Roger Waters was never interested in the punk movement: “I never really heard The Clash”
Some of the best musical movements really need to be felt in the moment to be truly appreciated. While everyone can go back and reminisce about being there when major musical events happened, those moments have the potential to happen every day, and Roger Waters could admit when he completely missed the boat on certain legends.
But by the time that the 1970s began, Waters was completely consumed in bringing Pink Floyd back from the brink. The fallout of Syd Barrett being let go from the group left a gaping hole where a frontman should have been, and even if David Gilmour was in his place, it was up to Waters to take the reins and carve out what their next goal as a band was supposed to be after their musical leader left.
While a lot of the band’s first albums without Barrett are strange facsimiles of what his music might have sounded like, they were always better off making their own reactionary music to his disillusionment. Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here are both brilliant pieces about trying to communicate with a friend that you’ve lost contact with, but underneath all of that sadness, Waters couldn’t help but feel a little angry.
Animals and The Wall were perfect cases of him having an axe to grind about the music industry, but if you were to ask him, he was simply following the lead of his inspirations that had something greater to say about the world, like John Lennon and Neil Young. Little did Waters know that both of his heroes also ended up creating the basis for another angry genre that was flaring up around that time.
Right in the middle of the group’s prime, punk was slowly starting to infiltrate the mainstream. Despite its insistence on being an underground genre, Sex Pistols and Ramones all began serving up a straight-ahead version of rock and roll that had nothing to do with the lavish lifestyle that seemed to come from every corporate rock band coming out at the time. Waters was also trying to speak for the common man, but he didn’t even pretend to pay attention at the time.
The frontman did have a few things to say about the groups in retrospect, but he also claimed that he didn’t come close to understanding what punk meant, saying, “I’ve never been very interested in modern music. I might find some of it enjoyable, but it’s never really been interesting. I never really heard The Clash, and certainly not the Sex Pistols. As I still am now, I was listening to Neil Young when all that happened. It passed me by.”
Even if the punk faithful seemed to hate bands like Pink Floyd with everything they had, it’s not like there wasn’t some overlap. If you listen to the ramshackle nature of some of the greatest punk songs of the 1970s, a lot of the strange chord changes or zany production is more than a little bit similar to what Floyd were doing back when Syd Barrett was at the helm, and it’s not like Waters ever stopped being critical of the industry on songs like ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep’.
The punk crowd may not have wanted someone like Waters among their fanbase, but they would have been delusional to think they weren’t students of what he had created. The idea of three chords and the truth runs deep in punk circles, but the genre always knew that emotion mattered over anything else, and Waters was a master at expressing himself whenever he made a new record.
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