By Keith Leslie

TORONTO (CP) _ For Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, getting together with his former bandmates after more than 20 years for London's Live 8 concert was a lot of fun, but don't expect to see a reunited band tour or release another album.

"What's not fun about being adored?" Waters chuckled during a telephone interview from London with The Canadian Press.

"It's a terrific feeling, and it was great to be up on stage with Dave and Nick and Rick again as well."

That's guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright, the band members Waters once sued in a failed attempt to stop them from using the Pink Floyd name after he quit and launched a solo career in the mid-1980s.

The bitter acrimony from that split, especially between Waters and Gilmour, was set aside - at least temporarily - when the group finally agreed to reunite for the Live 8 concert in London.

"It was good to mend some of those bridges, and accept that although we had our differences in the past, and probably will have differences in the future... there is always room for rapprochement to see the other guy's point of view," he said.

"I think it's very important that anybody who's given that opportunity seizes it."

Waters said he was the one who had to call Gilmour to get the band to play at Live 8 after the lead guitarist refused repeated pleas from organizer Sir Bob Geldof to reunite Pink Floyd for the concerts, held in cities around the world, including Barrie, Ont., to raise awareness about the campaign to end poverty.

"I called Dave, who was rather surprised when his phone rang and it was me, as we hadn't spoken," recalled the bass player, who sang and wrote many of Pink Floyd's biggest hits, including most of the music on The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.

"We had a perfectly cordial conversation, and he told me why he didn't want to do it, he was feeling a bit rusty. I said, come on Dave it'll be easy, it's only a couple of songs. It'll be fun. And 24 hours later, he called back and said 'all right, I'll do it.'"

Waters is following the hugely successful Pink Floyd reunion, by all accounts the standout performance of all the Live 8 shows, by going in a completely different direction with his new album, Ca Ira, a two-CD opera based on the French Revolution.

The new record, which will be in stores Sept. 27, will debut in a concert performance in Rome on Nov. 17, and Waters hopes to also perform it in North America if financing can be arranged.

"We need an eccentric billionaire before we can think about a production," he said.

Waters believes the themes from the opera - and from the revolution itself - ideals about hope and people's capacity for change, are relevant today, especially with the new focus on eliminating global poverty.

"I feel that we're very much at a watershed now," he said.

"We're beginning to actually openly discuss the enormous problems that are created by the disparity between those very few of us who represent all the wealth in the world and the huge majority of people who have absolutely nothing."

Even though it's been 13 years since the release of his last studio album, Amused to Death, Waters said he has continued to write rock songs and has two possible albums in the works, although he doesn't plan to record or tour again with Pink Floyd.

"I think that's very, very, very unlikely," he said.

"I can see us playing together again, but I think it would be some other event like that (Live 8) where we do a few songs or maybe even more than a few songs, but no, I don't think the tour's going to happen."

As for the long break between new records, the 61-year-old Waters admitted he'd been gone a long time, but said he went through a divorce, found a new love, moved from England to New York and enjoyed spending time with friends and family.

"I really like to fly fish (and) I like to play golf as well," he said. "There's more to life than rock 'n' roll."

Interview presented here for archiving purposes only; not all sites retain all their content for future reference.