Roger Waters’ eight favourite songs of all time
Roger Waters, best known as the co-founding member of the pioneering progressive rock band Pink Floyd, helped redefine the musical landscape with his group. Together, they produced seminal records, such as The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon, which changed public perception of what an album could be and set a new blueprint.
For several decades, Waters has been a leading—albeit polarising—voice in the rock scene. He and Pink Floyd began changing the chemical makeup of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1960s. From the start, when they started performing in the UFO Club in London, they quickly accumulated a stellar reputation for their prowess on the live circuit. While he and Syd Barrett began by asserting themselves at the forefront of the acid scene, that’s only the opening to Waters’ career. With and without Pink Floyd, he has since moved into every different project and venture with the same progressive and forward-thinking enthusiasm.
Having initially only taken the role of bass player in the formative years of the band, allowing Barrett to lead in both lyric writing and musical composition, Waters stepped up to be the band’s leader following the difficult departure of Syd Barrett in 1968. He soon became the face of Pink Floyd and, despite duelling constantly with David Gilmour—something he’s never shied away from doing, no matter the situation or the company—Waters has been seen as a grand member of British rock royalty.
Admittedly, he was a difficult person to work alongside in the studio during his time with Pink Floyd, much to the frustrations of his bandmates. Waters has always been a perfectionist who strives to be his best whenever he enters a session. While this uncompromising nature helped him achieve great results, it also affected the band’s spirit for the wrong reasons.
For 20 years, Waters and Pink Floyd secured international fame with critically acclaimed records such as The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall while rubbing shoulders with some other hugely influential figures of a counter-culture movement. It would result in the major development of pop and alternative music, with an extra focus on the evolution of sonic landscapes.
Although Waters isn’t obsessive about listening to new records, he’s still shaped artistically by the artists he consumed at a formative age. Unlike many of his peers, he’s not moved with the times and refuses to follow the ever-changing trends, but there are certain pieces of music that he continues to admire fondly. His favourite songs are filled with the esteem Waters tirelessly gave to his own work and pays homage to some serious figures of the past, noting their value to the wider musical sphere as well as his own personal progress. It’s a list of performers and rock icons that deserve their accolades as influencing one of the greatest composers in the world.
Leaving the band in 1985 amid creative differences that later spawned a bitter legal battle, Waters enjoyed a successful solo career before reuniting with his former bandmates years later for some one-off performances. Reflecting on a career that has seen him change the landscape of music as we know it, Waters sat down with BBC Radio 4 as part of their Desert Island Discs feature to pick out eight songs that he holds dearly.
It’s impossible to oversell the importance of BBC’s Desert Island Discs in the dense tapestry of British pop culture. It’s a time-honoured tradition that has seen Prime Ministers and rock stars alike walk through its studio doors. Created by Roy Plomley way back in 1942, the format is always the same: each week, a guest is invited by the host to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island. Along with their eight discs, a complimentary collection of the complete works of Shakespeare, and a bible, the star in question also gets to choose one luxury item and one book. There’s not much left to do but sit back and listen to Waters’ favourite tracks that influence can be found everywhere, no matter who you are.
His first pick is indicative of the path that Waters has followed at every step of his career. “Neil Young singing ‘Helpless’,” Waters began. “There is an honesty and a truth in everything that he’s done. You feel the man’s integrity and passion. I can feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck now remembering the purity with which he hits the first notes of this song. It’s extraordinarily moving and eloquent.”
For Waters, it’s not as much about how a song sounds sonically but the emotional effect it had on him as a listener. While he’s an incredibly experimental musician, what he seeks in others is a meticulous way with words that cut him to his core.
Strong songwriting is a shared trait among each artist on Waters’ typically eclectic list. Next, Waters continued with Leonard Cohen, an artist he would encounter numerous times during Pink Floyd tours. “Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were the two men who allowed us to believe that there was an open door between poetry and song lyrics,” he said. “This song of his, ‘Bird On The Wire’, is so simple, so moving, so brilliant. I love it.”
The choices continue to impress, as Waters also shows his noted love of freeform music, picking out Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Endless Flight’ and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor, ‘4th Movement’.
When discussing Ray Charles, Waters said: “I actually met him, fleetingly, when I was a student studying architecture in London. We were living in a squat in Cheyne Gardens—the whole block was full of squats—and Chet was squatting three doors down, and this must have been 1962. He was a junkie, and he had no teeth, and he Roger Waters couldn’t play anymore, and I’ve seen films about him after he got himself together, but what a remarkable man. What an extraordinary talent.”
Furthermore, Waters rounded out his list by name-checking two legends of the smokey jazz scene: Billie Holiday and Chet Baker. Although musically, they may seem like artists with very little in common with the Pink Floyd founder, they were two huge influences on his career. He selected Baker’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ and Holiday’s ‘God Bless the Child’, adding further gravitas to his selections.
The songs in his selections clearly show that Waters’ taste is largely stuck in a particular era, which is natural and common. This list of records entered his life at a crucial time, opening his eyes to new ways of creating music when he needed it most, and for that reason, they continue to occupy a position in his heart.
