Roger Waters shares the unlikely thing he ‘derives great pleasure from’ outside of music

Follow Cult Following

Get more of our coverage in Google.

Music is for pleasure but for Roger Waters it goes a little beyond that. The Pink Floyd frontman once suggested he got a little more out of listening to music than most ever could. When speaking of music he listened to Waters said it was mere mathematics that pulled him in rather than the signature sound of a much-loved artist.

Waters would flag the likes of Bob Dylan and Neil Young as his all-time favourites, but would go a little deeper into the structure of sound that he liked. The veteran songwriter behind hits like The Dark Side of the Moon, Amused to Death, and The Wall, suggested that he was completely uninterested in anything but the mathematical context of the music he was listening to.

He said: “Oh no, they didn’t spot that. But music is only mathematics anyway. It is another way of interpreting maths. Musical intervals are also mathematical intervals. If you double the frequency of a note, it rises by an octave. We call it music, but our brain is going, Oh, that’s twice as fast as that! But let me say that I never saw any music in maths. It was all complete drudgery to me. I was completely uninterested in it.

“I could never see the beauty of mathematical relationships. I started studying architecture, but they slung me out after two years for refusing to attend History of Architecture lectures. I was very bloshie. I must have been horrible to teach. But the History lecture that I came up against was very reactionary, so it was a fair battle. I said I wouldn’t do exams because the guy refused to talk to me. He’d tell us to sit down and copy a drawing off a blackboard.

“And I asked him if he could explain why, because I couldn’t see the point in copying something off a blackboard that he was copying of a textbook. It was just like school. I couldn’t handle it. I’d hoped I’d escaped all that. When you go to university, you expect to be treated like little grown-ups.”

Waters would go on to share how this read of music affected his writing style, and why it differed so much from his ex-bandmate, Syd Barrett. Waters, speaking to Radio Bogota, said: “Everybody starts trying to write, that’s all that happens. Bands live and die by whether they have someone, or more than one person, who can write. Writing is the fundamental cornerstone of any music. 

“It has to be written, and if you haven’t got somebody in the band who can write it’s gonna be a very short-lived enterprise. So we had to find out whether we did. And we did, and so it became a long-lived enterprise.”

The band would create some of their all-time best records following Barrett’s departure, including The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters would then leave the band himself in 1985.