 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are very fortunate to be joined by Roger Waters. Roger, welcome to NewsClick. Thanks, good to see you man. Yeah, nice to see you. You were very struck when you heard the news of the death of Ramona Medina in Villa 31 in Buenos Aires. Died of the coronavirus. You made a video about that Roger. The question of running water was central in this. The question of poverty was central. What moved you to make that short statement about the death of Ramona Medina in Buenos Aires, Argentina? First of all, I was told in the same communication from Garganta Podorosa which is a working class newspaper that I believe may even be based in Villa 31. It's certainly based in Buenos Aires. And they said to me, this woman is complaining because she's been told to wash her hands so that she won't catch coronavirus. Many times today, wash your hands many times today. They said to her, and she said, I can't, we have no water. You've cut the water off. There isn't any water here to wash out. And then of course she got the virus and died. So it's a tragic, tragic story. And her message, which was basically that water is a basic human right. So no authority, whether it's a municipal, urban authority or a government, should have the power to deny to the citizens of any country anywhere. So I made a little statement in support of them because they asked me to. I know Villa 31 because many years ago when I was on the road there, another organization in South America called ALAS asked if I would help to publicize their work in education for young children all over Latin America, which I did. And I did. I adapted a song that I'd already written and I made it and then I put it half in Spanish and half in English and you've seen it. Yeah, why don't you, I mean the song is extraordinary and we're going to run at least some of it in this video. The song is called The Child Will Fly. I find it a very affecting song. Could you talk a little bit, Raja, about making that song and also the video which you shot in Villa 31? Yeah, as I say, the child poverty action charity was called ALAS, which is wings in Spanish. And so los niños volarán means the children will fly. It's just that the child will fly, so that's what the song became called. But basically it's a call to allow our children whatever their beginnings and their roots and wherever they live. If they live in Villa 31 or any of the favelas of a Brazil or any poor district anyway, that they have the opportunity to be allowed to fly because one of them might be Galel, the great tango maestro, or one of them might be Marqués and suddenly write Time in the Love of Coral, or they might just be people who deserve to live a decent life with running water. So in fact the message when I made the ALAS song is exactly the same message that Ramona Medina was trying to get through the thick skulls of the bureaucrats in Buenos Aires when she died. And the message remains the same. We have an absolute responsibility to our children to change our systems, to offload neoliberal economics in order that our children and everybody's children should have at least the possibility to learn to fly. Most of them, not most, yeah a huge proportion of them now die when they're little kids because they've got nothing to eat. So that would be the first step on the way to... And that old bloke who to my eternal shame, I can never remember his name, who makes musical instruments, he's real. He really goes around the rubbish dumps and he makes those musical instruments out of rubbish that he finds on dumps and things. And some of them even work, you know, a bit. You can twang them and they make a noise. So I don't know what else to say about it but I became very involved there and I got old friends to help me. Eric Clapton played a guitar solo and Steve Gad played drums and I got a wonderful Brazilian percussion player and a young tenor from, he was at Juilliard at the time, he was a student called Alec Schrader. He sings this, turns some of it into a beautiful operatic area. So I don't know what else to say and I also managed to meet people from the Abreu movement in Venezuela. So I had some Venezuelan kids come up who I was hoping one was a cellist, good player and a beautiful, beautiful young woman and a boy who played the trumpet. Unfortunately they'd been given parts which they'd learned in the wrong key. And we didn't have time, and we weren't quite musically in sync enough to get them to... So we weren't able to use what they played but to even walk alongside Abreu's great experiment. One of the great, great things about Venezuela was this idea of teaching working class kids to play instruments just as a matter of course. You know there is light at the end, there are many tunnels and there is light at the end of a lot of them. It's just a question of clearing the people who run everything and steal everything out of the way so that we can first of all get into the tunnel and then see the light at the end and then crawl our way towards it and then burst out into the new tomorrow that we and our children deserve.