Roger Waters: The Man Behind the Wall

By Dave Thompson

To some, he is the face behind classic Pink Floyd. To others, he is the temperament behind some of the greatest albums of the rock era. And to others still, he is one of the most original songwriters of a generation that overflows with notable talent. To all, he is an enigma: a rock star who not only eschewed stardom but also spent much of his career railing against it. But to call Roger Waters a mass of contradictions is simply taking the easy way out. He is so much more than that. Roger Waters: The Man Behind the Wall is the first full biography of the author of The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and, of course, The Wall. It traces his life from war-torn suburbia to the multitude of wars he has fought since then – with his bandmates, with his audience, and most of all with himself. Packed with insight and exclusive interviews with friends and associates, Roger Waters: The Man Behind the Wall dismantles the wall brick by brick, revealing the man who built it in all his glory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781617135781

Dave Thompson

Dave Thompson is the author of over one hundred books, including best-selling biographies of the Sweet, David Bowie and Sparks

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Copyright © 2013 by Dave Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Backbeat Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Print ISBN 978-1-61713-564-4

epub ISBN 978-1-61713-577-4

Mobi ISBN 978-1-61713-578-1

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Contents

Part 1

1. Learning to Fly

2. Raving and Drooling

3. Let There Be More Light

4. Another Hit in the Hall

5. The Great Gig in the Sky

6. Charade You Are

7. Reset the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

8. Wot’s . . . uh the Deal?

Part 2

9. Emily, Playing

10. The Death of Amusement

11. The Near Side of the Moon

12. A Slice of My Pie

13. More of Those Days

14. Forward, He Cried

15. Shining On Crazily

16. Bleating and Babbling

Epilogue

Discography

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Photo Insert

Part 1

The tradition of all dead generations weighs

like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

1

Learning to Fly

The Wall was Roger Waters’s first solo album.

He never told the band, such as it was, because there were times when it felt as though there wasn’t really a band left to tell. Pink Floyd’s last tour, shipping Animals across Europe and the United States, had ended fractiously to say the least, with a final night in Montreal, Canada, that saw guitarist David Gilmour absent the stage before the encore, keyboard player Richard Wright admit that the album was decidedly not one of his favorites, and drummer Nick Mason effectively sidelined from any part in the decision-making process whatsoever.

Waters himself was utterly conflicted, on the one side relishing the lifestyle that Pink Floyd’s success allowed him to live so lavishly, but on the other hand resenting the compromises that the success demanded from him—the kowtowing to the industry, to the expectations of the audience, and to his audience itself.

Maybe he regretted the flash point that had already become a legend of sorts, when he spat full in the face of one especially enthusiastic fan on that final night of the tour. But not as much as he regretted the accumulation of all the personal triggers that provoked him to do such a thing in the first place.

Neither did his bandmates seem at all put out by the absence of Pink Floyd from their lives. Gilmour and Wright were both working on and promoting solo albums that presumably allowed them to exorcise whatever musical demons had been caged by Waters’s increasingly firm hand on the Floydian tiller, and Mason was off producing the latest LP by Steve Hillage, Green, not to mention the second album by the Damned, one of the more ambitious bands hawked up by the British punk rock movement. Rumor insisted that the punks had actually asked their record label to procure them the services of Syd Barrett, Floyd’s long-since-absent founder-member. He was unavailable, so they were offered Mason instead.

So, did Pink Floyd still exist? As a legal entity, yes. As a permanent fixture in the record racks, yes. But did Pink Floyd need to exist? That was another question entirely. So Waters proceeded as though they didn’t.

Which turned out to be a lot easier than a lot of people might have expected. As far back as Wish You Were Here, in 1975, Waters had complained that the traditional sounds of Pink Floyd frustrated him, that he was limited by the need to shoehorn his increasingly personal, and increasingly bitter, lyrical worldview into the soporific free fall of the typical Pink Floyd epic.

He was tired of endless guitar solos, sick of keyboard extravaganzas that went on forever. He was fed up with his music being tagged as space rock, and he hated the idea that his listeners got stoned and blissed out to the atmospheres when they should have been rising up to ride his lyrics and raze society to the ground.

That was what Sheep, on Animals, was about: the fans who read in magazines, or were told by their friends, how to behave in Floyd’s presence, and who didn’t even consider the possibility that there might be a more enlightened alternative. For those people, the band’s music was nothing more than a succession of sweet sounds and sweeping stereo effects with which to illuminate and enliven another night spent huddled around the bong.

Fans turned up at shows dressed more like the merchandising table than the merchandising table itself, as though fines would be levied on anybody who wasn’t clad in full Floyd couture—a memory so ironically revived thirty-some years later, when seventies-style silken scarves were among the goodies tucked away inside Pink Floyd’s Immersion box sets.

It was a problem Waters had always wrestled with. Ten years before, in the very infancy of Pink Floyd’s career, Waters railed, I’ve got nothing against the people who come [to our concerts] and I’m not putting down our audiences. But they have to compare everybody. So-and-so’s group is better than everybody else. It’s like marking exercise books.

Try telling that to the rest of the band, though. Gilmour enjoyed letting rip with his extended guitar solos; Wright was never happier than when expanding a keyboard motif to kingdom come. And Nick Mason, who had once been Waters’s closest friend in the band (and was godfather to Waters’s son, Harry) didn’t really seem to care either way.

It was time, Waters decided, to go back to basics, and the two hours of demo snippets that Waters included on the Immersion edition of The Wall’s 2011 remaster, while scarcely a satisfying listening experience, indicate just how far from the Floydian norm those basics had shifted. Talking of his eponymous first solo album in 1978, David Gilmour remarked that he had been trying to escape the cult of musical perfection that had built up around the Floyd. That, presumably, was before he heard Waters’s demos.

There was nothing here that spoke to Pink Floyd’s core audience, nothing that touched upon the pastoral dreams or extended jams of old. Half of the songs weren’t even songs; they were simply lyrics expelled at the speed of frustration, while sounds that may or may not have resolved themselves into a tune were strummed, thumped, or thundered out beneath them. It was as if Waters was creating an entirely new form of music, one in which the words themselves became the music, syllables as synthesizers, consonants as conga drums, glancing affectionately back at the rhythms that the young Bob Dylan discovered in his machine-gun poetics, and presciently forward to the raw vocal insistence of rap.

Waters had always written from the heart; now he spat from the soul. His words had always been personal. Now they were private, too. In demo form, The Wall was not a new Pink Floyd album. It was a first vicious volume of excoriated autobiography that twisted halfway through into the demolition of the very lifestyle that Floyd’s success and popularity had made possible. Originally, the principle figure in the tale was even named Roger—Waters later changed it to Pink, reigniting still-bitter memories of the record company execs who somehow expected one of the band members personally to be named Pink Floyd—and you could trace his early life through the unfolding narrative.

In the years that followed The Wall and, thereafter, Waters’s acrimonious departure from the band, it would become very fashionable to describe him as a dictator, furiously insisting that only his path was the right path. But friends agree, and history would ultimately accede as well, there was more to it than that.

Waters was not asking people to do what was best for him. He was asking that they do their best for the music. He loathed laziness; he despised the this will do attitude that so many people fall into once they have grown accustomed to success. His own personal standards were set so high that even the suggestion of a shortcut felt like a direct and deliberate insult. Was it really too much to expect other people to place their own endeavors on the same lofty pinnacle?

We all had the opportunity to write as much as we wanted, Waters explained. There was never any question of me saying ‘don’t write. I don’t want your stuff.’ I was desperately keen for everybody in the band to contribute as much as possible. But Nick doesn’t write at all, and Dave and Rick are not prolific writers. So . . . it fell to me as a more prolific writer to fill in the gaps, to actually produce the material, which I have done and continued to do, clearly, since.

George Roger Waters was the youngest of two sons, following brother John. Born on September 6, 1943, he first opened his eyes in Great Bookham, a picturesque village in the south-of-London commuter belt of the Mole Valley, smack between the towns of Leatherhead and Guildford. Though there was not much commuting going on at the time. Britain was at war—had been for almost exactly four years (World War II broke out on September 3, 1939)—and Great Bookham, a mere twenty-three miles from London, was gripped by the same fears and restrictions that benighted the capital itself.

With good reason. Nobody, the parental Waterses among them, had forgotten the nights earlier in the conflict when terror rained down all round them—the long nights in September and November 1940, when Guildford was itself a target for the raiders, bombs blitzing down upon streets and stores that were as familiar to the family as those of Great Bookham.

There were targets in the village. Eastwick Park, a gorgeous manor house whose grounds contained Great Bookham Commons, was occupied by the Canadian artillery throughout the war, and the Germans probably knew it. They knew, too, of Polesden Lacey, the stately home where King George VI honeymooned.

The Waterses attempted to keep the war at bay. Both of young Roger’s parents, his Scottish mother Mary (née Whyte) and his father Eric Fletcher Waters, were schoolteachers; Eric taught physical education and religious education at a time when the two were frequently twinned in the minds of British educators—robust young men in the service of the Lord were the backbone of society, it was believed, and the backbone, too, of such institutions as the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Brigade. Eric exemplified those virtues both through his bearing and his background.

He was a northerner; he grew up in County Durham, perched on the upper eastern shores of the island, a land where the coal mines were the inexorable fate awaiting any youngster whom destiny did not single out for a career in politics or sport, and even they generally put in an apprenticeship beneath ground before going on to greater things.

Eric was one of those who did escape, but his own father was a miner, at least until a fiery temperament, a powerful presence, and a gift for soul-soaring oratory saw him elected the Labour Party’s agent for the city of Bradford, an assignment that staggered even a man who had grown up accustomed to the poverty and hardship that was a miner’s life. Bradford had no mines; it was an industrial city, but only if the word city became a euphemism for giant slum, where children barely even knew what shoes were, let alone had such things of their own, and home was whatever half-adequate shelter that despairing parents could fashion around themselves.

It was in Bradford, and so many other similarly appointed cities, that British Communism, and other forms of political radicalism too, took root, not as the intellectual playthings of the moneyed classes in the south, but as a utopian vision that perceived the most basic human needs—shelter, medical care, food, and a living wage—as the most basic human rights, rights that any incumbent government should supply to its people without a second thought.

If a man wanted to go into business for himself, manufacturing goods and trinkets that people wanted, then let him. But the things that people needed, the essential requirements of life, they should be a person’s birthright. Communism, in the hands of both intellectuals and fearful authorities, would become a byword for oppression, suffering, and worse. But to men like Granddad Waters and his son Eric, it was less a way of life than an indisputable right.

It was Eric’s politics that kept him out of the war. Communist Russia’s role in the forthcoming conflict was still unknown in 1939, but it was generally assumed to be hostile to the Allies. Treaties between Soviet leader Stalin and his opposite number in Nazi Germany, Hitler, bound the two nations together politically, while Russia’s own territorial ambitions seemed no less ambiguous than the Nazis’. Two months after Germany (and, with far fewer headlines, Russia) invaded Poland, the Soviets made their move against Finland. It would be June 1941 before Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union bound Russia together with the rest of the Allies; until then (and even after), Communist sympathizers in the UK were regarded with suspicion at best, hostility at worst. Many were interned, others kept under watch, and others still kept as far from the war effort as possible.

A declared pacifist, and registered as a conscientious objector, Eric Waters was enlisted as an ambulance driver, itself a profession that could scarcely be regarded as one of the war’s safest. The ambulances were among the first vehicles to venture out once the bombs started falling, making their way into the heart of the resultant inferno to pluck as much life from the fires as the falling masonry, roaring flames, and choking fumes would allow. Only the fire brigade placed themselves so close to the frontline as the ambulance men, and even they knew when a building should be declared a loss and it was time to pull back. For the ambulance crews, as long as the possibility of life still existed, they were there.

Maybe it was the carnage that he witnessed on the streets of civilian England that drew Eric away from his early pacifism. Maybe it was the newly consummated marriage of Communism and Democracy against the common Nazi foe. Either way, Eric volunteered for the army.

He enlisted as a second lieutenant with the Eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment), a regiment that grew out of the Tower of London’s guard in 1648, and on January 22, 1944, his unit was among those that were first to land on Peter Beach, six miles north of Anzio, as part of Operation Shingle.

A massive operation built around the Allied advance on Rome and intended to outflank the German forces waiting on the Winter Line, the Battle of Anzio was destined to become one of the war’s most bloody stalemates, as the German Fourteenth Army raced to counter the invasion, pinning down the Allied troops, flooding the marshes on which they were stationed, and allowing constant shelling and disease to do the rest. It would be May before the Allies finally broke through, by which time it was already too late for Eric Waters, service number 292975. He was reported killed on February 18, 1944.

His youngest son would not even have memories of his father. But he would have memories of his absence.

As the Allies moved up the boot of Italy and now gathered on the French coast too, a pincer movement directed at the heart of the German fatherland, the Nazis responded with a wave of unprecedented terror, pilotless V1 flying bombs that simply flew until they ran out of fuel (which was generally just enough to get them to London) and then fell to the ground and exploded.

Great Bookham lay directly beneath one of the chosen flight paths, not only for the V1 but also for their silent, rocket-propelled V2 successors, which meant that any miscalculation in the fueling, any problem with the motor, or simply any lucky strike from the ground and air defenses could send a bomb hurtling down upon them. Neither had the conventional air offensive ended.

Just a week after Eric Waters was killed, a German Dornier bomber was shot down over the nearby market town of Dorking. Two weeks later, another bomber, a JU88, came down close by. A V2 rocket hit Guildford in January 1945; another hit Leatherhead the following month.

Like so many children born while the war was still waging, young Roger would have few, if any, tangible memories of the war itself. But the fear that was every family’s most constant companion, the mournful wail of the air-raid sirens that signaled another night cowering in the bomb shelter, the way his mother would clutch her children to her body, tight and tearful through the nights that never seemed to end—these things became a part of who he was, a part of his emotional DNA, and all the more powerful because of his youth.

Older children, brother John for instance, could chase away the fears of the night with the bravado of daylight, talking with their friends, discussing the sights they’d seen and the aircraft that had flown overhead—plane spotting was a hobby for almost every youth in the land through the war. There were bomb sites to explore, shrapnel to collect, and one another’s bravery (or lack of) to draw from, a carapace of courage that transformed the most terrifying night into some kind of adventure.

A baby did not have those distractions. A baby simply lay in its crib, absorbing the sound, the fear, and the terror, wordlessly accepting that this was what life was. A succession of sirens, explosions, and screams, and the somber voices that floated out of the adult world, discussing the latest war news.

Finally Mary could take it no more. She applied for a new teaching post, scooped up her two sons, and fled to the relative quiet of Cambridge, one of England’s great university cities, to a roomy, three-story terraced home at 42 Rock Road. The house itself was called Fleetwood, a pleasant name ideally in keeping with its surroundings; the River Cam meandered through Grantchester Meadows just a short bicycle ride away, and the pastoral tranquility of what remains one of the city’s most beautiful areas would become her children’s favorite playground.

The war was not wholly distant. East Anglia, the region over which Cambridge presides, lay at the operational heart of Bomber Command, the wing of the British Royal Air Force that oversaw the now-nightly raids on Germany. The Americans, too, were present in vast numbers—it was said you could not travel eight miles in any direction without encountering another US air force base, and when an operation was on, the skies overhead were literally blotted out by the silhouettes of the monster air fleets carrying the memory of the German bombing raids back to the embattled Reich. And so another sound embedded itself into the mind of the infant Waters, the deafening drone of hundreds of bombers flying overhead, and the sympathetic rattle of the very walls around him.

Then, when it was all over, when peace was declared and silence returned, the war hit home again, and this time harder than ever before. The fighting men were returning from the war, thousands upon thousands of conquering heroes coming home to reunite with the families they had left behind. Wave upon wave of them, released from service periodically so that the homecomings spread out across the next year or more, until Rock Road seemed to be in a constant state of celebration as father after father was reunited with his folks.

Except there were some families that did not have a hero to welcome. Some families that did not have a warrior to parade in front of their friends. Again, Roger would have been too young to be consciously aware of the fact. But the tears of his mother and brother were real enough, and so was the continuing fatherless silence of his house, compared to the bustle and noise of their neighbors and the street outside.

Later in his childhood, exploring his own home, he would discover the neatly folded and pressed uniform that his father once wore with such pride and distinction, and which his mother now kept in her bedroom. He would read the letter of condolence that she received when he died, signed by the King and thanking her for the sacrifice she’d made in the name of freedom. He would find photographs of his parents in happier times. He would question his mother and brother about his dad and treasure the memories that they were able to share.

And none of it was enough.

In September 1947, with his fourth birthday cake still a delicious, recent memory, Roger Waters enrolled at Morley Memorial Junior School on Blinco Road, just around the corner from his home. Mary taught there and would continue doing so after her son moved on to Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, on Hills Road, seven years later. He attended Saturday morning art classes at Homerton College, and it was friendships (or at least acquaintances) that he developed this early in life that would come to shape his future, a decade and more later. Among his fellow students at both Morley and Homerton, albeit a couple of years his junior, was a pair of all-but-inseparable rebels named Roger Barrett and David Gilmour.

2

Raving and Drooling

In 1954, Waters arrived at Cambridgeshire High School, and anybody tracing his life through the music of The Wall has now arrived at the second brick. A half-century-old establishment operating beneath the firm grasp of the newly-installed headmaster Arthur William Eagling, the high school already had a prepossessing reputation. With the staff seemingly dedicated only to funneling their charges into the universities for which Cambridge is internationally renowned, discipline was drawn as much from the pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and a firm military tradition as it was from any more modern curriculum. (Apropos of very little, Eagling’s predecessor as head, a former MI5 officer named Brynley Newton-John, left the school in 1954 in order to emigrate to Australia with his family and six-year-old daughter Olivia.)

Students were expected to follow the Victorian dictate that children should be seen and not heard, and education was less a matter of being taught than being cowed into submission with sarcasm and blunt put-downs, which might have worked in whatever prewar golden age of unquestioned adult authority the various teachers held dearest to their own hearts. And it presumably was successful when one studied the roll call of old boys who went on to greater things—the Liberal member of Parliament Sidney Peters, philanthropist David Robinson, Nobel Prize–winner Clive Granger, botanist William T. Stearn, and William Tutte, one of the unsung heroes of the British war effort, a mathematician who cracked some of the most devilish codes the Germans had developed.

Among Waters’s own contemporaries too, there were several who were destined for great things—or, at least, things that their teachers would consider great. Gerald Hayden Phillips, a high-flying civil servant of the 1970s and beyond (he was ultimately knighted for his services) was a year ahead of Waters at the high school; politician Kevin Tebbit was three years behind him.

Neither would go on to publicly describe the school’s regime as anything but educational. The young Waters, however, had very different experiences.

The mid-1950s was an age of great social change. Short-lived though it was, the Labour government that swept to power at the end of World War II had initiated a raft of social reforms that could almost have stepped out of Eric Waters’s private ambitions—a National Health Service that guaranteed free medical care to all who needed it, reforms throughout the welfare system, subsidized housing for those who required it, livable pensions for the elderly, and so much more.

The country was still struggling to get back on its feet following six years on the frontline of war, but the politicians who were aiding it seemed, for the first time, to have reached conclusions that idle dreamers and utopian planners of the prewar years had doubted would ever percolate into the halls of government: that a people who do not have to worry about the most basic human requirements will thus have the time, energy, and inclination to help the country improve its own position even further.

It was working, too, no matter that each of the reforms would