Roger Waters is ‘sure Radiohead is good’ but wasn’t ‘moved’ by their albums

Roger Waters is unconvinced by Radiohead’s work, saying the Thom Yorke-fronted group failed to move him with any of their releases.

Whether the Pink Floyd veteran has softened on Radiohead following their reunion tour is unknown, but the bassist had few positives for the band when he was last asked about them. Waters, when asked about the music he listens to and what he looks for in a song, was frank about his thoughts on the Creep hitmakers, suggesting that their works, including OK Computer, In Rainbows, and Kid A, had failed to move him emotionally. Despite this, the veteran songwriter still believes the band are, at the very least, “good”.

He said: “That bit of my brain has no power, I think. It doesn’t attach. I don’t really listen to Radiohead. I’m sure it’s very good and everything – I’m absolutely sure it is because everybody says it is – but I listened to the albums, and they just didn’t move me in the same way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music – and he lives on that plain with Neil [Young] and [John] Lennon.

“I don’t have satellite radio in my car yet – which is stupid and you can get whatever you want and as much of it as you want – but if I’m flipping through channels in the car I’ll stop for old stalwarts like Neil and John, but usually you can be certain that the thing you’ve stopped for is going to finish in three minutes and the thing that comes after it will be unlistenable. So you sort of don’t bother.

“That’s why I never watched MTV – because of the programming. Nothing ever seemed to go on long enough to be worth watching. And even if that particular video was interesting, you’d get something directly afterwards that inevitably wasn’t.”

Waters’ thoughts on Radiohead aside, the frontman has proven controversial with other comments made about industry legends. Waters caught plenty of flak for his comments on Ozzy Osbourne shortly after the Black Sabbath frontman’s passing.

Waters lashed out at the Black Sabbath frontman, who died on July 22 last year, in an interview with The Independent Ink. The songwriter behind Amused to Death and The Wall said he doesn’t care about Black Sabbath and that he “couldn’t give a fuck” about their musical legacy.

Waters, who is no stranger to controversy, went on to say he had “no interest” in the group’s decades of activity, and also referenced the infamous bat-biting moment. Osbourne would claim in interviews after the incident that he believed it was a fake, rubber bat thrown onto the stage. Nonetheless, it did not impress Waters, and his comments did not impress Black Sabbath fans, with many suggesting it was “too soon” to criticise Osbourne.

Despite Waters’ decades-long disinterest in Black Sabbath (he would say Evil Woman left him “speechless” with how underwhelming it was), Osbourne was apparently a huge Pink Floyd fan. His praise for Money and Obscured by Clouds is well documented, and the Iron Man hitmaker believed Pink Floyd never made a bad album.

He said: “I can’t think of an individual song, but I really like their album Obscured By Clouds. That was the soundtrack, wasn’t it? I remember listening to it while I was high on drugs. It had those weird bubbles on the cover. The Floyd made good albums; I don’t think they ever made a bad one.”