How Roger Waters' Brother John Shaped His Anti-War Stance

Roger Waters’ older brother, John Waters, never wrote a Pink Floyd song, but he might as well have. Growing up without a father—Eric Fletcher Waters was killed at Anzio in 1944—the two brothers processed that loss very differently. Roger channeled it into music; John became a poet, a left-wing activist, and arguably the more politically radical of the two. Roger has said John “was the one who really felt the loss,” and that his brother’s rage and grief taught him that the personal is political.

You can hear John’s influence all over The Wall and The Final Cut. The bitter anti-war sentiment, the obsession with absent fathers, the