The 1987 tour that made Roger Waters fall out of love with performing: “A real struggle”
The entire fallout between Roger Waters and Pink Floyd was like watching one of the biggest divorces in rock and roll history.
Waters knew that it was time to move on, but even if he knew that he needed to break free from the band, his mentality of not letting anyone else use the name of the band did seem a little bit too domineering for someone who wrote the lyrics to many of their greatest songs. Everyone else was contributing just as much on all of their classics, and it only took a few years before he started to realise that he might not have thought every part of his departure through.
For one thing, Waters never seemed to be the one who had to be the leader of the band. Syd Barrett had been the de facto leader of the group before he left, and when looking through a lot of the best records from their classic period, a lot of their finest moments are when all of them are working in conjunction with each other. ‘Echoes’ benefits from every member playing together on their tunes, but Waters knew that he needed a bit more recognition if the band was truly going to go on.
In his mind, the entire band belonged to him, but when he lost that lawsuit, he wasn’t about to roll over and pout about it. He knew that he had a lot more to offer as a solo artist, and The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was at least an extension of what he had already been doing. This was the concept that he had had in mind alongside The Wall, and with Eric Clapton guesting on guitar throughout the record, it should have been a home run, right?
Not quite. While David Gilmour was having his own issues keeping the band afloat during A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Waters got a rude awakening when he set out to tour and realised that there weren’t that many people turning up at their gigs. Floyd had always been a faceless band to some degree, so when one of them decided to go off on their own, it’s not like everyone was eager to see what he sounded like as a solo artist.
And while Radio KAOS was at least a way for Waters to get into modern soundscapes, not all of them actually worked. Using a lot of electronic elements worked serviceably well to tell the story of someone who’s talking through a radio speaker, but even with the different theatrical elements, Waters didn’t truly figure out what he wanted to be until he ended up making Amused to Death in the 1990s.
But by that point, Waters was quick to say that Radio KAOS virtually killed all of his desires to ever tour again, saying, “I toured Video Chaos in ’87. At that point I stopped in the face of a lack of demand. People didn’t come. Well, they did; I could play in New York, LA or London, but apart from that it was a real struggle. Because the other guys were touring as Pink Floyd, it became too difficult for me and I didn’t want to do it. I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall, and it was uncomfortable, so I stopped doing it.”
Which is really a shame, considering that Amused to Death is one of the few Waters albums that would really benefit from a gargantuan stage show. The concept wasn’t as thorough as what everyone had heard on The Wall, but the idea of someone getting more and more desensitised to the modern world by watching war on TV would have been perfect for a Big Brother-esque stage setup.
It would take a few more years and some help from people like Don Henley for Waters to realise what he gave up, but he wasn’t in a big hurry to commit to the touring lifestyle all over again, either. He was perfectly happy making his own masterpieces, and while it stung to see his former bandmates playing arenas, it had been his choice, and he had to leave the band that he made for himself.
