First came Pros & Cons in 1984 - the album featured Eric Clapton on lead guitar - and Waters officially left the band in 1985, filing a lawsuit to dissolve it the following year. By this point, Waters was the band's leader and he shepherded them through The Final Cut, a 1983 album that was billed as 'A requiem for the post-war dream by Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd.' This subtitle suggested the ill will within the band and, soon, Waters left. The recording of The Wall was difficult - Wright left the band and became a contract player - but the 1979 double-album was a smash, leading to a 1982 feature film produced by Alan Parker. Roger took The Wall and what became his 1984 solo debut, The Pros & Cons of Hitch Hiking, to the band and they chose to record The Wall. During the supporting tour for Animals, Waters felt himself retreating from his audience, and he used this as an inspiration for writing the semi-autobiographical rock opera The Wall. Two years later, the band delivered Wish You Were Here - a concept loosely based on the departed Barrett - and the dystopian Animals followed in 1977. Dark Side turned out to be the pivotal album in Pink Floyd's career, an instant hit that turned into an enduring blockbuster. Waters asserted a heavy degree of creative control for 1973's Dark Side of the Moon, penning all the lyrics, creating the concept, and receiving music writing credits on all but three of the songs. He also stepped away from the band to collaborate with Ron Geesin for the 1970 soundtrack to The Body, but 1971's Meddle and 1972's Obscured by Clouds found Floyd dividing the work equally. Often, the band collaborated on compositions, but Waters was the member with the largest number of solo songs. Over the next few years, the Floyd's audience steadily grew.

By that time, Barrett was the unquestioned leader, the singer/songwriter responsible for the band's earliest singles and 1967's debut Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but that album also bore Waters' first original tune, 'Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk.'ĭue to mental illness, Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968 and was replaced by David Gilmour. This was in the fall of 1963 and by 1965, the group had gelled into the Pink Floyd Sound, dropping the 'Sound' in 1966. Waters and his fellow students Nick Mason and Rick Wright played with vocalist Keith Noble and bassist Clive Metcalfe in a group called Sigma 6, and once they departed, Roger brought in Barrett. There, Waters met his future bandmates Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, but it wasn't until he was studying architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic that the first incarnation of Pink Floyd came into view. Eric Waters died in combat when Roger was five months old, and his mother Mary moved him and his brother to Cambridge. His childhood was haunted by the departure of his father Eric, a schoolteacher who abandoned his status as a conscientious objector to World War II to join the British Army. Waters didn't start playing music until he was on the cusp of his 20th birthday.

His long spell without new albums was broken in 2017 with the release of Is This the Life We Really Want? After 1992, Waters didn't devote himself to writing new rock music, preferring to stage live revivals of Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall as he composed classical pieces and worked as an activist. Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983's The Final Cut, after which he recorded a triptych of concept albums - The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, Radio K.A.O.S., and Amused to Death - addressing personal and political struggles in the modern world. In the wake of Syd Barrett's departure, Waters emerged as a formidable songwriter, but it's this stretch of '70s albums - each one nearly symphonic in its reach - that established him as a distinctive, idiosyncratic voice within rock, one with a sober morality and sardonic sense of humor. Roger Waters is Pink Floyd's grand conceptualist, the driving force behind such albums as Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.

Pink floyd roger waters