Inside Roger Waters’ decades-long grudge against Bono: “What a load of bullshit”
Roger Waters has not made an army of friends throughout his time in the music industry, even turning once-close bandmates into enemies, and racking up more feuds than gold discs.
For better or worse, Waters doesn’t mince his words and never mastered the art of diplomacy. If Waters doesn’t like a person, governmental regime or musical entity, he’ll express his feelings in no uncertain terms, even if they are recently deceased, like Ozzy Osbourne.
In some quarters, this attitude has made Waters one of the most disliked figures in music, with Bono likely to be of that belief, even if he’s consistently ignored the barbs that have been thrown in his direction over the course of more than four decades.
Initially, the (mostly one-way) feud was a result of a singular throwaway comment made by Bono about Pink Floyd in the early 1980s. According to Waters, Bono turned up his nose up at The Wall, and he’s held it against him ever since.
“I remember when [Pink Floyd] did The Wall being criticised by Bono,” Waters once said. He then paraphrased, “U2 were a very young band, and they’re going, ‘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.'”
Waters then accused U2 of hypocritically attempting to replicate the same brand of music that they once dared to criticise, adding, “Oh really? 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.”
While his dislike of U2 was initially born out of musical differences, it has grown into something much deeper that goes way beyond whether The Wall was a masterpiece or theatrical nonsense.
In 2022, much to the Pink Floyd founder’s anger, Nancy Pelosi, the then-speaker of the United States House of Representatives, read an anti-war poem written by Bono at the White House’s St Patrick’s Day Luncheon.
For context, the poem closes with the pro-Ukraine lines, “And they struggle for us to be free, From the psycho in this human family, Ireland’s sorrow and pain, Is now the Ukraine, And St Patrick’s name now Zelenskiy.”
Waters, who later claimed the war in Ukraine was “provoked” during a United Nations event in 2023, took to social media to vent his frustration. While he didn’t explicitly argue against its message, he wrote, “Isn’t it enough that the eejit Bono goes and hobnobs with the oligarchs at Davos every year without getting the eejit Nancy Pelosi to foist his shitty poem on us?”
Waters continued his one-way tirade against Bono in late 2023 after U2 honoured the victims of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas at the Nova Music festival in Israel during a concert.
Before playing ‘Pride (In The Name Of Love)’ during their residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Irish singer empathateically called for an end for violence, stating: “On the light of what’s happened in Israel and Gaza, a song about non-violence seems somewhat ridiculous, even laughable, but our prayers have always been for peace and for non-violence. But our hearts and our anger, you know where that’s pointed. So sing with us… and those beautiful kids at that music festival.”
Months later, during an interview with Al Jazeera, Waters said of the tribute: “Anybody who knows Bono should go and pick him up by his ankles and shake him… until he stops being an enormous shit.”
Throughout all of the insults hurled in his direction and that of his band by Waters, Bono hasn’t acknowledged them, which suggests that he doesn’t believe it’s even worth engaging with. Instead, he’s chosen to let Waters shout into the abyss, knowing that nobody will win if he stoops down to the former Pink Floyd man’s level, who views him as the embodiment of everything he detests.
Despite his silence, it’s hard to imagine that Bono won’t continue to enrage Waters again in the near future, and he’ll come back swinging for another round.
