Roger Waters

Founding member, bass player, lead vocalist and driving force of Pink Floyd after the early departure of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters – born in Great Bookham, England on September 6, 1943 - was the main architect of the group’s biggest successes which includes the concept albums Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. Roger Waters was only four when his father died, and he was brought up in Cambridge by his mother. At the age of 15, he became chairman of the Cambridge Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He went on to study architecture in London where he met fellow Pink Floyd founders Nick Mason and Rick Wright, who first started playing together in a series of different bands in the early 1960s. They made progress as The Tea Set, who evolved into The Pink Floyd Sound and, in 1966, became The Pink Floyd before settling on Pink Floyd. Roger Waters' crowning moment with Pink Floyd was the largely autobiographical The Wall (1979), an album which sold over 23 million copies. The group’s next album was 1983’s The Final Cut but bitter internal disputes resulted in his acrimonious departure from the band. There followed a legal battle over the right to use the Pink Floyd name, with Roger Waters embarking on a solo career that resulted in characteristically ambitious solo albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), and Amused to Death (1992), which was based on the Gulf War. He also put on one of the largest rock shows in history in 1990, performing The Wall in Berlin, and in 2005 he had a one-off reunion with Pink Floyd at the Live 8 concert in London. Later in 2005, Roger Waters released the album Ça Ira, a French opera featuring Bryn Terfel, Ying Huang and Paul Groves. The libretto was translated from Étienne Roda-Gil's French into English and the album reached number 5 on the Billboard Classical Chart. In 2010, he went out on the road with The Wall Live tour, announcing that the tour would probably be his last. Former band mates Dave Gilmour and Nick Mason joined him on stage at the O2 in London where they performed “Comfortably Numb” and “Outside the Wall.” After changing his mind about retiring, Roger Waters set out to North America on his Us + Them tour, combining old Pink Floyd music with his new solo releases. Following the success of this, he set about writing new material and released Is This the Life We Really Want?, his fourth solo album, in 2017. Roger Waters’ next release was his 2018 adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which he recorded with members of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. When the music world was put on pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, Roger Waters and his band recorded a series of songs, which were eventually released as The Lockdown Sessions in 2022. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s 1973, classic album The Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters released a re-imagined version of the album in 2023, which he retitled The Dark Side of the Moon Redux.

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