Roger Waters: Rock Express (July/August 1987)

"Cast Your Radio on the Waters"
An Interview with Roger in the July/August 1987 issue of Rock Express concerning His new album and upcoming tour, Radio KAOS.

Contributed by APFFN member stratman.

Somewhere in the quiet suburbs of London's Richmond Hill, George Roger waters is soaking in te bath with his mind tuned on Interstellar overdrive. It's during these early-morning sessions that the former Pink Floyd lead vocalist is at his most creative. Dreams, images and ideas are all mentally processed and indexed with the most vivid reflections allowed to take shape as song ideas.

Lately he's been thinking about money as the root of all evil. Mix this in with the misuse of telecommunications, the demise of a Los Angeles radio station, the personal tragedies of the 1985 British Miner's strike, Reagan bombing Tripoli and the triumphs of a quadraplegic Irish kid and you've got a potpourri of inspirations which waters amalgomated to create his second post-Floyd opus, "Radio KAOS"

Like his previous album, "The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking", Waters is aware that his work can rarely be take at face value. Like most of his Pink floyd creations, Radio Kaos is a complex merger of many ideas which cries out to be studied at length.

Sometimes, as in the case of Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall, The end result has been a blueprint for classic contemporary rock. More recent efforts such as the seemingly pretentious {i]Pros & Cons[/i] have been less than successful.

The 43-year-old ex-Cambridge architectural student can live with the occasional failure, though -- providing he remains true to his principles. He cares passionately about his music, to the point of pulling the plug on Pink Floyd during the recording of The Final Cut when he realized the creative chemistry wasn't there anymore. He's proud of the band's 20-year history and the legacy of music they've recorded. But he doesn't want to see the surviving three members, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, debase the name for purely monetary reasons.

"Pink Floyd is finished as a creative vehicle and should be left that way," said Waters in initiating a lawsuit to prevent the others from touring and recording under the Pink Floyd moniker. To this end, Waters has been unsuccessful. While his lawyers are pondering the mass of legalese, Messrs Gilmour, Wright and Mason are completing a new Floyd album and a major North American tour this fall has sold out well in advance.

In an exclusive Rock Express interview, Roger Waters explains the concept behind his new album, expresses his concerns about the continuation of Pink Floyd and sheds new light on his decision to pursue a solo career.
Which one's Pink? Let Roger Waters explain.

RE:Your latest album, Radio Kaos, evolves around quite a complex concept. Was there a specific idea which sparked the storyline or is it a result of a number of different ideas?

RW: Well, first let me say that songwriting for me has developed into a very passive excercise. The best things I have done have been things I've have very little control over. A writer or a painter or an artist is good because their creative force is in contact with some unconscious thought that triggers their best ideas -- it's not somehing they necessarily work at.

RE:How do you make contact with these unconscious thought patterns?

RW: I lie in the bath in the morning and think about ideas. I suspect that works for me because it's the time of day nearest when one is dreaming. Whin I started to write some new songs about 18 months ago, I wrote about how I felt at that moment. Ironically, the song that triggered the whole concept, Get Back To Radio, didn't end up on the album. But it contained a line which set the whole idea into place. "Like a volcano waiting to blow, a new generation waits by its radio." It brought back the idea of 13 and 14-year-olds lying in bed in the middle of the night listening to their radios.

RE: There used to be a magical quality about listening to radio alone in your room.

RW: Yes, particularly growing up in England and listening to the signal of Radio Luxembourg fade in and drift out into the night. It was a mystical experience that conjured up all kinds of ideas and images. When I wrote that song I thought I'll keep that concept and tuck it away for later.

RE: What came next?

RW: The next song I wrote was Who Needs Information. That's about the tabloid press and how they have ceased to be about the dissemination of news information. Particularly the Murdoch press in England, newspapers like the Sun and the Mirror. All you get is gossip, T and A. There's a specific reference to an actual incident where a striking Welsh Miner threw a concrete block which accidentally landed on the roof of a car, killing the driver. That struck me as being particularly tragic because there were only losers in that situation. Two young men, one incarcerated and one dead, as a result of a conflict (the 1985 coal miner's strike) that was out of their control. I felt that was a classic example of human lives being governed by the forces of the market. It says something when people are willing to commit violent acts to achieve their goals -- and that goal is monetarism. This may work in the short term. But in the long term, if the human race is to co-exist together for the next 10 centuries or several millenium, a monetary plan is not going to work.

RE:In the album's plot, Ben represents the violent Welsh miner. How did you come up with Billy and why is it important to the story that he be portrayed as having a handicap?

RW: The trigger for that idea is a young Irish lad called Christopher Nolan who was severely handicapped to the point of being a vegetable. The doctors gave him no hope of ever being productive, but through his mother, Chris gained access to a word processor. He had a conductive baton gaffer-taped to his forehead (it was the only part of his body that worked) and by using the baton, was able to trigger the keys. Using this method, Chris wrote some wonderful poetry and has just completed his biography. This shows that there's a great potential for the human race to more efficiently allow individuals to fulfill their potential.

My belief is that this doesn't happen by allowing people to compete in an open and free jungle.

RE:The central plot of your story revolves around the relationship between Billy and the deejay of a Los Angeles radio station. How did this idea form the rest of the concept?

RW: I was a tax exile in Los Angeles in 1980. Pink Floyd had made a lot of money with DSOTM and at one point it looked as though we had lost it all. Then we had to contend with the British taxman chasing us for money we didn't have -- so I was forced to leave the country and move to L.A. I was struck by the strange effect the place had on me. For one thing, it seemed everyone is an expatriate -- nobody actually belongs there. Everything is transitory. The houses are all made of cardboard and no one seems to pay attention to quality, craft, permanency or history. It's a very tacky place. What changed my attitude though was one day, while I was driving around, I accidentally tuned into FM radio station KMET. They had this bizarre spot called The Fish Report which was a strange, fanciful and very surreal sports fishing report about the beaches in and around LA. It was complete gibberish from beginning to end -- real Monty Python. It made me realize my superior European overview of this culture was quite wrong. These people were doing human, humorous things and moving in the same direction I was. It taught me not to make value judgements on individuals just because you don't understand their culture. It's like rationalizing the bombing of Tripoli because you think Khadafi is a jerk. Just because he comes across as a bit of an idiot, that's no excuse to sacrifice foreign lives on the altar of domestic elecotoral entertainment.

RE:Much of the strength behind the idea lies in the dialogue between Billy and the deejay. The conversations are almost as important as the music. You also make direct reference to the idea that market research resulted in the closure of KMET.

RW: Yes, ther's two things there. Firstly, the staff of KMET were all called into the manager's office one Friday and were all fired. They were told that management had conducted a market research study which showed that if they played New Age music and scrapped the existing format, the station would show and additional 4.35% profit. Which meant that 19 years of audience loyalty was tossed out in favor of elevator music. I found something strangely prophetic in that attitude. In planning the actual concert, I'm trying to write a lot more conversation between Billy and the deejay, Jim Ladd, so that you'll actually have the whole story explained in great detail. What I want to give the people is direct access to the plot. I want them sitting at the concert going, "Oh, I see what he means. Now I know what he's on about". You lose that on a 40-minute album because of the songs. But in a concert, I've got two and a half hours to work with the opportunity for a lot more dialogue. I've also got more songs that weren't included on the album. I can work them into the concert and flesh out the jigsaw a little more.

RE:In a way you must be relieved to be out of Pink Floyd and in a position to fully develop your own ideas.

RW: Yes, to a certain extent. I was quite happy working on my ideas within the context of P F until we got to The Wall. Up until that point it was understood that I came up with most of the lyrical ideas and everyone could live with that. We all made our contributions in our own way and we could all work with each other. But after The Wall, things changed. I had a horrible time recording The Final Cut. No one else wanted to co-operate. It's hard to understand what happened. My view of it is disjointed right now. But suffice to say that I'm happy recording albums that I'm comforable with and that I have total control over.

RE:Legal implications aside, what offends you most about the idea of Pink Floyd recording an album and touring without you?

RW: I wouldn't feel any more distressed if I saw George Harrison and Ringo Starr going out as The Beatles. And if they did, I'm sure there's an entire generation who would buy tickets not knowing about the death of John Lennon or that he was an original member. I shouldn't get into this...but when a band isn't working together as a band anymore -- then that's it. It's over! And if P F is going out as a band this summer then it's a rip-off. If Peter Townsend is not in The Who then it's not The Who and if I'm not in PF then it's not P F. The fact that a band's name is being used to make money is, in my opinion, offensive.

RE:David Gilmour told me a few months ago that he'd rather perform as Pink Floyd to 50,000 people than as David Gilmour, solo artist, to 5,000.

RW: All those people who have bought their tickets in advance for the Pink Floyd shows--do they really know what they're getting? When I was taking care of business in Pink Floyd, I got to the point where I refused to to play 50,000 capaity staduims. That was the reason I wrote The Wall. I was so against doing stadium gigs. In my view, rock 'n roll in staduims is wrong -- it's only about making money. It ceases to be about musicians communicating with an audience through the medium of music. All the talk backstage is "do you know how much we grossed? Do you know how much money we made?" I would not like to work in that environment.

RE:With The Wall concerts and The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking tour, you have shown a preference for smaller venues using a multi-media presentation to enhance your music.

RW: If you can put on a good show in an arena then every seat in the house can be worth 20 bucks. But a stadium is obviously different. Now if you say that there's thousands and thousands of fans who wouldn't be able to see us if we only played an arena -- then fine. Play in a stadium but only charge $5 to compensate for bad sightlines and poor sound. So instead of grossing 3.2 million dollars, you only take one fifth of that but you've been fair to your audience. But let's face it. The bands who play the stadiums are only in it for the money. Artistic integrity has nothing to do with it.
RE: You did play in Pink Floyd when they were doing stadiums. The 1977 concert at Montreal's Olympic Stadium in front of some 70,000 fans for instance.

RW: Yes and I hated every single second of it. That was the starting point of The Wall. I'll never forget that show. The promoter had strung a chain-link fence across the foot of the stage. There was this one kid who clawed his way up the fence and never stopped shouting through the entire show. I'm sure he was expressing a desperate need to make contact and to show his adulation -- but he really got to me. He drove me crazy, he never stopped screaming, even during the quiet bits. In the end I was drawn to the foot of the stage and I actually spat at this kid from about four feet away. It was at that moment that I thought, "Hang on a minute. There's something desperately wrong here. If there can be that much alienation between me and this kid then we have a serious problem." It was at that instant that I thought of the concept of creating a wall between us and the audience.

RE: You can build walls both physically and mentally. But there's no escaping the fact that you are a part of one of rock's most legendary and musically influential forces. It's a tag you'll always be tattooed with.

RW: I don't mind that. I'm proud of Pink Floyd up until now. I'm not sure I'll be proud of it after this fall. We've made a lot of weird stances and a lot of the music we wrote was very stimulating and innovative. David for instance is a brilliant guitarist and an underrated one too. Pink Floyd was more than just four musicians. It was a special chemistry that sparked a creative force and I'm very proud of that. I'm thrilled that Dark Side Of The Moon is still on the charts after 14 years. It's more than a good record, it radiates a great amount of feeling which still stands up to this day. Us And Them, Brain Damage, Eclipse and Money are as well constructed today as they were 15 years ago. But that doesn't mean I can't go on and do other work. If the other work isn't as successful as Dark Side then I won't be disappointed. I mean, I could record an album which sells just one copy but that album might move someone deeply. You don't always have to be popular to be good. Peter Gabriel was great long before the masses started buying his last album.

RE: I understand that one of the goals of your forthcoming tour will be to make direct contact with your audience.

RW: Yes, it will be like a radio station on the road. The KMET disk jockey, Jim Ladd, will be on tour with us and we'll be talking to the audiences. That's what I'm working on right now. We'll probably achieve this by putting phone booths around the venues and have the audience use them to talk to the stage. The original idea was for Jim to take a microphone into the audience. But you can't do that because the signal would have to feedback to the P.A. system and you'd get a time-delay effect on the conversation. The communication idea is important because it emphasizes the relationship between Billy and Jim in the story. You have a cripple, driven from his home country by market forces, communicating with a deejay who's about to be driven from his career in radio by similar market forces. They are driven together by a common enemy which is the almighty dollar.

RE:An underlying theme seems to be the misuse of airwaves for artificial means.

RW: That's right. Funny you should mention that but I've just been watching a television program on the Montreux Music Festival which is one of the most cretinous things I've ever seen. Used to be that a music festival was all about people gathering together for a common purpose. They'd cook their sausages, make love, smoke dope, watch the bands and wander off together if they didn't like the music. But now they have this pretentious 'festival' where 50 or 60 top bands mime to tapes over three days and this is sent out by satellite all over Europe for people to watch on their TV's. How artificial can you get?!

RE:In The Tide Is Turning (After Live Aid) you manage to end your story on a positive note.

RW: Yes, I must have had that feeling for a split second that day (laughs). I like the fact that we still keep hearing about Greenpeace and that people are still going on about rain forests -- even though these are concerns that are not monetary. We seem to be paying at least some attention to pertinent issues.
Chernobyl was a positive occurence in retrospect because it gave the world a graphic example of what happens when things go wrong and acted as a strong reminder for the future. Overall, I think things tend to be cyclical and that by the 1990's, there may be a resurgence of positive lines of communication which will allow the earth to be run in a positive fashion.