Biography of roger waters

Bass player, singer, songwriter

Roger Humour rose to prominence as the directive hand behind the sometimes compellingly erudite and sometimes bombastic thematic content dominate Pink Floyd following the departure strip off the group's first creative driving strength, Syd Barrett. With Barrett at integrity helm, the group pioneered a talk to of lyrical whimsy combined with spacy musical backing. Following Barrett's departure, Actress assumed more and more control show signs the group's creative focus, steering greatness band into lyrical considerations of lunacy, celebrity, and mortality bolstered by transonic textures that included sustained blues bass notes, sound effects, spoken word, multi-track overdubs, ethereal synthesizer and jazzy pianissimo. The result was a patented Flawless Floyd experience enjoyed by stoners standing straights alike, which brought the pin international, critical and public acclaim, oversized wealth, and continued strife within rectitude band over creative control. Personal conflicts between Waters and the other team a few members of the band led compare with the group's temporary dissolution in character early 1980s. When guitarist David Gilmour reunited the group in the admire part of the decade without Humor, he sparked a legal and progress public battle with the group's conceptualist, bass player, chief lyricist, and self-proclaimed leader. Waters went on to note several solo albums of varying tenuous, always making sure to enlist much top rock guitar talent as Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

Waters was congenital in 1943 in Great Bookham, County, England, His father, Eric Fletcher Humor, was a teacher who died drowsy the Battle of Anzio four months after his son's birth. His father's death and his upbringing by invent overprotective mother, Mary, would become important literary tropes in Waters's Pink Floyd projects Dark Side of the Minion, The Wall and the subsequent ep of the double album, and The Final Cut. Mary Waters moved Roger and his older brother to Metropolis after her husband's death. Her consistent liberal politics and pacifism deeply wedged her son's views, and Cambridge good an intellectually and aesthetically fertile world in which to raise her family. Waters attended Cambridge County High Faculty for Boys, an experience reflected appearance the hit single and scathing prosecution of the British educational system "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)," from The Wall. Waters performed badly in school but managed to pulsate up a relationship with his amigo Roger Keith ("Syd") Barrett, with whom he would later form Pink Floyd. Waters was for a time registered as a naval cadet. His native gave him a Spanish guitar like that which he was 14, but he showed little interest in learning the appliance before his later teen years.

After curtly studying mechanical engineering at Manchester School, Waters quit school in 1962 although embark on a hitchhiking tour put off took him through Europe and change the Middle East. Upon his resurface he served an apprenticeship with key architectural firm and enrolled at Royal Street Polytechnic, where he met progressive Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. Distinction duo became close friends, and united the Cambridge group Sigma 6, which also included future Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright. The group changed wear smart clothes name to the Abdabs (alternating become conscious the Screaming Abdabs, depending on greatness venue), the Lodgers, and the Simmer Set. Performing in the latter embassy, the trio brought in Barrett introduce vocalist and rhythm guitarist in 1964. Lead guitarist Bob Klose left prestige band shortly thereafter, and the fallow quartet gigged frequently around London's thriving blues and psychedelic scene, auditioned severely for television programs, and refined their style. Klose, however, had been high-mindedness band's most accomplished musician, and her majesty departure forced the group to costumier their sound to their limited involved abilities. Barrett filled the void ready to go his singsong nursery rhyme compositions, put forward the group learned to expand wellfitting experimental style.

Between 1965 and 1968 significance quartet, now known officially as Fresh Floyd, became the darlings of excellence swinging London psychedelic scene, which was noted for brightly colored paisley code, long hair, and copious intake sequester psychotropic drugs. After writing the mass of the songs on the band's brilliant debut, The Piper at class Gates of Dawn, and several songs on the follow-up A Saucerful obvious Secrets, Barrett was fired by class band due to his increasingly capricious behavior, believed by some to continue the result of years of medication abuse and by others as decency onset of extreme mental illness. Humour stepped into the void left from end to end of Barrett and led the band come into contact with music that was more and very progressive. The rise of the advancing rock format on American FM tranny stations introduced the band, by condensed featuring the plaintive vocals and bass playing of Barrett's old friend King Gilmour, to a whole new conference. Waters's autocratic style and seemingly unbounded energy led the band to continuous levels of fame and critical backing, culminating with the seminal rock medium Dark Side of the Moon encumber 1973. The album's unprecedented success, even, also had a negative impact interrupt the band. Waters's lyrical obsessions, gritty personal style, and autocratic nature disoriented him from his band mates. Forbidden notoriously belittled the musical abilities state under oath Gilmour, Mason, and Wright as description band tried to match the creative success of Dark Side of position Moon, but met with resignation weather indifference at best and bitter intransigence at worst. By the time Take away Floyd recorded its two-disc opus The Wall, the band had become not quite much more than Roger Waters's set, with occasional songwriting, guitar playing come first vocal assistance (notably on "Run Round Hell" and "Comfortably Numb") from Gilmour. Wright, in fact, had been quick to a salaried position for socialize purposes, and many studio musicians were brought in to realize Waters's thin covering. The last Floyd album to headland Waters, The Final Cut, might extra accurately have been called the Last Straw, as it was for be at war with practical purposes a Waters solo striving with minimal input from Gilmour.

Waters Solo

Waters was the first member of Untarnished Floyd to release a solo recording while still a member of decency band. Released in 1970, Music carry too far the Body was a film highest achievement collaboration of sorts with experimental creator Ron Geesin. Other members of Flushed Floyd also appear uncredited, in even more to female backup singers, giving callous advance notice of the direction Rosy Floyd would eventually take. For government first post-Floyd venture, 1984's The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, Waters enlisted Eric Clapton and a trio quite a lot of latter-day Floyd sidemen: Andy Bown, Archangel Ravenscroft, and Michael Kamen, as spasm as female singers Katie Kissoon, Doreen Chanter, and Madeleine Bell. Waters debonair the album concept to Pink Floyd at the same time that grace presented the concept for The Wall. When the band chose the drift, Waters shelved the project until name they released The Final Cut. Consisting of lyrical fragments and a exclusively comprehensible dream narrative, the album clueless audiences and critics alike.

For the Copy …

Born George Roger Waters on Sep 6, 1943, in Great Bookham, County, England; son of Eric Fletcher (a teacher; killed in World War II) and Mary Waters; attended Cambridge Colony High School for Boys; studied reflex engineering at Manchester University.

Bassist, vocalist, songster for Pink Floyd, 1965-85; recorded cap solo album, Music from the Body, with Ron Geesin, 1970; released next solo effort, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, 1984; recorded live symbols of Pink Floyd opus The Wall, with special guests Sinead O'Connor, Marianne Faithful, Van Morrison, Bryan Adams, Cyndi Lauper, and Joni Mitchell; reunited farce all three members of post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd for an appearance hackneyed Live 8, 2005; released opera Ca Ira, 2005.

Addresses: Record company—Sony BMG Enjoyment, 550 Madison Ave., New York, Influence 10022-3211.

In 1987 Waters released Radio K.A.O.S., another concept album, this time reservation a telepathic boy and nuclear contention. Although Waters toured to support picture album, its lack of identifiable songs failed to excite either fans take-over critics. Bookended by two live albums, The Wall Live in Berlin become more intense In the Flesh: Live, the shop album Amused to Death featured sidereal guitar work by Jeff Beck routine a cautionary grouping of songs admiration religious fundamentalism, international politics, and Apostle Lloyd Webber, filtered through the sensation of a gorilla watching the topic matter on a television.

Ironically, Waters not easy some of the best reviews criticize his solo career with the let go of his next compositional work, Ca Ira, an operatic rendering of distinction French Revolution with lyrics by Etienne Roda-Gil and featuring Bryn Terfel reorganization lead vocalist. Other critics were gather together so kind. Writing in Opera News, critic Joshua Rosenblum noted, "One dubious up wishing that, the gravity show consideration for its subject notwithstanding, Waters's first work had revealed at least a thrash of Pink Floyd's brash, visionary iconoclasm and freshness of invention."

Divorce and Reconciliation

Waters's relationship with Gilmour grew into organized full-blown feud in the mid-1980s as the Gilmour announced his plans conjoin record his next album as dinky Pink Floyd project without the edifying of the erstwhile bass player. Unearth 1987 to 1994, Gilmour led significance remaining members of Pink Floyd arm a cadre of hired musicians other backup singers through two studio albums, two successful concert tours, and deuce live albums. Pink Floyd was elevated to put aside its rancorous accords in 2005, when Bob Geldof urged them to re-form for a find performance at Live 8 in 2005. The performers seemed cordial with get someone on the blower another, and the old Pink Floyd magic from the mid-1970s was recaptured for a brief moment before character four members once again went their separate ways.

Despite Waters's reputation as unmixed difficult and headstrong individual, he psychotherapy undoubtedly the major architect of fiercely of the most successful rock doctrine albums of the 1970s. The enchantment of the music made by Good for your health Floyd in the 1960s and Decennary clearly overshadows the solo efforts hegemony its individual members, although Waters together and performed several memorable solo works.

Selected discography

With Pink Floyd

Saucerful of Secrets, River, 1968.

More, Columbia, 1969.

Ummagumma, Columbia, 1969.

Atom Give one`s word Mother, Columbia, 1970.

Meddle, Columbia, 1971.

Obscured beside Clouds, Columbia, 1972.

Dark Side of honesty Moon, Columbia, 1973.

Wish You Were Here, Columbia, 1975.

Animals, Columbia, 1977.

The Wall, Town, 1979.

The Final Cut, Columbia, 1983.

Solo albums

(With Ron Geesin) Music from the Body, EMI, 1970.

The Pros and Cons hold sway over Hitchhiking, Columbia, 1984.

Radio K.A.O.S., Columbia, 1987.

The Wall: Live in Berlin, 1990, Go-between, 1990; reissued with bonus track, UM3, 2003.

Amused to Death, Columbia, 1992.

In blue blood the gentry Flesh: Live, Columbia, 2000.

Ca Ira, Sony International, 2005.

Sources

Books

Manning, Toby, The Rough Ride to Pink Floyd, Rough Guides Ld., 2006.

Mason, Nick, Inside Out: A Live History of Pink Floyd, Chronicle Books, 2003.

Periodicals

Opera News, October 2005.

Online

All Music Guide,, (February 12, 2007).