How a fired-up Roger Waters learned to love performing and embrace his Pink Floyd past

PINK Floyd founder Roger Waters reveals the inspiration for the band’s last arena tour — and unloads on America’s “nincompoop President”.

THERE was a time where touring and playing live was torture for Roger Waters.

At the height of the success of Pink Floyd — one of the most celebrated bands of all time with album sales of more than 250 million — its founder, bass player and driving force was disconnected from his audience and disgruntled with his band mates.

That dysfunction and disaffection infamously reached a head when Waters spat at the audience during a 1977 gig in Canada and was subsequently so disturbed by the experience that it sparked double-album masterpiece The Wall.

The “spitting story” has become an integral part of Pink Floyd’s and Waters’ history, but the notoriously intense and sometimes prickly singer is quick to point out that the world only knows about it because he chose to broadcast it.

“It happened because I felt bad about that disconnect and that act,” he says, relaxing in the penthouse of a Chicago hotel, sipping a glass of white wine, the day after a sold-out show. “If I hadn’t been disgusted with myself and not written The Wall ... that’s the only reason anybody knows about it.

Guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason continued to tour as Pink Floyd after Roger Waters left, a decision that still irks the founding member and bass player.

“I could have walked offstage and gone ‘F---ing arsehole’ and got on with my life doing what I did but because I am a ... ” he pauses, giving a rueful and deeply ironic chuckle, “ ... caring, sensitive soul, I didn’t. I went ‘F--- me, what is going on?’.”

History records that Pink Floyd made two more albums with Waters after that incident: 1979’s The Wall and 1983’s The Final Cut (a Waters solo album in everything but name). They then embarked on one of the most acrimonious breakups in rock history.

Guitarist Dave Gilmour and founding drummer Nick Mason continued to tour as Pink Floyd and would release three more albums, infuriating Waters, who thought the name should be retired. That led to a long and protracted court battle. Although the warring factions eventually came to an agreement — and even settled their differences briefly to appear in the Live 8 charity show in 2005 — it’s a decision that still clearly irks Waters more than three decades later.

Waters aims a particularly pointed barb at Gilmour and his author wife Polly Samson, who contributed lyrics to latter-day Floyd albums The Division Bell and The Endless River.

“Dave and Nick decided to carry on and that’s when I realised just how powerful the trade name was that I was trying to retire. I said, ‘Come on boys, we’re done, let’s just retire the name’. But they said no and carried on and then I realised that people actually don’t really care who’s in the band or what the work is. You could get your new wife to write the lyrics and nobody would give a f---. And they didn’t.”

Pink Floyd (from left) Dave Gilmour, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Rick Wright, reunited for the Live 8 in 2005, but don’t bank on it happening again.

Waters forged on with a solo career, delivering well received albums The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (1984), Radio KAOS (1987) and Amused to Death (1992), but he admits he felt “somewhat out in the wilderness”.

It wasn’t until 1992, when Eagles singer-drummer Don Henley asked him to perform at a charity gig, that Waters finally realised how much he loved his job — and how lucky he was to have it.

“I went and played a few songs — Mother and Wish You Were Here I think — and I suddenly felt this thing that was very new to me,” Waters says. “It was a huge wave of affection and support and warmth coming from the four or five thousand people who were in the Universal Amphitheatre that night and I thought, ‘Wow, I like this’.”

The new millennium has seen a revitalised and re-engaged Waters once again embracing the songs and albums he wrote and that are so beloved by millions of fans around the world. In 2006 he undertook a mammoth two-year world tour playing 1972 masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon (the third highest selling album of all time) in full.

And in 2010 he began his spectacular arena production of The Wall, which would go on to become the highest-selling tour by a solo artist. This year, on the back of his first rock album in nearly 25 years, Is This the Life We Really Want, a fired-up Waters has been selling out arenas around the US with the visually spectacular, politically charged Us + Them Tour, which he will bring to Australia early next year.

The seeds were sown for Roger Waters’ spectacular Us + Them tour at the Desert Trip last year.

The seeds for the tour were sown last year, when he was approached by Coachella head honcho Paul Tollett to play the Desert Trip Festival (cheekily dubbed “Oldchella”) alongside Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Who and Neil Young.

“I realised that Paul Tollett was handing me the Pink Floyd mantle for 10 minutes,” says Waters. “Obviously his plan was The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Pink Floyd, throw in a bit of The Who and Bob Dylan and Neil Young and boom! I was really flattered and I thought, ‘I can do that’.”

The shows, held over consecutive weekends last October, came just weeks before the US presidential election and presented a perfect opportunity for the ever-political and always outspoken Waters to get a few things off this chest — particularly about the man he now calls “the nincompoop president”.

His festival show, and the subsequent Us + Them Tour, didn’t focus on one particular Pink Floyd album, but delved deeply into the sometimes overlooked 1978 release Animals, which was Waters’ take on George Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm. One of the show’s highlights is taken from that album, the extended jam Pigs, during which a list of Donald Trump’s lies are emblazoned on the giant screens and a floating pig makes its way around the stadium.

“I have never done Pigs before,” Waters says. “But it’s great. It was waiting for the appropriate pig and we found him. We were concerned at the beginning of the tour — we started off in really red (Republican-voting) places like Kansas City, Louisville, Tulsa and I was absolutely shocked and amazed: there were a couple of boos and a few people left, but by and large the audiences just went, ‘Yeah!’”

Roger Waters is no fan of Donald Trump, the man he calls the “nincompoop president”.

Waters makes no apologies about the political nature of the Us + Them tour, despite the abuse on his social media and the threats he has received. He suggests that the “shut up and sing” brigade would be better off finding a different show to attend.

“There is a huge trolling thing goes on the Facebook page saying, ‘Why can’t you just play the music and leave the politics?’,” he says, exasperated. “Have you not noticed that I have ALWAYS been political in my career? I actually said last night at the end of the show that politics is important. Politics is the way people organise themselves together to try to affect the way governments affect our lives. That’s what politics is and it’s certainly more important than a few old tunes that you think you remember. This is the fundamental stuff of trying to prevent us as a species from hurling ourselves to our deaths.”

Angry as he is at the state of the world, Waters says the title of the Us + Them tour is both deliberate and hopeful. The tour takes its name from a Dark Side of the Moon track, which is as relevant today as it was when it written more than 40 years ago.

“That’s the beginning of this tour; that is me actually identifying what it is I am talking about — that we are the same person,” he says. “There is only one of us — we are human beings and we have an absolute responsibility to look after one another. And we don’t. Sadly.”

Is Waters, in the end, an optimist?

“No, I don’t think I am,” he says. “I would like to be. I would like to think that reason and our attachment to the good feelings that come from helping our fellow men and women might trump a leaning towards the futile scrabble to steal as much as we can and a dog-eat-dog and f--- everyone else ethos and mentality that pervades most of the Western World.

“Will it happen? I don’t know. There is a chance — and it’s worth fighting for.”

Roger Waters, Us + Them, Qudos Bank Arena, February 2; Brisbane Entertainment Centre, February 6; Rod Laver Arena, February 10-11; Adelaide Entertainment Centre, February 16; Perth Arena, February 20; on sale Friday, livenation.com.au