The Reason Why Roger Waters is So Outspoken

Out of all the people that perform music and travel and are as prominent as you are, you're probably one of the most outspoken and informed when it comes to issues on foreign policy and human rights. When did this become a big part of your life and when did discussing this publicly become a big part of your life? Well it became a big part of my life the day my father died I think. I mean I wouldn't know because I was only five months old. My father as you might or may not know died at Anzio on the 18th of February 1944 and I was born September 1943 so I was only a few months old. But when I started to understand some of this was when he didn't come home and start picking me up from school when I was a little kid. And then all through my childhood I lived I was brought up by my mother my brother and my big brother John and I were brought up single handed by my mom who was a school teacher but she was also very left wing. She's an interesting woman because she came from a very kind of middle class family in London. Funnily enough they lived in Golders Green which was sort of well known for being a Jewish community in North London. Her father ran a business that was sort of middle man in fancy goods, toys and things like that so there was a big warehouse in London. My mother and she went off to a boarding school, girl's school so she was very brought up in a very fairly straight laced English Christian middle class way. She then trained as a teacher and her first teacher training was in a town called Bradford which is in the north of London, not North of London, north of England, far north of England in Yorkshire. And it was a huge eye opener to her. And there she was, first winter comes along, it's really cold, there's a foot of snow on the floor and she suddenly notices that half the kids in her class are walking to school with no shoes and something went bing. This would have been in 1935, 1936 something like that and she suddenly went what? And she started to look into social conditions there in the industrial north and even then in the mid to late 30s she understood that there were inequalities in the context of the society that she lived in that she felt a personal need to do something about and she became extremely left wing. Anyway, cut to later on, so our front room was always a Labour Party committee room and she was always off in the evenings canvassing elections and dragging me and my brother to British China Friendship Association meetings in the evening. But she was always very careful and clear with us that she would, I remember one day she said to me and my brother when we come back from a meeting, interestingly enough at the Friends Meeting House which is the place the Quakers meet, wherever it is in the world, it's always called the Friends Meeting House. And we've been watching films of K-pop clad Chinese soldiers fighting against Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist puppet government and blah blah blah blah blah blah. And she said, you know where we've been tonight, don't you Roger? And I said no. She said we've been at the Friends Meeting House, that is where the Quakers meet. She said well as you know I'm an atheist so I can't subscribe to their religious beliefs but I will say this, they are very very good people. Let's start with, I can still recount that story now because it's so important, you don't have to subscribe to people's beliefs. I can be a radical atheist and you can be a Hindu. The important thing is that we're good people, that we have hearts and that we care about our brothers and sisters and my mum did. I'm going to tell you one more mum story and then I'll stop about mum because this is the most important bit. I was 13 years old, I had just gone through a phase where I suddenly realised I was going to die. I don't know if all adolescents have this existential crisis in their early puberty but I did and I thought, F me, African and I, this is scary as shit, oh my God. It might have been that or it might have been something else but anyway something was worrying me and it was probably more some kind of political thing that I'd latched onto, maybe through her and she looked at me and she said, alright, I'm going to give you some advice now. Go on then mum. All through your life you're going to be faced with difficult questions and you're going to have to figure things out. This is my advice, when anything crops up, so it could be Israel powers, it could be anything, it doesn't matter what it is, you must read, read, read, read, read. That's what Smocarnish was telling me, he hadn't, he'd only read one side. That's the difference between Michael Smocarnish and me. I've tried to look at all sides of these things so I'd know a bit more. Anyway, she said read, read, read and very important, learn everything you can about the subject that's troubling you and importantly look at it from both sides. If there's another opinion, make sure you study that as well and blah, blah, blah. It'll take some time, it'll be hard work but when you've done that, the work is over. You have done all the heavy lifting, the rest of it is easy. And I went, what is the rest of it mum? And she looked at me and she said, the rest of it, well that's simple, you do the right thing.