What happened to Syd did have a big impact on me. If something happens to someone you love, and are very close to, as happened to Syd, it drives home to you that there but for the grace of God go I. It was a huge tragedy that he succumbed to the illness and stopped writing. I mean, Dave and I sort of co-produced his first album… Was it called The Madcap Laughs? I think it was. And not really where I was coming from at all. But I don’t think I learned anything from Syd’s method of writing songs because it was very idiosyncratic. Gradually Syd started writing and we became a bit experimental. At first there wasn’t anything different about what we were doing – we were a blues band, we couldn’t even play many pop songs. I didn’t start writing until Syd went crazy and couldn’t write any more. Who knows what might have happened if he’d been able to carry on. I had a bit of a band together by the time Syd came up and he joined us and that was the beginning of Pink Floyd. So after I went to architectural college in London I bought a guitar. We always had the plan that we were going to move to London together and go to college and we’d start a band. But I lived round the corner from Syd, and we went to the same school, though he was two years younger than me. I wasn’t creative as a kid. I played cricket and football.
I was frightened that we’d all be incinerated in a nuclear war. Let’s hope our friend Mr Corbyn can get rid of the independent nuclear deterrent that is still in the Firth of Forth or wherever it is. When I got older I marched for nuclear disarmament. It’s faintly extraordinary it never happened. And I was frightened that we’d all be incinerated in a nuclear war. When I was a kid I was afraid of death – not unnaturally, I don’t think – my father had been killed in the war when I was five months old. I don’t think I was a bully but bullies are people who feel bad about themselves and are insecure. I think I was quite a bossy kid. Because I was frightened, and fear usually manifests itself by being aggressive. I could probably have been encouraged to pursue the natural sciences, that’s what I was interested in. I have no idea if I’d have been more academically inclined if I’d been taught differently. Our brains can be trained, they’re just machines. So kids get the idea that life after school is about confronting problems and making decisions.
ROGER WATERS MOTHER HOW TO
We have to encourage them to think for themselves, not tell them how to think. We have to give children the power that comes from self-belief. The usual way to teach children is to say, okay we’re going to study the history of the civil war and you have to learn these names and dates and then we’ll test you on it. My mother was a primary school teacher but school didn’t work well for me. I was never very academic and I was naturally very anti-authority. My friends and I used to sit up all night listening to jazz, then drag ourselves to school the next day. And listening to lots of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Art Blakey. What are my preoccupations at 16? Trying to have sex, obviously.
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