“They were fucking awful”: Why Roger Waters blamed Billy Idol Patti LaBelle and Phil Collins for ruining ‘Tommy’
There’s a certain magic that comes with making a classic album. No one really knows that they are making their crowning achievement when they walk into the studio, but once the public embraces it and starts looking at something as a modern classic, that’s something that artists should want to preserve. But all music is supposed to be an ever-growing thing, and while Roger Waters has tried to twist his music in different shapes, he knew many people could easily ruin their best moments as well.
Granted, Waters isn’t safe from a little self-mutilation when it comes to his greatest records. Dark Side of the Moon Redux is still one of the biggest question marks in his discography, and even with some of the cornerstone members of Pink Floyd working on it, hearing him talk-sing his way through ‘Money’ or try to replay some of Richard Wright’s best keyboard lines still feels like musical sacrilege.
Looking at what Waters has done in the past, though, taking something out of the can and playing with it again was never off the table. He had already left the band with the rights to perform The Wall in any way that he saw fit, and when working on putting together the massive show in Berlin in tribute to the Berlin Wall coming down, many new faces went over surprisingly well.
No one would have considered the first person to sing ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ to be Cyndi Lauper or Van Morrison to take a swing at ‘Comfortably Numb,’ but each of them managed to pull it off a lot better than many would have expected. Then again, this is theatre, and the concept of a rock opera was supposed to be carried on by other rock artists ever since the days of Pete Townshend.
While Townshend isn’t responsible for making the first concept album, Tommy was the first of its kind to have a fully-fledged story behind every act. The Beatles may have flirted with the idea of an imaginary band during the days of Sgt Pepper, but hearing the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy carried out throughout the space of one record was the kind of masterstroke that no one saw coming.
And despite the movie also garnering great reviews for Tina Turner playing ‘The Acid Queen’ and Jack Nicholson pulling off the role of The Doctor, seeing The Who bring out more guests for a stage production of it in 1989 was absolute rubbish for Waters, saying, “I thought Tommy was reduced dramatically by the inclusion of Billy Idol and Patti LaBelle and Phil Collins. I find the ubiquitous nature of Phil Collins’s presence in my life irritating anyway – but having said that, the kid is a child actor, and he was very good. But Billy Idol and Patti LaBelle were an absolute nightmare. They were fucking awful.”
At the same time, the band seemed to be placed in the right kind of format to pull off this kind of production. The thought of living cartoon character Billy Idol doing the rock and roll equivalent of a Broadway show does make a bit more sense, whereas Waters’s choice of Bryan Adams to perform ‘Young Lust’ in his masterpiece is still one of the oddest musical substitutions in rock history.
Even if some of them didn’t do justice to the version of Tommy Waters had in his head, it’s easy to respect where Townshend was coming from. Every rock opera has to be somewhat elastic for everything to work, and with a new cast of characters to put around the band, the story manages to stay evergreen depending on who is singing it.
