Roger Waters

Founding member, bass player, lead vocalist and driving force after the early departure of Syd Barrett, Roger Waters was the main architect of Pink Floyd's biggest successes, the concept albums 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Wish You Were Here', 'Animals' and 'The Wall'. 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 Pink Floyd.

Waters' crowning moment with Floyd was the largely autobiographical 'The Wall', an album which sold over 23 million copies, 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 Waters embarking on a solo career that resulted in characteristically ambitious solo albums 'The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking', 'Radio K.A.O.S' and 'Amused to Death', based on the Gulf War. He also put on one of the largest rock shows in history, 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 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 five on the Billboard Classical Chart.

In 2010 Waters 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, 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.