The greatest song that Roger Waters ever ruined: “One of the best”
Roger Waters tended to have a much bigger idea for every single song he ever wrote.
Pink Floyd had been lost in the woods for their entire career before Waters hit upon ‘Echoes’, and when he found out what lyrics could mean to people, he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to tell the stories that he felt needed to be shared with the world. And while Floyd wasn’t going to be the best outlet for him to work in after a while, there were a few moments where his solo career wasn’t exactly the best option, either.
Granted, the beginning of his solo work was always going to be a bit of a gamble. The idea of the rest of his mates continuing the Floyd without him had to hurt a little bit, but aside from him losing his battle in court, it was probably a wake-up call going on that first tour and realising how many people preferred David Gilmour and Co Floyd were a faceless band for the most part, so if they were getting everyone to come based on their strange visuals, what good was seeing the ex-bassist of the band playing in a theatre?
Waters at least knew that things weren’t going great, but if The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was a little too cerebral, Radio KAOS was at least his attempt to become a bit more hip with the times. It may have just ended up sounding like one of the more dated electronic rock records ever made, but that didn’t mean that the concept wasn’t at least a little bit compelling for what it was.
Half of Floyd’s concepts at the time had dealt with Waters’s issues with war and the loss of his father, so having a song that was all about the struggling conflicts half a world away through radio waves did have a decent chance at getting huge. This was the era of the Cold War, so he definitely had his finger on the pulse of what was going on, but he did feel like he was pretty much clocked out by the time that he reached songs like ‘Home’.
Which was a shame, because Waters himself felt that the song got ruined by all the production that he put over top of it, saying, “I allowed myself to get pushed down roads that were uncomfortable for me. I love some of the songs – ‘Home’ is one of the best things I’ve ever written. And it comes out icky-prissy, because it’s sequenced. I remember the producer saying one day, ‘Oh no- that sounds old-fashioned,’ and alarm bells went off in my head.”
Then again, the rest of Floyd weren’t doing any better. Both of them had their strengths throughout the 1980s, but when listening to both Radio KAOS and A Momentary Lapse of Reason, it was clear that both parties wanted to be ahead of the curve but also had no idea what they were doing. That said, Waters did at least get somewhat of a second wind when he resurrected some of those songs for the live show.
Bringing in any new material for his reincarnation of The Wall in 1990 would have been a massive gamble, but ‘The Tide is Turning’ is actually a decent way to bring the show to a close. Waters had always complained about how the original album didn’t have a proper ending in his opinion, so this was his way of getting something that was a little bit more final than Pink making an eventual loop back to the beginning of the record.
Radio KAOS is far from terrible in many respects, but when looking through Waters’s greatest works, this is the one time where he seemed to shoot himself in the foot. He was a bit too eager to work with new technology, and this was one of the first times he was actively letting his experimentation get in the way of songs that could have actually been great.
