HOWZAT

“Is that the case?” he smiles. “I didn’t know. I gave up after I heard a reggae version of Money on (the 1988 live album) The Delicate Sound of Thunder. I remember lying on the floor howling with laughter with my feet in mid-air.”

Clearly, Waters hasn’t heard Easy Star All-Stars’ 2003 reggae tribute, Dub Side of the Moon? “I didn’t know about that,” he chirps. “But there’s a country and western version of The Wall by a band called Luther Wright and the Wrongs. I can thoroughly recommend it.”

While Waters can make time for comedy versions of his old songs (whether by ex-colleagues or people he has never met), he says his interest in other groups is minimal. Asked about Radiohead — whose Thom Yorke seems to harbour similarly complex feelings towards the Government and his fans — he shrugs. “I heard one album. Was it Oh Computer? It didn’t make an impression.”

I put it to Waters that, for many people, it was the Dark Side of the Moon of its generation — a portent of a brave but alienating new world. Waters says that he would quite simply prefer to hear the same sentiments from the mouths of his contemporaries, maybe John Lennon or Nick Drake — “but they’re a bit on the dead side, sadly”.

Operating on a hunch, I ask him if he has ever heard Abba’s bonkers final album, The Visitors — a record whose Bergmanesque shadow-world is surprisingly redolent of Pink Floyd’s 1977 opus Animals. Waters looks at me as though I’ve just been sick in his wardrobe. “The title track,” I continue, “is written from the point of view of a Russian dissident waiting for the fatal knock on the door. Very you, that.”

His reply is also very him. “Abba?” He rolls those two syllables around his mouth with Paxmanesque disdain. “From the first bar I ever heard by them, I was an ex- listener.”

In fact, the last album Waters bought was Living with War, the album Neil Young recorded in a two-week fit of rage at the US Government’s foreign policy. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, given the distrust of authority Waters inherited from his communist mother. He says he has also written no shortage of songs in a similar vein but, with 13 years elapsed since his most recent solo album, Amused to Death, he advises against holding our breath.

How can an album take 13 years to record? “Well, it just does. I maybe get some enthusiasm for it and then I do something else, like Ça Ira (his opera from last year, set in the early days of the French Revolution). Then, a few years ago, I got divorced — which also provides an interruption.”

Life, in other words, has overtaken work. Since the demise of his third marriage (to the actress Priscilla Phillips) Waters has moved from his Hampshire pile to Manhattan, where he and his American fiancée Laurie During spend most of their time. “You would be surprised how many golf clubs are in striking distance of New York.”

As befits a relationship in its first flourish, Waters and During “go out all the time”. After three years there, the only dinner party they have thrown has been in honour of the American economist Geoffrey Sachs, whose book The End of Poverty provided the ideological impetus for Live 8.

Waters says that his friendship with Sachs has further changed his outlook. “I’ve put my money where my mouth is and decided to support a village in Senegal. Single-handedly? Well, yes, but really it’s just a matter of committing lots of money for the next five years and putting tons of fertiliser into the ground and buying nets for mosquitoes.”

I suggest to Waters that something as practical as subsidising a Senegalese village must be more psychically calming than years of therapy. “Well, I don’t go to therapy any more,” he smiles. “But, you know, it’s no one act that makes you feel happier. I’ve been through a personal journey of transformation — with parenthood and failed relationships and all the rest of things that change you.”

If Roger Waters is at relative peace, I tell him it’s a shame that lifelong friendships should have been extinguished before he got a chance to share some of that peace with them. The usually outspoken singer moves to respond, only to realise that, for once, he has exhausted his stock of opinions. “Is it?” he shrugs, “I really don’t know. I’m enjoying my life. Perhaps that’s enough.”

Roger Waters plays Dark Side of the Moon as part of Hyde Park Calling, tomorrow from 2pm (0870 4000688)

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