A one-off show following Roger Waters‘ departure from Pink Floyd convinced the bassist to continue touring as a solo artist.
The founding member of Pink Floyd was all set to quit touring, but a show with John Fogerty and Neil Young changed his mind. Though it would be some time before he got on stage permanently, the veteran songwriter ended up feeling an urge to perform again. His performance with Young and Fogerty was organised by Don Henley, two years after he had performed The Wall in Berlin. Though that show, which featured The Band, Bryan Adams, and Van Morrison, had been well-received, Waters had no inclination to tour again. He cited a divorce and moving around as reasons for not bothering with a tour, though he changed his mind when the opportunity arose to tour again.
Speaking to Uncut Magazine in 2007, Waters said: “The last big tour I did was in ’87 – the Radio KAOS tour. Then I did The Wall in Berlin in 1990. What happened then? I got divorced and moved around for a bit. I did one gig in 1992 for Don Henley, of his Walden Woods project, in the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. He asked me if I’d sing a few songs.
“It was Don, me, John Fogerty and Neil Young. A great night. There was an enormous feeling of warmth coming off the audience, I thought, ‘Wow, this isn’t too bad. Maybe I should do some of this again’ that was in the back of my mind through the ’90s, then, finally in ’99, I thought I’d dip my toe in the water and see what happened. And it went well. So I went back out in ’01. Now here I am touring with The Dark Side of the Moon and it’s all good.”
Waters ended up touring The Dark Side of the Moon in the mid-2000s, reuniting with Nick Mason to take the classic album on the road. It was a love of motor racing that brought the two together, with the pair’s initially frosty relationship post-Pink Floyd seemingly fixed in time for the tour.
Waters said: “Oh god yeah. I mean I’m having an absolute blast. I mean, this tour that we’ve been doing is terrific fun. The band is great. I don’t know if people know this but the story behind why we do the whole of The Dark Side of the Moon was brought about by the French Grand Prix organisation last summer called up and said, ‘We want Pink Floyd to do Dark Side of the Moon at the French Grand Prix’.
“Everybody was saying, ‘Fuck off you’re insane,’ and they went ‘Oh what about Roger Waters’, and they said ‘Well, dunno, we’ll ask him.’ And so they did ask me and I thought, ‘Oh what a strange idea but I thought why not? Why I didn’t think of that myself a few years ago!’”
Waters would say it wasn’t just a love for the F1 that brought the tour to life, but a desire to revisit The Dark Side of the Moon. Their one-off show soon expanded into a twenty-date tour of Europe and further dates in North America followed.
“It’s a piece I’m really attached to, and then they asked if I’d take Nick Mason so I said, ‘Hey do you want to go and do The Dark Side of the Moon at the French Grand Prix. And he is an enormous aficionado of motor racing anyway, so he said ‘Yeah I’d love to’ so we did it and then it seemed daft for it to be a one-off, so I said, ‘Hey let’s do a couple of festivals in Europe,’ and then that turned out to be twenty dates in Europe.
“And we thought, ‘Oh well, we are up and running, we might as well go to the States.’ And then it was great, it was such good fun. We thought maybe next year we should go to the Southern Hemisphere and go and do some there…”
