Over the next few years, the Floyd's audience steadily grew. By that time, Barrett was the unquestioned leader, the singer/songwriter responsible for the band's earliest singles and 1967's debut Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but that album also bore Waters' first original tune, "Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk."ĭue to mental illness, Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968 and was replaced by David Gilmour. This was in the fall of 1963 and by 1965, the group had gelled into the Pink Floyd Sound, dropping the "Sound" in 1966. Waters and his fellow students Nick Mason and Rick Wright played with vocalist Keith Noble and bassist Clive Metcalfe in a group called Sigma 6, and once they departed, Roger brought in Barrett. There, Waters met his future bandmates Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, but it wasn't until he was studying architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic that the first incarnation of Pink Floyd came into view. Eric Waters died in combat when Roger was five months old, and his mother Mary moved him and his brother to Cambridge. His childhood was haunted by the departure of his father Eric, a schoolteacher who abandoned his status as a conscientious objector to World War II to join the British Army.
Waters didn't start playing music until he was on the cusp of his 20th birthday. His long spell without new albums was broken in 2017 with the release of Is This the Life We Really Want? After 1992, Waters didn't devote himself to writing new rock music, preferring to stage live revivals of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as he composed classical pieces and worked as an activist. Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983's The Final Cut, after which he recorded a triptych of concept albums - The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, Radio K.A.O.S., and Amused to Death - addressing personal and political struggles in the modern world.
In the wake of Syd Barrett's departure, Waters emerged as a formidable songwriter, but it's this stretch of '70s albums - each one nearly symphonic in its reach - that established him as a distinctive, idiosyncratic voice within rock, one with a sober morality and sardonic sense of humor. Roger Waters is Pink Floyd's grand conceptualist, the driving force behind such albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.