Roger Waters says he got a “great deal of pleasure” out of performing a controversial song during his tour of the United States.
The Pink Floyd bassist and songwriter confirmed he did not care at all about the mixed response to performing the song in question. Instead, Waters revelled in the reaction from members of the crowd and suggested it was one of the finer moments found in his set. The outspoken musician appeared to love speaking out against the American audiences, not least because they disagreed with the message found on his Leaving Beirut release. Speaking in an interview back in 2008, Waters confirmed the reason he loved performing the controversial track.
Waters said: “I don’t give a shit about that. I’ve been going all over this country doing this show, and one of the songs I do, Leaving Beirut, is pretty strident in its political message. So I’m standing there giving them both fingers, and when I sing lines like, ‘Oh George! Oh George! That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small,’ – which gives me a great deal of pleasure to sing – most of the audience respond very positively. But then we’re living in an eye-blink. It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that social and political changes happen over very large timescales.”
Leaving Beirut was released by Waters in 2004 as a digital download. It was released in Japan only as a CD release, paired with another song, To Kill a Child. The outspoken musician used his experiences hitchhiking through Beirut as a teenager as the basis for Leaving Beirut.
Waters would attempt to adapt some of his songs to reference the war in the Middle East and those responsible for it, but he did write Leaving Beirut as a response to the war. The veteran songwriter says he is “still confused” after writing the song, but seems to have gotten quite a response from the release of the track and subsequent performances.
He told Uncut Magazine in 2007: “It’s the story of me leaving Beirut when I was 19 years old. I was travelling in the Middle East with some friends, and the car broke down. I had to hitchhike home. It was an extraordinary experience and a great adventure. Anyway, the first night of that journey, I was taken in by a Lebanese/Arab family.
“They went and slept on the floor behind the curtain, insisting I slept in the only bed in the place. It was deeply moving, so when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq in ’03, I was so sad, sick and incensed by that weird, obvious, extraordinary, stupid, inhuman mistake that I was moved to write some verses expressing my disapproval.
“I recorded the short story and fitted the verses into it. Then I put it out on the web with another song I wrote at the same time, To Kill a Child. It’s about the invasion of Iraq – about which I’m still confused. We know it was nothing to do with WMD or 9/11. We know it was nothing to do with terrorism. Was it just a business move? Was it to create a US military base in that part of the Middle East? I still have no idea.”
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