George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943 in Great Bookham, Surrey) is an English rock musician. He is best known as the bass player and one of the main songwriters and lead singers in the English rock band Pink Floyd from 1964 to 1985. Following his split with Pink Floyd in 1985, Waters began a solo career, releasing three studio albums, one soundtrack, and staging one of the largest concerts ever, The Wall Concert in Berlin in 1990. In 2005 he released an opera, Ça Ira , and joined Pink Floyd at the Live 8 concert in London for their first public performance with Waters in 24 years.
Biography
Early years (1943–65)
Born in Great Bookham, near Leatherhead, Surrey, Waters grew up in Cambridge. His father Eric Fletcher Waters fought in World War II and died in combat at Anzio in 1944, when Waters was only five months old. Waters referred or alluded to the loss of his father throughout his work, from "Corporal Clegg" ( A Saucerful Of Secrets , 1968) and "Free Four" ( Obscured By Clouds , 1972) to the sombre "When the Tigers Broke Free", first used in the movie version of The Wall (1982), and "The Fletcher Memorial Home" ( The Final Cut , 1983).
Waters and Syd Barrett attended the Morley Memorial Junior School on Blinco Grove, Cambridge, and later both attended the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College), while fellow band member David Gilmour attended The Perse School in the same road. He met Nick Mason and Richard Wright while attending the Regent Street Polytechnic school of architecture. He was a keen sportsman and was fond of swimming in the River Cam at Grantchester Meadows. At 15 he was chair of YCND in Cambridge.
Pink Floyd years (1965–83)
In 1965, Roger Waters co-founded Pink Floyd along with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason. Although Barrett initially did most of the songwriting for the band, Waters wrote the song "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk" on their debut LP, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn . The album was a critical success and positioned the band for stardom. Barrett's deteriorating mental health led to increasingly erratic behaviour, rendering him unable to continue in his capacity as Pink Floyd's lead singer and guitarist. Waters attempted to coerce his friend into psychiatric treatment; this proved unhelpful, and the band approached David Gilmour to replace Barrett at the end of 1967. Even the band's former managers felt that Pink Floyd would not be able to sustain its initial success without Barrett. Filling the void left by Barrett's departure, Waters began to chart Pink Floyd's new artistic direction. The lineup with Gilmour and Waters eventually brought Pink Floyd to prominence, producing a series of albums in the 1970s that remain among the most critically acclaimed and best-selling records of all time.
In 1970, Waters collaborated with British composer Ron Geesin, who co-wrote Pink Floyd's title suite from Atom Heart Mother , on a soundtrack album, Music from "The Body" , which consisted mostly of instrumentals interspersed with songs composed by Waters. Within Pink Floyd, Waters became the main lyrical contributor, exerting progressively more creative control over the band: he produced thematic ideas that became the impetus for concept albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here , for which he wrote all of the lyrics and some of the music. After this, Waters became the primary songwriter, composing Animals and The Wall largely by himself (though continuing to collaborate with Gilmour on a few tracks).
Initially, Waters' bandmates were happy to allow him to write the band's lyrics and guide its conceptual direction while they shared the opportunity to contribute musical ideas. However, this give-and-take relationship began to dissolve: a consequence of the band's collective ennui, according to Waters. Songwriting credits were a source of contention in these years; Gilmour has noted that his contributions to tracks like "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II", with its guitar solo, were not always noted in the album credits. Nick Mason addresses the band infighting in his memoir, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd , characterizing Waters as egomaniacal at times. While recording The Wall , Waters decided to fire Wright, after Wright's personal problems began to affect the album production. Wright stayed with the band as a paid session musician while Waters led the band through a complete performance of the album on every night of the brief tour that followed, for which Gilmour acted as musical director. Oddly, Wright's firing and position as a paid session musician meant he was the only one of the band to realize a profit from the tour - since all bills for the expensive tour were paid by the three remaining 'members'.
In 1983, the last Waters–Gilmour–Mason collaboration, The Final Cut , was released. The sleeve notes describe it as being a piece "by Roger Waters" that was "performed by Pink Floyd". Gilmour unsuccessfully tried to delay production on the album until he could author more material; Waters refused, and in 1985, he proclaimed that the band had dissolved due to irreconcilable differences. The ensuing battle between Waters and Gilmour over the latter's intention to continue to use the name Pink Floyd descended into threatened lawsuits and public bickering in the press. Waters claimed that, as the original band consisted of himself, Syd Barrett, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, Gilmour could not reasonably use the name Pink Floyd now that it was without three of its founding members. Another of Waters' arguments was that he had written almost all of the band's lyrics and a great part of the music after Barrett's departure.
Early solo years (1984–2005)
Following the release of The Final Cut , Waters embarked on a solo career producing three concept albums, and a movie soundtrack which did not garner impressive sales. His solo work has managed critical acclaim and even some comparison to previous work with Pink Floyd. His first solo album, 1984's The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking , was a project about a man's dreams across one night. The list of musicians helping Waters during recording included guitarist Eric Clapton and jazz saxophonist David Sanborn. Conceived around the same time as The Wall , the concept was shown and demos played to the Pink Floyd members, but they chose to proceed with The Wall over The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking , rejecting the latter as "too personal". Gilmour was later to claim that this was not as obvious a task as might first seem, as, in his opinion, both demos were "unlistenable" and "sounded exactly alike." Longtime Pink Floyd engineer Nick Griffiths, however, says otherwise: "They were seriously rough, but the songs were there." The album, accompanied by Gerald Scarfe artwork that some claimed was sexist, received mixed reviews, with Kurt Loder describing Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking in Rolling Stone as a "strangely static, faintly hideous record." On the other end of the spectrum, Mike DeGagne of Allmusic praised the album for its "ingenious symbolism and his brilliant use of stream of consciousness within a subconscious realm", rating it four out of five stars.
He began touring the new album, aided by guitarist Eric Clapton, and featuring a set design by Marc Brickman and Mark Fisher of Park Display. With a new band, new material, and a selection of Pink Floyd favourites, Waters débuted his tour in Stockholm on 16 June 1984. The lure of a somewhat anonymous rock star however was no match for that of Pink Floyd. Some venues were cancelled, and Waters was irritated by the audiences, who would often react more positively to Clapton than he wished. The Clapton collaboration cost Waters an estimated $400,000, but despite the lukewarm reception to his new album Waters went to the US in 1985 with the Pros and Cons Plus Some Old Pink Floyd Stuff — North America Tour 1985 .
In 1986, Waters contributed songs and a score to the soundtrack of the movie When the Wind Blows , based on the Raymond Briggs book of the same name. His backing band, featuring Paul Carrack, was credited as The Bleeding Heart Band . Waters' then legal wranglings with Gilmour over the Pink Floyd brand are alluded to on the soundtrack album's "Towers of Faith", where the vocal transforms from "This land is my land", to "This sand is my sand", to "This band is my band". The following year he released another album, Radio K.A.O.S. , a concept album based around a mute man named Billy who can hear radio waves in his head. Billy learns to communicate with a radio DJ, and angry at the state of the world simulates a fake nuclear attack. Waters followed the release with a supporting tour, also in 1987. The album did not garner the sales he had achieved in Pink Floyd. Years later, Waters himself would express dissatisfaction at the album, expressing distaste for the production, and particularly regretting his decision to trim the album from a double to a single.
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