Roger Waters
George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943) is an English musician and singer-songwriter. In 1965, he co-founded the rock band Pink Floyd as the bassist. Following the departure of the songwriter, Syd Barrett, in 1968, Waters became Pink Floyd's lyricist, co-lead vocalist and conceptual leader until his departure in 1985.
Roger Waters
George Roger Waters
6 September 1943
Great Bookham, England
- Singer
- songwriter
- composer
- record producer
- Vocals
- bass guitar
- guitar
1964–present
-
Priscilla Phillips(m. 1993; div. 2001)
-
Laurie Durning(m. 2012; div. 2015)
-
Kamilah Chavis(m. 2021)
Pink Floyd achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979), and The Final Cut (1983). By the early 1980s, they had become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful groups in popular music. Amid creative differences, Waters left in 1985 and began a legal dispute over the use of the band's name and material. They settled out of court in 1987. Waters's solo work includes the studio albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), Amused to Death (1992), and Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017). In 2005, he released Ça Ira, an opera translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils' libretto about the French Revolution.
In 1990, Waters staged one of the largest rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, with an attendance of 450,000. As a member of Pink Floyd, he was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Later in 2005, he reunited with Pink Floyd for the Live 8 global awareness event, the group's only appearance with Waters since 1981. He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999. He performed The Dark Side of the Moon for his world tour of 2006–2008, and The Wall Live, his tour of 2010–2013, was the highest-grossing tour by a solo artist at the time.
Waters incorporates political themes in his work and is a prominent supporter of Palestine in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He has called for the removal of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, and describes Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Some of his comments, such as his likening of Israel to Nazi Germany, and elements of his live shows, drew accusations of antisemitism, which Waters dismissed as a conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
Early years
Waters was born on 6 September 1943, the younger of two boys, to Mary (née Whyte; 1913–2009) and Eric Fletcher Waters (1914–1944), in Great Bookham, Surrey.[2] His father, the son of a coal miner and Labour Party activist, was a schoolteacher, a devout Christian, and a Communist Party member.[3]
In the early years of the Second World War, Waters' father was a conscientious objector who drove an ambulance during the Blitz.[3] He later changed his stance on pacifism, joined the Territorial Army and was commissioned into the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers as a Second Lieutenant on 11 September 1943.[4] He was killed five months later on 18 February 1944 at Aprilia, during the Battle of Anzio, when Roger was five months old.[5] He is commemorated in Aprilia and at the Cassino War Cemetery.[6] On 18 February 2014, Waters unveiled a monument to his father and other war casualties in Aprilia, Italy and was made an honorary citizen of Anzio.[7] Following her husband's death, Mary Waters, also a teacher, moved with her two sons to Cambridge and raised them there.[8] Waters' earliest memory is of the V-J Day celebrations.[9]
Waters attended Morley Memorial Junior School in Cambridge and then the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College) with Syd Barrett.[10] The future Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour lived nearby on Mill Road and attended the Perse School.[11] At 15, Waters was chairman of the Cambridge Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (YCND),[12] having designed its publicity poster and participated in its organisation.[13] He was a keen sportsman and a highly regarded member of the high school's cricket and rugby teams.[14] Waters was unhappy at school, saying: "I hated every second of it, apart from games. The regime at school was a very oppressive one ... The same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers."[15]
Waters met future Pink Floyd members Nick Mason and Richard Wright in London, at the Regent Street Polytechnic (later the University of Westminster) School of Architecture. Waters enrolled there in 1962, after a series of aptitude tests indicated he was well suited to that field.[16] He had initially considered a career in mechanical engineering.[17]
Politics
Israeli–Palestinian conflict and accusations of antisemitism
Waters is a vocal supporter of Palestine in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[129] He is a member[130] of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a campaign for an international boycott of Israel.[131] Waters first saw the Israeli West Bank barrier in 2006, at the request of Palestinian supporters, when he was scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv. He subsequently moved a Tel Aviv concert to Neve Shalom and called for the barrier's removal: "The wall is an appalling edifice to behold. It is policed by young Israeli soldiers who treated me, a casual observer from another world, with disdainful aggression."[132][133] He has repeatedly described Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid.[134] In 2023, he was one of the principal signers of an open letter called Artists Against Apartheid.[135][136]
Waters has criticised numerous other artists who have performed in Israel. In 2015, Waters published an open letter in Salon criticising the rock band Bon Jovi for performing in Tel Aviv.[137] In 2017, he urged Radiohead to cancel a concert there, signing a letter with 50 others,[131] and was co-signatory on an open letter asking Nick Cave to cancel his.[138][139] Neither Radiohead nor Cave cancelled their concerts.[140][141][142] Waters narrated the 2016 documentary The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States about the methods used by Israel to shape American public opinion.[143][144]
In 2013, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center, accused Waters of antisemitism for including a giant pig balloon bearing a Star of David in his concerts.[145][146] Waters responded that it was one of several religious and political symbols in the show and not an attempt to single out Judaism as an evil force.[129] The same year, Waters compared the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany, saying: "The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious."[129] He said the reason why few celebrities had joined the BDS movement in the United States was because "the Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry".[147][148]
Following the remarks, the Anti-Defamation League charged that Waters' remarks were antisemitic.[148] The American rabbi Shmuley Boteach responded to Waters in the New York Observer: "That you would have the audacity to compare Jews to monsters who murdered them shows you have no decency, you have no heart, you have no soul."[129] Speaking in New York afterwards, Waters said supporters of Israel often attack critics as antisemitic as a "diversionary tactic" by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.[129] In a 2017 interview with Omar Barghouti, Waters again likened Israel's public diplomacy to Nazi Germany: "The thing about propaganda – again, it's not hard to go back to Goebbels or the 1930s. You understand the tactic is to tell the big lie as often as possible over and over and over and over again. And people believe it."[149][150] In 2017, the writer Ian Halperin produced a documentary, Wish You Weren't Here, accusing Waters of antisemitism and "erecting the very walls that hinder peace in the region and fuel hatred".[151]
In 2020, Major League Baseball stopped advertising Waters' This Is Not a Drill concerts after receiving criticism from Jewish advocacy groups.[152] Later that year, Waters said the American Jewish businessman and Republican Party donor Sheldon Adelson was a "puppet master" controlling American politics. He said that Adelson believed that "only Jewish people are completely human ... I'm not saying Jewish people believe this. I am saying that he does, and he is pulling the strings."[153] In the same interview, Waters said that the murder of George Floyd was carried out with a technique developed by the Israeli Defence Forces. He said the Americans had studied the technique to learn "how to murder the blacks because they have seen how efficient the Israelis have been at murdering Palestinians in the occupied territories by using those techniques ... The Israelis are proud of it."[153]
Personal life
In 1969, Waters married his childhood sweetheart Judith Trim, a school teacher and potter. She was featured on the gatefold sleeve of the original release of the Pink Floyd album Ummagumma, but excised from CD reissues.[218] They had no children and divorced in 1975.[219] Trim died in 2001.[220]
In 1976, Waters married Carolyne Christie, the niece of the third Marquess of Zetland.[219] They had a son, Harry Waters, a musician who has played keyboards with his father's touring band since 2002, and a daughter, India Waters, who has worked as a model.[221] Christie and Waters divorced in 1992.[219] In 1993, Waters married Priscilla Phillips. They had a son, Jack Fletcher. Their marriage ended in 2001.[222]
In 2004, Waters became engaged to the actress and filmmaker Laurie Durning.[223] They married on 14 January 2012[224] and filed for divorce in September 2015.[225] Waters married his fifth wife, Kamilah Chavis, in October 2021.[226] Waters has homes in Long Island and Hampshire.[227] He is an atheist.[228][229]
