Roger Waters Recording First Rock Album in Over Two Decades

Roger Waters in 2008. Photo: Brennan Schnell/Eastscene.com/Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Roger Waters wrapped up his three-year Wall tour in September, and since then he’s turned his attention toward his first rock album since 1992’s Amused to Death. “I finished a demo of it last night,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It’s 55 minutes long. It’s songs and theater as well. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s couched as a radio play. It has characters who speak to each other, and it’s a quest. It’s about an old man and a young child trying to figure out why they are killing the children.”

 He’s not sure if he’ll support the disc with a tour. “I’m suffering a little bit of withdrawal after ending the Wall tour,” he says. “It’s sort of a relief to not have to go out and do that every night, but they’re such a great team. There were 180 of us together every day. That piece was very moving every night.”

The massive show was staged 219 times at stadiums and arenas all over the globe, grossing upwards of $458,000,000. “I can’t top that tour,” Waters says. “First of all, you have to accept the fact that I’m not going to live forever. I’m 70 years old. You just have to accept that when you do something as enormous as that tour. The hardest thing in the world is thinking of something to do, so going and doing it is a reward in itself.”

The memory of the tour still brings a big smile to his face. “I found that the loudest fans in the world are in Istanbul,” he says. “I remember standing there with the band during ”˜Hey You.’ We were behind the wall, so nobody could see us playing. We started looking at each other going, ”˜What is that sound?’ When they sang ”˜Don’t give in without a fight,’ you could feel it. It was like the roof was coming off, even though there was no roof. It was amazing.”

With that in mind, he refuses to rule out the possibility of reviving The Wall tour at some point in the future. “I’m not thinking about that right now,” he says. “But that’s not to say I won’t. I think there’s an audience there. We did do 219 shows, which is a lot.”