The peculiar moment Roger Waters said his first solo album stood up for the porn industry
Through his solo work and classic output with Pink Floyd, Roger Waters has always spiked his material with a dissenting belligerence to the politics or mores of the day.
Weighty topics find themselves in the target of his lyrical shooter. War, capitalism, the British school system, the music industry, and the general dark side of the human condition have all been tackled by the former Pink Floyd bassist and creative captain before his official split in 1985.
While such themes were explored in more cosmic terrain as befitting their space rock scores, as the years rolled on, a lean toward rock opera concepts began to fuel a penchant for explicit narratives shaping Waters’ ambitious visions by the 1970s’ close.
As early as 1978, Waters had sketched out a story and accompanying demos for The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking, an exploration of a man’s midlife crisis as he takes a surreal road trip through California in real time, commits adultery with a hitchhiker before trying to make amends with his wife, finally wandering into the wilderness of solitude with a sober clarity on his isolation. It’s all a dream, however, waking up at 5:11am to his real wife and a newfound perspective on his life.
The rest of Pink Floyd pushed for Waters’ other concept, The Wall project greenlit and eventually standing as their last classic record in 1979. While band relationships would deteriorate around the career heights of their double-album opus, Waters eventually released The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking as his first official solo record in 1984, departing his pioneering progressive rock band the following year. While garnering much attention due to the album being Waters’ first without his former bandmates, some controversy was raised regarding the front cover, depicting the rear-view nude of softcore porn actress Linzi Drew, designed by The Wall cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe.
“That was really about the album cover, which showed a naked woman with a nice bum,” Waters confessed to Mojo in 2003, reflecting on the feminist backlash against the racy artwork. “It wasn’t about the album, which, if they’d listened, they’d have realised wasn’t offensive. It was an album about a night of erotic dreams, but nothing violent or unpleasant.”
He added, “I find extremists irritating, particularly in the sexual arena. I support the universal franchise, equal pay for women, all of those things, but I don’t want bigots interfering in our sex lives. I don’t favour exploitation of anybody, in the porn industry or anywhere else, but all that Women Against Porn stuff is nonsense. There is a visual element in our sexual make-up, and people will always make use of visual material when they masturbate.”
It’s the line between erotic positivity and exploitation that will always clash with friction. Ever since murals of sexual activity adorned the pots and crockery of antiquity, humans have delighted in the female form in all kinds of amorous illustrations. Yet, as the later porn industry indeed was instrumental in taking such a healthy embrace of sexuality toward an objectifying turn, the moral crusaders attacking such vice found whatever good faith usurped by religious dogmatists and prurient busybodies, a tension Waters attacked with seethe on Animals’ ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’.
Censorship would win in the end, later issues of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking seeing Columbia Records slapping a black box over Drew’s behind in light of the furore.
