The album Roger Waters thought equalled ‘Wish You Were Here’: “I’m incredibly proud”
Every rock band that’s been around for a while usually has a certain bubble where they can’t do anything wrong. The Beatles had the entire back half of their career as their high point, and even though Led Zeppelin’s tops out around Physical Graffiti, there were still a fair bit of highlights from the back half of their career as well. Roger Waters was slightly more lenient when heaping praise, but he knew that Amused to Death was enough to equal his best work with Pink Floyd.
When Waters first departed the band, it seemed like there was a good reason why both camps had split if you listened to both records. The Final Cut already had the stench of a Waters solo outing written all over it, and when people picked up The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, it just felt like all the drama from projects like The Wall, but with none of the musical punch to anchor everything down.
Meanwhile, it’s not like Floyd was firing on all cylinders, either. The David Gilmour guitar solos were still as emotional as ever and could make people cry, but when you hear some of the production on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, most people could point out the year it was made and what 1980s-style headband they were wearing when they heard it.
Although Radio KAOS at least put Waters on stable footing enough to put together the live version of The Wall in Berlin, Amused to Death is where the real version of Waters comes out again. Every album up until this point was about setting up a scene in the listener’s head, but hearing Waters make a concept around people finding death and war amusing on television rings true right through to today.
It also doesn’t hurt that Jeff Beck is on some of the best moments on the project, which is enough to put it on the same level as Gilmour’s traditional playing style. Considering how much people talked about Waters not having the music to back himself up, bringing in one of the greatest guitar players in the world may as well have been a fully erect middle finger pointed straight back at the critics.
Even years after its release, Waters thought that the album never got its due as one of his all-time classic projects, saying, “I’m incredibly proud of Amused to Death, which wasn’t enormously successful and didn’t get wide acceptance. If it had Pink Floyd’s name on it, it would be sitting alongside The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon. That’s part of the price I paid for leaving the band.”
While it’s hard to put an album like this on the same grand scale that gave us the greatest albums of all time, the conceptual side of the track at least makes a bit more sense, almost like watching everyday citizens turn into Pink from The Wall by slowly withering away watching television and numbing themselves to the pain.
This would also become a watershed moment for Waters, too, with only Is This The Life We Really Want reaching the same heights two decades later. No amount of goodwill could have possibly brought Pink Floyd back together, and while Waters is more interested in cannibalising his old work as of late, Amused to Death is still one of the most awe-inspiring solo outings a Floyd member ever made.
