Still Waters

Yesterday's broadcast of Hard Talk on BBC World saw Stephen Sackur  in conversation with Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, and very jolly it was too. A bit too short and generalised to be genuinely illuminating, especially for anyone who has a broad grasp of the history of the band - but there was a touch of the revelatory in just how agreeable Mr Waters appears to be, and how incredibly well-preserved for a seventy-year-old. I'd expected him to be at least a bit of an old curmudgeon, considering all the stuff about just how fractious his relationships have been with just about everyone in the Floyd camp (though I've always had the impression he got along well enough in the early days with the sadly missed Syd Barrett.) But he was charm personified, and clearly a very smart guy, though I don't think that's ever been much in doubt.

I think the answer to this little mystery lay in the palpable sense he exuded of someone who's continued to grow in middle-age and beyond. He made a particularly fascinating comment on how character forming it was to play to an audience of around a 1000 in the late eighties with his own band whilst Dave, Rick and Nick and assorted Floydian minions were playing to some 80,000 in the same area. At this point Roger would have been around forty by my calculations, yet he was as open to the notion of having his character moulded as any teenager might be. It was also interesting how easily he was able to say he'd been mistaken in disputing the rights of the other band-members to use the moniker Pink Floyd. It sounded easy, but I'd guess there was some hard-won real wisdom involved there.

His comments on the father he never knew - who died at Anzio - were also very moving. I'd always dismissed the emo stuff about his dad as just that, emo stuff. But emo stuff is always deeply important, as I really should have known.

If I have any ambition left it's to keep growing as I keep going - and to look half as good as Mr Waters at seventy, if I manage to last that long.