(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 6 January 2026 15:15, UK
Emerging from the shadows in the 1960s in a haze of psychedelic technicolour, Pink Floyd were always in a league entirely of their own when it came to Britain’s rock and roll landscape.
Albums like The Dark Side of the Moon or even Piper at the Gates of Dawn might as well have arrived on a comet from another galaxy, but according to Roger Waters, the roots of the band’s sound were always pretty conventional.
There are many words you could use to describe the tenure of Pink Floyd, but trailblazing is perhaps the most fitting. Not only did the band almost single-handedly introduce British airwaves to the mind-expanding sounds of psychedelia, under the leadership of Syd Barrett, but their sonic development throughout the 1970s, when Waters took over the reins, saw them explore avenues of the musical realm untrodden by anybody else.
Crafting expansive suites and endlessly complex musical narratives stretching across entire albums, Floyd never concerned themselves with following the crowd; hence why they never seemed to fit into any specific subgenre or scene throughout their existence.
Despite that individualistic approach to the music world, though, Roger Waters seemingly drew his earliest musical inspiration from the same sounds that impacted everybody from John Lennon to Jimi Hendrix. Namely, the blues, where all rock and roll roads lead back to, eventually.
Exploring his early influences during a 2005 chat with Rolling Stone, Waters espoused the joys of the early rock and roll, which emerged onto the UK airwaves thanks to the pirate radio stations of the 1950s. “Like everyone else in England, I listened to Radio Luxembourg, a pirate station,” he shared. “They played rock and roll, like Bill Haley and English acts with stupid invented names like Tommy Steele and Billy Fury.”
While neither Bill Haley nor Billy Fury has much in common with records like Wish You Were Here or Animals, those early experiences with music sent Waters down a path of musical discovery which would serve him very well.
“Seven or eight years later, the Beatles changed all that,” the songwriter continued, jumping ahead a few years from that first spark of rock inspiration in the 1950s. “In the meantime, I fell in love with Lead Belly, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Art Blakey. Monk and Mingus.”
Waters concluded, “The blues is at the root of everything I do.”
Names like Art Blakey or Charles Mingus shouldn’t be all that surprising to be included in Waters’ key influences. After all, Pink Floyd routinely drew upon the experimentation and exploration of jazz within their own work, even if Waters was never going to devote himself to the mastery of the saxophone.
Blues, being the other side of the jazz coin, had a similarly overt influence on Waters’ songwriting stylings over the years. Ultimately, though, rock and roll itself would not exist without the pioneering efforts of American blues musicians, so the fact that Waters draws from the same cloth is rather obvious, albeit given that Pink Floyd used that blues influence to explore a vast range of other sounds and influences that completely transformed those blues roots.
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