{"id":802833,"date":"2026-10-14T23:54:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-14T23:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/802833\/"},"modified":"2026-10-14T23:54:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T23:54:13","slug":"the-100000000-selling-singer-roger-waters-wanted-the-world-to-forget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/802833\/","title":{"rendered":"The 100,000,000-selling singer Roger Waters wanted the world to forget"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Roger<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ digboston<\/p>\n

Wed 14 October 2026 17:30, UK <\/p>\n

Roger Waters<\/a> wasn\u2019t exactly subtle when it came to making some of the biggest tunes of his career the way he envisioned them. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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\u2019t really feel the need to make something that seemed overly glossy whenever he came onscreen.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t want to make his version of Let\u2019s 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 \u2018Three Wishes\u2019, he at least had a better idea of what the medium was like other than a bunch of people trying out fashions that didn\u2019t seem to make any sense at all from his point of view.<\/p>\n

The Madonnas of the world didn\u2019t seem to mean much to him outside of the present moment, and even when he saw other legends in his field, he didn\u2019t think that all of them got the gist of what songwriting was about. The other members of Floyd sure as hell didn\u2019t understand his vision, and when he looked at the starlets on MTV, he felt that someone like Phil Collins wasn\u2019t the kind of person who needed to be remembered forever.<\/p>\n

The words of a great Dylan song<\/a> 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t 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<\/a>, \u201cThe \u2018feeling\u2019 I get is that he\u2019s pretending to be a songwriter or a rock \u2019n\u2019 roller. It\u2019s an act. If you cared about what you were doing, you would \u2018not be able\u2019 to do that silly walk, one behind the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

Adding, \u201cBecause you would find it impossible to ridicule your work in that way. That\u2019s taken over an awful lot of the business. You could say, \u2018Well, why shouldn\u2019t it?\u2019 Absolutely \u2018no\u2019 reason. So long as it doesn\u2019t take over and \u2018squeeze\u2019 out the Lennons and Dylans because they\u2019re too good for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not like Collins couldn\u2019t 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 \u2018In the Air Tonight\u2019 on Face Value or eventually tackling the fallout of his next marriage on Both Sides. <\/p>\n

Every one of his albums was about reaching that next level in terms of songwriting, but Waters didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ digboston Wed 14 October 2026 17:30, UK Roger Waters wasn\u2019t exactly subtle when it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":802834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,10869,1581,34789,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-802833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-phil-collins","tag-pop","tag-roger-waters","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=802833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/802833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/802834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=802833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=802833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=802833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}