Will Roger Waters’ Explosive New Comments About Israel and Ukraine Sink a $500 Million Pink Floyd Catalog Sale?
Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor While there’s been no official word, Pink Floyd has been shopping its recorded-music catalog and other assets for several months, seeking as much as $500 million, according to the Financial Times, with both major music companies and investment firms as the top bidders. But sources say an explosive new interview with founding member, main songwriter and stakeholder Roger Waters — in which he makes extensive remarks about Israel, Ukraine, Russia, the U.S. and other political matters that one could politely characterize as controversial — is giving at least one potential buyer cold feet and seems likely to lead others to rethink their positions. For years Waters has sounded off about politics in the press and at his concerts, most controversially Israel’s policies. But the new interview in Rolling Stone raises (or lowers) the bar considerably. While interviewer James Ball does his best to challenge some of Waters’ more far-fetched statements, the former Pink Floyd singer argues emphatically that some Jewish people in the U.S. and U.K. bear responsibility for the actions of Israel “because they pay for everything”; that well-documented accounts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine are “lies, lies, lies”; that the United States is “the most evil [country in the world] of all by a factor of at least 10 times”; that Russia’s brutal military involvement in Syria is justified because “they were there at the invitation of the Syrian government” (which is led by one of the world’s most murderous dictators, Bashar Assad), and more. (See a 12,000-word transcript of the interview here).