“Everything Goes Back to My Father”: The Emotional Moment That Brought Roger Waters to Tears on ‘The Wall’ Tour

Despite Roger Waters’ external persona as raw, unapologetic, and brazen, not even the former Pink Floyd bassist could help but be moved to tears during a memorable moment on “The Wall” tour in the early 1980s. The fleeting interaction took place during an intermission and stuck with Waters for years.

In fact, during an interview with AXS TV’s Dan Rather, Waters said that all of his music and writing traces back to the subject matter of this brief memory.

This Moment On Tour Brought Roger Waters To Tears

Former Pink Floyd bassist and solo artist Roger Waters has developed quite a reputation for delivering his opinions and feelings with no filter. However, those feelings tend to lean toward the principled and aggressive, not mournful. During an interview with AXS TV’s Dan Rather, Waters let his guard down to reveal a more vulnerable side to him than he usually shows.

During the interview, Rather and Waters eventually settled on the topic of Pink Floyd’s iconic track “Wish You Were Here.” Music historians and fans have long known that the band’s 1975 album was a tribute to the band’s founding member, Syd Barrett, who left the band due to struggles with his mental health. But Waters told Rather that another man was on the other end of the album’s touching title track: his father.

Waters’ father died in a World War II battle in Italy just weeks after he enlisted in the service. “Everything goes back to my father,” Waters said. “When I was doing “The Wall” tour, every gig that we do, we had 20 wounded men. At half-time, I would always go and say hello to them.”

“At one particular show, there was an old guy there,” Waters continued. “He put his hand out, so I took it, and he wouldn’t let go of my hand. He looked me in the eye—I find it hard to say this—but he said to me, ‘Your father would be proud of you.’ I welled up. I sort of [shows pained expression] as I went to the stage to do the second half.”

The Memory Revealed A Common Musical Thread

Roger Waters has been making music that offers scathing critiques against war, capitalism, greed, and the rejection and ignorance toward mental health for decades. But in this one moment of his interview with Dan Rather, he offered a far more soft-hearted glimpse into why he feels the way he does about these hard-hitting topics. Waters’ father, whether the bassist was conscientious of it or not, helped shape many of his opinions.

“That is in quite a lot of poems that I’ve written,” Waters said, “about feeling a presence, a benign presence. Something that I have to live up to, you know. He was a conscientious objector at the beginning of the water, and he changed his mind when he saw what Hitler was doing in Europe. He decided that his politics trumped his Christianity because he was an objector on grounds that he couldn’t kill anybody because he was a Christian.”

“It’s a heroic story indeed,” Waters said. “It’s brave to be a conscientious objector.” Waters’ connection to the armed services is likely another reason the former Pink Floyd member felt such a strong connection to John Prine’s music, particularly his early work, like “Sam Stone,” since many of his lyrics covered the same topics.

David Thorpe/ANL/Shutterstock