From Phil Collins to Bono: Five songwriters Roger Waters slated
Few figures in rock music have split opinions as much as Roger Waters. Not only is he one of the undisputed great songwriters of the genre and the driving force behind Pink Floyd’s rise to artistic eminence after the tragic departure of original frontman Syd Barrett, but he is also one of the most outspoken voices in popular music.
A champion of free speech and democracy from early in life, Waters has a very definitive view of the world, as can be heard in his most important bodies of work with his old band, including The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, not to mention his overtly political solo material. While he is currently embroiled in an anti-semitism row, in which he has vehemently defended himself, across his career, he has always defended what he deems righteous causes and remains undeterred in doing so, despite the backlash.
When not involved in heated and controversial political disputes, Waters has often produced uncompromising takes on the songwriting of other musicians. Naturally, his deeply political character has reared its head in many of these sonic critiques, which are also prone to featuring distinctly personal angles, adding an extra layer of discomfort for the recipient.
Of course, we might not agree with everything Waters says and does, but there’s no denying that his opinionated status has not been incredibly fascinating over the years. An unstoppable force driving at breakneck speed through life, he rarely has come up against an immovable object firm enough to resist his fire and push back against the crack of his acid tongue.
Five songwriters Roger Waters slated:
5. Phil Collins
Waters has watched the music industry evolve greatly during his time. Over the years, he’s come to see a clear divide between artists who write based on emotions and those who conceive plastic sounds for the masses. Given the profoundly reflective essence of The Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd classics, Waters is aware he resides in the former category.
However, he deems Phil Collins, of prog rock outfit Genesis, symptomatic of the latter. The Surrey native has also enjoyed an immensely successful pop career outside of the ‘Land of Confusion’ outfit, which only cements Waters’ position.
Speaking to Musician magazine, Waters described Collins’ pretensions and claimed that his drumming contemporary only feigns to be a rocker. He said: “I seem to always wind up attacking poor Phil Collins. He’s symptomatic of an awful lot of it. He might well disagree, and so might his fans. But the ‘feeling’ I get is that he’s pretending to be a songwriter or a rock’n’roller. It’s an act. That’s why it’s unsatisfying.”
In true form, Collins has his own view of being associated with Pink Floyd. He once stated: “I was aware of what they were doing. But I never was really a fan. I was in a band that was kind of being always put in the same box as that lot. But never felt that we actually were in the same box. But we probably were.”
4. Bob Dylan
While Bob Dylan first enraptured his generation by pouring a hefty dose of gritty reality into his songs, social commentaries that saw him be hailed as ‘The Voice of a Generation’, as time wore on, he shed his skin of cultural saviour for a gradually more cerebral angle. Things changed for the curly-haired curmudgeon in the mid-1960s when he decided to go electric, leave protest music behind, and create less explicit art that made the listener do the work.
While this brave shift produced many moments of unfettered genius, and, on the other hand, his much-maligned gospel period, it also culminated in his 2015 album Shadows in the Night, which consisted of old standards made famous by none other than Frank Sinatra. Delving into the world of the late crooner would have been unthinkable in his younger years.
At the time, Dylan explained: ”I don’t see myself as covering these songs in any way. They’ve been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”
However, the uber-realistic Waters, who’s followed Dylan from the start, had some stern words for the American maestro. Shock, he believed that the 2015 project was a schlocky covers album and not the excavation of old songs that Dylan thought.
Waters said: “I haven’t got time to do an album of Frank Sinatra covers like Bob Dylan, for instance, which is weird. You go, ‘Fuck me, Bob, what is wrong with you? Why would you do that?’ I guess it’s because he can’t bear the thought of not being on the road, and he couldn’t think of anything else to do. I can’t believe he really has an affinity for all that schlock. But maybe he does.”
3. Bono
We all know that U2 and their frontman Bono are among the most hated in music history, a paradoxical position given their immense global success. Typically, Waters’ gripe with the Irish quartet is longstanding, and it goes back to when the post-punk upstarts criticised his 1979 passion project, The Wall.
“I remember when we did The Wall, being criticised by Bono,” he told Rolling Stone. “U2 are a very young band, and they’re going [in a mock Irish accent], ‘Oh, we can’t stand all that theatrical nonsense that Pink Floyd do. We just play our music and the songs unto themselves and blah, blah, blah.’”
In Waters’ mind, he had the last laugh. He claimed Bono and The Edge’s songwriting is a cheap copy of his style. However, with a clear lineage between his bombastic The Wall live show and the band’s performances at the Las Vegas Sphere, the former Pink Floyd man is skewed in the perceived separation between him and U2. I’m also not sure it’s a good thing saying that a band widely perceived as vanilla merchants copy you.
He said: “All they did for the rest of their fucking career was copy what I’d been doing and continue to do. So good luck to them, but what a load of bullshit. If you lead them, people will follow.”
2. Andrew Lloyd Webber
There’s a long list of people who hate the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and it’s safe to say that Waters is one of his most prominent critics. It stems from the openly Tory impresario allegedly lifting the riff from Pink Floyd’s sprawling epic ‘Echoes’ and using it in his hit 1986 musical, The Phantom of the Opera. Rightfully bitter about what was seemingly such an unashamed theft, Waters has made it clear that Webber “sickens me”.
Speaking to Q in 1992, Waters said: “Andrew Lloyd Webber sickens me. He’s in your face all the time, and what he does is nonsense. It has no value. It is shallow, derivative rubbish, all of it, and it makes me very gloomy… Phantom Of The Opera is absolutely fucking horrible from start to finish.”
Waters thought about taking on the West End’s number one villain in court but thought better of it. He instead opted to use songwriting as the conduit for striking his wee foe down. In ‘It’s a Miracle’ from 1992’s Amused to Death, Waters – who has admitted he’s barely heard any of Webber’s work – sings: “We cower in our shelters with our hands over our ears / Lloyd-Webber’s awful stuff runs for years and years and years”.
1. Sinéad O’Connor
On paper, Waters and the late Sinéad O’Connor were cut from the same cloth. They’re two of rock music’s most outspoken defenders of freedom and no strangers to controversy. Furthermore, they’re both excellent musicians, meaning that when Waters brought The Wall to life in 1990 without his old bandmates, he drafted in O’Connor for the ‘Mother’. It’s a song she was born to deliver, given her heartbreaking background and familiarity with melancholic songs.
Despite her celebrated renditions, after O’Connor couldn’t make the final show in Berlin, Waters trashed his Irish colleague in the same Q interview where he destroyed Lloyd Webber. It was a case of them being from two different generations.
He said: “[They were] all brilliant. Except for Sinead O’Connor. Oh, God! I have never ever met anybody who is so self-involved and unprofessional and big-headed and unpleasant. She is so far up her own bum, it’s scary. She was so worried that there weren’t any other ‘young people on the show’. I and everybody else were old farts in her opinion.”
