“An extraordinary experience”: Roger Waters’ transformative teenage hitchhiking journey from Lebanon to London
“So we left Beirut, Willa and I / He headed East to Baghdad and the rest of it / I set out North for home,” begins Roger Waters’ 2004 B-side ‘Leaving Beirut’, a part-spoken-word, part-song that recounts his time hitchhiking in Lebanon as a teenager.
‘Leaving Beirut’ began as a short story, written by Waters 25 years earlier. In its contents, he revisits being a 19-year-old in the 1960s, when he, along with some of his friends, was travelling across the Middle East as their car broke down. “I had to hitchhike home,” Waters recalled to Uncut in 2007, “It was an extraordinary experience and a great adventure”.
Just north of Beirut, Waters was taken in by a Lebanese family, who let the teenager sleep in their home, insisting that he take their sole bed while they slept on the floor, a gesture that Waters remembers as being “deeply moving”. It was this instance that inspired him to write the story that would become ‘Leaving Beirut’.
“That was life-changing, as well, to be the object of that kind of Middle Eastern hospitality,” he told StepFeed in 2017, “For us [sometimes] it’s far easier to be persuaded that other cultures, other people, are all foreign and dangerous, and of course, that’s simply not the case.”
From Waters’ account, a core memory of his time in Lebanon held a similar resonance. He and a friend were living and sleeping on the beach, while pretending to stay at a hotel in order to use their facilities, and one day, while swimming in the sea, he saw his belongings, passport, jeans, shoes and the like being stolen by a child. He instinctively went in search of the police, looking for help, with a cry of, “Hey! I’m a tourist in trouble, some kid’s stolen my shoes”, as he searched for the kid among the crowds of people. Eventually, they found him, who returned Waters’ shoes and was let go by the police.
“The kid disappears into the crowd again, and I go, ‘What? What are you doing, why are you letting him go?’” he remembered, “And this cop looks at me, pityingly, straight in the eye, and he speaks to me in English for the very first time, and he says, ‘He is poor’.”
It was a humbling moment that permanently stuck with Waters for the rest of his life, and made him realise his privilege in the grand scheme of things, as he admitted, “That cop became very special in my life because there I was, this callous, stupid, little schmuck from England, demanding retribution: ‘Lock him up, he’s a criminal!’ Now, of course, I realise what a blessing it is, if when we’re young and dumb as shit, like I was, we’re lucky enough to meet that cop. And if he’s humane, in that moment, if we’re prepared to accept the opportunity, we get to start to learn about love.”
Such instances remained in Waters’ mind as he wrote the short story that would eventually turn into the 12-minute song, where he recalls hitchhiking and catching a ride with a shared taxi, recounting in French that while he had no money, the driver accommodated him anyway. His companion on the drive invites Waters to his home to share a meal with him and his wife, a couple who struck Waters with their kindness. “Is gentleness too much for us?” he asks in the chorus, “Should gentleness be filed along with empathy, we feel for someone else’s child?”
Waters began to conceptualise turning his words into song in the wake of political turmoil. Certainly no stranger to fusing his musicianship with his political activism, Waters felt compelled to revisit the story as a potential song in the wake of news that the United States’ then-president George W Bush and former Prime Minister Tony Blair had invaded Iraq in 2003, thus beginning the Iraq War. “I was so sad, sick and incensed by that weird, obvious, extraordinary, stupid, inhumane mistake,” he expressed, so much so that he addressed his concerns in the best way he knew how: through song. He began to incorporate song verses with his short story fragments that addressed his disapproval of the events that had occurred.
“Are these the people that we should bomb?” he sings, “Are we so sure they mean us harm? / Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime? / Is this a mountain that we really want to climb?” He calls to the American people, directly, citing the literary hero of morality in Atticus Finch and the promise of freedom of speech, while begging, “Don’t let the might, the Christian right, fuck it all up / For you and the rest of the world.”
Waters also addresses Blair directly, singing, “Not in my name, Tony, you great war leader you / Terror is still terror, whosoever gets to frame the rules”.
Upon ‘Leaving Beirut’s’ release in 2004, Waters incorporated it into his live performances for his two-year-long The Dark Side of the Moon Live tour, where he replaced his spoken-word moments with onscreen visuals of a graphic novel, telling his story. Remaining firm in his declaration of anti-war sentiment, he turned the story of his teenage travels and the kindness of the strangers he met along the way into a call for empathy and an end to unnecessary violence. ‘Leaving Beirut’ became a moving portrait of the importance of opposing mistreatment, whether such be within personal interactions or from the higher, influential powers that be.
“I’d like to be remembered as somebody who spoke his truth and stood by it through thick and thin,” he expressed to Uncut, “And wasn’t to be diverted by the vagaries of fashion or popularity or anything else. I paint what I see.”
