Roger Waters - In the Name of the Father

Roger is a great artist, a total obsessive and every psychiatrist's dream.

(Bob Ezrin)

Roger Waters is one of the best-known and longest-lived musicians to emerge from the golden age of British psychedelia. Although never endowed with top-tier technical skill, he managed to make up for his shortcomings with a creativity that - during a narrow span of his long career - can safely be called explosive. His profound analyses of society, his anti-capitalist and anti-war critique, and his capacity for psychological inquiry, developed across a series of highly communicative albums, are so distinctive as to make any comparison with his contemporaries difficult.

His career has gone through various phases, often very different from one another, but it will always be marked by the sad events of his childhood, which would increasingly become the central protagonists of his most complex works.

Roger was born in Great Bookham on September 6, 1943, son of Mary and Eric Fletcher Waters (1913-1944). In 1939 his father Eric refused to be enlisted in the British army and became - out of sincere pacifist convictions - a conscientious objector. A few years later, at the end of 1943, he decided - like many of his fellow countrymen - to take part in the conflict, aware of the importance of the fight against Nazi barbarism. He left for war, but had time to be photographed just once with the newborn Roger, the only photo his son would have left to remember him by. Eric Fletcher died a few months later, on February 18, 1944, in the clash at the Fosso della Moletta, near Aprilia. His body was never recovered. This is the tragic event that would mark Roger's entire life, the cause of an absence so profound as to be unbearable. From a certain point on, Waters' career as a musician seems entirely dedicated to his father, an attempt to exorcise this intolerable deprivation, an endless session of self-psychoanalysis that finds no resolution, a rage made sharper by the sense that the death of his father and of so many other soldiers who had fought for freedom had been betrayed: these events bred in him an almost absolute pessimism toward humankind and toward every model of social organization.

It almost seems as though Waters does everything solely for his father Eric, not for the millions of listeners from whom he would abruptly distance himself in the second half of the Seventies, building a wall between them and the stage. Roger seems to be telling his father, "look dad, I measured up to you", as if waiting for an approval, an appreciation that every child seeks, but which in Roger's case could never come. This also emerges in a very recent interview he gave in Italy.

I always thought I had to measure up to him. He was a brave man, not only because he was a conscientious objector in 1939 and refused to enlist in the army. Then he changed his mind when he realized that his political convictions outweighed his Christian faith, and decided he had to fight against the Nazis during the Second World War. He was a heroic figure from my past and still means a great deal to me, the memory I have of him. Yes, he was very important.

After a difficult childhood marked by an overly anxious mother, struggles at school ("the teachers at school thought I was a complete failure"), growing anger over his father's absence ("I used to see men in uniform coming to pick up other children after school: for me, he never came") and indelible disappointments ("when I found the letter of condolence, sent in the name of George V, I felt a great anger on seeing that the King's signature was just a rubber stamp"), he found in music an escape from school and family, and especially in the radio, which he listened to late into the night as a teenager. At fourteen, his aunt gave him his first acoustic guitar, a choice his mother opposed. Despite this, he taught himself, entirely on his own, the basics of the instrument that would serve him in his university-era bands.

The psychedelic years

Having just enrolled at Cambridge to study architecture, Waters joined his first band, Geoff Mott And The Mottoes, where he played bass and had the good fortune to meet the guitarist who would change his life, Syd Barrett. In 1965 Syd and Roger moved to London to continue their studies, in painting and architecture respectively; as fate would have it, they ended up sharing lodgings with fellow students and musicians Nick Mason and Rick Wright. The four of them, together with guitarist Bob Klose, started playing together, frequently changing the band's name, going from The Screaming Abdabs, The Tea Set, The Architectural Abdabs, Meggadeaths, until finally settling on Pink Floyd. Roger recalls those years like this: "I was studying architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where we formed several bands. It wasn't a serious thing, we didn't play for an audience. We had lots of names, one great one was Meggadeaths. We spent our time figuring out how to spend the little money we'd earned."

Between 1965 and 1967, Waters is still just a barely-more-than-amateur musician who plays bass essentially as a session player, having minimal influence on the writing of Pink Floyd's early songs; despite this, he always shows an enviable ambition and self-assurance in his own abilities ("I remember shouting at a bank manager, telling him I'd be rich one day, while asking for a £10 loan"). Nothing foretells what would happen in the years to come; he is certainly the least technically gifted of Barrett, Wright and (later) Gilmour, so lacking in "ear" that, to tune his bass, he is often forced to ask Wright for help. This marginal role of his in the early Pink Floyd period clearly emerges from several of his statements.

In 1967 I was just an architecture student spending all his money buying basses, the songs were all Barrett's, it didn't matter who played bass or drums, it was completely irrelevant.

The debut album, a milestone of British psychedelia, the masterpiece The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn is therefore a creature born almost entirely of the mad genius of Syd Barrett. Waters takes part by signing just one track, the bizarre, lysergic "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk", which still clearly bears Barrett's imprint.

The tour that follows is marked by the steady deterioration of Barrett's health, now at the mercy of LSD abuse and schizophrenia. The live shows of the second half of 1967 are disastrous: Barrett has moments of total absence during concerts, deliberately forgets his guitar, playing with loosened strings and throwing the rest of the band off balance. After the early successes, many shows are now nearly deserted.

Christmas 1967 is a period of reflection that leads Waters and Mason to propose to Barrett and managers Peter Jenner and Andrew King that a second guitarist, David Gilmour, join the band, and that Barrett's role be limited to writing and recording his songs in the studio, without performing live. Waters recalls that, initially, Barrett seems to accept the proposal, but his instability leads him to change his mind very easily: "By the end of the afternoon I thought I'd convinced him this was a good idea and he'd agreed, but that didn't mean much, because Syd was capable of completely changing his mind within an hour." Things come to a head on 2 March 1968, when Barrett is officially out of Pink Floyd. Jenner and King, convinced that the band had no future without Syd, would go on to produce his solo albums, leaving Waters and the others behind.

It's certainly a turning point that shows, for the first time, Waters' force of will, as he takes charge of the situation and writes a good part of the following A Saucerful Of Secrets, including the two psychedelic jams "Let There Be More Light" and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun", plus the Barrett-esque "Corporal Clegg". An LP marked in particular by the stylistic difference between Barrett and Gilmour, it contains the lysergic title track — written by all the band members — which shows just how capable the new Pink Floyd are of surviving without their former leader.

Waters increasingly becomes the central figure in Pink Floyd, delving further into the psychedelic folk elements that would become essential in the subsequent soundtrack for Barbet Schroeder's film, More. Written in just eight days, More is a small psych-folk gem on which Waters writes or co-writes nearly every track. The 1969 live shows are a success: Waters has gone — in little more than a year and a half — from a near session bassist to the creative mind of the band.

A few months later, in November 1969, they release the psychedelic monument Ummagumma, an LP destined to become, in the collective imagination, a peak of the Floydian discography. On Ummagumma everyone takes part in an almost egalitarian way, a phase in which the members of Pink Floyd manage to reconcile their own ideas, creating a bizarre and formidable mix of psychedelia and experimentation. Waters writes the intimate folk piece "Grantchester Meadows" and the offbeat "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict" (featuring Ron Geesin), a far from trivial collage of noise elements and musique concrète that partly foreshadows his first solo album.

In 1970, the collaboration with Ron Geesin leads to the recording of Atom Heart Mother; the shift is evident in the phenomenal title track, which veers toward highly ambitious symphonic sounds looking ahead to the burgeoning progressive rock. Waters takes part in the suite's purely lysergic moments ("Mother Fore", "Mind Your Throats Please"), contributes to the super-psychedelic "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast", while the only track credited solely to him is "If", a very simple guitar arpeggio with a faint, barely whispered voice, typical of Waters' style in the early '70s.

Meanwhile, Geesin has already begun composing the soundtrack for a film inspired by Anthony Smith's book "The Body" (1968) and — after learning that director Roy Battersby also wanted sung tracks and not just instrumentals — asks Waters for help, who contributes by adding a few songs to those already written by Geesin. Just a month after Atom Heart Mother (October 1970), Music From The Body is released, the first solo LP by a member of Pink Floyd, if one excludes Barrett's two, "The Madcap Laughs" (January 1970) and "Barrett" (14 November 1970, that is just 16 days earlier).

The first solo album

Music From The Body, the last collaboration between Roger Waters and Ron Geesin, is a bizarre, experimental work, but also fairly typical of the British counterculture mood of those years, utterly removed from any limit imposed by the rules of the record market and bent on going beyond what's called the "song format". A continuous flow divided into twenty-two short pieces ranging from musique concrète ("Our Song") to the intimate folk typical of Waters ("Sea Shell And Stone"), with chamber-music vignettes made of strings ("Red Stuff Writhe") and piano ("Piddle In Perspex"), from the various dark cello moments ("Embryo Thought") to the obsessive guitar-and-mandolin rhythms of ("A Gentle Breeze Blew Through Life") and the amusing "Dance Of The Red Corpuscles".

Waters sticks to the two paths he had already explored on previous Pink Floyd albums; he moves from the psychedelic folk of More to the sound experimentation he'd already attempted on Ummagumma with "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict". Worth noting are "Breath", an embryo of what would become the far more complex version on Dark Side Of The Moon, the hallucinated experiences of "The Womb Bit", a lysergic track that drifts between brief arpeggios and electronics, the daring vocal experiments of "More Than Seven Dwarfs In Penis-Land", the musique concrète of "Body Transport", and the classic intimate Waters folk of "Chain Of Life", which anticipates some of the themes on nostalgia for a secure past versus an uncertain future. The melancholic and fundamentally pessimistic mood and lyrics are partly present, but the figure of the father and the anti-war, anti-capitalist rhetoric that would mark his career are still completely absent. The final track, "Give Birth To A Smile", is played by all the members of Pink Floyd, but despite the contributions of Gilmour, Mason and Wright, it's perhaps the most disappointing and banal track on the album.

The years of the perfect synthesis between Waters and Gilmour

After this brief solo experience, Waters' career continues exclusively with Pink Floyd. These are the years of the perfect synthesis between Waters and Gilmour, the years of the great Floydian masterpieces. In 1971 Meddle is released, which, together with the earlier Atom Heart Mother, is considered a meeting point between psych-rock and progressive, although here the symphonic component is certainly less prominent. Waters writes only "Saint Tropez", but contributes to all the other compositions, particularly to the monumental psychedelic suite "Echoes". He also composes the legendary bass intro of "One of These Days".

In 1972 a new soundtrack was released for the film “La Vallée”, by French director Barbet Schroeder (the same director behind More). Obscured By Clouds is made up of ten tracks, almost all written by Gilmour and Waters, and while it follows the same psych-folk path, it fails to convey the same positive feelings, perhaps because an excessive forcefulness strips away much of the dreamlike atmosphere.

The reason probably lies in the fact that early work had already begun on what would become the album marking a new turning point, The Dark Side Of The Moon (1973). Even though many songs are co-written, Waters, besides writing the lyrics, dictates the direction of what becomes a concept about alienation, about man's relationship with power and money, about the conflict between good and evil, about the bond between man and society, about life and death, about the inability to communicate, and about illness. It's a sign of the band's great maturity, as they abandon long suites in favor of a complex, sophisticated, unified concept. Waters is decisive in choosing the themes; it's as if something in him had changed, a clear sign of maturation that is only the beginning of a development of themes that would become a genuine obsession in the years to follow. The success is such that Waters feels drained.

The success of 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' left us anguished. What more could we do, after an album like that?

Success upends the ideas and relationships within the band. During the recording of the following album, Wish You Were Here, Waters has the impression that the band was only physically present at rehearsals, that playing had become a mere habit, just a well-paid job. Out of this feeling comes the realization that, in order to keep moving forward with passion, it was necessary to talk about the feelings experienced in that moment. Perhaps it's from here that a greater capacity for introspection emerges in Waters, one that would mark much of his later career.

Waters is the central figure on every track and once again proves to be the only one capable of developing a concept-album idea that everyone can share. The themes he tackles are those of absence (references to Syd Barrett), of show business destroying art (“Have A Cigar”), and of society crushing the individual (he writes about this in “Welcome To The Machine”, addressing a theme that would become obsessive in Animals and The Wall).

Although born under less than rosy auspices, the album is excellent, and the long suites dedicated to the “crazy diamond” Barrett — “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” — become two pillars of their discography. Waters is increasingly the leader, and his influence keeps growing steadily. A new phase begins, in which Pink Floyd become almost an extension of him, the instrument through which to develop his own themes and ideas, which become ever more political and focused on criticizing capitalist society and war as a means of resolving conflicts; the figure of the father looms large, and will be omnipresent from a certain point onward. The sacrificial victims are first Mason and Wright, and later Gilmour: all of them are gradually pushed to the margins. Wright would later recall that period: “It all started with Animals, it's the first album where I didn't write anything, Roger sidelined me, he considered every idea or suggestion of mine completely worthless and wouldn't even listen to me”.

Sociology and psychoanalysis. Dogs, pigs, sheep and worms

Animals (1977) marks yet another turning point in Waters' career; his lyrics become so complex and meaningful that, from this point on, his albums need to be, as well as listened to, also “read”. Animals is conceived entirely by Waters, who writes every track (only “Dogs” is credited to both Waters and Gilmour); it's his project, his idea to tie the new concept-album to George Orwell's “Animal Farm”. It's the album where Waters' left-wing, almost Marxist political ideas come through strongly. A sweeping fresco that makes no secret of its utter pessimism toward capitalist society, seen as inherently violent, a creator of pointless and irreconcilable conflicts between human beings.

Very detailed is the description of the dogs: they are the pawns of the pigs, ruthless social climbers, capable of anything to get money and every kind of personal advantage, their one true interest being to claw their way up society through force and arrogance. These are the qualities needed to become a dog: You have to be crazy, you have to have an absolute need, you have to sleep standing up, and when you're out on the street, you have to be able to pick out easy prey with your eyes closed, creep up quietly and, without being seen, strike at just the right moment without thinking twice. The dogs must always be alert, both to prey – which must not be allowed to slip away – and to predators out to destroy them (the other dogs or the pigs). They must be quick and act without thinking, without humanity or guilt. And after a while you can turn your attention to polishing your style, like the club tie and a firm handshake, a certain look in the eyes and a winning smile — you have to inspire trust in the people you're lying to, so that when they turn their backs on you, you'll have the chance to sink the knife in.

A volte il cane percepisce di essere soltanto usato (dai maiali) e si spinge a un’autoanalisi che si risolve solo in un aumento del suo cinismo (“Devo ammettere di essere un po’ confuso, a volte ho l’impressione che mi stiano solo usando, devo cercare di scuotermi di dosso questo malessere strisciante, se non sono forte, come potrò trovare l’uscita da questo labirinto? Devo essere sordo, cieco, muto e continuare a far finta che tutti siano sacrificabili, che nessuno abbia un vero amico e credere che per natura tutti siano degli assassini”). Ma in mezzo a questa totale mancanza di umanità, Waters – nel finale epico di “Dogs” – individua anche delle giustificazioni, degli eventi scatenanti che hanno “rallentato il sangue e trasformato il cuore in una pietra”; per Waters gli uomini non nascono cattivi, ma lo diventano sofferenza dopo sofferenza (“Chi è nato in una casa piena di dolore, chi è stato istruito dall’uomo su come fare, chi è stato vestito di collare e catena, chi è stato messo sotto, chi è stato trascinato giù da una pietra”).

The album's conclusion is sad and melancholic. According to Waters, capitalism creates a society in which everyone is unhappy, regardless of whether they're rich or poor. The sheep are submissive, the dogs are sad, violent, devoid of affection and destined to die of cancer in utter solitude, perhaps repenting when it's already too late. Even the pigs, the luckiest and most privileged, pay for their power with fear and loneliness. Modern society, then, offers no hope of happiness; the only escape left to people is to have warm, sincere relationships with one another.

After this sweeping portrait of society, Waters sets out to confront his own fears and neuroses. Live shows become unbearable, the record industry's rules suffocating, and the bond between musician and audience all but severed. These feelings come to a head in the incident of July 6, 1977, at Montreal's Olympic Stadium: during the performance of "Pigs On The Wing (part II)," Waters stops and berates a fan who was disturbing both the crowd and the band. The audience cheers him on, but Roger orders the fan to leave the concert. At one point another fan climbs the fence separating the crowd from the band and tries to get up on stage. Blinded by rage and disgust, Waters spits in his face. Gilmour doesn't share this attitude and refuses to come back onstage for the encore; guitarist Snowy White is forced to fill in for him.

Performing at concerts became an utterly alienating experience, and it was then that I became fully aware of the wall that now separated us from our audience.

(Roger Waters)

This episode marks the moment of Waters' greatest detachment from his audience, and a point of no return in the increasingly worn-out relationship with his bandmates, whom he no longer considered essential. Waters isolates himself, building a wall around himself. Thus is born The Wall (1979), an album that describes - like a biography - the life and fears of Pink, Waters' alter ego. It's a record in which Waters cuts himself off from everyone, erecting the wall that metaphorically shields him from the outside world, only to emerge from it - as in a tragic psychoanalysis session - after having laid bare all his phobias. It clearly reveals - as in his subsequent solo albums as well - a pessimistic view of every human relationship: from the bond between children and parents, to those between students and teachers, husband and wife, man and institutions. In its own way, The Wall marks an era, becoming an anthem for the overturning of Sixties pop culture, from revolutionary and unifying to reactionary and alienating.

Inside are all his fears, his frustrations and his thoughts, as had never happened before: from his father's death in the war ("Papà è volato al di là dell'oceano, lasciando solo un ricordo"), to the overprotective bond with his mother ("Mamma farà avverare ogni tuo incubo, ti inculcherà ogni suo timore, controllerà tutte le tue amichette per te"), to his terrible relationships with teachers and with his wife. Pink is forced to live in a society that torments him in every way, ever since childhood; every event is simply one more brick that isolates him from the world, and even the doctor treating him just numbs him with drugs while being totally uninterested in the real causes of his distress ("Comfortably Numb").

Here come the worms

Once the wall is built, loneliness and alienation lead Pink to fascist and racist thoughts, and he turns – within himself – into a fascist dictator (“Is there a queer in the audience tonight? Put them up against the wall! "There's someone down there under the spotlight I don't like, put him against the wall!" That one looks like a Jew to me! "And that other one's a n*gro!" Who let all this rabble in here? That guy's rolling a joint! And another one has pimples! If it were up to me, I'd have you all shot!”). To Waters' classic triad dividing humankind into pigs, dogs and sheep, worms are now added. In “Waiting For The Worms”, the English composer adds fundamental elements of his thinking. The worms represent physical and moral decay. Loneliness and alienation have turned Pink into a racist, fascist, violent figure. The equation is fascism/racism=death. Death understood as decay, the degradation of body and mind. Pink, dressed as a dictator, has a host of imaginary followers who praise him and wait on him. “Waiting to cut away the dead wood.” Waiting to cleanse the city. Waiting to follow the worms. Waiting to put on a black shirt. Waiting to exterminate the weak. Waiting to smash their windows in and kick their doors down. Awaiting the final solution that will strengthen the bloodline. Waiting to open the showers and switch on the ovens. "Waiting for the faggots, the niggers, the communists and the Jews".

Horrified by so much violence, the brief track “Stop” (“Basta! I want to go home. Taking off this uniform and abandoning the show”) interrupts this escalation of hatred. All that's left for Pink is to be put on trial (“The Trial”) over the charges brought by the prosecutor (“The prosecution will clearly show that the prisoner was caught in the act of showing feelings of an almost human nature”), by his mother (“Come to mother, baby, let me hold you in my arms, Milord, I never wanted you to get in any trouble, why'd you have to leave me?”), by his teachers (“I always said he'd come to no good, Your Honour, if they'd let me have my way I'd have given him what for, but my hands were tied, soft-hearted souls and do-gooders let him get away with it”) and by his wife (“You little shit, you're in the cooler now, I hope they throw away the key, you should've talked to me a lot more than you did, but no!”) "You were supposed to mind your own business, have you destroyed any other families lately?").

Pink then steps outside the wall, and in "Outside The Wall" we once again see the ideas Waters had already expressed in Animals resurface, namely that only affection between individuals can offer any hope of happiness: ⟦Q1⟧. Everything is peaceful and calm, but the unexpected and fear are always lurking just around the corner. ⟦Q2⟧

The legacy of The Wall, for anyone wanting to understand Waters's thinking, is immense: a goldmine of information and insight. The live shows that follow are monumental, unprecedented rock spectacles, but their grandeur cannot hide how far relations between Waters and Gilmour had by then deteriorated.

This is partly why four years pass before the release of the last Pink Floyd album with Waters, The Final Cut (1983). With Wright pushed out ("He was driven out by Waters's almost Teutonic cruelty," recalls Bob Ezrin), the leader decides on the themes and writes every track without any outside input. One day Gilmour storms out of the recording studio, shouting at him: "If you need a guitarist, just give me a call!"

It is, in effect, a Waters solo album, played by what remained of Pink Floyd. War is the founding theme, alongside the memory of his father, by now a genuine obsession for Waters. Here too one can trace various reflections of his thinking: the idea of the betrayal of the victory won in the Second World War, of democracy's failure, of the horror of war repeating itself (the Falklands conflict). On the whole the album doesn't match its predecessors, though it isn't short of good moments; the music itself all but recedes, with the lyrics taking on far greater weight than the sound. Waters's extremism and Gilmour's isolation don't bode well. The split is by now a fact: no tour follows The Final Cut, and Waters decides to declare the Pink Floyd experience over with an official statement. Gilmour and Mason disagree and voice their intention to carry on under the band's name. Waters naturally objects, and a legal dispute follows which, in 1985, will rule in favour of Gilmour and Mason.

Farewell to Pink Floyd

Meanwhile, a year earlier, in 1984 Waters officially launched his solo career with The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking. Giving up the Pink Floyd name was a challenge he embraced willingly.

Knowing that sales would be guaranteed by the band's name was frustrating; it was far riskier, and therefore far more exciting, to try his luck under a name that had never been tested.

(Roger Waters)

Born from an old idea of Waters', it was released just two months after David Gilmour's solo album, "About Face". It almost feels like a duel between the two former friends, by then locked in permanent conflict. For different reasons, the impression is that both lose a great deal from the absence of their rival. The perfect fusion of Waters' creativity and Gilmour's musicality, which had been the key to Pink Floyd's historic masterpieces, is by now a distant memory; the sense is that their union had been much more than the simple sum of two talents, who on their own struggle far more to live up to the high expectations of critics and audiences alike.

On The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking, Waters has to replace Gilmour, and he does so, almost as if swapping one guitar hero trading card for another, with a name that - in his mind - wouldn't pale next to his predecessor. He thus chose one of the most famous guitarists in the world, former Cream member Eric Clapton. Adapting Clapton's blues style to Waters' concepts is certainly no easy task, and indeed the fusion is almost untenable. Throughout the album, Clapton tries to fit himself into Waters' melodic structures, but the impression is that of a fish out of water, of a forced attempt to pair two great musicians for the sole purpose of selling more copies. Clapton's guitar is utterly predictable and intrusive, Waters' creativity is at an all-time low, even down to the tasteless cover (a photo of porn star Lindsey Jane Drew, naked with a backpack, waiting to hitchhike).

The structure of the songs is fairly typical of Waters-style ballads, ideally a link to The Final Cut, but the sound tends to repeat itself in an almost worrying way, and everywhere you can hear patterns already heard on Pink Floyd's most recent records. Having abandoned the themes of war, the loss of his father and sociological reflection, Waters focuses on more individual, personal matters. The story unfolds in real time during a dream between 4:00 and 5:10 in the morning. Reflections on sexuality, on the gap between our actual behaviour and the truest desires of our unconscious, use the metaphor of hitchhiking as a chance to fulfil unspeakable dreams, a radical change. Almost nothing redeems the twelve tracks: tedium and a clear inability to reinvent himself are the defining traits.

Post-apocalyptic soundtracks and concepts

In 1986, Waters took part — alongside musicians of the calibre of David Bowie, Genesis, jazz musician Paul Hardcastle, guitarist Hugh Cornwell (The Stranglers) and new wave band Squeeze — in the soundtrack of the post-apocalyptic animated film When The Wind Blows, directed by Jimmy Murakami and in turn based on the 1982 graphic novel by British illustrator Raymond Briggs.

All ten tracks on side B of the LP are Waters' own, while the other musicians each contribute a single track on side A. It's a project Waters — always at the forefront of anti-nuclear demonstrations — believes in wholeheartedly, tied as it is to Greenpeace's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ("Briggs' book is brilliant and ironic, and it fills a gap in English literature").

The film is essentially in line with Waters' worldview, which certainly helps him find the right atmospheres. The protagonists of the animated film are the two amusingly ordinary Jim and Hilda Bloggs, an elderly English couple living in isolation in the countryside. Two simple souls who trust the authorities without ever questioning them, bound to their own traditions and oblivious to a world that has changed too fast for them to keep up. When the radio announces an imminent nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, the couple aren't particularly worried, partly out of faith that the authorities will sort the problem out, and partly out of sheer ignorance of the real consequences of radiation. When the bomb explodes, they take shelter in a homemade anti-atomic bunker built following the instructions in some government pamphlets; naturally, the bunker, built with unsuitable materials, offers them no real protection. Unaware of the actual danger and assuming the new war will resemble the one they lived through in their youth, the Second World War, they go outside in search of food, not knowing that nuclear fallout will kill them. They die from the effects of radiation, still optimistic to the end that someone sent by the government will come to save them.

The story contains many elements dear to Waters: the fight for nuclear disarmament, distrust of official truths imposed by the authorities, and concern over a technology advancing so rapidly that it becomes a danger to all humanity. The ten short tracks (eight of them instrumental), totalling twenty-four minutes, bring Waters back up to an acceptable level. What stands out above all is a greater willingness to try new things. It's precisely when he moves away from what he had been doing in recent years that he reaches his best moments: for instance, in the soft folk ballad "Hilda's Dream", in the hypnotic, nostalgic music-box of "The Anderson Shelter", in the unexpected chaotic whirl of "The Attack", and above all in the post-atomic ambient of "The Fallout", a blend of electronic drones and music-box tones that recalls something of his early psychedelic experiments. Waters sings on only two tracks, "Towers Of Faith" and "Folded Flags", squarely in the vein of The Final Cut.

This brief taste of post-apocalyptic scenarios gives Waters the idea for his new album, Radio Kaos (1987). Only four years have passed since the last Pink Floyd album, and Waters already has three solo LPs under his belt — probably too many for a period in which stress and courtroom battles with his former bandmates were taking a heavy toll on him. Adding to the tension is producer Bob Ezrin, who initially agrees to produce Radio Kaos but then can't bring himself to say no to Gilmour's request to work on the imminent new Pink Floyd LP, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason. When Waters calls him to find out when recording sessions will begin, Ezrin makes up an excuse, claiming his wife would ask for a divorce if he moved from the US to Britain even for a few months. Only days later, from the papers, does Waters learn of the deal the producer struck with Gilmour.

Radio Kaos confirms a period artistically starved of effective ideas, one of constant self-involution, capable of complicating even the simplest things. The new LP is emblematic: the story behind the concept is so convoluted that a booklet had to be included with the record just to make it comprehensible. For the first time, Waters shows signs of absorbing some of what the Eighties had to offer, causing no small stir among his usually unbending fans; there's no shortage of bright synth-pop moments ("Radio Waves"), dance-pop ballads ("Sunset Strip") and even echoes of Lou Reed ("Who Needs Information"). But looking for common ground with more contemporary musical trends isn't the problem — what's missing is precisely the inspiration and the ability (always one of Waters' trademarks) to move listeners and tell stories. The concept, besides being nearly incomprehensible, fails to hit any real target beyond a generic message of brotherhood among peoples, all too childish compared to what Waters had offered in the past.

Also missing is the connecting thread that had been the strength of an album like The Wall. The tracks seem disconnected from one another, despite the concept; after repeated listens, very little sticks in the memory — perhaps, paradoxically, what lingers most, aside from the excellent closing track, are precisely those brief synth-pop excursions on "Radio Waves" that were most criticised at the time. Waters himself admits as much a few years later.

I went down roads that made me uncomfortable. I should never have made that record.

The lyrics reveal other strands of Waters' thinking, as in "Home", where he recounts with horror those who divide countries or races into superior and inferior ("It could be Jerusalem, it could be Berlin, it could be Prague, it could be Moscow, it could be New York, everyone has a place called home"), or in "Four Minutes", centred on the idea of repentance, which suggests that it may take sheer terror — in this case the last four minutes before the end of the world — to make humankind realise just how foolish it is to keep waging war ("After a near air disaster, you swear to yourself you'll never fly again. After the first kiss, when you fall in love, you swear to yourself you'll never leave again"). During the four minutes of terror before the atomic apocalypse, people come to realise the absurdity of every division, between East and West, Occident and Orient ("Sometimes I feel like I'm going home, I swear I'll never cross my ideals again, and when the east wind blows I feel like I'm going home"). For the first time, Waters offers a message of optimism: the album closes with the poignant "The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid)", which echoes Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964). Inspired by the optimism generated by the historic Live Aid concert of 1985, it's a wistful ballad embellished with female choral vocals and built on a strong message of hope, an unusual thing for the cynical, pessimistic Waters. Once it becomes clear that the countdown was merely a pretext to make humanity understand how important peace and brotherhood are, the mindset begins to shift, and radio — once used to spread the propaganda of the powerful — now broadcasts messages of equality: "The tide is turning, now the satellite's confused, 'cause on Saturday night the airwaves were full of compassion and light, its silicon heart warmed by the sight of a billion candles burning". There's also a jab at actor Sylvester Stallone, seen as the embodiment of warmongering American machismo: "The tide is turning, Sylvester. Now the past is over, we won't be dragged down in his South China Sea full of macho bullshit and mediocrity". An excellent track that, not by chance, is the only one from the album Waters would play live in subsequent years, for instance at the historic The Wall concert in Berlin in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Wall. Unfortunately, though, it isn't enough to save Radio Kaos from mediocrity.

The Gulf War years: enter the monkeys

After the release of The Wall – Live In Berlin (1990), a concert that takes on symbolic meaning well beyond that of a simple rock event, restoring to Waters both the pleasure of performing live and a sincere hope (soon to be betrayed) for a possible peaceful future, a new conflict arrives that is destined to shape the next twenty years. Just as the Falklands War had been the spark that set off The Final Cut, the First Gulf War (1990-1991) strikes Waters' imagination as the first war followed almost live on TV by the entire Western world. Added to this are memories of the recent 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which give rise to the (false) hope that television might finally hold every bloodthirsty regime accountable. Out of these two events comes a serious reflection on the role of the media in contemporary society; Waters wonders whether war is truly perceived for what it is, or whether it is instead seen as the most exciting of television spectacles.

I started out picturing a gorilla watching TV, a metaphor for everyone who has spent the last ten years watching television programmes. I imagined TV as a drug that eases the pain but slowly kills our humanity and our culture. I'm convinced that most of the humanitarian disasters of recent years stem from the need for a 'theatrical' foreign policy — war becomes a televised entertainment product, especially when it's happening in far-off countries.

Out of these reflections comes Amused To Death (1992), a clear step forward compared to his previous two works, which had raised legitimate doubts about Waters' ability to match the heights of his Pink Floyd years. A full 14 tracks, hidden behind a production that is far more lavish and professional than that of Radio Kaos.

Waters is decidedly more inspired here, both in the lyrics and in the music, both a coherent flow of notes and ideas that never feel tiredly repetitive, but instead reveal a vision and a consistency that had been missing for years.

The album centres on humanity's relationship with television, which from a potential tool for investigation and exposure becomes a means of distraction and dependency, leading ultimately to total alienation and indifference towards any form of others' suffering. After the pigs, the dogs, the sheep and the worms, now comes the monkey, a sort of de-evolved man in the style of the Residents. Human beings are compared to monkeys fiddling with a remote control in search of something violent to shock them, without ever awakening any sense of anger or injustice. Pure numbing stupor, suggesting how television today can prove to be one of the most powerful means of keeping the masses from ever becoming aware of reality. Waters, in a thoroughly prophetic way, sees this long before others do, going so far as to foresee politics as pure media spectacle, where it becomes conceivable to declare a war purely to keep people glued to their screens, in a grim show that turns Orwell's bleak, totalitarian scenarios into macabre diversions that "democratic" countries stage for the entertainment and amusement of the masses, not unlike the battles of Roman gladiators.

In such a clear-sighted and forward-looking project, Waters enlists the collaboration of Jeff Beck (ex-Yardbirds) on guitar and producer Pat Leonard, two choices that prove perfect. Beck in particular is without doubt the guitarist best suited to Waters's music, managing to fit perfectly into a context that might not have seemed natural for him.

War and the death of his father remain the ever-present specters looming in the background, right from the opening "The Ballad Of Bill Hubbard": four minutes of stretched-out keyboards over which Beck's guitar enters, as a dedication to the soldier who died during the First World War in the historic Battle of the Somme. First come the dogs, who in Waters's mythology are the prophets of a new war; suddenly a TV switches on, bearing witness to the fact that war today is a billion-dollar show. Keeping Hubbard's memory alive are the words of his fellow soldier Alf Razzell, who at the age of 75 recalls - with a desperate, spoken delivery able to bring back to life the anguish and guilt of the tragedy - the day he had to abandon, in order to save his own life, his comrade mortally wounded in no man's land: "I looked at his wound and I realized it was a mortal wound. You can only imagine the state of pain he was in. Afterwards I noticed three bullet holes that had gone through him. There was a way, I could try to save him. He was punching me, 'Put me down, put me down, I'm already dead, I'm already dead, put me down'. I was hoping he'd faint. He said 'I can't go far, let me die'. I told him 'If I leave you here, you won't be found. Let's try again!'. He said 'All right, then'. But he couldn't hold on any longer, and I had to leave him there. In no man's land".

The TV switches on and we move into "What God Wants, Part I", a track of unusual harshness within Waters's discography; the voice of a boy who watches war on TV with absolute indifference, as if it were a football match: "I don't care about war, it's one of those things I like to watch, if there is one. That way I can find out whether our side is winning or losing". Energy and anger run alongside Waters's vocals, bearing witness to his absolute pessimism. Who is God, does he really want what's good for us? For Waters, each of us has a God shaped in our own image, to believe in and obey: "God wants peace, God wants war, God wants famine, God wants shopping malls". Every fanatic, every warmonger can use their own personal model of God to justify any crime whatsoever, invoking the famous phrase, repeated even during the Gulf War, 'God is with us': 'God wants voodoo, God wants organized crime, God wants the crusade, God wants the Jihad, God wants Good, God wants Evil'".

Another change of TV channel by the bored ape-man, and we arrive at "Perfect Sense, Part I", a slow melodic ballad for piano, strings and voice. The ape now looks out at a world reduced to rubble, destroyed by the latest war, and tries, uselessly, to understand how it could have happened. "The Germans killed the Jews, the Jews killed the Arabs, the Arabs killed the hostages, is it any wonder the monkey's confused?". Once again the figure returns of a God created by men to justify their own crimes: "Man spreads his wings in the sunset of his nation state, he is just a tool of the great God of Mercy, they gave him a Nuclear Submarine and sent him to Discover the Garden Of Eden". A deeply dark pessimism, which goes so far as to imagine mankind destroying its own Earth in the name of God. In "Perfect Sense, Part II" Waters's voice becomes little more than a sigh before giving way to female choirs building in a crescendo with a martial rhythm. Here too the lyrics are prescient; what can give meaning to all the tragedies and deaths we see on TV, what can impose order and thereby soothe our guilt? The numbers that quantify the dead, the bombs and the money spent on war make everything seem colder and more bearable. "Don't you see? It all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds, shillings and pence".

"The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range" opens with imposing drums and is the most typically rock track, with stadium chants showing just how much war and death are the most exciting show there is, as long as they happen beyond our reach. War must always take place in faraway countries to be "fun," never in the West. The ape-man watches the war on TV at the bar while ordering a beer: "Hey, barman, two more shots and two more beers. Turn up the volume! The war has started! We play with the bravery of being out of range, we strike and maim with the bravery of being out of range." "Late Home Tonight" – split into two parts – begins as a simple acoustic ballad, later joined by strings, and describes a young man carefree at the start of military life, with no awareness of what war really is ("The beauty of military life, no questions, just orders and flying"). If flying is at first a childish dream, it's "tender Uncle Sam" who will finance, with ten thousand billion coins, the global entertainment of the war video game. The young man bombs Tripoli, a perfect television spectacle: "Watch the baby bleed, it'll look wonderful on TV." But after this bombing, a crowd consumed by hatred screams: "Death, death, death to the imperialists!"; war and hatred feed off each other and never know an end. The second part opens with ambient music, first with a flow of synths and angelic voices, then with a sustained trumpet note; it's one of the most powerful and moving moments, underlining the madness of war; the boy returns home hailed by the crowd: "Hey boy, you're a hero, take this cigar and go home. All the papers and local TV stations will call your mother." "Too Much Rope" is desperate and melancholic, with a mighty solo from Beck. The ape-man loses his humanity; even when a small part of it surfaces as he watches two corpses on TV, he quickly slips back into a state of numbness: "What does this tear-jerking scene in my living room mean, that moves me so? Why all this sentimentality? They're just two human beings."

We return to the outbursts of rage of "What God Wants, Pt II" and "What God Wants, Pt III," amid the shouting of evangelist televangelists ("Do you believe in a better world? If you think you do, we must come together today. United! United financially! United socially! Through the power of money and the power of your prayers we will fulfill your pleas") and aliens arriving on Earth to understand how mankind became extinct. In "What God Wants, Pt III" we clearly hear the unmistakable note of "Echoes," while the ending is dominated by a great performance from Beck and Waters' anguished voice. "Watching Tv," a folk song in which Waters duets with Don Henley of the Eagles, is instead dedicated to a Chinese girl who died during the Tiananmen protests. Knowing nothing about her life, Waters builds a story around her, giving her an engineer father and a job in a pastry shop, turning her into a symbol of hope and sorrow: "She's different from the Aztec, from the Cherokee, she is everyone's sister, she is symbolic of our failure, she's the one in 50 million who can help us be free, because she died on TV." But faced with so much pain, the ape-man can do nothing but keep watching TV, unable even to imagine acting differently. "Three Wishes" opens marked by synth sounds, before soaring into a simple melody with yet another excellent performance from Beck. Waters imagines himself as a child as the genie of the lamp appears before him and says "Hey, boy, you can make three wishes if you don't take too long. I said 'Well, I wish for happiness in Lebanon, someone to help me write this song, and that, when I was young, my father hadn't gone away.'" The ending, between ambient and psychedelia, makes you not miss the absence of Wright and Gilmour.

The closing tracks are among the slowest and saddest; the first, "It's A Miracle," in some ways the most Floydian, is also the most pessimistic and raw: "They've got Pepsi in the Andes, McDonald's in Tibet, Yosemite's been turned into a golf course for the Japanese, the Dead Sea is alive with rap, between the Tigris and the Euphrates there's now a leisure center. It's a miracle, by the grace of merciful God and market pressures the human race has civilized itself." Waters' voice, growing ever more tired and dull, now seems resigned and hopeless. The title track closes the circle and ties back to the rest of the songs, on one hand reaching a peak of depression with a requiem-like finale, on the other clarifying every single question. Human beings have gone extinct without even realizing it, entertaining themselves in front of the TV: "We watched the tragedy unfold, we did as we were told, bought and sold, it was the greatest show on Earth. We drove our racing cars, we ate the last tins of caviar, and somewhere out among the stars, a keen observer saw our last hurrah." The aliens, after much searching, catch sight of some shadows – all that remains of the very few human survivors – in front of a TV and, incredulous, understand the truth: "They repeated every test and the alien anthropologists, still puzzled, having ruled out every other reason for our sad demise, understood the only explanation left 'This species amused itself to death.'"

Amused To Death thus becomes an obsessive karma and a warning for all of humanity.

Waters then disappears from view for quite a few years, save for the occasional live performance (most notably In the Flesh – Live in 2000) and political statements on the foreign policy of George Bush or Tony Blair. He returns in 2005 with an entirely unexpected project: Ça ira (There Is Hope), an opera in three acts about the French Revolution. The idea certainly deserves credit for its sheer boldness, but the ground Waters ventures onto is far too slippery, and the work plays no significant role in his discography.

The return after twenty-five years

In 2013, thanks to a war survivor, former soldier Harry Shindler, who had fought alongside his father, Waters manages to pinpoint the exact spot where he died, where a memorial plaque now stands. This gives rise to the idea for the 2015 documentary/concert film (Roger Waters: The Wall), which opens with Waters driving from England all the way to Anzio and then on to the Cassino war cemetery. Twenty-five years after Amused To Death, at a point when it seemed plausible his career was over, and after a series of tours revisiting The Wall updated to reflect the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along comes Is This The Life We Really Want? (2017). The rhetorical question posed in the title — 'is this the life we really want?' — reads as a final reckoning with the fading of hope, the death of dreams, and the vanishing into thin air of the rosy futures once imagined after the Second World War; his father's death, then, is not merely something that happened at Anzio in 1944, but something that repeats itself every day in a thousand conflicts across the world.

While Waters's thinking has evolved and kept pace with the times, the music instead carries on down the path set out as far back as Animals. Indeed, the impression is of listening to an extended, shuffled selection from Waters's entire discography; the game of self-quotation runs almost nonstop, and it's the least interesting aspect for anyone wanting to truly understand this album, produced this time around by Nigel Godrich.

Waters's journey opens with the mechanical pulse of 'When We Were Young', drawing a timeline back to the heartbeat of The Dark Side Of The Moon; as if to say that today humanity has lost precisely its most human quality: empathy. 'Dejà Vu', meanwhile, picks up the lyrics of 'What God Wants' from Amused To Death; Waters's hopelessness leads him to imagine that if he were God, he would have done a better job — he would have protected his children (a reference to the deaths of Herod's firstborns), he would have created a stronger, more resilient body, not subject to disease and ageing. Picturing himself as a drone, the latest weapon devised by the human mind, one that kills on its own without making whoever sends it feel like the killer, he says that if he were a drone he'd be afraid of finding someone at home, perhaps just an ordinary woman in her kitchen. In the end, all that's left for man to do is count up the love he has lost.

'The Last Refugee' imagines the end of a war through the eyes of one last refugee who, finally safe, dreams of starting a new life, peaceful and free from bombs. But of course it's only a dream destined to be shattered, history repeats itself, and the last refugee is never truly the last. 'Picture That', on the other hand, uses hypothetical phrases to describe what is in fact already real: a series of events that in a normal world would seem absurd, yet have actually come to pass. 'Picture a courtroom with no laws, picture a leader with no brains.' Here begin the first real musical jabs at Donald Trump, who today stands as Waters's true enemy, and the enemy of all his ideals of peace and equality.

'Broken Bones' is one of the tracks that best captures the cornerstones of Waters's thinking. His voice shifts from whisper to anguished cry; the end of the Second World War had given the world hope, but rather than choose freedom, mankind opted for greed and wealth, for that 'American dream' that lulls people to sleep and inevitably leads to man's war against man. A truly free world would be one in which two children born in the United States or in Afghanistan would enjoy the same quality of life, yet every day television tells us that freedom is achieved by destroying homes and cities through bombing. These contradictions lead Waters to conclude that the new generations have nothing to learn from the old ones (“non possiamo mettere indietro l’orologio/ non si può tornare indietro nel tempo ma possiamo dire ‘vaffanculo’/ non ascoltare le vostre stronzate e le vostre menzogne”). It's a message already voiced in the famous line 'We Don't Need No Education' from 'Another Brick In The Wall', but one that here plunges to far deeper depths.

The dismal "Is This The Life We Really Want?" opens with Trump's voice and spells out the real reasons that can turn someone into "a stupid and liar president". Fear is the first element, fear of everything that's different from us; humanity is compared to ants, always busy with their role but incapable of understanding other people's pain. But ants lack the intelligence to understand, while man doesn't: because “ogni volta che uno studente viene investito da un carro armato/ ogni volta che un giornalista viene lasciato a marcire in galera/ ogni volta che cala il sipario su qualche vita” we should be in solidarity with each other, instead we sit in front of the TV "silent and indifferent".

"A Bird In A Gale" explores with greater anger man's indifference to other people's suffering, citing the tragic story of Aylan, the Syrian child who died at sea and whose body washed up on Turkish beaches in 2015. Waters's style continues steadily in the wake of Animals, with echoes in particular of "Sheep". The (seemingly) lightest moment can instead be found in "The Most Beautiful Girl"; the music is almost a slow, melancholy ballad, the kind that his old friend/enemy David Gilmour has paradoxically long accustomed us to, but the story of a beautiful girl killed in a bombing "like a bulldozer crushing a pearl" is pure tragedy.

The single "Smell The Roses" is the new "testament" track that contains most of Waters's ideas, even if musically it's very close to the Pink Floyd sound. It opens with the smell of roses, but that's just a brief preamble that gives way to the smell of phosphorus. Change is coming, the dogs start barking. There's a powerful man (a pig) in a secret room plotting bombings in order to get rich, and he'll find zealous dogs ready to carry out his orders for a pittance. To make it all seem more humane, the dogs even write their name on the bomb. The smell of phosphorus mixes with that of "bacon" (charred corpses), but the pig who devised it all tries to reassure him ("this is the room where you can bury your ifs and buts", "where you can burn" your emotional involvement "on a funeral pyre"). This last line is a nod to "Light My Fire" by the Doors; "Throw A Photo On The Funeral Pyre" indeed echoes "And Our Love Become A Funeral Pyre", but it's obviously ironic: while Jim Morrison sang of love and passions metaphorically ablaze, here it's corpses and our most human side that burn, so that once reduced to ashes we can stop thinking and go on living happily, free of guilt.

It closes with three tracks that form a continuum, a funeral song of great simplicity and emotional power. "Wait For Her" (inspired by "Lesson From The Kama Sutra" by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish), "Oceans Apart" and "A Part Of Me Died" make for a deeply sad ending in which the agonizing wait for the beloved woman turns out to be in vain, because the woman is no longer there.

Waters points out that within each of us there's a part that's envious, heartless, greedy, prone to evil. And that part of humanity stands at the pulpit, spreading lies (and once again the references to Trump are obvious). But then, suddenly, hope arrives; once again it's love that can change things. That negative part present in each of us can be defeated: "When I met you/ that part of me died". Finally, the last farewell: “Portami la mia sigaretta finale/ sarebbe meglio di gran lunga morire tra le tue braccia/ che indugiare in una vita di rimpianti”.

Roger Waters's journey into human psychology, begun many years ago with Pink Floyd, continues without finding peace, and his visions of an ever bleaker future grow even sharper. A tireless observer and critic of society, the English composer remains one of the most important moral voices of our time.

His renewed creative drive continues with a reinterpretation of a classic by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Histoire Du Soldat (1918) was composed by Stravinsky during the years of the Great War, an event so tragic that it awakened a strong anti-war, anti-militarist urge in great artists. Inspired by the Faust myth and by some Russian folk tales collected by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afanasyev, it's a work of total pessimism – essentially Watersian, in other words – that belongs to the first phase of the composer's career, the so-called Russian phase, even though the Stravinsky family had already left Russia following the revolution.

Stravinsky's themes are taken up by Waters, who lends his voice to the opera's three characters (the soldier, the devil, the narrator) to underline many of his own ideas, in particular that of money as the great corrupter of mankind, seen as an unsuppressible curse upon humanity, a sentence with no chance of redemption. If the devil – seen through the lens of Animals – is the powerful pig who manipulates Joseph's naive soul, the soldier is the sheep crushed purely for the convenience of a devil in need of a new soul. Joseph's life, a good soldier sincerely in love with his fiancée, is sold off for money and power, and precisely because he carries human feelings he must be crushed and punished, just as the teacher in "The Wall" throws young, free minds – untainted by the corruption of the outside world – into the meat grinder, to mould them into the greed of "adults" sold out to the capitalist laws of the market. Joseph the sheep's rebellion can only be hopeless, and the only possible ending is the "Devil's Triumphal March", celebrating his new soul.

Shortly before the 2023 European tour he released The Lockdown Sessions, featuring tracks drawn from the most Watersian albums by the Pink Floyd, from "The Wall" ("Mother", "Vera" and "Comfortably Numb") to "The Final Cut" ("Two Suns In The Sunset" and "The Gunner's Dream"), with the small exception of "The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range", the only piece drawn from a solo album ("Amused To Death"). These are almost entirely acoustic versions, often stripped-down and simplified, which nevertheless contain moments of acceleration and very fast electric guitar, as in the finale of "Vera", where the closing chorus "Bring The Boys Back Home" is repeated several times over a guitar solo that lends the track an atmosphere at once epic and tragic, as Waters attempts to further update songs now nearly fifty years old.

And if the whole point of Waters's upcoming tour is to bring his back catalogue up to date with recent historical events – hardly a new move for him ("The Wall" and the fall of the Berlin Wall before it, then the Iraq War and the reassessment of "Animals" on the last world tour with the emblematic anthem "Trump Is A Pig") – it's clear that "The Lockdown Sessions" would have faded into the background were it not for "Comfortably Numb 2022", which feels less like an alternative version of the memorable track from "The Wall" than a prophecy.

Stripped of every 1970s residue, of every tie to any pop-rock tradition – obviously including Gilmour's famous solo (perhaps the very emblem of 70s rock) – the sound becomes more contemporary, dominated by synths, harmonium and bass. Roger Waters seems to want to underline the importance of his music, still not fully understood today despite its worldwide success. He seems to be telling us, "stop humming my songs without understanding them". That's why he slows down and dismantles "Comfortably Numb", reducing it to its essence and stripping it of anything that might allow for a superficial, "entertainment"-style listen.

The atmosphere in the video becomes particularly oppressive. Scenes of war and destruction seem to foreshadow a none-too-distant future. If in the original version it was drugs that numbed Pink, and in "Amused To Death" it was television distracting the man/ape "entertained" to death, now hordes of men move unaware through scenes of war, alone and abandoned, heads bowed down toward their smartphones, feeling neither anger nor fear, but calm, as if anesthetized to pain. Humanity wanders unknowingly toward its end, perhaps toward a third world war: above, watching and dominating it all, the usual flying pig, symbol of evil and power throughout Waters's entire discography.

"Comfortably Numb 2022" is thus consistent with Waters's entire philosophy, the ultimate evolution of the ideas found in "Animals", "The Wall" and Amused To Death, a solemn and desperate elegy for a man racing toward his own end that – for attentive eyes and ears – lands like a punch in the gut.

At eighty years old, and still eager to keep surprising audiences, Roger Waters announced the October 6th release of The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux, his personal reinterpretation of the Pink Floyd classic recorded fifty years earlier. Thanks in part to production by Waters and Gus Seyffert, the psychedelic, orchestral arrangements of Pink Floyd become leaner, while at the same time rawer and darker. "The original Dark Side Of The Moon," Waters explained, "seems, in some way, like the lament of an old person for the human condition. But Dave, Rick, Nick and I were so young when we made it, and when you look at the world around us, clearly the message didn't stick. That's why I started to consider what the wisdom of an eighty-year-old might bring to a reimagined version".

If the 1973 original, made when Waters was 29, was a meditation on the passing of time, on madness and alienation, today's reworking becomes an opportunity for the former Pink Floyd leader to shape that work around his current view of society. On top of that, the Redux vinyl edition includes a thirteen-minute bonus track inspired by the re-recording as its closing track. "I'm immensely proud of what we've created, a work that can stand proudly alongside the original, hand in hand across half a century of time", Waters said of the record.

The Redux version is by no means an attempt to improve upon an album that is already perfect – a moment of absolute balance between the experimental soul of the band's early years and the more psychoanalytical one of the following years – but rather an attempt to personalize, as much as possible, a work that Waters feels is entirely his own. In order to change and update such an iconic album, the English artist understands that the only viable path is to strip away as much as possible, for a dry, far more skeletal version than that of "Comfortably Numb 2022", which had already given a first taste of the new sounds Waters was after.

The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux is therefore an anti-musical work, born out of anger, inner unease and an even more pessimistic view of society – in some ways almost an act of hostility towards the fans, as if trying to single out the most devoted among the indistinct mass of distracted listeners, almost designed not to please. So far so good, because a great artist like Waters has every right to turn his own discomfort into art in whatever way he sees fit. And in this sense, the stripped-down versions of "Us And Them" and "The Great Gig In the Sky" manage to retain some of the melancholic charm of the originals.

The downside, perhaps, is Waters' choice to insistently return to his own period of peak inspiration without seeking any real renewal (the choice of lyrics for "Breathe" is also odd, taken from a track off "Obscured By Clouds"), re-presenting the same lyrics from fifty years earlier. The reduction, even in its most extreme form, works perfectly well, but perhaps we might have expected a perspective closer to the eighty-year-old Waters of today, rather than the thirty-year-old Waters of 1973.

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