Credit: Far Out / digboston
Wed 14 October 2026 17:30, UK
Roger Waters wasn’t exactly subtle when it came to making some of the biggest tunes of his career the way he envisioned them.
In his mind, some of the biggest tunes of all time were often made because they drove the writers to make a statement, which is half the reason why so many of his greatest influences were people like John Lennon and Bob Dylan whenever he sat down to write a song. But when looking at the coming changes of MTV, Waters felt that everything was going south really quickly.
Because as much as MTV seemed to be a good idea for creatives, it was one of the biggest ways to exploit the manufactured side of rock and roll. So many people may have got in on the ground floor when it came to making music videos, but whereas someone like David Bowie was a consummate artist who lived to change things up every single time he made one of his records, Waters didn’t really feel the need to make something that seemed overly glossy whenever he came onscreen.
He didn’t want to make his version of Let’s Dance or anything like that, because to him, the visual medium let him work on a lot more cerebral ideas. Not all of his videos showed him getting a lot done outside of a few decent studio performances, but when you look at the story being told in a song like ‘Three Wishes’, he at least had a better idea of what the medium was like other than a bunch of people trying out fashions that didn’t seem to make any sense at all from his point of view.
The Madonnas of the world didn’t seem to mean much to him outside of the present moment, and even when he saw other legends in his field, he didn’t think that all of them got the gist of what songwriting was about. The other members of Floyd sure as hell didn’t understand his vision, and when he looked at the starlets on MTV, he felt that someone like Phil Collins wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be remembered forever.
The words of a great Dylan song were going to be remembered as genuine works of high art whenever they were written, but Collins seemed more interested in having fun with music rather than playing the same routines all the time. He wasn’t particularly deep for any reason, but whereas he saw that as his strength, Waters felt that he was only producing fluff that needed to be removed from the charts.
He didn’t have any clear malice for Collins by any stretch, but he knew that he needed to find something different on the charts than him, saying, “The ‘feeling’ I get is that he’s pretending to be a songwriter or a rock ’n’ roller. It’s an act. If you cared about what you were doing, you would ‘not be able’ to do that silly walk, one behind the other.”
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Adding, “Because you would find it impossible to ridicule your work in that way. That’s taken over an awful lot of the business. You could say, ‘Well, why shouldn’t it?’ Absolutely ‘no’ reason. So long as it doesn’t take over and ‘squeeze’ out the Lennons and Dylans because they’re too good for it.”
But it’s not like Collins couldn’t get introspective every now and again. Some of the biggest tunes of his career came from him reeling from the devastation of his marriage, and he was going to do everything within his power to show his emotions on his sleeve, whether that was working on tunes like ‘In the Air Tonight’ on Face Value or eventually tackling the fallout of his next marriage on Both Sides.
Every one of his albums was about reaching that next level in terms of songwriting, but Waters didn’t see someone who was all that concerned about songwriting. He saw someone complicit in making tunes that people wanted to hear, and while that should have been enough, Waters had no time to settle for the kind of cultural junk food that Collins and the rest of MTV were so concerned with.
