![]() ![]() Waters is one of his generation’s most gifted songwriters, but famously uncompromising. But perhaps there was a grain of truth to that description. “They said I was autocratic,” he says, still clearly hurt, decades after the split. “Faux Floyd,” as Waters calls them, “went touring round the world and made millions and millions and millions of dollars.” (By one newspaper’s estimate, Waters is $130 million (£108 million) richer than Gilmour, which may offer some consolation.)Īfter founding member Syd Barrett had, as Waters puts it, “gone loopy” (a 1968 breakdown following heavy drug-use), Waters had taken on the brunt of songwriting duties. As a result, Gilmour and Mason, the only other surviving members, own the band’s name. Waters quit Pink Floyd in 1985, expecting it to dissolve without him. Pink Floyd’s legacy has been the cause of much bitter debate. Waters is planning a lavish vinyl release, but this might prove tricky. At the time of writing, I’m one of just a handful of people to have heard it from start-to-finish. ![]() He’s still polishing the final details, but plays me a full-length cut. He has re-recorded it from scratch, without the involvement or even knowledge of any of his old bandmates. For months, Waters has been secretly working on a new version of Pink Floyd’s psychedelic journey through life and death, sanity and madness, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). I’d been promised details of a major new musical project, one that may land Waters in yet more hot water. He wants to share all of them, before getting round to the reason he’d invited me to meet him. Waters has strong views on – in no particular order – China, Spotify, Ecuador, Biden, Haiti, Brexit, Putin and, inevitably, Israel (of which more later). Over four impassioned hours, Waters gives vent to the full range of his often divisive, sometimes contradictory opinions, while his interviewer struggles to get a word in edgeways. “Nazis,” he tells me, echoing Russian propaganda, are “in control of the government” in the war-torn country. The idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is, in Waters’s view, “f-g insane”. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he went much further. He called the invasion “illegal” but “not unprovoked”. After accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”, he went on to call the USA “the main aggressor” in the Russia-Ukraine war, a stance that seems to have gone down well with Russia, who invited him to speak at a UN Security Council hearing on Ukraine on Wednesday. ![]() The latest spat follows an interview Waters gave to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in which, not for the first time, he compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. After this week, a reconciliation looks less likely than ever. “It’s really disappointing these rather elderly gentlemen are still at loggerheads,” as the band’s drummer Nick Mason put it in 2018. Waters and Gilmour spent the 1970s collaborating on some of the most successful albums ever made, and subsequent decades hurling insults at each other. Naturally, his ex-bandmate Waters, 79, rejected the “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” portrayal. “ Every word demonstrably true,” chipped in her husband David Gilmour, the 76-year-old Pink Floyd singer and guitarist. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.” “You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core,” novelist Polly Samson told the rock star on Twitter. ![]() It has not been a quiet week for Roger Waters. ![]()
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