MTV Europe - News At Night

MTV voice-over, with What God Wants in the background...

Presenter: Roger Waters is back with Amused To Death, an album of intense emotion...

Roger Waters: This record is, as you know, about our relationship with television, and I see it very much as a two-edged sword; it's a very, very powerful medium as we all know, and it can either, you know, it can... it can destroy us... save us. I see it as powerful a medium as that really.

Presenter: The recurring Waters theme of war is again top of the agenda here as is that, dare we say it, classic Pink Floyd sound.

Roger Waters: What brought us together, you know, was a desire to be pop stars, and after Dark Side Of The Moon we were. We had fulfilled our function.
 
We stayed together for a long time after that but there was never really any kind of "nice feeling" of a group of people working together. People do what they do. I left and there's a band there still called Pink Floyd.
 
People must make of it what they will... it's none of my business any more, you know. Gilmour and Mason OWN the name Pink Floyd, that's it. Finish. It's nothing to do with me... I have no control over it... I have no control over the back catalogue... I can't. I have nothing to do with any of it. I'm out of it, okay... and it happened several years ago, and I was jolly angry and gloomy about it at the time, and I'm now over it, and I'm getting on with my own work and let's talk about something else.

Presenter: Waters is however aware that in commercial terms at least, the mantle of Pink Floyd means automatic sales.

Roger Waters: If it said Pink Floyd on it, you know, I'd sell ten million albums, and because it says Roger Waters, who knows, I have no idea what I may sell but it is extraordinary how difficult it is to cross that line, you know, for people to understand who I am and what my work is, and what it was in the past.

Presenter: Waters is now focussed and even happy, though not at ease with the media.

Roger Waters: We can see when we watch our MTV, we can see the lie that all that is. It's there in front of us, and successive generations of people who like to buy records to listen to music, or at least a percentage of them, will be unable to NOT understand 'em... uh... the dilemma, the dichotomy that exists in the conflicting messages we get from it.