The combined wishes of all of us on the Brain Damage team, along no doubt with many of you reading this, go to Roger Waters, who celebrates the very special occasion of his 81st birthday today!

Roger was born in Great Bookham, Surrey, in 1943, moving to Cambridge when he was two years old. It was there that he met, and became childhood friends with, a number of key people in the story of Pink Floyd.

Of course, Roger has been extremely busy over recent years, having successfully taken Dark Side Of The Moon on tour in 2006, through to 2008. On completing that, he immediately started work on a new version of The Wall - which finally opened in September 2010. That tour was spectacularly successful, wrapping up in Paris for show number 217 in September 2013. Recordings of that tour turned into the film, shown in cinemas and released on DVD/Blu-ray and as part of a mammoth Super Deluxe Edition.

More recently, he performed his highly acclaimed Us + Them world tour, which was filmed and was shown in cinemas worldwide, with the home release of it on Blu-ray, 2CD, 3LP vinyl and DVD that followed. He also released his latest full solo album, Is This The Life We Really Want? as well as overseeing the release of the late Nick Sedgwick's book about the band, and in particular, the 1974 tour of The Dark Side of the Moon.

2022 saw him back on tour for This Is Not A Drill, originally due to start in 2020 but delayed due to Covid-19, with the stage presentation being "in the round". The powerful presentations, with the unique staging which sees Roger wandering around, addressing attendees on all sides of the arenas, thrilled audiences in many countries with more shows in 2023. One of the shows, in Prague, was broadcast live in cinemas and it would be great if that got a release too.

There's also been the release of the six-song album, The Lockdown Sessions, which gathered together new versions of Mother, Two Suns In The Sunset, Vera, The Gunner's Dream, The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range, and Comfortably Numb 2022. This was followed with Roger's Redux version of The Dark Side Of The Moon, and he presented that in a pair of shows at the legendary London Palladium. At those shows, he narrated extracts from his memoir, which should be published at some point hopefully soon, and also performed a longer version of The Bar which we hear is the subject of his next album.

We hope you have a great day, Roger. Many happy returns!