The album Roger Waters said the world needed to hear: “A very important record”
Nothing that Roger Waters ever recorded was supposed to be a bunch of musical schlock.
He had gone through years of trying to figure out the kind of songwriter he was when he started leading Pink Floyd, and now that he had found his calling, his priority was about making the greatest rock and roll epics that he could. There needed to be some common link throughout every song on one of his albums, but he could also be more than a little bit cutthroat when he realised he had a masterpiece on his hands.
Then again, chances are no one was expecting an album like Dark Side of the Moon to do what it did. Had the rest of the band known the record would be one of the most iconic albums of all time, they would have probably still been working on it to this day, but Waters had a much different take on the record than the rest of his bandmates. He felt that it was the final hurrah for Floyd, and if he was going to keep making music, he needed to take complete control over what they were singing about.
Which probably explains why he gets so pissed off when he hears about what David Gilmour did with the band afterwards. There was no rule that said that Pink Floyd needed to make massive concepts and work exclusively in one lane, but when you listen to Waters’s solo work, you can definitely hear what he was going for compared to anything that turned up on A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking definitely got his solo career off to a shaky start, but Waters needed to learn the hard lessons before he became a legend on his own. Radio KAOS was another case of him working out the bugs of his sound, and when he finally had the right songs behind him, Amused to Death practically blew every single record he ever made out of the water.
And a lot of that is down to the band that he worked with. Most people had grown used to what the members of Pink Floyd could do together, but getting everyone from Don Henley to sing backup vocals to Jeff Beck to create some of the most beautiful textures of his career made for one of the best-sounding records Waters ever made. So if he had that much to work with, he was more than a little bit pissed when he saw that so many people were ignoring singles like ‘What God Wants’.
It wasn’t going to be easy to get a song with ‘God’ on the radio, but Waters felt it was a gross injustice to what he saw as his masterpiece, saying, “If you picked out 10 names of the most important people in post-war popular music, I’m one of them. This is a very important record. And Jeff Beck is playing guitar. He’s a living national treasure. Here is a very important record producer and a very important guitar player, and these assholes won’t play the record.”
Yeah, that doesn’t sound egotistical at all, Rog. Okay, so maybe he has more of an inflated ego of his own work, but Amused to Death is one of the few times that he was actually right. Working with Pat Leonard really helped offset a lot of the work he was doing, and with Beck’s guitar, this could easily stand alongside some of the best records he ever made as a member of Floyd.
Sure, the rest of the world may have been more focused on the Pink Floyd brand at the time, but that wasn’t what mattered to Waters. All that he was focused on was making a great record, and he didn’t want to spend his life watching the rest of the world ignoring songs that they needed to hear.
