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(Credit: Alamy)<\/p>\n
Mon 15 September 2025 18:00, UK <\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one thing that anchors Roger Waters<\/a>\u2019 artistry, be it Pink Floyd or his solo work, it\u2019s a restless pursuit of new creative terrain.<\/p>\n As the 1970s rolled along, Waters\u2019 emerging principal songwriting and conceptual steer across Pink Floyd\u2019s golden album run would end the decade on a completely different plane of visionary inspiration than how they started it, shuffling around in aimless circles on 1970\u2019s Atom Heart Mother, to weaving gripping rock operas on 1979\u2019s The Wall.<\/p>\n Greater success and album high marks came with deeper fractures. With cracks forming in Pink Floyd\u2019s foundations as early as the mammoth-selling The Dark Side of the Moon, relationships between Waters and the rest of the band hit a breaking point after The Wall Tour, limping on for 1983\u2019s The Final Cut\u2014minus keyboardist Richard Wright\u2014before Waters officially disbanding two years later. Respective guitarist and drummer David Gilmour and Nick Mason, with Wright back in the fold, ploughed on under the Pink Floyd name from then on.<\/p>\n Yet, it was Waters\u2019 work that possessed the frissons of vitality that used to spark Pink Floyd\u2019s classic material. While Pink Floyd under Gilmour\u2019s captaincy would drop the soggy A Momentary Lapse of Reason and the marginally better The Division Bell, Waters would dream up innovative multi-media projects such as 1987\u2019s Radio KAOS<\/a>, conjuring a captivating critique of nuclear threat set to a rock narrative as cohesively realised as The Wall, matched with a live extravaganza that beat U2 to the media overload arena spectacle they\u2019d unleash on their Zoo TV Tour by five years.<\/p>\n Waters would resurrect the Pink Floyd canon, dusting off The Wall for frequent live shows and even revisiting The Dark Side of the Moon for his own \u2018redux\u2019 release, but a bolder intuition for new projects guided Waters to a degree that seemed to elude the remaining Pink Floyd members. Such a strident step into the unknown was evident in Waters\u2019 embrace of opera.<\/p>\n First completed and recorded in 1988, with an official CD release arriving in 2005, \u00c7a Ira saw Waters compose an 82-piece orchestra work on the French Revolution, based on the libretto by chanson writers \u00c9tienne and Nadine Roda-Gil. Despite garnering some high-profile fans, the then-president, Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, pushing the Paris Opera to stage the show for its bicentennial celebrations of the revolution, critical reception was mixed, \u00c7a Ira facing criticisms of its narrative flow and conservative score. Waters was prepared for the shade thrown by classical connoisseurs, however.<\/p>\n \u201cI understand the knives will come out\u2014that\u2019s inevitable,\u201d Waters confessed to CDNow in 1999. \u201cBut one of the problems that people in the classical world have is how many recordings of Mahler or Beethoven symphonies can you make? They\u2019re always looking for new music, but many of the new serious composers are into academic forms, which strike some people as sterile and cold.\u201d<\/p>\n He added, \u201cI think I\u2019ve made a work that is melodic and emotional; I think I\u2019ve done something that can move people. The libretto is very much relatable to my earlier work because it has that humane element.\u201d<\/p>\n