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Pink Floyd · S1 E1
The Architecture Student
George Roger Waters is born in 1943 in Surrey. His father is killed at Anzio when Roger is five months old. He grows up in Cambridge, furious at a war he never saw, and goes to London to study architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic
February 18, 1944, the Anzio beachhead in Italy. Eric Fletcher Waters of the 8th Royal Fusiliers is killed in action, and his five-month-old son Roger, back home in Surrey, loses the father who will haunt every album he ever makes.
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The Great Gig in the Sky, Pink Floyd (1973)
From The Dark Side of the Moon, recorded at Abbey Road Studios with Alan Parsons engineering. Rick Wright wrote the chord progression, and session vocalist Clare Torry improvised the vocal in just a few takes. She was embarrassed afterward and tried to apologize on her way out; the band told her it was perfect.
Anzio Beach Head War Cemetery
Via Nettunense, Anzio, Italy. Eric Fletcher Waters is buried here among more than two thousand Commonwealth soldiers. Roger Waters first visited in 2013, nearly seventy years after his father was killed.
TAP TO REVEAL: How long did Roger Waters wait before visiting his father's grave?
Cambridge
After the war, Roger's mother Mary moves the family to Cambridge. She raises Roger and his older brother John on a teacher's salary, filling the house with books, protest politics, and determination. Roger is bright, restless, and angry at a world that took his father before he could know him.
“I remember explaining it to the rest of the band: that the whole record might be about the pressures or preoccupations that divert us from our potential for positive action.”
— Roger Waters
When the Tigers Broke Free, Pink Floyd
Written for The Wall film and released as a standalone single in 1982. This is the most nakedly autobiographical song Waters ever wrote: no fictional Pink, no metaphors, just the Anzio bridgehead, the Company Commander's order, and a father who never came home.
In a Cambridge bedroom, a teenager named Roger Keith Barrett is painting watercolours and teaching himself ukulele. Everyone calls him Syd, he has the most magnetic personality anyone in town has ever encountered, and he is about to change Roger Waters' life completely.
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