The one composer Roger Waters doesn’t want to think about: “Life’s too long”
Roger Waters doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being one of the most cheerful individuals in rock history.
He has constantly been at war with many facets of the music industry, and even if he didn’t have the same lust for life that everyone else in Pink Floyd did, that didn’t mean he still didn’t have a lot of great ideas in the tank when he made their classic records. He was willing to do everything he could to find empathy through his music, but he knew that some artists weren’t worth him spending more than a few minutes thinking about.
The beginning of Floyd was already fraught with tension after Syd Barrett left, but Waters wasn’t quite cut out to be a frontman by any stretch. Every single one of their albums for the next few years sounded more like art pieces than fully fleshed-out records, and even though Waters was happy to keep the band going, it was going to be a while before they actually managed to find something that worked.
Not every one of their songs went off without a hitch, and even if he would gladly forget about ‘Atom Heart Mother’ or the entirety of Ummagumma, it’s not like those records don’t have a reason to exist. Each of them was another building block to reach an album like Meddle, and from the second that Richard Wright’s keyboard *ping* on ‘Echoes’ started, people understood that the band had turned into something different.
No one would have guessed that the band could have made something this expansive, but Waters needed something more than a traditional musical exercise. He could still play for minutes on end, but the lyric about seeing himself in someone else was what really got people going. He knew he had a formula that could work, so when he saw someone blatantly stealing from him, he was not impressed in the slightest.
Granted, anyone who has ever tried to become a prog band can relate to Floyd in some capacity, but Andrew Lloyd Webber got way too close for Waters’s comfort when he heard Phantom of the Opera. Webber’s masterpiece is still one of the finest pieces of theatrical music that he has ever made, but when listening to the main overture, Waters was absolutely livid when he heard the exact same riff from ‘Echoes’ copied and pasted into the main meat of Webber’s song.
Waters has said his piece about how much he hated Webber for that steal, but he felt that it was better to never think about the composer ever again, saying, “I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. It’s the same time signature – it’s 12/8, and it’s the same structure, and it’s the same notes, and it’s the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is! But I think that life’s too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber. I think that might make me really gloomy.”
Legal action might not have been needed in that particular instance, but Waters’s habit of blocking people out of his memory wasn’t all that uncommon. Aside from his strained relationship with his bandmates over the years, his interactions with Sinead O’Connor would have been enough for her to be blacklisted by Waters as well, especially when she wanted to redo her entire section of The Wall when Waters put on the show in 1990.
So, really, the fact that Waters wanted to stop thinking about Webber in any capacity is actually his version of taking the high road… He could have easily kept on badmouthing him in the press, but he felt that it was better for his state of mind if he tried to ignore those who tried to blatantly take his work away from him.
