Why Roger Waters Wrote 'The Nile Song' Like Syd Barrett

The heaviest song on More wasn’t written by Syd Barrett — it was Roger Waters playing dress‑up. “The Nile Song” is a full‑throttle scream‑along with distorted guitar and lyrics about drifting down a river, and Waters later admitted he consciously adopted Barrett’s surreal, whimsical style for the track.

The song was made for Barbet Schroeder’s film More, which needed authentic psychedelic rock to accompany its Ibiza drug‑scene visuals. Waters saw a gap: Barrett was already out of the band, but the soundtrack demanded that Barrett‑esque looseness. So Waters wrote a song that sounded like Syd — dreamy, cryptic, sung with a snarl — but set to a riff that foreshadows the hard rock Floyd would explore later on Meddle.

It was a one‑off experiment. Waters never again wrote lyrics this openly trippy, and the band rarely played it live. Most fans treat “The Nile Song” as a curiosity: a glimpse of what Roger Waters might have