Waters (centre right) with Pink Floyd in the 1960s. The album was recorded in Los Angeles, with Godrich "and some friends of his – whose names I don't remember", Waters told Billboard magazine, adding "it's nice to work with somebody else's vision for a change. Normally it tends to just be me-me-me-me-me." Anyone hoping for a Pink Floyd reunion should check their expectations here. Lyrically, Is This the Life We Really Want? could be a sequel to Animals, Pink Floyd's 1977 concept album based on George Orwell's Animal Farm. It is vehemently anti-war and anti-capitalist, a handful of sand thrown in the gears of the "insensitive, mechanistic, inhuman juggernaut that is inexorably rolling its caterpillar treads over the lives of the human beings who we might love", as Waters puts it. "Fear keeps us all in line, fear of all those foreigners, fear of all their crimes," he sings, on the title track. Broken Bones ends on a refrain: "F--- you, we will not listen to your bullshit and lies." "My obsessions have never really changed," Waters says. He is still mourning the father he never knew, killed at the battle of Anzio in World War II. Still defying the schoolteachers who beat him for insubordination. The cane they used is on display at the Pink Floyd retrospective that opened last weekend at London's Victoria & Albert museum.

Roger Waters (left) with Nick Mason, Syd Barrett and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd in 1967. Credit:AP Photo "I am really concerned about World War III," he says. "Everybody is lying about everything as hard as they can. That's one of the things that really frightens me: the normalisation of the telling of untruths wittingly. Politicians now wittingly make up whatever lie suits their purpose. "Having said that, I do believe that there is a river of love and truth running through societies all over this planet … Many people do not believe that it's necessary to live in a state of permanent war … There is a resistance, and I like to think that I'm part of it." Until he met Godrich, Waters was writing a radio play, Lay Down Jerusalem, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The producer's first job was to convince him to abandon that idea and focus on making a rock record. "I think it's a great collaboration," Waters says. It soon becomes apparent that another man was almost as essential to the album: the new President of the United States, Donald Trump. Trump is the perfect foil for Waters: a cartoonish, malevolent figure elected on a promise to literally build a wall to keep people out. "This is the guy who told them all he was going to do was save their jobs and Make America Great Again, and he's backed his pantechnicon up to the national vault and is stealing money from the electorate as fast as he can," Waters says, warming to a theme that will consume the rest of the interview.

"Is this what you really want? To allow this f---ing buffoon to steal from you?" When he's not touring, or at his English country estate, Waters lives in New York. As a US taxpayer, firmly in the top 1 per cent, he is about to get a huge tax cut, passed for plutocrats by plutocrats. "You just have to sit back and laugh," he says. Rumour has it Trump attended a performance of The Wall at Madison Square Garden in 2010, but left halfway through, meaning he saw the wall being built, and Waters spraying blanks from a Schmeisser machine gun, dressed in Nazi regalia, but did not stick around to see it torn down. "Somebody told me one of his awful sons came multiple times to see The Wall," Waters says. "I can only assume that they thought the fascist ranting was real. They didn't realise it was satire." Last October, Waters performed a free concert in Mexico City's Zocalo square. During Pigs, a track from Animals – "big man, pig man, ha, ha, charade you are" – Trump's image was projected on the giant screens. As the song ended, his face was replaced by a banner reading: "TRUMP ERES UN PENDEJO", calling him an idiot, an arsehole, or a bit of both. "We won't call him pendejo in Kansas City," says Waters. So what's the right thing to call him, then? "Well, c---, but you can't do that because it's different in America ... It's gendered and considered misogynistic. I am now sticking with something that's on the face of it very soft, which is a nincompoop. There's something about the fact that it's a derivation from non compos mentis – not of sound mind … I do think he is not of sound mind." The Us + Them world tour kicks off in Kansas City on May 26. The last time Waters went out on the road, performing The Wall, the trip lasted three years, becoming the most lucrative tour ever by a solo artist. He expects to be unpacking his latest box of tricks in arenas for at least two years, by which time he will be 75 years old.

This in itself is reason to doubt that Pink Floyd will ever play together again. At the opening of the V&A exhibition, Waters and Mason teasingly suggested they have always wanted to headline the Glastonbury Festival, but keyboardist Rick Wright is dead, and guitarist David Gilmour apparently wants no part of it. "Roger and I have outgrown each other, and it would be impossible for us to work together on any realistic basis," he said in 2015. When Pink Floyd split up in the mid-1980s, Waters unsuccessfully sued his bandmates in a bid to prevent them carrying on without him, a decision he now says he regrets. These days, he and Gilmour offer competing interpretations of Floyd's back catalogue. At London's Royal Albert Hall last September, Gilmour played Wish You Were Here, Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Money, Comfortably Numb and The Great Gig in the Sky. Two weeks later at Desert Trip, a festival for Baby Boomers in California, Waters performed them all too. For a backdrop, he chose four giant columns representing Battersea Power Station, riffing on the cover of Animals, with its giant inflatable pig that famously loosed its moorings during the photo shoot and floated away, briefly shutting down Heathrow Airport. "I'm using Battersea as a symbol of malevolence, which I hadn't really thought of before Desert Trip, but I like it, because it is a power station and it does make smoke and it is kind of ominous looking, so it becomes an armaments factory and torture chamber and all the negative aspects of the way we organise our lives …" The Sony executive reappears and indicates that time's up, but Waters has reached a gallop, and will not be reined in. "… so that the people who wake up in the morning wanting to be richer can accumulate more and more and more power and possessions at the expense of everybody else … and people who live in this country stand for it and vote for it and applaud it, and believe all the propaganda guff that they're fed about how exceptional it all is …"

And Roger Waters, who f---ing hates interviews, is dragged from the room, grasping hands as he leaves, telling us he wishes he could stay and talk. Is This the Life We Really Want? is out on June 2.