Theoretically, one shouldn’t meet Roger Waters. After all, in all his years as Pink Floyd’s dark star, Waters was THE MAN BEHIND THE WALL, never doing interviews, and delivering fewer and fewer albums— all of which presented him as some battle-scarred soldier of the psyche, a veritable prince of paranoia. It’s an approach that helped Waters and Floyd burrow deeply into the hearts, minds (and pocketbooks) of teenaged out-patients everywhere.

But now Waters is living in the postFloyd era—a solo artist with his second album out, Radio K.A.O.S. (a Get Smart reference?). It’s finally time to stop pressing the meat and start meeting the press.

Of course, Waters in person is nothing like the nutcase he seems on vinyl. In fact, as he sits in his plush New York hotel suite, the 43-year-old, with streaks of grey in his hair, seems together and straightforward. Also honest about why he’s here. “Since I’m no longer operating under the golden goose of Pink Floyd,” he says, “I need all the help I can get:”

That’s especially true considering Waters is currently waging a major image war with the rest of Floyd. Though he’s still suing to stop them, the two remaining niembers of the band are touring the U.S., at the same time as Waters, under the name Pink Floyd. Considering Waters’s role in the old band, that’s roughly the equivalent of Andrew Ridgeley touring under the name Wham! “It’s extremely irritating,” Waters says. “My feeling is the name should just be retired. It meant a great deal to a great many people, and therefore it should never be used as a money-making lure just to get people in.”

Obviously, because of this, Waters no longer speaks with his fellow Floyds, but he explains the rifts actually go back quite a ways. Particular pressure built up over the fact that, as the years went on, Waters became their only viable songwriter. ‘‘There was a lot of resentment over that, but there was also a lot of opportunity for anybody else to write songs,” Waters explains. “Nobody did. If you’re in a band like that, if you want to write the songs you’ve got to go home, sit down and write them. You can’t sit in the corner and whine, ‘Oh, you keep writing all the songs.’ ”

Those complaints reached their zenith on 1983’s The Final Cut—an album totally penned by Waters in memory of his father, who’d been killed during World War II. Working on the album was a crucial experience for Waters since, as he explains it, that devastating childhood loss shaped the core of his later work. “I am, and always will be, obsessed with the death of my father,” he says. “My paranoia, or bitching, comes from that early experience. That’s why the records are always a bit dour.”

The new one, of course, is no exception. In fact, Waters again stresses his standard M.O. of emotional isolation by setting the album’s plot on the radio waves, a perfect medium for private exploration. “In terms of communication I would suggest radio is second only to the novel in its ability to move one in a personal, private way.” Waters says. “You can’t disappear into a television set the same way you can a disembodied voice. As a child I was particularly keen on radio—not just the comings and goings of the American Forces Network or Radio Luxembourg, where I got my early rock ’n’ roll from, but also the early days of radio theater. Every Saturday night we’d sit around as a family and listen to something called Saturday Night Theater.

I think it’s a medium that should be used much more for theater, or for something along the lines of what Orson Welles did with War Of The Worlds.",

No surprise, then, that Welles’s classic shock radio program was one of the inspirations for the plot line of Radio K.A.O.S. The main character, in fact, Billy (this album’s equivalent of Townshend’s “Tommy”) stages a mock nuclear war to, in Waters’s words, “shock everybody into a different view of their lives in particular, and the way the planet is run in general.”

On a less lofty level, the album is also an attack on how radio is run these days—a bit of biting the hand that feeds, considering how good radio has been to Floyd. “Rather than biting the hand that fed me, I’m trying to bandage the hand that fed me,” Waters asserts. “How do you think Pink Floyd became successful? Through individual DJs at FM stations. It was a very open situation then. Now it’s getting more and more closed. In America, there’s a trend away from individual, human control of radio stations with jocks who make up their own playlists, toward creating programs from computer data that’s been gathered from market research.”

Besides criticizing radio greed, Waters stresses the album is also about lots of bigger issues like (1) how mass communication has helped break down communication and (2) how money is the real motive for all wars. Great moon/June stuff. No wonder then, these themes are far more fleshed out by Waters’s liner notes on the LP than his rather sketchy lyrics. Luckily, Waters is refreshingly specific in those notes about his targets, staking out some admirably risky territory to boot. He righteously likens the U.S. bombing of Libya to a perverse and offensive circus sideshow—a view H surely not held by the conservative power-base of Floyd’s old arena rock audience. Does the jarring gap in political views upset Waters? “Of course,” he affirms. “This generation of Reaganite teenagers who are rock ’n’ roll fans— what can you say? It upsets me that any young people feel like that, or any old people. That they can be conned into thinking that the bombing of Tripoli is a good thing. You only have to look at it rationally for a minute-and-a-half to realize that it did nobody any real good at all, except possibly Reagan. I feel huge anger at the perpetration of such a monstrous piece of terrorism purporting to be antiterrorist. It’s such doublethink. Real George Orwell.” wrong.’ That’s not available to a lot of people because they haven’t got the time or energy to put into it.”

JIM FARBER

I suggest that perhaps the reason many of his fans may not share Waters’s politics and yet relate so intensely to his music is that they identify with the general feelings of alienation, frustration and powerlessness he expresses, turning that into an excuse to become isolationists, or worse, reactionaries. Waters agrees, saying “Well, maybe we weren’t specific enough (about our ideas) early enough. Then again, the last record I made with Pink Floyd was very specific, in that it was about the stupidity of the Falklands War, not a very popular thing to say in England at the time. But it’s very hard to battle the media propaganda. I’m 43 and sometimes I listen to this stuff and think, just occasionally, ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong.’ Then I have to go back and actually open a newspaper and read all the details about it. When you really read detail instead of the propaganda headlines, then you say, ‘No, they’re

Still, Waters sees hopes (or at least imposes it) on events like Live Aid. “As a man not noted for great optimism,” he says, “I’m clinging desperately to the image of Live Aid, and maybe it’s the wrong one to cling to. I did have a resistance to all the ballyhoo surrounding it. Also, I was a bit disgusted by some of the things that went on, like (Phil Collins) flying about on the Concorde. I couldn’t quite see how anyone could do that. How could they rationalize that with what the event was supposed to be about? But overall, it’s so easy to knock things like Live Aid and I felt proud, in the end, that Geldof went and did it.”

Significantly less proud are Waters’s feelings about another project involving Geldof—the movie version of The Wall. In fact, Waters was so displeased with the project that all the suggestions he’s received to flesh out the new album with a movie version have been greeted with frosty stares. “(Making The Wall) was an awful experience,” Waters recalls. “I think the movie lacked feeling. I could find no sympathy with the central character at all. If the film was to work at all you would’ve needed to sympathize with him. On a more ordinary level, in terms of dynamics, it was all on one level: a barrage from beginning to end. There was no ebb and flow. The Wall live show had real drama. It was allowed to die almost completely at times so it could explode later. The film had none of that: it’s a movie you can only watch on video in 10 minute stretches. Actually, when it was being made I saw it that way, single reels at a time. When I finally saw them all together at the end I was so depressed. Alan Parker (the director) and I have hated each other ever since.”

No surprise, then, that Waters is equally dubious about the many offers he’s received to make a Dark Side Of The Moon movie. “As succeeding generations of young executives at film companies think, ‘Christ, we can make a lot of money off this,’ I get offers,” Waters explains. “Occasionally Steve O’Roarke (Pink Floyd’s old manager) would come to me about it, but luckily I can stop it because I wrote so much of the music that I’m in control. There will never be a film of Dark Side Of The Moon,” he declares. “It would be madness. Why take something millions have taken for their own and impose somebody else’s vision on it?”

Waters isn’t sure why so many people feel so strongly about the album but hazards a guess: “It may be because it gives them the feeling it’s alright to think you may be going crazy.”

TURN TO PAGE 55

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

Of course that’s not an uncommon feeling for most rock fans—especially teenage ones. In fact, Waters admits this may reveal another reason for the album’s enduring resonance: its aura of adolescent selfinvolvement and alienation. Still, Waters explains that even as a 43-year-old, he feels those attitudes remain relevant. “Maybe some of those adolescent experiences are useful later in life,” he explains. “We tend to throw them away too soon. We certainly throw our childhood away too early. We should hold on to it, in a sense, until the day we die.”

Accordingly, these days Waters feels he’s closer to a childlike sense of openness than he’s been in years. To wit: the Radio K.A.O.S. tour features Waters’ most outgoing live jesture to date— a live phone-in hook up, allowing audience members to relay messages directly to the stage. “It’s the antithesis of The Wall show,” Waters smiles broadly. “Now I want to make as much contact as possible.” ®