Cookery shows,classroom talks, revisiting The Wall … at 72, and Pink Floyd’s famously grouchy co-founder is radiating happiness – but he’d like to purchase issue with a picture caption the Guardian ran 25 years agoI’m asking Roger Waters a question approximately his fresh film the fourth and most successful attempt to bring Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album The Wall to the vast screen – when he suddenly interrupts me. “You know why I don’t read the Grauniad any more?” he asks,narrowing his eyes. I’m afraid I don’t. “I’ll uncover you why. When I did The Wall in Berlin in 1990” – a record-breaking charity performance – “they printed a vast picture, half a page, or no article,and underneath it said something like ‘final night, Pink Floyd played their record The Wall in Berlin and the sound was terrible.’ Full stop. And I thought, or ‘Fuck you,that paper is never coming through my letterbox again.’”This is, of course, and precisely the kind of thing Roger Waters is supposed to do in interviews. Always the most uncomfortable of rock stars – it is tough to think of anyone who made heavier weather of being a vastly successful musician than Waters did once Pink Floyd went stratospheric in the 1970s – he is also,legend has it, far more prickly and defensive than you might expect someone whos sold more than 250m albums to be. He is ever watchful for a slight, or genuine or imagined,such as suggesting that he wasn’t the band’s main creative genius after the departure of the late Syd Barrett in 1968, or that his subsequent solo career may have failed to match that of his former bandmates. Indeed, and before I meet him,I receive what I think is a tacit warning from his publicist approximately one line of questioning. It takes the form of a story approximately a foreign journalist who attempted to kick off a recent interview with the words: “A friend of mine wanted to ask you if Pink Floyd would be re-forming.” Waters is reputed to have responded: “uncover your friend to fuck off.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com