Roger Waters on the final time he saw Syd Barrett
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Credit: Andrés Ibarra
How the blues changed Roger Waters’ life
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters was raised in a time and place when music wasn’t particularly accessible, a period when it required real effort and commitment to seek out new bands. Once he got a taste of the blues, Waters became desperate to hear more, and it took a stranglehold on his existence.
Alternative radio was yet to be the dominant medium for music it would become, and during his youth, the format was firmly in its infancy, but for Waters, it was life-changing. During the 1960s, pirate radio had begun to blossom, and it was an escape to a whole new world for the former Pink Floyd member whose favourite station was Radio Luxembourg.
The station was founded in 1933 and later established the blueprint for modern commercial radio. It played records from bands before they were available to buy anywhere else, and it helped shape a whole generation which included Waters.
If it wasn’t for Radio Luxembourg, Waters might have never become so besotted with the blues, which eventually led to the formation of Pink Floyd. It remains his earliest memory of music, and in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2005, he recalled: “Like everyone else in England, I listened to Radio Luxembourg, a pirate station”.
He added: “They played rock & roll, like Bill Haley and English acts with stupid invented names like Tommy Steele and Billy Fury. Seven or eight years later, the Beatles changed all that. In the meantime I fell in love with Lead Belly, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Art Blakey. Monk and Mingus. The blues is at the root of everything I do.”
Waters wasn’t alone in his infatuation of Bill Haley, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason also held similarly strong feelings towards the American rock ‘n’ roller. He said in 2020: “The beginning of rock’ n’ roll. Elvis was moving things on slightly from Bill Haley. Bill Haley was the first record I ever bought, and I almost certainly bought it as a 78″, not as a 45″, which shows my age!”
Although Waters isn’t recognised for his affiliation to the blues, the genre has always been a place in which he finds himself boomeranging back. His dreams came true in 1985 when Eric Clapton joined his band, and he got to live out his blues fantasy on a nightly basis.
Waters remembered: “When Eric [Clapton] was in my band, back in ’85, we’d play the blues during sound-check. In Pink Floyd I was being savaged — because Dave [Gilmour] and Rick [Wright] were kind of insecure, they’d always try to attack me, saying I sang out of tune or I couldn’t really play.”
He added: “I said something about that to Eric, and he said, ‘Are you fucking crazy? You’re a great bass player.’ I went, ‘Oh, yeah, maybe I am.’ I would be totally happy to be standing at the back of a stage playing the blues hour after hour . . . . I enjoyed playing bass [at Live 8].”
While the blues is a far cry from the world of progressive rock, where Waters has predominantly plied his trade for half a century, it remains his happy place, and there’s nowhere else he’d rather be than on-stage playing the twelve-bar blues.
