Roger Waters doesn’t know how long he’ll tour for as shows are ‘harder’ to do

Roger Waters says he is unsure about how long he will keep touring, as it gets trickier to put shows together.

The Pink Floyd member had already been toying with the idea of reducing his tour schedule in 2011, with the bassist saying he was “getting up there” in age and had thoughts on pulling out of shows entirely. Part of the problem, Waters says, is that his shows have to “be a bit more physical” and doing that in the lead-up to his seventieth birthday was tricky. Now eighty-two, the veteran musician responsible for the likes of The Dark Side of the Moon and The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, it is not clear whether Waters will grace the stage again. His last tour concluded in 2023 and led to a live album, This is Not a Drill.

Speaking back in 2011, Waters said: “It might be, you never know. I tend to do quite big shows, and I put a lot into it. Some people go out on tour until they die. Muddy Waters, or BB King, or some of those old blues players, they can just set up a chair and play, and that’s all they need to do.

“I feel that my shows have to be a bit more physical. That might be harder to keep going. When I finish this tour, I’ll be nearly 70 years old, which is getting up there for a rock’n’roller.”

It isn’t the first time Waters has aired his troubles with touring, as one touring moment with Pink Floyd stuck with the bassist for years. Speaking to Jim Ladd during a radio special on The Wall ahead of its anniversary back in 2010, confirmed the stadium gigs were an annoying aspect of Pink Floyd’s popularity that he countered by creating The Wall.

Waters explained to Ladd that the “alienation” he felt when performing shows of this size directly fed into not only how the band were writing music at the time, but also how the shows came together.

He said: “The reason that I designed this show in the first place all those years ago was because I had become somewhat disaffected by doing gigs in football stadiums in front of large numbers of people who I felt were not really engaged in the same thing that I was engaged in.

“And for one reason or another, whether it was to do with them or me I’ll never know, but I did become disaffected from it all.  And that’s why around that time I thought of building a wall to express the feelings of alienation that I felt from the audience. 

“So the guys that go to stadium gigs, and I’m sure that they exist, and they go because it’s the thing to do and they stagger around and break bottles and they shout and scream, that’s sort of the mindless element that you get in any large group of people, who are annoying to all of us.”