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Sound Bites - short bits and pieces of interviews
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: Here's another excerpt. This one pertaining to Roger's leaving the
: band. It is reprinted (without permission) from Rolling Stone issue
: #513, dated November 19, 1987.
..."We never assumed that it was defunct," says Gilmour. "But the
growing tide or rumors and Roger's vocal output combined made it almost
like an avalanche. We couldn't keep issuing press statements saying,
'No, we haven't split up'. It wasn't worth the bother. Our assumption
- my assumption, anyway - was that we would do another record."
According to Gilmour and Mason, Waters officially announced his
leaving in a letter to the Floyd's record companies, Columbia in
America, EMI in the UK, in December 1985. "We had had discussions,"
Mason says. "We sort of knew something was up." Gilmour and Mason say
that Waters thought his exit would mean the de facto end of the group.
"We'd been having these meetings in which Roger said, 'I'm not working
with you guys again,'"Gilmour says. "He'd say to me, 'Are you going to
carry on?' And I'd say, quite honestly, 'I don't know. But when we're
good and ready, I'll tell everyone what the plan is. And we'll get on
with it.' I think partly his letter was to gear us up into doing
something."
"Because he believed very strongly that we wouldn't do it," says
Mason.
"Or couldn't do it," Gilmour says. "I remember meetings in which he
said, 'You'll never fucking do it.' That's precisely what was said.
Exactly that term." He laughs wryly. "Except slightly harder."
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: This is an exceprt from an interview with Dave. It was on the "In The
: Studio" radio program where they choose an album and talk with the
: people who made it.
It's a bit of a joke. We started off once, and we put all the tracks
down without any noise reduction on them, but using these things called
keypexes (sp?) which are noise gates which would turn the tracks on when
we were using them and off when we weren't using them. Just cut out the
hiss between the moments, you know. And like the Dolby system, which is
a general noise reduction system which is in operation all the time.
And then -- this is a period of very heavy technical advancements
rapidly happening. During that period of time the Dolby system became
quite wide spread, and they got them in at Abbey Road, and we actually
had all the tapes copied. All the master tapes were copied onto --
sixteen track non-Dolby onto sixteen track Dolby. So all the masters
are second generation from the word go. It's amazing what you can do
with sound. Technically speaking, every rule in the book was broken on
that. And people think it's a kind of an audiorile record. Wonderfull
(chuckle). And it shouldn't really be that way (interviewer laughs).
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: Roger Waters, Musician Magazine, May 1992
Something is triggered off in each of us when we listen to certain songs,
a feeling so intangible that it might only whisper, yet is recognized. Roger
Waters explained how he thinks music does this: "As an audience, we look at
the painting or hear the music and recognize truth of some kind that affects
us deeply. It explains our universe to us in some way that is reassuring.
It is that which makes me feel there may well be something to be in tune with."
Roger's description of his school illustrates how the traditional educational
process seems designed to squash creativeness, a theme that he later explored
artistically in The Wall. "My father was killed in the war when I was three
months old, and I was brought up in Cambridge, England, by my mother, who's
a school teacher. She didn't encourage my creativity. She claims to be tone
deaf, whatever that means, and has no interest in music and art or anything
like that. She's only interested in politics. I didn't really have a happy
childhood. I loathed school, particularly after I went to grammer school.
Apart from games, which I loved, I loathed every single second of it. Maybe
toward the end when I was a teenager, going to school was just an 'us and
them' confrontation between me and a few friends who formed a rather violent
and revolutionary clique. That was alright, and I enjoyed the violence of
smashing up the school property. The grammer school mentality at that time
had very much lagged behind the way young people's minds were working in the
late '50's, and it took them a long time to catch up. In a way, grammer
schools were still being run on pre-war lines, where you bloody well did
as you were told and kept your mouth shut, and we weren't prepared for any
of that. It erupted into a very organized clandestine property violence
against the school, with bombs, though nobody ever got hurt. I remember one
night about 10 of us went out, because we had decided that one guy - the man
in charge of gardening - needed a lesson. He had one particular tree of Golden
Delicious apples that was his pride and joy, which he would protect at all
costs. We went into the orchard with stepladders and ate every single apple
on the tree without removing any. So the next morning was just wonderful;
we were terribly tired but filled with a real sense of achievement.
"Syd Barrett [the cofounder of Pink Floyd with Roger] - who was a couple of
years younger - and I became friends in Cambridge. We both had similar
interests - rock 'n' roll, danger and sex and drugs, probably in that order.
I had a motor bike before I left home, and we used to go on mad rides out into
the country. We would have races at night, incredibly dangerous, which we
survived somehow. Those days - 1959 to 1960 - were heady times. There was a
lot of flirtation with Allen Ginsberg and the beat generation of the American
poets. Because Cambridge was a university town, there was a very strong
pseudo-intellectual but beat vibe. It was just when the depression of the
postwar was beginning to wear off and we were beginning to go into some
kind of economic upgrade. And just at the beginning of the '60's there was a
real flirtation with prewar romanticism, which I got involved with in a way,
and it was that feeling that pushed me toward being in a band. I used to go
with friends on journeys around Europe and the Middle East, which in those
days was a reasonably safe place. How much all that experience had to do with
my eventually starting to write, I've no idea.
"The encoragement to play my guitar came from a man who was head of my first
year at architecture school at Regent Street Polytechnic, in London. He
encouraged me to bring the guitar into the classroom. If I wanted to sit
in the corner and play guitar during periods that were set aside for design
work and architecture, he thought that was perfectly alright. It was my
first feeling of encouragement. Earlier, I had made one or two feeble attempts
to learn to play the guitar whan I was around 14 but gave up because it was
to difficult. It hurt my finger, and I found it much to hard. I couldn't
handle it. At the Polytechnic I got involved with people who played in bands,
although I couldn't play very well. I sang a little and played the harmonica
and guitar a bit. Syd and I had always vowed that when he came up to art
school, which he inevitably would do being a very good painter, he and I
would start a band in London. In fact, I was already in a band, so he joined
that."
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: Roger showed up on MTV News At Nite yesterday, with a
: interview that lasted 3-4 minutes.
: This is what he said about Pink Floyd:
People do what they do.
I left and there's a band there still called pink Floyd.
People must make of it what they will.
It's not of my busiens anymore, you know.
Gilmour and Mason own the name pink Floyd, that's it, finished!
It's nothing to do with me.
I have no control over it, I have no control over back
catalogue, I have nothing to do with any of it.
I'm out of it.., OK?
And it happened several years ago, and I was jolly angry
and gloomy about it at the time, and I'm now over it and I'm
getting on with my own work.
You know, let's talk about something else.
[ Smiling when saying this ]
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: There is also Waters "interview" in the latest Q magazine (November '92)
: It seems it's the same that was on MTV.
: Here are some nice quotes :-)
"I wrote The Wall as an attack on stadium rock - and there's is Pink
Floyd making money out of it by playing it in stadiums! Pathetic. They
spoiled my creations."
"Well, anyway, I am one of the best five writers to come out of
English music since the War."
"Radio One won't play my single because they know it's no good. They
know it's not as good as Erasure or Janet fucking Jackson."
[He also said that Lloyd Webber used music of Echoes in the beginning
of Phantom Of The Opera.]
"Bastard. [...] But I think that life's too long to bother with suing
Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber."
[Waters was asked which writers could possibly rank above him]
"John Lennon. [...] Er, I can't think of anybody else [...] Freddy
Mercury maybe...."
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: --- Included from Dave Gilmour interview, Q Magazine, August 1990 ---
HAVE YOU COMMUNICATED IN THE LAST THREE YEARS OTHER THAN
THROUGH LAWYERS?
Oh yes. We've met and talked. He has now stopped coming to the meetings we
have to hold - we are still in business together and we have to have board
meetings to make various decisions, but now he usually sends a proxy along.
The last time I spoke to him was when we signed our agreement (in 1987),
which stopped all lawsuits at that time and settled the fact that we had the
name in perpetuity. He got some rights and bits and pieces, particularly to do
with The Wall. There were one or two areas of the agreement that weren't
clear and he subsequently entered two or three lawsuits against us, which he
has now dropped.
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: Extracts from an article about The Wall in Berlin, taken from
: Q Magazine, #48, September 90.
: I have only typed in what Waters says, the rest is just a description
: of the show and things like that.
: Interviewer Phil Sutcliffe
...AND PIGS WILL FLY!
"If this concert is to celebrate anything, it's that the Berlin Wall
coming dow can be seen as an liberating of the human spirit," Waters
tells Q during rehearsals.
So it is not in any sense a "Top that!" addressed to Dave Gilmour and
Nick Mason, now legally established owners of his old band's name
and, hence, proprietors of an fabulously successful Pink Floyd
comeback in the late '80s?
"No it's not Top that! But it certainly will be most gratifying
that a few more people in the world will understand that The Wall is
'my' work and always have been. There must be an element of that.
Though after hearing them at Knebworth I don't think I should worry.
They just haven't got the faintest idea of what any of it's about.
But then they never did. Still most of the audience for this show
will probably think it's Pink Floyd anyway. The attachment to the
brand name is limpet-like. It's something I live with."
...The 100-piece Soviet army band took no more than a word in the ear
of the right chap. Four tanks, though, were just not on. Nor,
finally, were the pair of WW2 bombers buzzing the site, proposed by
Waters.
Even Cheshire had balked at that one. "He said, You can't do that"
Waters recalls. "I said, "But that's what this is all about! Anyway,
we had an argument. I think he felt bad about it because he still has
things to deal with, knowing he'd been up there dropping bombs on the
poor bastards."
The bomber proved unobtainable anyway but for Waters, other
satisfactions were readily to hand. "When I came to listen to the
album again after 10 years, I thought, Christ, I hope I like it still,"
he says. " Then I put it on in the car and it was, This isn't half
bad. I'm extremely proud of it. I'm proud of the fact that I get
letters from schoolteachers who use Another Brick as the basis of
class discussion.
And there's a book about psychotherapy in which the author mentions
The Wall and says how extraordinary it is that an Englishman should
write in this way. When I read that in an academic tome about child
psychology I did feel a warm thrill that somebody had taken it so
seriously.
I get letters about The Wall too - I'm not saying the mailbag's
bursting with them - but from people it meant a lot to, helped them
free their feelings. It's given comfort. So the pay-off from having
expressed myself before my peers and torn down my wall, if only to
limited extent, the pay-off is... good."
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When the band reached NZ on "that" world tour, Dave and Nick and Rick
were interviewed briefly for television. One of the questions asked was
very similar to the above, along the lines of "How do you feel about
performing without Roger Waters".
Dave's answer (paraphrased - this was some time ago):
"Well, we're only doing three songs that he sang on and I'm singing
those, and bass players are ten-a-penny really."
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Stolen from the 08Jan83 Goldmine:
Gilmour:
"The whole side three bit with the orchestra all got shortened
radically. Other songs -- `Run Like Hell,' was chopped to bits,
really. Whole chunks. One was concentrating then on vinyl. It
wouldn't matter so much today, but with vinyl, there was a finite limit
of about 21 minutes a side. Every extra minute, you lost a db, one db
of level when it's being played on the radio. Not so much here, where
they compress the shit out of it, but also [the] signal-to-noise level
gets worse and over 25 minutes you're beginning to suffer quite
distinctly. So, our objective was to get it short enough to be able to
get it onto two albums, and some things suffered for that."
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Here is what roger waters said of "not now john"
"john" is a british word much like "jack" or "buddy" in the states.
INTERVIEWER: "not now john" is about over ambitions & drive for money and
winning...blind ambitions to best the "wily japanese" and to conqueor
the russian bear"
ROGER:yes, but never mind the russian bear, what about the other members
of the human race?...wait until they start trying to compete, and that's
most of us. There are lots more of them than there are of us. There are
more of the third world than there are of the old and new worlds. And as
soon as they get TVs, they're going to get well up-tight. In fact,
they may well say, "You've had your go, we want our go now."
it's that kind of 'more.'
INTERVIEWER: Would you say that the personality/persona of the singer
in "not now john" has the same mentality or character as in "have a
cigar?"...We're all put together as a team.
ROGER: Well, yes. You've done your homework!
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Rolling Stone, July-ish 1990:
RS: I understand that PolyGram Records, which is releasing a live album of
the event, has put a lot of pressure on you to employ special guest stars
in the show. It strikes me that 'The Wall' is less suited to a parade of
guests than, say, 'Tommy'.
RW: Well, I thought Tommy was reduced *dramatically* by the inclusion of
Billy Idol and Patti LaBelle and Phil Collins. I find the ubiquitous
nature of Phil Collins's presence in my life irritating anyway - but
having said that, the kid is a child actor and he was very good, though I
did feel it was kind of overkill to wear two different costumes. But
Billy Idol and Patti LaBelle were an absolute nightmare. They were fucking