‘Radio KAOS’: The album Roger Waters said was “doomed to failure”
Despite their eventual disintegration and ongoing legal battles, Pink Floyd emerged as the great survivors of 1970s rock. While punk’s meteoric rise sounded the death knell for many progressive rock giants like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd forged ahead, unapologetically pursuing their own vision. They absorbed punk’s themes of alienation with the brooding Animals and released their most ambitious rock opera yet with 1979’s The Wall.
At their core, they were a jazz band in spirit, with lead vocalist and primary songwriter Roger Waters steering clear of the flamboyant clichés of their peers. Instead of indulgent, synth-heavy noodling, Waters delved into humanity’s inner darkness and emotional turmoil, crafting immersive mood pieces devoid of the pomposity often associated with the era’s prog-rock excesses.
By the time the 1980s arrived, the band’s unity was hanging by a thread. Waters had taken full control of the creative direction, with 1983’s The Final Cut effectively serving as a solo project. Keyboardist Richard Wright had quietly exited after The Wall tour, and amid the uncertainty surrounding the band’s future, Waters released The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking as a solo venture.
However, guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason, and a returning Wright pressed on under the Pink Floyd name without Waters, releasing A Momentary Lapse of Reason and embarking on a massively successful world tour. The “classic line-up” wouldn’t share the stage again until their unforgettable 2005 Live 8 performance—a moment many fans had long believed impossible.
Waters fought hard to legally stop his former bandmates from carrying on the Pink Floyd name and legacy to no avail, resulting in a press war of mutual snide bitchiness and mud-slinging; accusations of Waters as an egocentric monster unwilling to recognise the artistic contributions to Floyd’s acclaimed album run, and Gilmour a lazy and creatively bankrupt johnny-come-lately happy to capitalise off the hard work of others. Leaving Pink Floyd in 1985 amid bitterness and lifelong resentment, Waters poured his restless energy into a second solo album, which would yield the biggest live production of his career to date despite misgivings about its narrative arc.
Released in 1987, Radio KAOS captured the ruthless impact of market forces on industry and the mounting anxieties of the Cold War era. The album tells the story of Billy, a disabled Welshman with the extraordinary ability to naturally hear radio wave frequencies. After his brother Benny loses his mining job, the two head out for a night on the town. When Benny becomes enraged by a televised speech from Margaret Thatcher playing in a shop window, the narrative suggests that, in a fit of despair, he drops a concrete block onto traffic below, tragically killing a taxi driver.
Sent to prison and forced to relocate to Los Angeles, Billy eventually uses his superhuman radio skills to speak to the local radio station KAOS to tell his life story before hacking into the military and fooling the world that nuclear ICBMs are heading for every major city, an effort supposed to remind everyone of the value of family and community over corporate media.
While the clarity of its grand theme is lost on record, Radio KAOS‘ story was greatly illustrated by its extravagant live show. KAOS on the Road, playing North America and two dates at Wembley, stadium show architect Mark Fisher designed circular screens, quadrophonic sounds, and back projections for Waters’ nuclear extravaganza. Committed to the album’s conceptual theatre, popular FM rock radio DJ Jim Ladd, as featured on the record, provided live commentary and conversations with Billy, plus phone-ins Waters would answer on stage, precipitating U2’s subversive media tomfoolery on their 1990s Zoo TV reinvention.
“I accepted halfway through the record that as a narrative form, the album was doomed to failure. You just get a taste of the narrative. I made the decision to go with it anyway and allow the project to develop if it was going or stop if it was not,” Waters told Rolling Stone at the time. Stressing perceived credibility over easy commercial gain, Pink Floyd’s mammoth ticket sales weren’t lost on its former frontman.
“The connections one makes in quality make up for the ones you make in quantity,” he added. “In Indianapolis and San Diego, we had like 4000 people in 12,000-seat halls. And strangely enough, at those shows, I got a fantastic affirmation from the audience, that not only did they want to grasp some of this stuff, but that they actually do. And that helps me get over the moments, the knockers who sit at their typewriters and say, ‘This is all liberal airy-fairy bullshit.'”
Faced with the daunting task of ploughing ahead with new material off of a semi-established solo reputation makes Radio KAOS an impressive achievement, musically and theatrically, while Pink Floyd was resting on their laurels and producing the utterly unremarkable A Momentary Lapse of Reason, albeit supported by a knockout live show. Plagued with a woolly narrative and grossing a lot less than his nemesis rivals, Waters showed he was an artist full of ideas in a way the post-1985 Pink Floyd never did.
