do it.” But EMI wanted to do something, so they went ahead. Obviously we couldn’t stop them from doing it, but I thought it was daft.
Final question: What would you say is the meaning of your music… No, I’m just kidding – let’s go and have a beer.
This is an abridged version of an interview that first appeared in Zigzag 32, 1973.
From: www.pinkfloydz.com
Where did you get your name from?
RW: (groans) Oh no… you can make something up.
In an earlier Zigzag, we chronicled the early days of The Pink Floyd. The story was told from the point of view of Peter Jenner, one half of Blackhill Enterprises who discovered Pink Floyd and managed them for a few years. Was the story we ran about the meeting with Peter Jenner the way you remember it?
RW: Yes, as far as I can remember it. He must have come to a gig. Maybe it was one of those funny things at the Marquee. But had and [co-manager] Andrew King approached us and said, “You lads could be bigger than the Beatles”, and we sort of looked at him and replied in a dubious tone, “Yes, well, we’ll see you when we get back from our hols”, because we were all shooting off for some sun on the Continent. We like to think that we would have made it anyway, later on maybe. We definitely don’t believe in the myth of managers making bands.
Were you influenced by American bands, apart from the R&B stuff. For example, Interstellar Overdrive [from Floyd’s first album, 1967’s The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn] seems to me to have a very Velvet Underground feel to it?
NM: We never heard much of that.
RW: hat was nicked from Love wasn’t it? It was a cross between the theme to Steptoe and Son and that Love track on their first album, which I can’t remember.
NM: I’d never heard any of those bands. Someone in the band had Authentic R&B Volumes I to III – lots of Bo Diddley – but we never heard any of the other American stuff… It was a complete amazement to us when we did hear them in the States. There was such confusion. People would come over and talk about those far-out West Coast bands like Jefferson Airplane and Sopwith Camel, a whole string of names, half of which were bubblegum groups.
RW: And the others were country blues bands.
But you were listening to Love, they were pretty unknown at that time.
NM: We weren’t listening to Love. Peter Jenner was. We were listening to Cream and The Who, Hendrix. That was what turned me on to being in a band again.
Was it true, as Jenner was quoted as saying at the time, that he got you to drop the R&B stuff?
RW: No, that’s absolute rubbish. He had little influence over what we played at all. The idea that Peter Jenner steered us away from Roadrunner into a new realm of psychedelia is crap. As Syd [Barrett, Floyd’s original frontman] wrote more songs, we dropped others from the repertoire. But we went on doing Roadrunner and Gimme a Break and all that stuff for years.
What was the UFO Club like for you? Was it as magical as legend now has it?
NM: It’s got rosier with age, but there is a germ of truth in it, because for a brief moment it looked as though there might actually be some combining of activities. People would go down to this place, and a number of people would do a number of things, rather than simply one band performing. There would be some mad actors, a couple of light shows, perhaps the recitation of some poetry or verse, and a lot of wondering about and a lot of cheerful chatter going on.
RW: Mind you, there were still freaks standing at the side of the stage screaming that we’d sold out.
NM: Actually, Roger, that was usually the other band. One night we played with a band called The Brothers Grimm, and that night at least, it was either the band or their lady friends. I remember that well because it hit hard.
What about that other great legend, The Great Technicolour Dream [gig at Alexandra Palace, North London, 1967]?
RW: Oh that was a joke.
NM: That was the night we did East Dereham [in Norfolk] as well.
RW: I’ll never forget that night. We did a double header. Firs of all we played to a roomful of about 500 gypsies, hurling abuse and fighting, and then we did Ally Pally… There was so much dope and acid around in those days that I don’t think anyone can remember anything about anything.
What did you think of Pete Murray saying on Juke Box Jury that you were just a cult?
RW: Now he didn’t say that. This is where my memory doesn’t play tricks, because it will always remain crystal clear. (Menacingly) He said we were a con. He thought it was just contrived rubbish to meet some kind of unhealthy demand. Well… the man’s an idiot. A fifth-rate idiot, and always has been.
I remember David Jacobs – or maybe it was Pete Murray – saying, in tones of a magistrate, “I understand that there is a lot of this psychedelic stuff in America, but I very much hope that it doesn’t catch on here.”
NM: That’s fantastic. That programme obviously had a great impact on people. The nice thing is that we can all remember it after all these years, and see that they’ve all been made to look very stupid.
RW: But both our first two singles [Arnold Layne and See Emily Play] were so bloody innocuous, there was nothing difficult about either of them.
NM: But people still say that. You know: ‘I have to listen very carefully, and I can just about understand the music.’
You got hassled by the BBC a couple of times, didn’t you?
RW: We had to change all the lyrics in one song [the B-side to Arnold Layne] because it was about rolling joints. It was called Let’s Roll Another One, and we had to change the title to Candy and a Currant Bun and it had lines in it like…
NM: “Tastes right if you eat it right”.
RW: No, they didn’t like that at all.
Doesn’t that contradict the image of the underground band – that you agreed to change the line?
NM: Christ, no. We were a rock’n’roll band, and if you’re a rock’n’roll band and you’ve got a record that you want to be Number 1, you get it played, and if they say take something out or whatever, you do it. In fact what you do is exactly what was done – you make as much press out of it as possible. You ring up the Evening Standard and say: “Did you know that the BBC won’t play our record because it mentions your paper?”
RW: That line was changed to Daily Standard to appease the BBC, but nobody ever heard it because it was such a lousy record.
You used to slag off a lot of your own records at the time. You once described It Would Be So Nice [Floyd’s fourth UK single] as complete trash, and added that anyone who bought it needed their head looking at.
RW: (Laughing) I think that’s the truth.
NM: It was an awful record, wasn’t it? At that period we had no direction. We were being hustled about to make hit singles. There’s so many people saying it’s important, you start to think it is important.
Did you get upset by the failure of your subsequent singles?
NM: No, I can’t understand why actually, but we didn’t.
You never had a feeling that you were rubbish – that maybe they were right?
NM: We may have thought that we weren’t good musicians but we never thought that they were right. It’s funny, but I never did feel that we’d had it when two singles slumped horribly – that it was all over.
You applied for an Arts Council Grant in 1968. What on earth was that about?
NM: (Amid explosions of laughter) It was another of Peter Jenner’s ideas.
RW: It was a bloody good idea.
NM: But the Arts Council just aren’t into subsidising bands.
RW: Peter is just great for ideas – free bands, free festivals and so on.
NM: There’s much more to it that that. Whatever we say about the now, they did discover us, and to some extent they discovered T-Rex. They definitely have a talent in a way that other people don’t.
But what was the grant meant to be for?
NM: I don’t think anyone really knew – to put on a film or some show, mainly just to keep the finances running, I should think. We’ve been heavily in debt ever since we started – up until a few years ago – and Blackhill was at the height of our indebtness – our debt peak.
RW: At the end of the week we’d all go in to get our cheques, and week by week people would start to go in earlier and earlier. They’d collect their cheque, dash around to their band and have it expressed, because there wasn’t enough to pay everybody, so whoever got their cheque first got their money. Cheques were just bouncing all the time because there wasn’t enough money in the account, and if the bank manager wouldn’t let the overdraft get bigger, then you didn’t get paid.
NM: They were usually seven, eight, maybe nine thousand overdrawn, but they were usually owed a fortune too.
Were Floyd gigs in the early days scary?
NM: No, not really. We got jolly annoyed but we weren’t really scared. We just went on and on and on. We never said, “Damn this, let’s pack it in”.
RW: Where was it that we actually had broken beer mugs smashing into the drumkit?
NM: East Dereham, and the California Ballroom, Dunstable.
RW: The California Ballroom was the one where they were pouring pints of beer on to us from the balcony. That was most unpleasant, and very, very dangerous too.
How much were you getting paid for that?
NM: Two hundred and fifty pounds, because we were a hit parade group and we could draw people.
RW: Went down after that, though, to about a ton.
NM: No. It never went down that low, Rog – maybe £135 once or twice.
RW: Actually, I remember the worst thing that ever happened to me was at The Feathers Club in Ealing, which was a penny thrown at me, which made a bloody great cut in the middle of my forehead. I bled quite a lot. And I stood right at the front of the stage, glowering in a real rage, and I was gonna leap out into the audience and get him. Happily, there was one freak who turned up who liked us, so the audience spent the whole evening beating the shit out of him and left us alone.
Have you ever gone in for smashing hotels and things like that?
RW: No.
But what do you do on the road in America to combat the boredom?
RW: Unlike most other bands, we’re not heavily into crumpet on the road. What we’re heavily into is swimming pools and trips to see or do things. If we can get together any kind of activity, we’ll all be into it. We play football, go to American football matches.
NM: And we have crazes like Monopoly and Backgammon. We also tend to work almost daily, which is important because otherwise it is so boring, but none of us are smashers.
In the early days, though, you have toured with other bands?...
NM: We don’t know any other bands really. The nearest we got to that was The Who, where we did about three gigs with them. It’s a whole area of social life that we’ve missed out on.
RW: I think The Who are still my favourite band to meet on the road, because they’re the same kind of people as we are really. They’re not all smashers. Moony’s a smasher, but he’s a very sophisticated smasher – he’s got it down to a fine art. When he’s not smashing, he’s incredibly amusing.
NM: He’s very good company to have a drink with. A lot of people are just drunken maniacs, just lurching about, being boring.
RW: The Who like a good chat, except for Roger Daltrey.
NM: You’ve never recovered from the time he thought Rick [Wright] was Eric Clapton. It was in a band room somewhere.
RW: At the Fillmore.
NM: He came up to Rick and said, “Hello man, good to see you.” And Rick was thinking, “Shit, that’s funny”.
RW: And when he realised he slunk off, and we’ve never seen him since.
In around 1968, you were saying that you wanted to do a rock circus…
NM: The circus was quite advanced in the organisation stage. We actually did have a big top but there was some fantastic reason why the tent people pulled out.
RW: We got a bit of that feel at the Earls Court gigs last week. When we were setting up, I thought that it did look a bit like a circus with all these wires going into the audience. And the plane we used at Earls Court was very like those circus space rockets that people whip round and round in – it was silver and red and about six foot long, like a bloody great aluminium paper dart, flashing lights and smoke, amazing.
What do you feel is the role of sound effects on albums?
RW: Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit. Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant, because it doesn’t make any difference. We started on a piece a while ago which was carrying this to its logical extreme, or one of its logical extremes, where we don’t use any recognisable musical instruments at all – bottles, knives, anything at all, felling axes and stuff like that – which we will complete at some juncture, and it’s turning into a really nice piece.
What’s the lowdown on all this science fiction stuff and space music?
RW: Christ, I hardly ever read science fiction now. I used to read a lot but only occasionally now. I suppose the reason I liked to read science fiction novels was that they give the writer the chance to expound and explore very obvious ideas. Sticking something in the future, or in some different time or place, allows you to examine things without thinking about all the stuff that everybody already knows about, and reacts to automatically, getting in the way. Also, you get some bloody good yarns, and I like a good yarn.
How does that relate to the description on your music as space rock?
RW: Not very much.
NM: That was a convenient tag.
RW: Which was held over for so bloody long. People are still calling it space rock. People come and listen to The Dark Side of the Moon and call it space rock, just because it’s got moon in the title. The other thing that they do is say that we’ve gone from outer space to inner space, which is daft. We haven’t done many tracks that had anything to do with science fiction at all. It just depends on what you read into it. We did three songs, Astronomy Domine, Set The Controls… and Let There Be More Light.
A lot of writers have used analogies with painting to describe their feelings about your music. Do you share that at all?
RW: Maybe. I think that sometimes there may be something that isn’t inherently apparent in the piece because of the lyrics, so it becomes very easy to let your imagination go.
NM: People often listen to the music and come up with a visualisation about what it is about, and when they’ve had it they think they’ve got it, they’ve discovered the secret. Sometimes they even bother to write to us and say, “I’ve got it – I’ve got the answer. It’s cornfields, isn’t it?”
RW: And when they say it to us, we tell them the truth. We just say, “If that’s what it is to you, then that’s what it is.” But it can be whatever you want – it doesn’t matter what you visualise, it’s not important.
NM: And they’re invariably disappointed.
RW: The way our music impinges on your mind makes it very easy to conjure up some vision, very easy to imagine some scene. If you’re listening to John Cage or Stockhausen it’s very difficult, because the music is all squeaks and bubbles. It’s more like hard-edge, real, abstract painting. There are definite things in it like triangles and squares. It doesn’t give you an overall impression of The Battle of Waterloo or whatever, it’s triangles and squares, that you respond to in an intellectual way. Our music is non-intellectual, it is straight emotional response gear.
Why did Syd Barrett leave – what’s the true story?
NM: What true story would you like? Have you heard the one about how he threatened us with a gun?
RW: That’s a good one.
NM: Do you want the story behind the facts?
What were your feelings about it?
NM: We staggered on, thinking to ourselves that we couldn’t carry on without Syd, so we put up with what can only be described as an unreliable maniac. We didn’t choose to use those words, but I think he was.
RW: Syd turned into a very strange person. Whether he was sick in any way or not is not for us to say in these days of dispute about the nature of madness. All that I know is that he was murder to live and work with.
NM: Impossible…
RW: We definitely reached a stage where all of us were getting very depressed just because it was a terrible mistake to go on trying to do it. He had become completely incapable of working in the group.
NM: And it seemed his whole bent was on frustrating us.
Yet you helped him on his solo album?
RW: That was because – and I still believe this now – he is one of the three best songwriters in the world.
What’s he doing now?
RW: I don’t know. Not very much, that’s why we worked on the album. There was a great plan to expand the group, to get in two other geezers – some two freaks that he’d met somewhere or other. One of them played the banjo and the other played the saxophone. We weren’t into that at all, and it was obvious the crunch had finally come. One evening we went to UFO to do a gig and Syd didn’t turn up, so we did it alone and it was great. We went down well and we enjoyed playing together.
NM: That’s fantastic because I don’t think it’s true.
RW: Don’t you, didn’t you think it was good?
NM: No, I think you’re imagining a situation that never happened. Syd arrived, but his arms hung by his side, with the occasional strumming. That was the night of doing…
RW: …Saturday Club.
NM: Right, which was the breakdown, but that wasn’t the end of it all. That evening was something referred to four months later.
RW: Anyway, and Nick’s almost certainly right, because my memory’s a bit dodgy. It was more or less that we did a gig without Syd. He may have been on the stage but we really did it without him, he just stood there with the guitar hanging around his neck, which was something he was prone to do after that we realised we could manage.
NM: But we didn’t do anything about it for some months. We had a long think at Christmas.
RW: So it must have been over that Christmas that we got in touch with Dave (Gilmour) and said, “Whooaa Dave, wink wink!”
NM: So we were teaching Dave the numbers with the idea that we were going to be a five-piece. But Syd came in with some new material. The song went Have You Got It Yet, and he kept changing it so that no one could learn it.
RW: It was a real act of mad genius. The interesting thing about it was that I didn’t suss it out at all. I stood there for about an hour while he was singing, “Have you got it yet”, trying to explain that he was changing it all the time so I couldn’t follow it. He’d sing, “Have you got it yet” and I’d sing, “No, no”. Terrific.
What happened to the ballet Pink Floyd were supposed to be making? It was based on Proust, wasn’t it?
RW: It never happened. First of all it was Proust, then it was Aladdin, then it was something else. We had this great lunch one day, me, Nick and Steve [O’Rourke, Floyd’s manager], with Nureyev, Roman Polanski, Roland Petit, some film producer of other. It was to talk about us doing the music for a ballet, and Roland choreographing it, and Rudy being the star, and Roman Polanski directing the film, and making this fantastic ballet film. It was a complete joke because no one had any idea what they wanted to do.
But you said at the time that you’d just been out and bought the entire works of Proust to study.
RW: I did.
NM: But nobody read anything. David did the worst – he only read the first 18 pages.
RW: I read the second volume of Swann’s Way, and when I got to the end of it I thought, “Oh what, I’m not reading any more, I can’t handle it.” It just went too slowly for me.
NM: It just went on for two years, this idea of doing a ballet, with no one coming up with any ideas, us not setting aside any time because there was nothing specific, until in a desperate moment, Roland devised a ballet to some existing music, which I think was a good idea. It’s looked upon a bit sourly now.
RW: We all sat around this table until someone thumped the table and said, “What’s the idea then?” and everyone just sat there drinking this wine and getting more and more drunk, with more and more poovery going on around the table, until someone suggested Frankenstein and Nureyev started getting a bit worried. They talked about Frankenstein for a bit – I was just sitting there enjoying the meat and the vibes, saying nothing…
NM: Yes, with Roland’s hand upon your knee.
RW: …And when Polanski was drunk enough he started to suggest that we make the blue movie to end all blue movies, and then it all petered out into cognac and coffee, and then we jumped into our cars and split. God knows what happened after we left.
How did Floyd’s soundtrack to the Zabriskie Point movie come about?
RW: We went to Rome and stayed in this posh hotel. Every day we would get up at about 4:30 in the afternoon, we’d pop into the bar, and sit there until about seven. Then we’d stagger into the restaurant, where we’d eat for about two hours, and drink. By about halfway through the two weeks, the guy there was beginning to suss out what we wanted; we kept asking for these ridiculous wines, so by the end he was coming up with these really insane wines. Anyway, we’d finished eating – the crepes suzettes would finally slide down by about a quarter to nine.
NM: The peach Melba was good too. I used to start with sole Bonne Femme, followed by the roast leg of lamb cooked with rosemary, and then a peach Melba or a crepes suzettes… Or perhaps both.
RW: We’d start work at about nine. The studio was a few minutes walk down the road, so we’d stagger down. We could have finished the whole thing in about five days because there wasn’t much to do. Antonioni was there and we did some great stuff, but he’d listen and go – and I remember he had this terrible twitch – “Eet’s very beauteeful, but eet’s too sad” or “Eets too strroong”. It was always wrong consistently. There was always something that stopped it from being perfect. You’d change whatever was wrong and he’d still be unhappy. It was hell. He’d sit there and fall asleep every so often, and we’d go on working till about seven or eight in the morning, go back and have breakfast, go to bed, get up and then back into the bar.
What was your reaction to the review in Rolling Stone recently? [After years of their reporters not showing up for pre-arranged interviews, nor apologising, Floyd told RS to get lost when, in the wake of Dark Side…, they asked again. The paper carried a vitriolic attack on the band’s gig in New York in the next issue…]
RW: Well, I’m sure you know the story. [The magazine’s writer] never got into the band room – everybody else did, but we do draw the line at people from Rolling Stone. It’s hard to generalise about them all because I don’t know all of them, but from my experience of meeting people from there, they’re all a bunch of power-mad maniacs. They are completely carried away with the idea that the media surrounding rock’n’roll, or at least their corner of it, is more important than the actual thing. Though they did print a letter in the most recent issue from someone saying, “Dear Ed, if you didn’t’ like it then you were in the minority of one”, which is something the Melody Maker wouldn’t do in similar circumstances, I can assure you.
Why didn’t you attend the [Dark Side Of The Moon] press reception at the London Planetarium?
RW: Nicky and Dave and I thought that it was so daft that we tried to get it stopped, and when they refused to stop it, we refused to go to it. I think it was pathetic.
NM: The intention was to have the Planetarium with a quadraphonic mix, which I would have been into, but there wasn’t a quadraphonic mix, there was only a stereo mix, and they’d got the most terrible speakers. I heard that it was stereo, not very well done, with cold chicken and rice on paper plates.
RW: The only point of it was to make a really first-class presentation of a quadraphonic mix of the album, so that it was something special. We didn’t have time to do that, so we said, “You can’t do it.” But EMI wanted to do something, so they went ahead. Obviously we couldn’t stop them from doing it, but I thought it was daft.
Final question: What would you say is the meaning of your music… No, I’m just kidding – let’s go and have a beer.
This is an abridged version of an interview that first appeared in Zigzag 32, 1973.
From: www.pinkfloydz.com
2012/04/21
Roger Waters in BBC-"Dancing In The Street", 1996
Interviewed:
Roger Waters - RW
Peter Jenner - Jenner
Roger made a rare TV appearance on British Television during the summer of 1996. The program was one in a series by the BBC covering the history of Rock and Roll called "Dancing In The Street."
It was a massive project involving over 200 interviews with the people who have made Rock and Roll history or who have made the subject so engrossing over the years. These included - musicians, performers, writers, TV - Radio personalities etc., people who have had an important part to play in the business.
The Roger appeared in was titled "Eight Miles High" and was about the psychedelic years of 1966/67. It was broadcast on July 20, 1996. Peter Jenner also appeared. The episode was narrated by Sean Barrett. The program started with the American psychedelic scene portraying artists like the Byrds, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin, etc. Then the focus moved to early psychedelic groups of the UK. With narration by Sean Barrett, Roger Waters, and _then_ Pink Floyd manager, Peter Jenner, commented upon the era giving their perspective and account of Pink Floyd and the beginning of psychedelia in that time period of Rock and Roll history.
S: Gradually London developed a home grown psychedelic scene with its own distinctive sound. There were strange noises emanating from an old church hall at Ladbroke Grove.
RW: There was a need to experiment in order to find another way of expressing ourselves that didn't involve practicing playing guitar for 10 years. That time people were standing there in little suits with Gibsons and bass guitars held against the chest going like that (Roger demonstrates and although it wasn't very complicated stuff it wasn't something I was interested in doing. In fact if you turned the thing up loud and used a plectrum - and I had a Rickenbacher which I bought with a grant, in fact my entire terms grant - if you ganged it hard it made strange noises and I found if you pushed the strings against the pick-ups ,it made a funny clicking noise.
Jenner: There was a sort of wildness about the British psychedelic scene that was a sort of freedom of expression which you didn't come across in America. We thought that was part of the psychedelic experience. I don't think anyone at that time did that, maybe The Grateful Dead did it in terms of guitar solos but they tended to improvise in a far more conventional manner around conventional chord sequences, because I think a lot of the British stuff was...what was a chord sequence?...we're just playing man! They played one chord until everyone got bored then 1-2-3, back to the song.
S: British record companies soon cashed in on the new underground scene. Pink Floyd were signed by E.M.I. and Syd Barrett penned the perfect slice of pop psychedelia for their first single.
RW: "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" were both minor hits. We would not perform them live because we considered the three minute form to be irrelevant to the idea of live performances and so we did a lot of gigs where people would stand on the balcony and pour beer on us because we would not play "See Emily Play" or "Arnold Layne."
S: In April 1967, 10,000 people crowded into Alexandre Palace for a night of psychedelic abandonment, billed as the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream.
Jenner: I dropped a tab on the way to the gig and it started coming on as we were being directed in. I was having to steer the van through something very tiny and lots of people were wondering about all absolutely out of their crust. There were people climbing over scaffolding and it was an extraordinary building with all the glass in the Alley Palley...as the light came up, because it was the summer...it was a wonderful, really a psychedelic experience. The whole world was there and every band was playing and it was a magical occasion. Any more precise recollections I'm afraid have been wiped out.
S: When Pink Floyd came to San Francisco in October 1967 there were disturbing signs that their lead singer had taken too much LSD.
RW: By the time we went to America, Syd had gone by and large. We did the Pat Boone show, and we were taping the show, and he would do the run-through and Syd would stand with his Telecaster with silver bits all over it and mime happily. (Roger doing an American accent) Cut, cut, we are going to do it now...He knew perfectly well what was going on, he was just being crazy and they did four or five takes like that. Eventually I mimed it.
From: www.pink-floyd.org
2012/04/19
Roger Waters interview - The Word, 13 April 2008
Is this a new Roger Waters, forgiving and gently philosophical about his former Pink Floyd partners? Or has a fresh consignment of grief arrived to get his goat? "You can't suck me down that whole pit of despair again. I can't go there," he warns Mark Ellen.
Roger Waters: It's an absolutely stunning morning in Manhattan, the sunlight streaming into an apartment on Lexington Avenue, the current home of Roger Waters. These days you can't help but feel there's also a gentle wind at his back, and that the road is rising to meet him. His two current projects are firing on all cylinders.
The first is the restaging of his opera Ça Ira in Brazil in April, in the same magnificent theatre that appears in Fitzcarraldo. These three shows precede the upcoming second swing of his performance of Dark Side Of The Moon, a massive success in 2007 and returning to the United Kingdom in May.
RW: And, fairly obviously, there's a third project too, blossoming with much the same vigour as the others, an emerging facial thatch that makes him look as though he might have just returned to his new American base, not in a first-class window seat but at the helm of a papyrus raft.
THE WORD last talked to him just after Live 8, his conversation still fired by Pink Floyd's brief reunion and careful to leave the door ajar for David Gilmour - for 20 troubled years the group's director - to reactivate the show-stealing foursome for another world campaign. Some things never change, so Waters went out and did it himself.
RW: Two-and-a-half years later, he's softly philosophical but still brimful of vim and vigour - Hillary-hating, Radiohead-resistant, nostalgic about his artistic and personal life at the time of the record that revised their fortunes, and comically resigned to the lumbering, broken marriage of the group that made his name.
A member of Led Zeppelin once told me that one of the things that keeps him working is the fear of having to play golf with Alice Cooper, of that awful cliched vision of rock star retirement. What motivates you?
RW: Well certainly not the fear of playing golf with Alice Cooper! Though Alice actually started playing golf very seriously about 40 years ago, and he plays every single day, so he's almost certainly frightfully good. But no, the last few years have been a huge revelation, to discover that there's a young audience out there who are devoted to your work - I had no idea really - and I've discovered huge changes in my personality. I no longer feel even faintly constrained to spit at anyone, to feel angry. So I get a huge kind of emotional payback.
When I interviewed you just after Live 8, you talked about these "huge holes in your psychology" that needed to be filled by large crowds of people appreciating your music.
RW: Yes, but I'm not sure you even have to have huge holes in your psychology, and in recent years I've grasped that. And I love it now. How much longer I'll go on doing it I don't know, but I do work every day - and work and sex even come before sport on the Pleas-o-Meter. Mind you, [Arsenal] beating AC Milan two-nil last night was pretty spectacular. If only Chelsea had lost...
If only. Do you keep an eye on the game partly out of homesickness?
RW: Well, as you know, the coverage of English Premier League, and even the Championship, is actually better over here. You actually get to see more matches than in England. And I've been an Arsenal fan all my life. I lived there from 1968 to 1975, and when I wasn't on the road I went to every home game. Stood under the clock, before they built the stands. I can name the whole squad now (he does so). I can still remember everyone going out into the street in Islington at the end of the Cup in '71 [Arsenal beat Liverpool in extra time], wandering about, slightly dazed, just remembering the pleasure of it. Which puts me in mind of listening to the radio inside and then going back out into Rock Road in Cambridge back in 1956 when Jim Laker took ten Australian wickets. Another of those moments that never ceases to be magic. They never evaporate.
If you don't feel competitive about touring and recording, I can't imagine there's much point in carrying on. It'd just be a hobby. Don't you have to want to win - and badly?
RW: I would absolutely own up to this. I confess that when I get those emails from my PR that tell me I've come third in some poll somewhere I have to own up to a little glow of pride. There may be one or two exceptions but, by and large, most musicians are pretty insecure. A bit less so than we used to be but, nevertheless, insecure. And we crave that kind of attention you get by standing up in front of thousands of people. And if you're interested in music, you don't have to go for that aspect of it. You don't have to flog round the world and make huge fortunes and play huge places. You can just do it in your bedroom.
Correct any misunderstandings about you. Write you own Wikipedia entry.
RW: Oh, you can't suck me down that whole pit of despair. I can't go there. I'm sure there are lots but I'd have to leave that to others.
The track Echoes [from Meddle in 1971] came up on my iPod the other day and I couldn't believe how contemporary it sounded - the lyric, the vocal, the "inner-voyaging" sound effects. Why does this music still survive and so much else released at the time sound dated? Weirdly, it lasted exactly the same length of time as my tube journey from Hammersmith to King's Cross - 23 and a half minutes.
RW: God, that takes me back. I used to travel on the tube from Goldhawk Road to Paddington a lot, back in the late '60s when I lived in Shepherd's Bush. And there was this terrific piece of art I passed every day, graffitied on this very long kind of concrete wall. So as you pulled out of Goldhawk Road tube station and headed for the darkness, while you're still up in the light, somebody had written, SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY. It was about 30 yards long. The whole thing read something like, HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE, GO DOWN THE STATION, GET ON THE TRAIN, GO TO WORK, COME HOME, WATCH TV, GO TO BED - SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY. And it was repeated again and again, going faster and faster as you accelerated into the blackness of the tunnel. And I was thinking, "Who did that?" This was 1968 or whatever. In fact there was an advert in the tube around the same time - and I don't think I've ever shared this before - not sure what it was advertising, a bank or building society or something, and it said GET A GOOD JOB WITH MORE PAY - though there were no vowels, only consonants. And I remember connecting those two images from the underground - one was art and one was commerce - and they sort of married in my mind. And that's where the lyrics for the song Money came from.
But to answer your question, I really don't know why its popularity has sustained. Dark Side is just very accomplished sonically and musically; the work we were all doing - particularly Rick - in terms of chord structures. Rick described that rather eloquently in the documentary, all these jazz influences that start with Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue. And also obviously Dave's playing and singing, which is just beyond good. So all those things really.
It was complicated music to have reached so many people - the idea of the life cycle from birth to death in the songs themselves. The only records that sold more in America were a lot more superficial - Thriller, The Eagles' Greatest Hits, Saturday Night Fever, The Bodyguard soundtrack...
RW: Funnily enough, The Wall has sold a lot more than Dark Side in America now. I think it goes Thriller, The Eagles, The Wall, then Dark Side. But it always sounded like a very popular record. I remember when we finished it off thinking it would be a huge hit. I honestly don't know why. I just did. It had a lot of class but it was also deeply appealing. And of course Money was seriously embraced by the AM radio, the cash register thing struck a chord. And radio was a big factor then. Which is why they were always bribing them so heavily in those days with cocaine and cash! But I like to think there's a political dimension of honesty about the whole record that gives it a flavour of truth. That's also a contributing factor to its longevity. People understand immediately when they hear it that there's nothing contrived about it.
Did you imagine any of the political issues it raised would have changed in 35 years?
RW: No, probably not. Though to some small extent they have changed. They go through cycles. That sort of slavish attention to Reaganism, to Thatcherism - although it was actually pre-Thatcher and pre-Reagan. But I stare out of my window every morning down Lexington Avenue and you can't live in New York without being very aware that money is still the primary god. But there is this sense, particularly in this election year, that the great unwashed may, finally, just be beginning to twig it a little bit, to just begin to understand that they're being fucked over by the 3 per cent of the population who own 98 per cent of the world and dangle that apple of billionairism in front of them. And that
they may - may, particularly in the light of the debacle in Iraq - they may just be on the verge of beginning to twig that the people who had their heads busted for starting the unions in the '20s and '30s were maybe on to something. They may start to vote with their mortgages, with the disaster of their economic lives, in a more realistic way. I mean how anyone with an income of 50,000 dollars a year can vote Republican is absolutely beyond my understanding.
But isn't the problem partly the whole economic structure of virtually any political election anywhere in the world, but particularly in America? To have the table stake to even be able to play, to be able to launch a campaign that will get any publicity, you need enormous funding. And, if elected, you're permanently in a political compromise with the organisations that gave you the money to get elected in the first place?
RW: Yes, but that's not true of Obama. That's the most elevating and exciting thing about the race for the Democratic position: Obama's money is coming from the people! It's coming from small contributions from people with access to computers. And that is very exciting. I mean, I am a huge fan of Barack Obama and I was so disappointed the other night when the ghastly Hillary got Texas and kept the whole thing going. Please God, let's not have this woman! Not because she's a woman, just that she's old guard. And we've had enough of the Clintons and Bushes. Hillary will want to make her mark and show that she can be just as good as a male president and she will fucking invade Iran. Trust me. She voted to declare the Iranian Republican Guard a terrorist organization!
After the Vote For Change tour in 2004 - REM, Springsteen, etc - you wonder, honestly, whether a rock star's view can ever persuade anybody.
RW: I don't agree. And if I thought there wouldn't be a huge reaction, I would buy a whole page in The New York Times and fly Obama's flag and lend support to his cause. But I would be terribly afraid that they'd go, "This is that pinko shitbag whose, you know, attacking our President in time of war" or whatever.
And a lot of Republicans would presumably stop buying your records.
RW: I don't give a shit about that. I've been going all over this country doing this show and one of the songs I do, Leaving Beirut, is pretty strident in its political message. So I'm standing there giving them both fingers and when I sing lines like, "Oh George! Oh George! That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small" - which give me a great deal of pleasure to sing - most of the people in the audience respond very positively. But then we're living in an eye-blink. It's very easy to lose sight of the fact that social and political changes happen over very large timescales. It's only now that the globe is beginning to grapple with some of the thinking dating back to the 18th century - the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and Le Déclaration des Droits de L'Hommes in Paris in 1789. The idea that human beings had rights. Because before that - and this is only 200 years ago, which is really sort of nothing, it's two lifetimes if you think about it; these days people live to 100 - before that, by and large, the political systems have been feudal. OK, we English had a little bit of a revolution about 150 years before but, by and large, people believed in the divine right of kings - that the king was appointed by God and that he was connected to God - a bit like the Catholics still believe that you can only find God through the divine ruler. So this idea was only really dismantled in the late 1700s. And the fact that it is still being dismantled and the idea that ordinary people have rights has come even as far as it has in the last 200 years shows that these changes are happening and will continue to happen. But it's important to keep a sense of perspective.
Do you think the attitude to rock music is different in America? I have this theory that American media embrace it because they've got less cultural history - F Scott Fitzgerald is up there with Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg and Madonna; they're all part of popular culture. But there are still sections of the British media that find it hard to take rock music seriously in a cultural history that includes, you know, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hogarth and Dickens.
RW: I think that's absolutely true but it's also true that American society and culture is much more positive and more giving generally. There's a lot less criticism. I found in the UK there's a sort of mealy-mouthed reluctance to pat anyone on the back or whatever. It seems that the first national reaction to any measure of success is a stab in the back rather than a pat on the back.
But that's just the great "earthing" capacity of the British cynical filter! Americans tend to envy success but the British fear that it'll make them lose touch with someone they feel a connection with.
RW: Is that what you think it is? That you should be "poo-er" forever? But they sort of hate you for being good at anything - unless it's kicking a pig's bladder about, anything else you get attacked for. But I've been over here for a few years and people go (Yorkshire accent, bizarrely) "Well done, son! By gum, you did well!" You don't get any of those amazing blistering vitriolic attacks on what people call progressive rock or whatever - "Who do they think they are? Overblown self-indulgent crap..."
Can you hear the influence of the Floyd in all these clever British rock bands - Wire, Talk Talk, Blur, Shack, Coldplay, Radiohead?
RW: Can I? No I can't. That bit of my brain has no power, I think. It doesn't attach. I don't really listen to Radiohead. I'm sure it's very good and everything - I'm absolutely sure it is because everybody says it is - but I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extra-ordinarily eloquent music - and he lives on that plain with Neil [Young] and Lennon. I don't have satellite radio in my car yet - which is stupid and you can get whatever you want and as much of it as you want - but if I'm flipping through channels in the car I'll stop for old stalwarts like Neil and John, but usually you can be certain that the thing you've stopped for is going to finish in three minutes and the thing that comes after it will be unlistenable. So you sort of don't bother. That's why I never watched MTV - because of the programming. Nothing ever seemed to go on long enough to be worth watching. And even if that particular video was interesting, you'd get something directly afterwards that inevitably wasn't.
That's interesting. So, for you, brevity automatically implies superficiality.
RW: Yeah, and that's one of the tragedies of the death of FM radio as it was in the late '60s. People played whole albums, or Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands or whatever, and that made it much more interesting. Then the businesses got hold of it and decided they had to respond to the bottom line and the audience figures were the only thing that mattered, and that sort of destroyed it. Which in some ways could be seen as a microcosm of - or at least a warning sign to - society in the United States at the moment. If you make that the only thing that matters, you destroy many potential avenues for society to change.
Have you given up hope of finding a replacement for Neil Young or John Lennon?
RW: Well, no, I mean… no, I haven't given up hope at all. If one comes along I'll notice it. John Prine is one but he's almost a contemporary. Can you think of another?
I honestly think you should give Radiohead another try. There's not a lot of brevity in your Radiohead album - some songs are in four movements - but it's got all the good parts of what we used to call progressive rock and none of the bad bits. It's not complexity for its own sake, just the reverse: everything is designed to support the lyric and the soul of the song. And they seem very influenced by Pink Floyd. I don't mean to twist your arm here but...
RW: No, I'm very happy to have my arm twisted. Seriously! Maybe I'll give them another go. It would be very nice to discover something else to listen to.
If you could go back to your 29-year-old self, is there anything you'd rewrite on Dark Side Of The Moon?
RW: No, I don't think there is. But I remember when I wrote Time - yes, I was 29 at the time - it was all true. It's not like I made the song up or anything. What happened was I suddenly had this revelation. I was 29 before I suddenly twigged that I wasn't in a rehearsal. That I wasn't preparing for anything. That actually my real life had been happening for some time without me noticing it. It was that weird feeling, you know, that I'll soon be ready and then life will begin. But I loved the way we worked back then. Dark Side's forerunner was a thing we did at the Royal Festival Hall [in 1969] called The Man And The Journey, which was this strange rambling sort of piece that was put together but it had some of the elements that later showed up on Dark Side Of The Moon. I have this memory of arriving with this song Eclipse one afternoon - in Cardiff, I think - and saying, "Look I've nearly got an ending for this." And we may have even done it that night in the show. It was that free and easy. That night I seem to remember we'd suspended a giant elbow at the back of the stage. We went though this long period where "giving someone the elbow" would be very important! Can't remember why.
I saw an old pal from college the other day and told her I was going to interview you and she got in a right old pickle. She said, "For God's sake, the Pink Floyd - they ruined my sex life! You'd be sitting around with a few blokes, one of whom you quite fancied, and then one of them would put on three Floyd albums on one of those Selecters - you know, all stacked up, Ummagumma, Meddle, Dark Side Of The Moon - and then you knew nothing was going to happen for at least 90 minutes, after which everyone would probably be asleep."
RW: Well, yes! (laughs) Women did tend to have a slightly different reaction to us than men! But I'm happy to say that women in general - and young women in particular - are attaching themselves to this stuff a lot more than they used to. There's definitely a bit more knicker-waving now, which can be nothing but a good thing. My audience is now packed with young women, whereas it always used to be young men in greatcoats. You look at some of that old footage on YouTube and you can see that the audience used to sit there, actually sit, very still and quiet, concentrating and listening very carefully.
Syd Barrett died in 2006. How accurate do you think the perception of him was in any obituaries you read?
RW: I think it's a great shame really that people swallowed the notion that he suddenly took a lot of acid and it destroyed him. This is absolute bollocks. There was something much more fundamental about Syd's schizophrenia than taking too much acid. But I felt very sad. I still feel regret that we weren't able to enjoy his company for all those years when he disappeared into the illness. But I think of him often. No least because I've been editing some of my shows recently and we've been doing Shine. We now do this with a 60 by 30 LED screen with footage of Syd. I went to the opening of Rock And Roll in New York, having been in London and met Tom Stoppard and become friends with him. Have you seen this play? It's really, really good. Particularly if you're me as it's about three things I'm particularly interested in - Communism, Cambridge and Syd.
Will the Live 8 lineup of Pink Floyd ever perform together again?
RW: (Chuckles)
I'm contractually obliged to ask you. WORD readers would murder me if I didn't - and rightly so.
RW: It's always the same answer. I always chuckle.
So the answer is "possibly"?
RW: The answer is... not up to me. The answer is: I'd be very happy to do it but it's sort of up to Dave, I guess. But I don't think he wants to do it, so I don't think it'll happen. And that's absolutely fair enough. It's not going to change my life. But I did love Live 8. I thought it was really, really special. If that's the only thing we ever get to do again to underline the collaboration then I'm very glad there was at least one moment we could do it. But I thought it sounded great. The feeling was... it was so... it was so intense. But I'm not sure that we all felt that. In fact I'm quite sure that we didn't all feel that. But most of us did.
How are relations between you and Dave Gilmour - cordial?
RW: Well we never speak to each other. But we don't speak to each other in a very cordial way! I feel no enmity at all.
Tell us something about the Pink Floyd we don't already know.
RW: Read Nick's book. It's the gospel truth! Of course it isn't, but no, Nick and I have a more than
cordial relationship. We met up on a beach in Mustique and we've become great friends again. So the book [Inside Out: A Personal History Of Pink Floyd] is a running joke. He said that when he sent me a draft - when we were still faintly estranged - that when it came back it had a blue pencil through almost everything.
Did he take any notice?
RW: Not much. But you know, so what. The great thing about all of that is that we now know - because of all the research that's done in neurologly - we now know that we can't actually remember very much, so a lot of the arguments about who did or said what are all actually irrelevent because, however much we may think we remember, we now know the brain will invent memories that suit the ego of the person who owns the brain. It's not a reliable instrument, even faintly. So, for instance, if Nick thinks he helped me make the cash register loop for Money and I seem to remember doing it on my own in a shed in the bottom of my garden, then there is absolutely no way of knowing whether he did or he didn't. It's not like somebody's lying. The person who has the false memory will believe it absolutely and so… Oh, but who gives a fuck really? (laughs) I got this brilliant email passed through to my office the other day - "Dear Mr Waters, I gather you may be casting a feature film about the recording of Another Brick In The Wall and I'd like to put myself forward to play the part of Nick Mason, who I believe to be the central character in the Pink Floyd story. I think I'm absolutely meant to play the part, with my extraordinary character acting skills and ingenious use of makeup…" and it went on like this for some while. And there were some JPEGs attached. I open one up and it's Netty, Nick's wife, dressed up in one of his old hats with a scarf round it and a false moustache. I know! (laughs) It was really, really good.
From: wordmagazine.co.uk
2012/04/15
Roger Waters interview - Rocky Mountain News, April 25, 2008
Fans of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd will get to see Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety on Wednesday night, which is something of a miracle. Waters had no touring plans for the U.S., but did have a benefit he wanted to do in Buenos Aires. Playing the Coachella Festival seemed like a good warm-up, then the benefit date got moved. There was room for a few more dates, so Colorado and Texas got added. Finally, the punch line - the Buenos Aires benefit was canceled altogether, so Waters finds himself on a mini-U.S. tour he never intended to do. The upside, he said with a laugh, is that he'll get to sing the anti-George Bush song Leaving Beirut in the president's home state.
Waters agreed to a rare interview from West Palm Beach where he was recording a benefit single to talk about the upcoming show.
Waters agreed to a rare interview from West Palm Beach where he was recording a benefit single to talk about the upcoming show.
What's the story with this weird routing on your tour with just four U.S. dates?
"What happened was I had no plans to do any gigs this year. A friend of mine in Argentina was organizing a gig in Buenos Aires for ALAS on May the 7th. They wanted me to do my whole show down there. I had meeting with him and agreed to do it. In the meantime my manager in London said to me 'One week before that Coachella is on and they'd like you to go and do the last day there.' It seemed ridiculous not to do that. So I agreed to do Coachella. I'm sorry, this is a bit long-winded. Then the charity gig got moved to the 17th of May. Suddenly it wasn't just a few days. So they said to me 'I don't know if you remember but Denver was sort of upset that you didn't go (in 2007).' I remembered seeing lots of fan things on sites saying 'Oh, he's not coming here.' So I said 'Why don't we take it to Denver? That still leaves some time to fill in - do you want to play Texas?'"
And see how Leaving Beirut goes over there?
"Exactly! I said 'I do, I really want to go with Leaving Beirut to Texas.' So they put in a couple of there. They said 'You still have a few days, there are a couple of festivals in Europe. Would you consider those?' I said '(Expletive), why not?' Keep the whole band working, keep the crew on the road. So we're doing one in Denmark, one in Spain, one in Holland. And then at the end of the day, the Buenos Aires thing fell through. So we're going back and doing two gigs at the O2 in London."
Coachella should be interesting because Pink Floyd's music still draws a young audience. Are you excited?
"Listen, last year I worked solidly from January to July. We played to more than a million people all over the world. I promise you the average age of the audience must have been 20. My audience is very young, apart from Calgary where they're all old cowboys. I'm not bagging on Calgary, I'm not. But there's a thing where outside the US the audience is very, very young. My impression of the audience I've played to in the states last year is that there are a lot of young people there, which is very edifying, I have to say. I love that."
You were booed early on for Leaving Beirut, but a lot of America has come around to your thinking. Are you still booed?
"That's one of the great things about Barack Obama. He may persuade America to be less parochial than it has been over the past couple of hundred years and to take a more balanced and broad worldview. And take more account of how people live in the rest of the world and how they think in the rest of the world. I remember the first gig we did on the first bit of the tour was in Camden, New Jersey. There were lots of military bases around there. I was getting the finger and there was a certain measure of unrest. In the intervening years that unrest has become a quieter and quieter voice. The people who have embrace the idea that just because you're an Arab or a Muslim doesn't mean you're one of the 'evildoers.' We're all people and we need to understand one another better. It has taken hold much more and I'm very happy to see that."
You live in New York City now. Is it odd to have your worldview compared to that of the average American?
"I'm certainly sensitive to it. But a) I think it's changing and b) there is so much good about the American public. There is a warm-heartedness in American culture ...the friends gather round to help rebuild the barn after the storm. That neighborliness thing is still there somewhere underneath. The trouble is it has been subverted by the Neocons and the hawks into 'Let's all be neighborly with each other but (expletive) everyone else in the world,' which is not a good thing. Once this administration is out of the picture (perhaps) most of America can accept that George W. Bush was a dreadful mistake and that kind of foreign policy can do America and Americans nothing but harm in the long run. (It) remains to be seen if the electorate is capable of taking that view. I believe they are and I certainly hope wholeheartedly that they are. And they'll therefore not vote for John McCain, who's really a small clone of George W. Bush. Please, God - I'm an atheist so maybe I shouldn't be asking God - but let Barack Obama finally win the Democratic nomination and elect a person who seems to be not just enormously intelligent but also deeply humane and seems to have an imagination. Seems not to be entirely attached to the way the Congress works. It does need reform, desperately."
Does revisiting Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety bring any new meaning to you?
"It's a strange thing doing Dark Side of the Moon now 35 years later or however long it is. But I don't think it's necessary to find anything new to like about it. It's how strange the politics of the thing seem to be right up to date now. What impresses me most about it is the attachment of an increasingly young audience to the ideas in it and songs like Us and Them, which develop the ideas that you and I have been speaking about here. None of this stuff has gone away ever. The idea that we get to make choices about these things and that we can somehow join together to provide a somewhat united front against a military-industrial complex that Eisenhower was so worried about when he was president ... is still fundamentally important to all of our lives. It's a voice that since the '60s has become stronger and stronger. It's a voice that becomes subverted to our attachments to video games and cell-phones and all that technological (expletive), but it's never the less a voice that has never faltered. And I think it's increasing in power."
Some music from that era sounds timeless like Dark Side or John Fogerty's anti-war songs...
"Absolutely."
...but some music from that era sounds dated and silly. You managed to avoid that with Dark Side and The Wall, Any idea why that is?
"Yeah. It's because they're truthful and they spring from a passionate attachment to political and philosophical ideals that are based in the experience of others. If you were to name something that you now consider silly....not that I want to knock other artists, but you'd probably find the subject matter is fey in some way."
I'm thinking music like Emerson Lake & Palmer.
"Well that wasn't about anything. It wasn't about anything. It was a construct in order to sell records and be successful and all that. It didn't have its roots in somebody's passionate belief in human life. It had its roots in wanting to be successful in the world of pop music in the 1970s."
Is it difficult to stage Dark Side and find musicians who can handle the parts?
"No it's not. One has to always take one's hat off to Dave (Gilmour) and Rick (Wright) who created the original parts. But I treat it as a classical piece. There are lots of musicians around who are capable of learning the parts as if it was a piece of classical music. The guitar player who plays most of the Gilmour stuff, Dave Kilminster, does it beautifully. He brings his own something to it, but basically they're the notes in Dave's solos. I make no bones about staying very close to the original parts because I think they're beautiful. You could take another approach, like those people who did Dub Side of the Moon. You can do a reggae version of the whole thing if you want to. And that's fine as well. Or you could take the songs and rearrange them and do them however you wanted. What I've done is try to treat it as a classical piece."
I'm told you're recording an album called Heartland. Any truth to that?
"That might well be. It might be called Heartland or it might be called something else. I have a ton of songs I've written. I keep meaning to get around to going in the studio and making it into an album. But the recording I'm involved with in the moment, I wrote a song for ALAS. Although I'm not longer doing the gig... I have recorded a 13-minute piece for them. In fact I'm in West Palm at the moment and Eric Clapton has very kindly agreed to record a solo. So I'm recording him tomorrow or the next day. We'll be working with the Venezuela Youth Orchestra in another two weeks. ... that's the recording I'm doing at the moment."
Would today's technology made recording Dark Side or The Wall different? I get the idea that the struggle to make the sounds was part of the creative process.
"I don't think that pertains to Dark Side because there's nothing really very innovative on it ... I mean there are some ideas but they weren't technically difficult. To make a track like Money, a tape loop made up of sounds of cash registers and pound notes being torn up..."
But even tape loops were pretty out there at the time.
"But you don't need technology - you need a tape recorder. That's all you need. It's not a huge leap of the imagination to say 'If I loop this together we could make a rhythm track and start from there. It wouldn't be any easier to do today. Well, a little bit. I guess it is technically easier to do."
Is it more enjoyable to record today?
"I was talking to an engineer last week in New York and we were doing a rough mix of this ALAS thing because I needed to take it with me. I was reminding myself that back in those days ... when we were doing a mix of something all of us would sit down at the mixing board. We'd start the 24-track tape. Everybody would have three or four faders that were their responsibility and pan pots and equalizers and effects and things. You'd run it from the top to the bottom and it would be a performance. That would be mix one. Then you'd go I didn't get this move quite right and you'd do it again. You'd listen to those mixes and make a value judgment about which one moved you more. There was something great about that process, whereas now of course it's all digital and it remembers everything you do and you can change minutia without having to do the whole thing again. It has removed the idea of performance from the mixing of the song."
Some musicians get paralyzed by too many choices.
"I always think it's a bit of a handicap in terms of writing. If you're a virtuoso guitar player or keyboard player or anything else, really. That could be a handicap. There's a temptation to sort of noodle. However brilliant it may be, it's not writing. I've always thought the fact that I can't really play instruments really well has been something of an advantage to me. It means I have to think about things - what is the effect I'm trying to create here."
Because you're such a crappy musician.
"Exactly! (laughs). It's funny you should say that. Just because you're not a virtuoso guitar player doesn't mean that you're not a good musicians. It's a sort of fallacy that has been picked upon by my enemies from time to time (laughs). Music is actually about communicating feelings to human beings. If you do that within the genre it doesn't matter if you can't play Chopin preludes on the piano. You're still a musician."
When you do have a new album how will you release it? Your last studio release was in a different era, but you're also savvy about downloads. You've kept one foot in each school.
"I have no idea what I would do. The whole industry has been turned on its head. I don't think anybody has a clear idea of which way to go. I haven't heard the album yet, but the Eagles did that deal with Wal-Mart and that was their primary outlet. They did big numbers, like a million and a half records, without any record company being involved. I don't know which way it'll all go. I do know one thing, though: everybody should immediately download (Levon Helm's) Dirt Farmer. Best thing I've heard in 10 years. It is absolutely succulent. It's so cool. I only heard about it about a week ago. I downloaded and I sat there and listened to it with my mouth hanging open. I always knew he was great and I've kept in touch with him a little bit over the years. Not enough, sadly. But he's in such great voice. I always say to people the thing that changed everything for me was the Beatles and (The Band's) Music From Big Pink. Music From Big Pink changed the whole way that musicians felt about recording. You can so hear how large a contribution (Helm) made. Obviously everyone in the band was great. Robbie (Robertson) wrote great songs. But Levon was for me the heart and soul of the thing. They were all great, Rick (Danko), Garth (Husdon) and Richard (Manuel), they were all fantastic."
Pink Floyd's one-off reunion at Live 8 has been analyzed to death. But are you yourself a fan of reunions?
"I don't think you can generalize about it. It's hard for bands. Often half of them are dead. I'm not really keen on the reunion when there's only one bloke left standing. However if everybody's alive and enthusiastic about doing it I think they're great. The Live 8 thing was quite extraordinary. Even at our advanced years we all still seemed to be able to play a bit and sing. I thought those songs we did sounded great. It was very moving for me personally to hear those four musical voices joined together again onstage. And equally very moving to experience the enormous waves of love that were coming off the field at us. It was just fantastic. I loved it."
How involved are you in preserving your musical legacy?
"I'm not much of an archivist, I have to confess. I have an enormous respect for the other guys in the band and for the work. So I'm very happy to do whatever I can. But I don't keep T shirts. I have enough things. Nick (Mason) is that guy. He's got everything from everywhere. He's the museum. I've never been able to do that."
Will you consider releasing music from the vaults like the 1973 BBC broadcast?
"I think it's all out there on bootlegs. I'm not that interested in it. I have started work on the original Wall shows. We already mixed the music and it came out but I own all the film. We did do a multi-camera shoot on videotape back in 1980. We also have some 35-millimeter footage as well. I'm looking at all that at the moment."
The story fans heard was that the footage was shot but unusable.
"It's not unusable. It's not great but it's not unusable. I will find my way through it and make something that is very watch-able, I hope. We'll see."
What's the status of The Wall on Broadway?
"We're proceding with it. I'm still working with Lee Hall. We're on sort of draft four or five of the book. We've been in conversation with Rupert Gould, who is a young English director who's had a huge success in New York with MacBeth, which is why I approached him. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. So it looks like we may have the three of us will be the center of the team to which we'll continue to add. I suspect we may be looking at fall '09 or spring '10. This stuff, trust me, takes a long time. Not the work that we do but one you arrive at a stage you have to find the right theater and this that and the other. It's a long, complex process. But the work isn't going to go away. It's nearly 30 years old now, which is young, as we know, for a piece of theater. It's not going anywhere. People aren't going to suddenly be entirely disinterested in The Wall. They'll be no less interested in two years time. I'm content it should be allowed the time to grow and come to a proper fruition as a proper piece of work for the theatre."
By Mark Brown
2012/04/10
Roger Waters - The Pros & Cons of Hitch Hiking - Full Album
The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking is a 1984 concept album and the first solo album by Roger Waters. The album was certified gold in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America in April 1995
The concept, as envisioned by Waters in 1977, rotated around a man's scattered thoughts during a road trip through somewhere in Central Europe, focusing on his midlife crisis, and how he dreams of committing adultery with a hitchhiker he picks up along the way. Along the way he also faces other fears and paranoia, with all of these things taking place in real time in the early morning hours of 04:30:18 AM to 05:12 AM on an unspecified day.
In July 1977, Waters played some of the music demos of what he had pieced together, but he also played parts of another album he was preparing titled Bricks in the Wall to the rest of his bandmates in his group Pink Floyd. After a long debate, they decided that they preferred the concept of Bricks In The Wall instead, even though their manager at the time, Steve O'Rourke, thought that The Pros and Cons... was a better-sounding concept.
'Well, the idea for the album came concurrently with the idea for The Wall – the basis of the idea. I wrote both pieces at roughly the same time. And in fact, I made demo tapes of them both, and in fact presented both demo tapes to the rest of the Floyd, and said "Look, I'm going to do one of these as a solo project and we'll do one as a band album, and you can choose." So, this was the one that was left over. Um...I mean, it's developed an awful lot since then, I think.'
— Roger Waters,
Retitled The Wall, it became the next Pink Floyd album in 1979, and Waters shelved The Pros and Cons.... In early 1983, following his split from the band, Waters undertook the shelved project himself. The album was recorded in three different studios between February and December 1983 in London, the Olympic Studios, Eel Pie Studios and in Waters' own Billiard Room, the studio where his demos were constructed. Several people appeared on the album, including musical conductor Michael Kamen, the vocal talents of actor Jack Palance, saxophonist David Sanborn and rock and blues guitarist Eric Clapton.
Lyrics:
4 30 AM (Apparently They Were Travelling Abroad)
[Jade:] "Oh God...."
[Wife:] "Wake up you're dreaming."
[Jade:] "What?"
[Wife:] "You're dreaming."
[Jade:] "We were moving away from the border."
[Wife:] "Huh, what border?"
[Jade:] "Have a nice day."
[Wife:] "Huh?"
[Jade:] "Have a nice day."
We were moving away from the border
Looking for somewhere to sleep
The two of us sharing the driving
Two hitchhikers slumped in the back seat
[Woman:] "Hello"
I sneaked a quick look in the mirror
She gave me a smile
I said, is anyone hungry?
Should we stop for a while?
So we pulled off into a layby
Her dress blew up over her head
I said, would you like to come with me?
She said something foreign under her breath
[Woman:] "(foreign words)"
And the sun shone down on her lovely young limbs
I thought to myself she's much too good for you
I lay down beside her with tears in my eyes
She said
4:33 AM (Running Shoes)
So I stood by the roadside
The soles of my running shoes gripping
The tarmac like gunmetal magnets
Fixed on the front of her Fassbinder face
Was the kind of a smile
That only a rather dull child could have drawn
While attempting a graveyard in the moonlight
But she was impressed
You could see that she thought I looked fine
And when she turned sweeter
The reason, between you and me, was
She'd just seen my green Lamborghini
[RW:] "I think it was the Lamborghini."
So we went for a spin in the country
To feel the wind in our hair
To feel the power of my engine
To feel the thrill of desire
And then in the trees I heard a twig snap
Warning lights flashed on my map
I opened my eyes and to my surprise
There were Arabs with knives at the front of the bed
Right at the front of the bed
Oh my God, how did they get in here
I thought we were safe home in England
She said, come on now kid, it was wrong what you did
You've got to admit it was wrong what you did
You've got to admit it was wrong
[Jade:] "Oh god....Jesus..."
4:37 AM (Arabs with Knives and West German Skies)
There were Arabs with knives
At the foot of the bed
Right at the foot of the bed
Oh my God how did they get in here?
I thought we wee safe home in England
She said "Come on now kit, it was wrong what you did
You've got to admit it was wrong."
Jade: "Oh god....Jesus"
Sleep Sleep
I know that I'm only dreaming
Jade: "Leave her alone..get out..out..get out of my house!"
Through closed eyes
I see West German skies on the ceiling
And I want to get back
To the girl with the rucksack
To feel her flaxen hair
I want to be there
See the sun going down
Behind Krupps steelworks
On the outskirts of some German town
Guten Abend meiner Damen und Herren Ha Ha Ha Ha
Willkommen in Konigsburg Ha Ha Ha Ha
Wollen zie danzen mit mir oder drinken Bier Ha Ha Ha Ha
Thank you but......
This young lady and I
Will just finish this bottle of wine
It was kind of you...but
I think we'll just say goodnight.
Jade: "Leave us alone"
Goodnight
Jade: "Leave us alone"
[Bell]
Man: Could I have the key to one for three please?
"There you are"
Man: "Thank you, goodnight"
Man: "Hello yes I'd like to order breakfast please I'd like coffee for two, and toast with marmalade. No...marmalade."
4:39 AM (For the First Time Today, Part 2)
For the first time today
I help her naked body next to mine
In this hotel overlooking the Rhine
I made her mine
Ooh babe...ooh babe
Come with me and stay with me
Please stay with me
Woman: "Uh...what is it?"
Stay with me
Stay with me
Stay with me
Woman: "No..."
Stay with me
Woman: "Forget it"
4:41 AM (Sexual Revolution)
Hey...girl
Take out the dagger
And let's have a stab at the sexual revolution
Hey girl
Let freedom for all be our rallying call
Tomorrow lets make...our new resolution
Yeah, but tonight lie still
While I plunder your sweet grave
And remember
Only the poor can be saved
Hey girl
As I've always said I prefer your lips red
Not what the good Lord made
But what he intended
Hey girl
Don't point the finger at me
I am only a rat in a maze like you
And only the dead go free
So...please hold my hand
As we blundre through the maze
And remember
Nothing can grow without rain
(Thunder)
Don't point
Don't point your finger at me
I woke in a fever
The bedclothes were all soaked in sweat
She said "You've been having a nightmare
And it's not over yet"
Then she picked up the doggy in the window
(The one with the waggly tail)
And she put him to bed between two bits of bread
4:47 AM (The Remains of Our Love)
I just cowered in the corner
My pyjama coat over my head
And she smiled as she finished her sandwich
And her cold eyes fixed me to my dark history
As she brushed the remains
Of our love from the bed
And when she had turned back the covers
When all of the prayers had been read
She said, come on over here you silly boy
Before you catch your death of cold
I was only joking
Let's leave behind the city grime
Let's not compete
It could be fine in the country
Couldn't it thoughcome on lets go
I said, OK
[Young Child:] "Are we going to go now?"
[Jade:] "Where would you like to go darling?"
[Wife:] "MmmVermontWyoming"
[Jade:] "WyominghuhChildren!"
[Children:] "What?"
[Jade:] "We're going to Wyoming
DarlingWhich way is Wyoming?"
[Wife:] "Hook a right here
You're going the wrong way"
[Jade:] "I know that
I know children
Let's see how manyVolvos we pass
On the way to our new life in the country
One
[Wife:] "Jade, don't do that, that's really negative
4:50 AM (Go Fishing)
As cars go by I cast my mind's eye
Over back packs on roof racks
Beyond the horizon
Where dream makers
Working white plastic processors
Invite the unwary
To reach for the pie in the sky
Go fishing my boy!
We set out in the spring
With a trunk full of books about everything
About solar devices
And how nice natural childbirth is
We cut down some trees
And we trailed our ideals
Through the forest glade
We dammed up the stream
And the kids cooled their heels
In the fishing pool we'd made
We held hands and we exchanged bands
And we practically lived off the land
You adopted a fox cub
Whose mother was somebody's coat
You fed him by hand
And then snuggled snuggled him down
By the grandfather bed while I wrote
And we grew our own maize
And I only occasionally went into town
To stock up on antibiotics
And shells for the shotgun that I kept around
I told the kids stories while you worked your loom
And the sun went down sooner each day
[Jade:] "Chapter six in which Eeyore has a birthday
And gets two presents."
[Child:] "Daddy...come on dad."
[Jade:] "Eeyore the old grey donkey stood by the side
Of the stream and he looked at himself in the water
'Pathetic' he said, 'That's what it is'
'Good morning Eeyore' said Pooh
'Oh' said Pooh, He thought for a long time
The leaves all fell down
Our crops all turned brown
It was over
As the first snowflakes fell
I realized all was not well in the camp
The kids caught bronchitis
The space heater ran out of diesel
One weekend a friend from the East
Rot his soul
Stole your heart
I said, fuck it then
Take the kids back to town
Maybe I'll see you around
I said, go then
She said, OK
And so...leaving all our hopes and dreams
To the wind and the rain
Taking only our stash
Left our litter and trash
And set out on the road again
On the road again
On the road again
[Child:] "Bye Bye Daddy, Bye Daddy
You can bring Pearl she's a darn nice girl
But don't bring Liza."
4:56 AM (For the First Time Today, Part 1)
For the first time today
I feel it`s really over
You were my everyday excuse
For playing deaf, dumb and blind
And who`d have ever thought
This was how it would end for you and me
To carry my own millstone
Out of the trees
And I have to admit
I don`t like it a bit
Being left here beside this lonesome road
Lonesome road
Lonesome road
4:58 AM (Dunroamin, Duncarin, Dunlivin)
Trucker: "Hey kid, you looking for a lift?...Get on up here
How's it going good buddy?"
I nailed ducks to the wall
Kept my heart in dark ruins
I built bungalows all over the hills
Dunroamin, duncarin, dunlivin
Took my girl to the country
To sleep out under the moon
Next thing she's going crazy
Trucker: "Women are like that kid
What the hell can you do?
She waits for the real Mr. Right to come
Gently removing her heart
With his promises of real communication
Trucker: "I saw a program about that on TV........"
Who's always picking up the tab
Who built a bungalow for his mum and dad
Me.....
Who took you out to all the shows
Who worked his fingers to the bone
Me....
While you were asleep
Jade: "It was me...I did"
I kept you in buttons and bows
Jade: "Christ all those clothes"
So you could encourage this creep
Hick: "With that program
I bet some son of a bitch made a million dollars"
With his neat feet
And his clean fingernails
With his wise but twinkling eyes
He's a rock standing out in an ocean of doubt
Trucker: "Get movin', get off the road ya Goddam faggot"
And compromise
I'd like to go on with this bit of a song
Describing this schmuck
I'd like to go on, but I'm going to throw up
Trucker: "Not in my rig you don't boy...get the hell out of here"
5:01 AM (The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, Part 10)
An angel on a Harley
Pulls across to greet a fellow rolling stone
Puts his bike up on it's stand
Leans back and then extends
A scarred and greasy hand...he said
He said, how ya doin bro?
Where ya been?
Where ya goin'?
Then he takes your hand
In some strange Californian handshake
And breaks the bone
[ Whiny person: ] Have a
nice day, hehe
A housewife from Encino
Whose husband's on the golf course
With his book of rules
Breaks and makes a 'U' and idles back
To take a second look at you
You flex your rod
Fish takes the hook
Sweet vodka and tobacco in her breath
Another number in your little black book
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
Oh babe, I must be dreaming
I'm standing on the leading edge
The Eastern seaboard spread before my eyes
Jump, says Yoko Ono
I'm too scared and too good looking, I cried
Go on, she says
Why don't you give it a try?
Why prolong the agony all men must die
Do you remember Dick Tracy?
Do you remember Shane?
[ Child: ] And mother wants you.
Could you see him selling tickets
Where the buzzard circles over
[ Child: ] Shane.
The body on the plain
Did you understand the music Yoko
Or was it all in vain?
[ Child: ] Shane...
The bitch said something mystical
(Herro)
So I stepped back on the kerb again
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
Oh babe, I must be dreaming again
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
These are the pros and cons of hitchhiking
5:06 AM (Every Stranger's Eyes)
Waitress: "Hello...you wanna cup of coffee?"
Customers: "Heh, turn that fucking juke box down
You want to turn down that juke box...
loud in here"
Waitress: "I'm sorry, would you like a cup of coffee?
Ok you take cream and sugar?"
In truck stops and hamburger joints
In Cadillac limousines
In the company of has-beens
And bent-backs and sleeping forms
On pavement steps
In libraries and railway stations
In books and banks
In the pages of history
In suicidal cavalry attacks
I recognize
Myself in every stranger's eyes
And now from where I stand
Upon this hill I plundered from the pool
I look around, I search the skies
I shade my eyes, so nearly blind
And I see signs of half remembered days
I hear bells that chime in strange familiar ways
I recognize
The hope you kindle in your eyes
It's oh so easy now
As we lie here in the dark
Nothing interferes it's obvious
How to beat the tears
That threaten to snuff out
The spark of our love
5:11 AM (The Moment of Clarity)
And the moment of clarity
Faded like charity does
Sometimes
I opened one eye
And I put out my hand just to touch your soft hair
To make sure in the darkness that you were still there
And I have to admit
I was just a little afraid, oh yeah
But then...
I had a little bit of luck
You were awake
I couldn't take another moment alone.
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