‘In the Flesh’: the “really stupid” song Roger Waters wrote to mock stadium rock
Stadium rock is, by its very definition, popular. After all, bands like Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Journey have attracted thousands of fans to their stadium shows for decades, charging them a pretty penny in the process. However, just because something is popular doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good – and a lot of people would argue that “stadium rock” is actually the death of art and should be branded “corporate rock” instead. One person who definitely subscribes to this theory is Roger Waters, who actually wrote a Pink Floyd song specifically to mock stadium rock – and then lost his mind when the band played it in stadiums in front of legions of fans.
Throughout 1977, Pink Floyd toured in support of their album Animals, playing in the biggest venues the band had experienced up to that point. Instead of being happy that their music was reaching so many fans, though, Waters began to resent the arenas they were playing in – and the people who were attending the shows. He became convinced most of them weren’t really there to listen to the music. Instead, they had come to get drunk, be rowdy, and even set off fireworks in the middle of the show. It all came to a head one fateful night at the Montreal Olympic Stadium.
During this particular gig, Waters became so enraged by a group of fans near the stage that he actually spat on one of them. Naturally, this didn’t go over well, and Waters admitted, “Immediately afterwards, I was shocked by my behaviour.” However, while he might have been disappointed in himself for reacting, his beef with the overblown, capitalistic nature of playing stadiums to hordes of fans who just want to party still pissed him off. “I realised that what had once been a worthwhile and manageable exchange between us (the band) and them (the audience),” Waters mused, “had been utterly perverted by scale, corporate avarice and ego.”
A despondent Waters subsequently spoke to a psychiatrist and revealed he sometimes thought he’d love to erect a wall between the band and the fans – and this gave him the germ of the idea for The Wall. With this concept record, he could pour all his hatred of stadium rock into one song.
As he told Q magazine in 1992, “Rock ‘n’ roll in stadiums is genuinely awful. These concerts are just like Tupperware parties – held in honour of the Great God Tupper – with 50,000 people. Only they don’t buy Tupperware; they buy hot dogs and T-shirts and occasionally look up to watch those disgusting video screens that are all out of sync and make you feel sick and torture you.”
To fully express his hatred of the “Great God Tupper” in the form of the perfect satirical tune, Waters just needed to come up with an appropriately mindless riff that would get the masses moving without them even thinking about it. “We needed a beginning, so I went into a room with a bass guitar and went, ‘I need something that’s really stupid-sounding,'” Waters told Rolling Stone in 2010. “Really loud, monolithic, dumb.”
Waters emerged with the riff for ‘In the Flesh’ and felt it perfectly encapsulated what he was aiming for. However, to his chagrin, after he left Pink Floyd under a cloud of acrimony in the mid-1980s, the rest of the band reunited and began happily playing the song in front of arena after arena.
He admitted, “It made me very, very gloomy,” and raged, “How can they find it within themselves to go on stage and do my songs – songs from The Wall? I wrote The Wall as an attack on stadium rock – and there’s ‘Pink Floyd’ making money out of it by playing it in stadiums!”
