“Against my better judgement”: the album Roger Waters thought he blundered
One lesson that every artist needs to learn is knowing when they screwed up. Even though it’s hard to receive criticism on something that you worked so hard on, it’s easy to fall into a holding pattern of boring music if everything that you get back from people is positive affirmation. Roger Waters was no stranger to albums that didn’t quite hit the mark, but he knew that one solo venture was a lot more overblown than what he heard in his head.
Granted, anything that Waters was going to do in his solo career had to be 100% his own vision. The whole point behind his leaving Pink Floyd was that he had found his calling in writing grander concepts, and it would never have worked if David Gilmour had insisted on tampering with the story that he wanted to tell.
Even though Waters did claim to be the heart of Pink Floyd, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking proved how wrong he was. There are a lot of good ideas on the records, but considering how mismatched some of the tunes and the scattershot storyline, it’s easy to see why the group chose to work on the concept for The Wall rather than this borderline theatrical piece.
But maybe that was the problem. The main issue people had with The Final Cut was how grandiose it was, and since Waters was entering a new decade, it was time for him to start working with new technology on Radio KAOS. Unfortunately, that also meant trading in one bad habit for a completely different one.
While the idea of listening to a disjointed radio show surrounding the tense political climate of the time may have worked on paper, hearing Waters lost in a sea of synthesisers does nothing to help his voice. Despite being the primary songwriter in Floyd, his voice benefited from sounding very raw, and hearing him smothered in electronic soundscapes is like watching Tom Waits try his hand at making a Kraftwerk album.
Then again, Waters had enough foresight to realise that he might have gone a bit too far into electronic territory, saying, “I think I may have blundered slightly on Radio KAOS by allowing myself to be persuaded to use more modern production methods – rather against my better judgement.”
In fact, both Waters and the rest of Floyd seemed to have the same problem around that time as well. While the songs on Radio KAOS and A Momentary Lapse of Reason are fine on their own, the material seems to work much better live than being doused in synthetic production, and God knows how much reverb on every single track.
Given the kind of material that he’s released now, though, is it possible to get this wise version of Waters back? He may have still been opinionated, but he might have had the foresight to say that working on a revised version of Dark Side of the Moon was a shit idea before it was released to the public.
