Roger Waters at 73, carefully curating the Pink Floyd legacy

The bassist-songwriter on music, radical politics and getting the band back together.

Roger Waters in 2013.

It is baffling at first. Maybe the 73-year-old just needs a rest after his trip down memory lane. Modesty forbids the thought that it could be the charming company of the man from The Times. Whatever it is, Roger Waters does not want to leave me.

Shooing his PR minder away and stretching out, the Pink Floyd lyricist and bass player continues to shoot the breeze. With his slim stone-washed jeans, skin-tight jumper and gaunt, grizzled features, Waters ticks most of the ageing rock star boxes. He launches into a vivid recollection of being 15, hearing Ray Charles sing Georgia on My Mind and thinking: “If only I could write a song that would move someone as much as this is moving me now.”

Next he recalls writing the lyrics for the mid-1970s masterpiece Wish You Were Here in 30 minutes. Then we’re on to the band’s concept of the concept album, which was “rock ’n’ roll as an extended piece of work that is theatrical and takes you on a journey”.

Maybe he needs a friend? Then the confusion disappears. This is about legacy. This is a finger in the eye to all who have questioned his merits. Pink Floyd is getting the V&A summer blockbuster treatment in London.

Of course he wants to talk about it. About 350 artefacts have been collected and curated for the show, Their Mortal Remains. It starts with the band’s 60s rise as a pioneer of psychedelia and the madcap days with Syd Barrett, the original lead singer, continues with the peaks of 70s albums Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, and goes on through the theatre of The Wall. It’s proof that the band was not, in Waters’s words, merely about “outer space and drugs”. It is up there with David Bowie, who got his own V&A show in 2013.

“Maybe it is vindication,” says Waters. “I think the work we did together was important and I am really proud of all our contributions. We were lucky to meet one another, very lucky. Most of the work was political but a lot of people did not notice it. It was about humans relating to each other and empathising with each other.”

As Waters reminisces about working with David Gilmour, who supplied the chords for his lyrics, and speaks fondly of Nick Mason, his lifelong friend and the band’s drummer, one could be forgiven for thinking this had been a band of brothers.

Perhaps it was for a while, but after Pink Floyd’s first album Barrett, having taken copious doses of LSD, mentally disintegrated. He was dropped, Gilmour came in and Waters became the de facto leader. They trailblazed through the 70s with innovative technology, groundbreaking designs and epic sounds, but there were fractures that wouldn’t heal.

Tension between Waters and Gilmour resulted in walkouts, legal disputes and harsh words. There was one comradely concert in 2005 but, despite constant chatter about money-making reunions, the band appears to be finished. Gilmour has donated some of his treasures to the exhibition but did not wish to be involved, alongside Waters, in the accompanying promotional blitz. Waters dismisses the idea of getting back together as boring. Keyboardist Richard Wright has died. Only Mason would consider it.

And here he is, the drummer, looking remarkably unruffled for a rock ’n’ roll veteran of 73, dressed in blue jeans and a grey shirt, as would befit a grandfather pottering around his shed. He laughs at his enthusiasm to continue the Pink Floyd story. “I think it is almost in the nature of being a drummer. You can’t operate on your own so consequently I would love it, I would cheerfully pack tonight,” he says.

Mason, who belies his age and dress sense with a continuing fascination with fast cars, is also self-effacing about the V&A’s seal of approval. “I don’t want to spend my whole time doing us down,” he chuckles. “I am a technically able drummer but I have learned that I can do something that works really well in the context of this band. And we did have a reputation for being cutting edge with our use of technology. A lot of it is about originality.”

Surely the fact thousands of copies of Dark Side of the Moon are still sold each week suggests a deeper achievement? “I have worked it out,” Mason says with another laugh. “What it equates to is that one in four households (has) a copy of the record. But I don’t think that is the case. We have an older audience now, many of whom are quite forgetful. So they go out and buy it again. I think one in seven (has) got three copies each.”

Mason, his second wife, Nettie, and their two sons (he has four children in total) divide their time between their north London and Wiltshire homes.

Waters, a father of three with four marriages behind him, lives in the US and is clearly more restless than Mason. He tours this summer with his first solo album in 25 years, full of politicised venom at the rulers and sympathy for the downtrodden. He would willingly play Glastonbury, just not with his former band.

His activism has not stilled. Just last month he put his name to a letter criticising Radiohead for playing a concert in Israel. There is still a belligerence but also thoughtfulness, albeit delivered with direct eye contact that dares a wavering in concentration. Don­ald Trump is blasted. Mainstream media is “propaganda”.

“I was political; they are not political,” he says of his former Pink Floyd colleagues. “I am serious, Nick is maybe a little bit, Rick was completely apolitical and Dave, well, he and I had issues.”

The two are known to have clashed over the band’s creative direction, with Gilmour the guitarist wanting more big licks and Waters the poet wishing for more prose. Waters shed more light on the disintegrating relationship in the 80s, suggesting that he and Gilmour were, politically, polar opposites.

“He didn’t think that I should criticise Margaret Thatcher,” Waters reveals with a chuckle. “That was one of the big issues.”

Although acknowledging that he and Gilmour will never be best mates, Waters says he recognises that for a while they were good together. Gilmour’s riffs and chords allied with his lyrics and the daring stage and album designs propelled Pink Floyd into the stratosphere. The Beatles had innovated with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and, arguably, Pink Floyd was the band that moved the story on.

“We turned rock ’n’ roll into something that will work in an arena,” Waters says. “The concept album; rock ’n’ roll as an extended piece of work that is theatrical, has a theme, a beginning, a middle and an end and takes you on a journey.

“And one or two decent songs. Wish You Were Here is a pretty cool song. Dave had written that guitar riff and I sat down with a piece of paper and probably wrote it in half an hour. One of these things that just came out. Listening to it, f..k me, that’s not bad.

“It is luck, though. Nobody knows why some people can write poetry and others can’t. It is just something about language and the way it forms and connects.”

Although Waters does not feel undeserving of an exhibition at the V&A, he is quite candid about the motivations of those behind it. “Someone has figured out that they can make a few quid,” says the multi-millionaire. “That’s fine. I have nothing against people making money.”

While legacy management would be an obvious motivation for Waters giving it his seal of approval and raiding his archives, he gives a more unexpected answer when asked what’s in it for him. “All the time you have been speaking to me I have been thinking: ‘Do I have anything that is really important to me?’ ” he says. “Because of my political activism I come under a great deal of attack. Mainly because of the Israel-Palestine question. They accuse me of anti-Semitism and it is very difficult to get past that loud bang that goes off in people’s minds and people will believe a lie about an individual like me.

“I get very little (out of the show) but I thought that what would be a good thing would be for there to be a photograph of me explaining that I have never been anti-Semitic. I am the son of a man who died in World War II fighting fascism and was brought up in an extremely open-minded and liberal household.”

The Times

The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains opens at the V&A, London, on Saturday.