Roger Waters, born in Cambridgeshire, England on Sept. 9, 1944, formed the great psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd in London in late 1965 with keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason, whom he met while studying architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. They played together in a succession of bad R&B bands (the T-Set, the Meggadeaths, and the Architectural Abdabs) before linking up with Roger "Syd" Barrett, a Cambridge-born painter and poet and the primary songwriter for the early Floyd. After Barrett unfortunately was forced to leave the band midway through the recording of Floyd's second album because his near-constant tripping, combined with an existing manic-depressive condition and the pressures of sudden fame, sent him over the edge, a very different Floyd emerged, this one a superstar rock band and staple of FM radio featuring Barrett's old Cambridge chum Dave Gilmour. But with the landmark Dark Side Of The Moon album, released in March 1973, it was clearly Waters who moved into the role of Floyd's leader. Wish You Were Here and Animals came next, followed by the bloated double-album rock opera The Wall, which indicated the rest of the group was increasingly taking a backseat to Waters' ideas. 1983's The Final Cut was basically all Waters, and true to its title, it turned out to be his final album with Pink Floyd, after which he embarked on a solo career while Gilmour, Mason, and Wright soldiered on. After leaving the Floyd, Waters released three solo albums (1984's The Pros & Cons Of Hitch Hiking, 1987's Radio K.A.O.S., and 1992's Amused To Death), as well as The Wall--Berlin 1990, a soundtrack to his $8 million live staging of The Wall musical at the site of the dismantled Berlin Wall. However, he stayed out of the public limelight for much of the '90s, never embarking on a full tour during the entire decade and not performing live onstage since a 1993 Walden Woods benefit concert in Los Angeles. Instead, he collaborated on an opera about the French Revolution, Ca Ira, with French composer Etienne Roda-Gil, though the project was indefinitely shelved after the death of Roda-Gil's wife, Nadine, from leukemia. Several years passed before Waters and Roda-Gil resumed work on the piece, which will finally be unveiled soon by Sony Classical.
In addition to the opera, Waters returned to the spotlight in 1999 with the reissue of a newly restored version of the film The Wall, as well as the announcement of his first concert trek since 1987, his sold-out summer "In The Flesh" tour, which featured state-of-the art multimedia light and quadraphonic sound. This was followed by the release of a new single from the soundtrack to the Tim Roth film The Legend Of 1900, "Lost Boys Calling"--a much-anticipated superstar collaboration of sorts between Waters and legendary film composer Ennio Morricone, with guitar solos by none other than Eddie Van Halen.
This Biography was written by Lyndsey_Parker.
Roger Waters