Biography - Roger Waters
 Roger Waters was born on
September 6, 1943, in Cambridge, just four months before the death of
his father Eric Fletcher Waters, whom he never got to know and whose
death in Anzio in 1944 during the WWII allied landings in Italy was a
great loss to Waters. He considers it the first, and most important
brick in his wall...
George Roger Waters has two elder brothers, John and Duncan. Like Syd
Barrett, Roger, too, attended the Cambridge High School for Boys and
adopted his mother's leftist and pacifist views. He would become what he
later described as "a militant antimilitarist." Soon he became
intrested in the work of CND, Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament. He even
gave a speech he had written himself at one of the CND meetings, at the
age of 16.
When he moved to London, he became much more intrested in his
education and culture. He made it to Regent Street School of
Architecture, where he started a band called Sigma 6 with Wright and
Mason. The band then changed its name a few times, before it became The
Pink Floyd Sound.
Waters wanted to learn to play guitar. Although he did not have the
ear for music, he learned it quite well, even though he was a
self-taught player and could hardly play a few chords, he played with
Mason and Wright in several bands. He took guitar lessons at Spanish
Guitar Centre, but was bored by repeating scales over and over, so he
gave up and began to play bass guitar with Sigma 6, when Syd became part
of the band. (Reportedly he was afraid of becoming a drummer in the
end.)
In the end he, like his friends, gave up school to become a musician
(Roger in particular because he was "disgusted by the dominant role of
economy in architecture").
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