“Impossible not to”: The moment Roger Waters was compelled to write an anti-war song
While it’s often the later work of Pink Floyd that people tend to associate with being more politically motivated and conceptual in its lyrical and thematic approach, there are still a handful of moments from the band’s early discography that ditched the whimsy and spaced-out psychedelia in favour of something more thought-provoking.
Despite having ventured down this more conceptual route earlier on in the 1970s, Roger Waters introduced plenty more political ideas on records like Animals, The Wall and The Final Cut as he became far more controlling over the compositions and themes that the band were tackling in their work. Rather than it ever hampering them, this approach managed to win over many people who weren’t entirely convinced that Pink Floyd could write something with such a weight to it.
But at the same time, the band were quietly showing off some of their political ideologies in their earlier work, despite the fact that prior to this string of releases, most people thought of them as being far more influenced by psychedelia than they were by the real world.
This is especially true of the Syd Barrett era, where things were truly obtuse in their presentation, and it appeared that it was more about the ability to tell surreal stories and invent characters than it was about using their platform to talk about the political landscape that was surrounding them in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
However, one song from their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, does far more to tap into Waters’ politics at an early stage than one might have realised, and ultimately introduced a particular theme that the bassist was both fascinated and perturbed by into the band’s identity.
Waters has a very personal connection and pacifist outlook on war and conflict, and developed a particularly strong opinion on it from a young age after he lost his father when he was just five months old, and while Eric Waters had initially been a conscientious objector at the outbreak of the Second World War, after joining the Territorial Army in 1943, he would die in battle, leaving behind a wife and two sons who would have to navigate the world without him.
As a consequence, militaristic themes found themselves entering some of Waters’ earliest compositions, with ‘Corporal Clegg’ being what he called his “first antiwar song.” During a 1987 interview with The Washington Post, he reflected more on how this manifested at the time, and how it later developed on future Pink Floyd material.
“It was the first stirring of my own bitterness and sense of loss of my father in the Second World War, which finally came out in ‘The Tigers Break Free’,” he said, referring to the song that was used in the soundtrack for The Wall and re-recorded for The Final Cut. “For me, it was impossible not to explore my father’s death. It was central, it was my one big loss. Maybe I was lucky that I ended up in a situation where my work could be therapeutic. A lot of people have to live with those kinds of losses with no recourse to dealing with it in any way at all.”
There’s a sense of catharsis in how he addresses it in his later material, but on ‘Corporal Clegg’, it appears to be much more mocking, perhaps underlining Waters’ immaturity at the time and inability to fully process his thoughts. However, while this early venture into war-themed songwriting wasn’t entirely delivered by him, with him sharing lead vocals with Nick Mason and Richard Wright, it gave him the impetus to explore this theme further later down the line, with Waters producing some of the band’s finest work while zooming in on these ideas he’d been harbouring for most of his life.
