‘Amused to Death’: The one album Roger Waters got all wrong
Despite being considered a legend within the psychedelic rock genre, Jimi Hendrix was never a big fan of this style when it first came about.
“Here’s one thing I hate, man,” he said when clarifying his disdain towards the sound. “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.”
Hendrix mentioned Pink Floyd specifically when talking about why he didn’t like psychedelic music, saying that while they might put on a good stage show, their songs lacked depth, saying, “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights, but they don’t sound like nothing.”
While this might seem like a harsh assessment, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters would likely agree – he’s never shied away from talking about which of his albums he likes and dislikes, and the majority of Pink Floyd albums he despises either stem from the very beginning or the very end of their time as a band: the end, because that’s when he left, the beginning, because that’s when they had no direction.
When discussing records like Piper At The Gates of Dawn (the kind of albums which Hendrix was around to hear), Waters agrees that the band didn’t really sound like anything. They pushed the boat out sonically, trying new things with music, and not worrying about being too experimental with their sound. That’s all good in theory, but in those early days when psychedelic music was still finding form, that experimentation didn’t have any logic behind it, and it meant albums didn’t really develop any shape.
It took Waters some time to really work out what kind of music he wanted to make and what style he was happiest putting his name to. You can hear it most effectively in Pink Floyd’s complex and layered concept albums, such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, as that experimentation is still there, but it has a lot more direction, as the LPs the band was working on had structure and a storyline to follow.
When Pink Floyd eventually disbanded, Waters took these ideas into his solo career, as the albums he went on to make continued to push the boundaries of psychedelia, but also kept that ambition somewhat contained within a structure. His 1992 album Amused to Death is a good example of this, as while playing with a new sound system and giving his music an otherworldly spacious feel, he also gave this large sound some stability by attaching a loose concept to it.
Ever the innovator, Roger Waters mixed this entire album with QSound, which means when you listen to it, the music is much more spacious than you might hear on other records. That being said, he didn’t just want the album to be about him, seeing what random sounds he could heighten with this new mixing technique, and so to add a bit of stability to the chaos, he attached a concept throughout, which centred around the idea of an ape with a TV remote flicking through different channels.
Waters was convinced that people were going to love this record. “My fans, the ones who know me, the odd ones who occasionally recognise me in a restaurant and come up, who are kind of, I’m happy to say, quite passionate about what I do, will love this record,” he said. “They will lock themselves away and play it, play it, play it and play it. And it will not disappoint them, and that makes me feel very good… That makes me feel very good, and I’m glad about that.”
He wasn’t necessarily wrong, as fans did enjoy the album, but it’s not revered as one of his very best. It falls by the wayside slightly, as when we ponder over what Waters’ best records are, people are very slow to mention Amused to Death. Critically, it received some fairly negative press at the time of release as well, as people felt like Waters had been too self-obsessed when making the record and, in turn, put out an album that was out of touch. It just shows, even when you’ve got a new sense of direction, as Waters had, you still can’t guarantee it’s going to work out.
