‘Amused to Death’: The album Roger Waters called his “masterpiece”
Anyone who has been thrown out of a band is normally going to have some trouble finding their feet again. The whole process behind working with a group is to have someone to work ideas off of, but the minute that everyone is left to their own devices, it’s like trying to create a song with one of your musical limbs missing. But even without David Gilmour by his side, Roger Waters was always convinced that he could still make fantastic music outside of Pink Floyd.
That was before he had to fight to use the Pink Floyd brand in the mid-1980s. No one really wanted to work with Warers again after the headache that was The Final Cut, but Waters claiming that he owned every piece of the band because he had a hand in writing all of the lyrics is still absolutely ridiculous. No matter how much he contributed to The Wall and Animals, this would have been the equivalent of Bernie Taupin winning a lawsuit for ownership of every one of Elton John’s songs.
Then again, it’s not like Waters didn’t have something left in the tank, but a lot of what he came out with afterwards proves why the rest of the band should be so missed. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is far from a poor record, but listening back to how thin everything sounds, the tracks are aching for some keyboard textures from Richard Wright or the occasional guitar lick from Gilmour.
That kind of problem would become a running theme throughout Waters’s discography. If we ignore the dramatic shift into delusion on Dark Side of the Moon Redux, a lot of his best records were dictated by the people that he had surrounding him, and even if Radio KAOS had a thin layer of 1980s sheen plastered all over it, Amused to Death gave him a godsend when Jeff Beck agreed to work on the record.
Outside of being one of the greatest living guitarists at the time, bringing that kind of musicality to tracks like ‘What God Wants’ is what makes the record work overall. The majority of Waters’s best material could be a bit of a heavy listen, so having Beck balanced everything out and even enhanced some of the best tunes on the record.
And despite having a shaky start at the beginning of his solo career, the former Pink Floyd frontman felt that he went far beyond anything that he had done before, saying, “I’m not sure I made all the right decisions making those records, but I don’t regret making them. And Amused to Death is, I think, a kind of classic masterpiece. I think it’s a really great record.”
Looking at the band’s post-Wall career, though, Amused to Death seems to occupy the same space as what Gilmour would do on The Division Bell. Neither of them is perfect from back to front, but they both show each member still having more to say outside of their strained relationships with the outside world and the disillusion of Syd Barrett.
So, while Waters does have more than a few moments in his catalogue that don’t hold up, Amused to Death is the greatest proof of concept for his status as a solo star. He may do a majority of Pink Floyd songs during many of his stadium shows, but he was never afraid to make something even more dramatic, and when it worked, it was enough to surpass some of his old band’s best material.
