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ROCKLINE INTERVIEW: ROGER WATERS. MONDAY FEB.8,1993
(This is the interview, pretty much verbatim . While I have a
dictionary to look up the spelling of words, I do not have one
for the spelling of peoples' names.)
Bob Cockburn: Amused to death is the third and current solo
album from Roger Waters. It's an album Roger obviously believes
in strongly otherwise he wouldn't be joining us at 4:30 in the
morning as he is now, ha, ha, ha. Let's welcome live from
Capitol Radio in London Mr. Roger Waters: Good morning to you
Roger Waters: Bob, Good morning.
BC: I trust you are well and healthy and settled in there at the
studio in London?
RW: Um, well, healthy and sleepy.
BC: Ha, ha, ha. It is I believe 4:30 in the morning there in
London right now. Again we thank Roger for getting up at this
God awful hour. So much happened sonically Roger, on Amused to
Death, let's talk about the new cd for a moment. Listening to it
is almost like going to see a film in a theater. How long were
you in the studio to create the desired effect for this record,
there is so much detail in here?
RW: Well, the mixing process took about eight months, I suppose,
last year and a bit of the year before. But we've being putting
songs together for the last four or five years.
BC: And, uh, going into the first song we're going to play which
is "Three Wishes", um, tell us a little bit about that song.
What was going through your mind as you wrote that? It seems
that if you've been working for five years, it may have been a
while ago that you wrote it. But what do you recollect about the
song writing process and what you were trying to convey in this?
RW: It is, it is, that one was one of the early songs, so it was
some time ago. Well, it's the old three wishes story, you know,
the Genie comes out of the bottle and before you know it you've
had your three wishes and you never got 'round to the thing you
really wanted. In this case true love.
BC: We are going to play that song right now and talk with Roger
Waters momentarily and of course your phone calls too on Rockline
on the Global Satellite Network.
(Three Wishes is played)
BC: The old "three wishes" story as Roger put it. Roger Waters
>from Amused To Death, that is an edited version of that that is
currently available at radio stations and you just heard it on
Rockline on the Global Satellite Network.
(Summons people to phone in)
Theodora from North Hollywood: Um, it's really a wonderful thing
when we can have intelligent people in the music industry that
can present a cohesive amount of music. There's a certain
anethnic quality to your music Roger and with regard to Radio
K.A.O.S. do you really, do you feel it might have hurt your
chances of getting any solo airplay because of the fact that
Radio K.A.O.S. really took the programmers to task?
RW: I dunno. I dunno that's a I maybe. Maybe, who knows? But
uh, you know we don't choose what we write, I'm happy to say.
Um, writing songs is the difficult bit of, of the end of the
business that I'm in. And is so difficult that those of us that
write songs have little choice in the matter so if that's what I
have to write songs about then I do and whether people play them
or not then is kinda up to them. But thank-you for your
comments.
BC: So how radio programmers or any one like that might respond,
you really don't care about, your goal is to write a song that
you're comfortable with huh?
RW: Well, I'm happy to say, that's right, and I'm happy to say
that um, Jim Ladd who you all know very well, you know, who made
that record with me and came on the road with me seems to have at
least found himself a decent job. Which is nice.
BC: Theodora, thanks for the call.
Russell from Huntington, Indiana: Hi Roger, I'm thrilled to talk
to a rock legend. I seen your tour of Radio K.A.O.S. at Wembley
arena when I was living in England, and it was great. And I had
a question, uh, how you met up with Andy Fairweather-Low?
RW: Andy Fairweather, how did I meet up with him, I, when I was
going into the second bit of the Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking
tour in 80-whenever that was, 85 I think it was. Um, I was
looking around for guitarists and I bumped into Andy from time to
time since I first met him on tour in 1968. We did a tour
together when he was in a band called Amen Corner(?) and we did
one of the last kind of rock package tours around England and the
headliner was Jimi Hendrix. It was Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, The
Nice, Amen Corner, and another band that I can't remember. And
so I'd known him for all those years and he'd been working with
Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton was working with me on Pros and
Cons, and I asked Eric what Andy was like and he said he was
great so I gave him a ring and he came around and the rest is,
happy.
BC: You've done a lot of projects with him over the years.
Russell thank-you, that's a good call.
Billy from Waterbury, Conneticutt: Hello, Mr. Waters. On the
first track "The ballad of Bill Hubbard" and also at the end of
the title track of ATD, you incorporate Alf Ruzzell and the Royal
Fusiliers, talking about his experience in WWII with Private
William Hubbard, uh, I was wondering how do you feel this moving
story weaves itself into ATD with its modern day social and
political scandals?
RW: Oh, that should be easy to answer in 15 seconds. Um, I
don't know, what struck me about Alf Ruzzell was the
extraordinary humanity of his story in that he had been living
with his concern, having left his friend in no-mans-land 74 years
before and that he had carried this kind of burden with him and I
guess it struck me that we help each other little to sort out
those burdens that each of us individually has. Though, I have
to say that if I am optimistic about the future, which I am, it
is largely because, um, I dunno, through modern
telecommunications, and this is the positive side of
telecommunications, we seem to be getting better at understanding
each other and helping each other personally with our individual
problems.
BC: It's very stirring to hear his, I guess you would call it
monologue, on the album. It's very heartfelt and very
passionate. Are you surprised that after 74 years he still
carries pangs of guilt for something that happened in WWI, or do
you think that's just human nature?
RW: I think that's what we're like, you know. I think that's
one of the great things about human beings, is that they carry
those feelings with them, but also, when you hear one
individual's experience like that, it lends support to the notion
that we need to be compassionate with one another and help one
another.
Ken from Philadelphia: Hi Roger, how are you? Your solo albums
and things like The Wall and The Final Cut have all had central
themes and storylines. I want to know when you are working on
new material, do you write with a specific narrative in mind, or
do you write a series of songs and a theme naturally emerges?
RW: Um, normally the latter. Certainly to start with and then a
theme will develop and I may fill in the gaps, you know, the bits
and pieces, uh, afterwards. But, ya, normally the thread is
whatever's going on in my heart for the period of time that I'm
writing those particular songs. Um, and it's my need to make
sense of it that provides the theme.
BC: You co-produced this album with Patrick Leonard, a lot of
people think of Madonna when they think of him. This shows some
real diversity on his part, co-producing an album like this with
you, doesn't it?
RW: Uh, yeah, well Pat grew up in Michigan, and uh, he told me
when we first met that he came to a Pink Floyd concert when I
believe it was when Dark Side of the Moon was still called
Eclipse, so it must have been in 73, I guess, or maybe, yeah 73.
And uh, you know, he was one of those 13 or 14 year old kids in
the front row sitting there with their mouth open. And he kind
of fell in love with the whole idea of the thing at that point.
And uh, so this was kind of ambition fulfilled for him, and we
had a terrific time together, he's a very accomplished musician
and producer.
BC: In co-producing, did it ever come down to who had the final
say? Did you ever have to say "No, this is the way we're doing
it Patrick"?
RW: No. Absolutely not, because Pat completely understands that
it's my record and that if there is any question of a final say
then it rests with me. So, he would, he would, he would, he
would if he felt something about anything, he would uh, you know,
argue his points vociferously but at the end of the day he has to
go with my instincts finally. He said that to me often, which,
you know, and he's quite right.
BC: We are going to play Watching T.V. We have taken some
liberties with the music tonight. We're not playing all of
everything. You need to get the cd to listen to everything all
the way through. And if you have not heard it all the way
through, you should. It is really amazingly well put together
and very thought provoking. We're going to play Watching T.V.,
the first half of this song. This was inspired by the incidence
in China, wasn't it Roger?
RW: Yup, it's a song I wrote the day after I saw the Tianmen
Square massacre stuff all over my T.V. screen.
BC: And it exemplifies really what one person can do in this
world, doesn't it?
RW: Yeah, that's the idea at the end of the song, if we are only
playing the first half you won't get to the punchline which is
that the notion is, it's about one individual girl who is killed
in Tianmen Square and the fact that her death is important
because it occurs on television and therefore moves a large
number of people and in that way as I say in the second chorus at
the end of the song she's different from the unknown Nicaraguan,
or the Rosenbergs or the unknown Jew because she died on T.V.
(Watching T.V. is played)
Pete from Paul Smiths, N.Y.: I would like to say hello God, also
known as Roger Waters. And I'd like to ask him, having knowledge
that most of today's popular music that's like dance music and
other childrens' listening songs consist mainly of bits and
pieces of other artists work, how does he feel that the issue of
sampling as far as influencing music and creativity will affect
the music industry? And does he really feel that the children of
the video age are, or will be amused to death?
RW: Well, that's an interesting question and it's one that we
are all going to find the answer out to. I think not. And I
certainly hope not. I hate the whole idea of sampling. You
know, nothing is more loathsome, well there are more loathsome
things but, well, Marky Mark having a hit record with Walk on the
Wild Side was something that turned my stomach to a large degree
and I don't like that using of other peoples, mind you Lou Reed
doesn't seem to mind so why should I but there's something about
it that uh, that affects me. That I don't like. But I think
that people who think their own thoughts and write their own
music, and uh, whose basic motivation is not the bottom line are
beginning to have more impact, you know, there's something, I
dunno, I think there's a new kind of honesty developing in some
of the young bands. They're playing their own instruments now.
People are finally beginning to understand that the Roland 80-
80's aren't the absolute answer to all God's questions.
BC: I know Brian May of Queen, on this program, took offense to
Vanilla Ice and what they did with Under Pressure and even said
on the show "We're going to kick his Ice" and they did. There
was a lawsuit over that one.
David from Indianapolis: Hello Roger, congratulations on ATD.
It's definitely the best sounding album I've ever heard. And I
was wondering, I noticed it was recorded in Q Sound, and I was
wondering how that compares to the Holophonic stereo you used on
the PaCoHH?
RW: Well it's a completely, it's a different system. Q Sound is
designed primarily for speakers, whereas the Holophonic system
was for headphones. That's number one. Number two - the
holophonics was invented by a man named Zurkerelli, an
Argentinian, who was slightly crazed and very secretive about
what the thing actually was. And so we know it did something,
nobody, I think, to this day knows exactly what. Q Sound comes
>from Calgary, from a couple of Canadians and a Russian working
together and they're not secretive about it. They're very
pragmatic about it and so we know exactly what their system does.
It divides any signal into a left and right component and so it
works with any stereo system and it introduces minute delays at
different frequency levels into left and right components to make
your brain think that the sound is coming not from in front of
you from the two speakers, but from in any one of a number of
other positions around you. But, you have to be sitting right
between the two speakers, I mean exactly to within like an inch
or an inch and a half either side of the central perpendicular
axis. And it is an amazing effect, as you rightly have noticed.
Brian from Rochester, N.Y.: Hello Roger, it's quite an honour to
speak to you and it's been well worth the wait for the ATD album.
I have two questions for you tonight. The first one, in the song
"Too Much Rope" you say "Each man has his price Bob, and yours is
pretty low". Are you referring to Bob Ezrin?
RW: Strangely enough, a lot of the lyrics I write now I write
directly onto tape by putting some music down on a track and then
going into the studio and running the tape and singing directly
without thinking too much about what it is. And those verses of
"Too Much Rope", I did like that. The reference when I actually
put the word down on tape was to Bob Dylan because at the time, I
was going through a kind of Bob Dylan sound-alike period to amuse
myself in the studio. Uh, so I would be singing (Dylan style)
"Each man has his price Bob", like that. For a joke. But
afterwards it seemed to me a rather appertain lyric for Bob Ezrin
so I left it in because of Ezrin as a little gift for Bob Ezrin.
Yeah.
BC: So, Dylan in mind but if it works the other way, no problem
with that either, huh?
RW: (Dylan-esque) That's right. That's right.
Brian - question #2: I would like to know what part Flea of The
Red Hot Chilli Peppers had to do on your album? He's mentioned
in the special thanks.
RW: Yeah, he is. Um, strangely enough I was talking to an
English journalist who is very into bootlegs and bits and pieces
and he was complaining about the new Pink Floyd box set because
there wasn't anything special in it. Reasonably enough in my
view, but that's another story. Um, and uh, we were talking
about the possibility of releasing demos, you know, as he said
you should release your demos sometime as an album and I thought,
well, that's not a bad idea. We recorded "It's a Miracle" three
times and the second time we recorded it, we did a very up tempo
version of it and Flea came in and played bass. And wonderfully
he played too. He was great. I loved it. But when we put the
record together, this very up tempo version of "It's a Miracle"
didn't fit within the dynamic context of the rest of the record.
So the very last piece of recording we did was to re-record "It's
a Miracle" and just Pat and I sat down one afternoon at the piano
and re-did it.
BC: ...You were not really involved in this 9 cd box set, were
you Roger?
RW: No, I wasn't.
BC: Did that bother you?
RW: Yeah, yeah it bothers me. The way our back catalogue is run
is through a company that we're all shareholders in but because
Dave and Nick out vote me on the board of that company, I don't
have any say in what happens to the catalogue. And I find it
extremely irritating but there we are. Such is life.
BC: I got the impression too that there's been no movement
between the three of you. No fence mending or anything like that
has taken place.
RW: Very little.
BC: That's a shame.
RW: No, there hasn't been any. Well is it? I don't know, you
know, we, it's a strange thing. It's something that lots of fans
of the music attach to. But the music is still there, the work
that we did in the past I think was very good you know, we all
contributed to it. It was a good period, I think, in all of our
lives and the fact that we have fallen out musically,
philosophically, politically, and in every other possible,
imaginable way, uh, I think does not discredit everything we did
together and we will make our choices in life, you know, and
sometimes you fall out with people and it's not the worst thing
in the world.
Eric from Sacramento, CALIF.: Good morning, Roger. ATD is a
very, very great album. What started me off in to your music was
in the early 1970's at Winterland. The Meddles tour, the Dark
Side of the Moon debut. It was incredible sound then. Why do
you think quadrophonics didn't make it, I mean to follow the line
of that album, that concept?
RW: Um, I'll tell you what, as a home thing I think it didn't
make it because you needed to have four speakers and the system
the industry adopted was pretty archaic. The encoding and
decoding was bad. And also, they set the system up as front
left, front right, back left, back right over four tracks. The
human brain doesn't register that. I think for it to have worked
decently, they should have done it like we used to do it live,
which is to have the front information as a stereo image left and
right, but then the surrounding information to be left, right and
behind because that's the way we think. We don't think back
left, back right. We think is it on my left, is it on my right,
is it behind me, or is it in front of me. That's the way the
brain works. So they made a fundamental error, I think, encoding
it onto four tracks of information. If they were going to do
that they should have had a modern signal in the front, a left
signal, a right signal and a back signal. And it would have been
much more dramatic and interesting.
(Dark Side of the Moon montage is played. Cool!)
BC: I've got a question for you, Roger. I was curious if ATD is
part three of a trilogy that includes The Wall and Dark Side of
the Moon, is there anything to that?
RW: What, what did you say? Sorry, I missed that.
BC: Is ATD part three of a trilogy that would include The Wall
and Dark Side of the Moon? Or is that total out in left field?
RW: Yeah. No, I don't think you could make that connection,
however, it's strange you should say that because there seems to
be some connection, people seem to connect them. I certainly do
in my mind, you know, there is something similar about them
certainly.
BC: Well, I feel better now. Ha,ha,ha. Gosh. Left me hanging
in the wind out there.
Jim from Louisville, Kentucky: How's it going? I have one
question. I noticed on your new album there's a lot of great
guitar work. Jeff Beck is just an excellent choice. I was
wondering what it was like to work with him?
RW: Magical. Yeah, absolutely wonderful. I've always loved the
way he plays the guitar and I guess we worked with him for maybe
three or four days to do the stuff that he does on the album.
And it was terrific. He arrived at the studio and he has a brand
new guitar, he gets it out of the box, he doesn't seem to tune
it, you know, he sits and leans with his bum on the studio multi-
track and you run the track and he starts doing these kind of
magical things and kind of looks at you and says "Is that the
sort of thing you want?", you know, and you say "well, no it's
not" and then you tell him what you do want and he does that
magically as well. What I find extraordinary is that unless you
can watch his fingers really closely and you still can't work out
how he's doing it. Amazing.
BC: He is one of really a handful of the cut above guitarists,
he is in a certain group - the Clapton, Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff
Beck. And you worked with some other good guitarists- Andy
Fairweahter-Low, whose name came up a little earlier. Steve
Lucather also, also on this record Don Henley, Rita Coolidge,
Flea who got mentioned, and you got to work with the late Jeff
Piccaro too, didn't you Roger?
RW: Yeah. In fact that was the very last piece of recording we
did. As I mentioned before, we re-recorded "It's a Miracle".
And it suddenly felt, we reduced the tempo and made it much
quieter, it's just one piano, one synth, and the voice really.
And we decided it should have bass and drums in the middle and
Jeff was working with ToTo in the studio down the hall so we
asked him to come in and do it and he did. Very sad.
Trish from Paddock Lake, WS: Hi, Roger. I was wondering, was it
your idea for the video for "What God Wants", and if it was, what
gave you the idea for it?
RW: Uh, I had an idea at the beginning of the making of that
video which was the idea that uh, visually the album hangs on
which is this idea of a gorilla who is a metaphor for the human
race sitting watching television and trying to work out what his
relationship is with the t.v. set and with all the other
gorillas. Insofar as there is a gorilla and a television set in
it, yeah it was my idea but the rest of it is down to Tony Kaye
who's the man who made it.
BC: I think in some ways it takes a lot of courage to put out a
rock-n-roll album with a song on it called "What God Wants". I
mean there are certain forums where it's ok to discuss God
openly, there's others where it's a bit iffy and you're going to
be looked at with a lot of scrutiny. Did that cross your mind at
all, or did you actually welcome that type of challenge?
RW: Um, it's not a question of welcoming it or not welcoming it,
as I said earlier in this program we don't choose what we write.
I paint what I see and take the consequences and there's enough
people out there who will happily attempt to censor what I do
without me censoring it myself, you know, before it gets to you,
if you see what I mean.
BC: Oh yeah.
RW: So, I kind of leave that up to them. I mean, it's, that
particular song has been widely misunderstood as I knew it would
be misunderstood.
BC: It has been. It really has been. I've had people take
offence just at the title and not be able to explain why even.
RW: Yeah. Well, my concern is that we take the name of God in
vain and that, you know, as was typified in the recent conflict
in the Gulf, you know, there we all are dropping bombs and firing
shells at each other all firmly believing that we're doing it all
in God's name. And the paradoxes that are involved in that still
don't seem to have been brought home to us all. And it's the
same God, you know, it's just a different prophet.
("What God Wants" is played)
BC: Unmistakably Jeff Beck on that.
Joe from Bingington, N.Y.: Hello, Mr. Waters. I have a question
that's a little bit of Pink Floyd trivia for you. Remember back
to the Wall album, at the very beginning of the recording and the
very end, there are some almost inaudibly mumbled words and in
the book ASOS he alludes that this might be a sentence that
begins at the end of the album and ends at the beginning of the
album. Although the voice is almost inaudible it sounds like it
might be yours and I wonder if you could clear up what the
sentence is?
RW: Yeah, it is. Well spotted. If you make a tape recording on
a reel to reel machine of the end of the album and then edit it
onto the beginning of the album, you'll find that the sentence
runs straight through. And the sentence is "Isn't this where we
came in?"
Jeremy from St. Louis: Hi Roger. My question is at the Wall live
in Berlin concert, did you seek out such a wide range of
performers from the music world? 'Cause you had everything from
Scorpions to Cyndi Lauper, or did they all come to you asking to
be part of the project?
RW: No. We went to all of them. And loads and loads of others
too. You see, when you're doing something like that, you ask
lots and lots of people. Some of them say yes and then hedge and
you never hear from them again or whatever, and some of them say
yes and then turn up. So, it was a question of putting a team
together that could do the show. And we did I'm happy to say.
And with one notable exception, they were all wonderful. But
we're not going to talk about Sinead, are we? Not tonight.
We've talked about her enough already, I think.
BC: I was just about to ask but I don't need to now. I was
really glad that you included the Scorpions. In that, in talking
to them especially before the show, they more than anyone, I
think, as far as the performers or anyone in the media, had a
real sense of the history of where they were and what was
happening, they and Ute Lemper, they really knew what was going
on. They kept saying to me "Bob,do you realize where you are
sitting. People were dying a couple of years ago, literally
right where we are this moment." I think that really opened
their eyes and they were very joyous over that weekend. It
really meant a lot to them, I think. Were they part of your
plans in the beginning, or did they come in later?
RW: I thought it would be good to have a heavy rock or a heavy
metal or I don't know what they call themselves, band doing "In
the Flesh" which was written, always, as a parody of that kind of
music. So, I went and met them, they were recording in Holland
and I went and explained the idea to them and I liked them a lot,
they are a very good bunch of guys.
(Wall montage is played)
Fred from Blacksburg, VA: Good morning, Roger. My question
involves the recording of the Wall album. In a Jan. issue of
Goldmine magazine, David Gilmour stated that of the original
recordings of that release, there was a great deal of finished
material that had to be edited out to fit into the constraints of
a double album. But that these tapes still exist and are
available. Would there be any interest on your part in seeing
the full unedited edition being prepared for release? And if the
interest is there, would it require artistic co-operation between
yourself and David?
RW: Um, to answer the second part of the question first, I think
if the tapes are there, no it wouldn't. They could just do it
without speaking to me. But I don't know what he's talking
about. I don't, I don't think there's a whole load of unreleased
material. I certainly don't remember anything.
BC: Is it hard to walk away sometimes from great takes because
you have one that is slightly better. I mean working with Jeff
Beck there must have been some things that you threw away that
you would have loved to have kept and inserted into the piece?
RW: Yeah, but you always do that in anything. The whole thing
about producing a record is making those decisions all the time,
you know, there's always something about the different takes and
you put bits from here and bits from there together and that's
what making a record is all about. But, I'm interested in this
question because I don't think this material exists. I don't
know what Dave is talking about.
BC: Well, you should have your people check it out because Fred,
let's bring Fred back. You saw it in Goldmine is that correct,
Fred?
Fred: Yes sir. It was in a Jan. issue of Goldmine. He was
saying that there was enough material to maybe be a third album
in the set. But because of the constraints of the double album
situation back in the '70s, unlike cd right now, there wasn't
space for this additional material.
BC: A little homework for you there, Roger.
RW: Well, I don't know. I mean, Dave never had the faintest
idea what the record was about anyways.
BC: OOOKAY! Jeff is next. Jeff you're on with the outspoken
Roger Waters.
Jeff from Austin, Texas: Hello, Mr. Waters. In your opinion, at
what point did Pink Floyd peak? And what was your biggest, most
meaningful contribution to the group?
RW: I think as a group, we peaked with Dark Side of the Moon.
And I think my most meaningful contribution was sometime after
that was maybe writing The Wall.
BC: Interesting. I was very curious to hear your answer on
that. So you think the band peaked with Dark Side and your most
valuable contribution was The Wall?
RW: Yeah. I mean, by the time the Wall happened it wasn't really
much of a band anymore. Wish You Were Here was a pretty
uncomfortable experience. When people start their bands, as
anyone whose been in a band will know, we all rehearse in our
garages and living rooms and we all have this notion about being
successful and standing on a stage and people applauding and
anybody who goes into rock-n-roll is always motivated by those
factors as well as wanting to make money. As well as some of us
maybe wanting to communicate some of our ideas. And when you
have your first kind of really big hit album you fulfil lots of
the functions that you got together for in the first place. With
Pink Floyd, that point was reached with Dark Side of the Moon and
after Dark Side of the Moon there was a lot of clinging together
because it was safe, you know, because we had achieved a certain
amount of success and it seemed like a good idea to stay together
under the nice, cozy umbrella roof of the trademark. And so we
did for many years and I'm happy that we did because we've
produced some really good work after that but it didn't really
feel like we were all in it together anymore quite the same way
after that point. That's why I say that was the peak.
Alan from Oklahoma: Hi, Roger. With the Final Cut, you opened
yourself up a lot emotionally with that album and I'm wondering
if that is frightening for you to expose yourself that much.
RW: Uh, yeah. I think it is for everybody, you know. Strangely
enough, that's what the end of The Wall is about, which is why
that was such a good kind of experience for me, cause in writing
The Wall I actually get to that in the end of the thing in The
Trial sequence where Pink, the central character, is sentenced to
expose himself before his peers and tears down his wall. I think
it's any artists responsibility to share all that, whether it's a
painter or a musician or a writer or whoever. That's what we do.
And if we don't expose ourselves then probably what we're doing
isn't all that interesting.
Dan from Philadelphia: Good morning, Roger. Two questions for
you. A question on "Three Wishes". I wanted to know if the
second wish was in any way reference to getting back with David
Gilmour?
RW: Ha,ha,ha.
BC: Ok. Next question.
Dan: In reference to Pros and Cons, do you think it's really
possible for mankind to really grasp the moment of clarity that
slips away from the narrator's grasp at the end of the album? Do
you think it's possible for mankind as a whole to really view the
rest of humanity as exactly what it is, as human persons? Would
you really think that we're forced to view each other as simply
objects?
RW: That's a good question. That particular lyric was written
within the terms of reference of a microcosm of a man and a woman
in bed together on their own, you know, so to take it into the
larger arena of the way we all view the rest of humanity. I
don't know. These are kinds of questions that people like Asimov
and Arthur C. Clark have addressed in novels like Childhood's End
and things about the evolution of the human race and also
questions that are addressed by Buddhism and by all kinds of
philosophers in the last 5000 years or so. We have to remember
that history is short, as I say in one of the songs on the
record. We human beings haven't been looking at these questions
for very long. 5000 years is not a long time to have been
writing stuff down. So, I don't know. But we all recognize those
moments of clarity when they happen, you know. And we all
understand their quicksilver nature and the way that they slip
away from us and that moment when it seems so right, you know, we
know there's something more to the way the human mind works than
looking to the bottom of the sheet and seeing if we made a profit
or a loss. Because we've all walked in from dreams and felt that
we've made a connection that is more meaningful than that. So, I
don't know.
BC: As we roll "It's A Miracle" underneath us, I'll pose this
question to Roger Waters. When you write songs and create an
album, are responses like Dan's what you hope for? That you can
take a microcosm of a situation and someone like Dan can hear it
and expand on it, expound upon it and take to another meaning?
Is that what you hope people do with your music?
RW: I just hope, if I move people and they listen to something
and they get a shiver down their spine, then I've fulfilled my
function. If I make them think about something, about their
lives and about the way they relate to other human beings then
that's an added bonus. I've been listening to Neil Young's new
album recently. When we cook dinner in the evenings, we put it
on and listen to it. "I'm a dreaming man", maybe that's my
problem. I can relate to that.
("It's A Miracle" is played)
(Ok, this is where the guy at the radio station was slow to the
switch, so there's a bit lost.)
Caller: ... I was wondering what was before that, and what the
guy was yelling at the beginning of that. I'm trying to figure
out exactly what that was.
RW: So, what you did is record that bit of the record and then
turned the tape around and listened to it.
Caller: I recorded it onto a video editing machine at a t.v.
station and I played it backwards, and it was like popping out of
the left channel too.
RW: Ok. Alright. Well, well done. A number of people know
that I often put messages on records that I make. There's one on
The Wall and a few other bits and over that particular piece of
"Perfect Sense Part I", we had a bit from 2001. You know the
Kubric movie. The bit where Dave is turning off the HAL 2000
computer and the computer is saying "Stop Dave", I don't know if
you remember it and there's all this breathing in the background.
It's a great scene and it's been sampled and used on a million
different rap records. Anyway, I stupidly asked Stanley Kubric
for permission to use it as background on that particular track.
He hummed and hawed for ages and ages and eventually refused me
permission to use it on the grounds that it would open the
floodgates and lots of other people would use it. And my
presumption is that he was closing the stable door to those who
bolted and fell on deaf ears. So, I made my own which is why
you've got me breathing on there which is a bit like that thing
and that is a backwards message for Stanley Kubric. So,
"Yelnats" backwards we all now know is Stanley.
BC: OH. There you go
RW: And the shouting at the beginning, I wouldn't like to tell
you what that is but it's the "Mad Scotsman" having a quiet word
with Stanley Kubric about not giving me permission to use that
Kubric stuff on the record.
BC: Roger, a quick 90 minutes, and thank-you for it.
RW: Not at all. Thank-you.