Troubled Waters

edited by Dave Ward

Waters (about ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’): “It works on various levels; it doesn’t have to be about the war. I mean it should work for any generation really. The father is also... people who leave their families to go and work, not that I would leave my family to go and work, but lots of people do and have done, so it’s not meant to be a simple story about, you know, somebody’s getting killed in the war or growing up and going to school, etc, etc, etc but about being left, more generally.”—The Friday Rock Show, interview by Tommy Vance, 30 November 1979

Waters: “I’m sure my hatred of war was spurred on by the death of my father. I find myself compelled to feel for everyone’s father or son who is killed in a war—and for what?”—Q, November 1992

Waters: “It [The Final Cut] sold three million copies, which wasn’t a lot for the Pink Floyd. And as a consequence, Dave Gilmour went on record as saying, ‘There you go: I knew he was doing it wrong all along.’ But it’s absolutely ridiculous to judge a record solely on sales.... I was in a greengrocer’s shop, and this woman of about forty in a fur coat came up to me. She said she thought it was the most moving record she had ever heard. Her father had also been killed in World War II, she explained. And I got back into my car with my three pounds of potatoes and drove home and thought, ‘good enough.’”—interview by Chris Salewicz, 14 August 1987

Waters: “Well, on the 21st of July, ten o’clock GMT I and a band are going to be performing The Wall at the Potsdammer Platz which is the no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin, on a very grand scale. We’re building a wall which is 600 feet long and 60 feet high, and using big inflatables and three military bands, one from India, one from Australia, and one from Canada, the Red Army Choir, in aid of the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief.... It goes towards Leonard Cheshire’s Fund, the World War Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, and it goes toward the lump sum of 500 million that he hopes to accumulate, and it would go to Armenia or Montserrat, or wherever there is a need.”—BBC World Service, April 1990

Waters: “[Leonard Cheshire] was the most decorated pilot in the RAF. After the war he took a damaged veteran into his home and looked after him ’cos this guy had nowhere to go... After the war, there were a lot of very damaged people, like there are after all wars who. They get sewn up in hospitals, but afterwards there’s a problem about how they rehabilitate... and mentally as well. And so he established, eventually, a series of homes for the disabled called the Cheshire Homes, which are all over the world. They’re in fifty different countries.... And he had this dream to create a fund to respond quickly to disasters in the world. And the concert in Berlin was part of his efforts in raising funds for that thing, but it was meant to be a memorial to all the people who have died in wars this century. A number that, unfortunately, is rising fast even as we speak.... All the royalties. Everthing from the video. It all goes to the Memorial Fund.”—Amused to Death radio premiere, Album Network, 27 August 1992

Waters: “They came and asked me to do it in October [1989]. We went on in July 21st [1990] I think it was. And the intervening months were an absolute nightmare. It wasn’t just getting the permission. When we first started talking about it there were still guys wandering around with machine guns killing anybody who walked out into that piece of land. But it was also getting the other artists together. And logistically, the team of guys on the ground that put it together; how they did it I’ll never know. They didn’t set foot on the site until four weeks before the show. And when they got there it was like a field with huge molehills because the East German Army had dug down to five meters everywhere they found a piece of metal to make sure it wasn’t an unexploded bomb. And of course a lot of them were unexploded bombs, and they dug them all up and threw them away. But yeah, it was a very bizarre thing.”—Amused to Death radio premiere, Album Network, 27 August 1992

Waters: “All that religious bullshit when it’s used to bolster our side in a war is extremely distasteful and offensive to me, and I’m sure to a lot of other people. It certainly ought to be to all Christians, because that wasn't what Christ was trying to teach. And yet here we are apparently, in England and in North America—apparently mainly Christian countries—and we’re still going through all this nonsense about God being on our side and I thought the whole point was, you know, that we were supposed to love one another... I’m not a practising Christian myself but it always staggers me that people who claim to be can stand up and spout—like your president, George Bush—can stand up and spout all this bullshit. Which is why the lyrics in this song about ‘God want crusades and God wants jihad.’ Well, it may well be that God doesn't want either of those things, that they are manifestations of the insecurities of the Muslim and Christian communities on the different sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”—Roger Waters: The Beginning, interview by Jim Ladd, circa 1992