The solo album Roger Waters was never a fan of: “I went a bit modern”
Every single record Roger Waters ever wrote focused on the bigger picture.
None of his songs was cut out to be singles when he started writing for Pink Floyd, but that didn’t matter when they were an album band focusing on taking their listeners on a journey. It was much more about making songs that complemented each other and told the story that he wanted them to, but there were bound to be a few more tunes throughout his career that ended up falling well short of what he wanted them to be.
But a lot of what made Waters’s songs sound so great came from the interaction between him and his bandmates. As much as he felt disillusioned with the band after Dark Side of the Moon, the only reasons why albums like Wish You Were Here and Animals work the way they do is because of how much everyone is listening to each other whenever they begin working off of each other.
Hence why The Wall ends up sounding so different from every other Pink Floyd record. It’s not a bad record by any means, but when you think about all of the background bickering and the fact that Richard Wright got fired halfway through the production, it’s not like it was going to sound like a united effort when it was finished. This was still Waters’s vision, and he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his career being tied down to compromising whenever he had a new idea for a song.
But he might not have realised what he got himself into when he started aiming for a solo career. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking does have a decent narrative behind it, but since he was trying so hard to match what he had done with The Wall, it wasn’t necessarily going to work without the rest of his bandmates, even if he did manage to wrangle Eric Clapton to play a handful of leads on the record.
Amused to Death might have been the first time where the guest stars contributed the best to his work, but in between his debut and his masterpiece is Radio KAOS, which might be the most dated thing that a member of Floyd has been associated with. There were already a lot of strange 1980s soundscapes across A Momentary Lapse of Reason, but putting his songs through the synthesiser treatment throughout an entire record wasn’t exactly going to bode well over time.
Waters clearly wasn’t a synth expert, and while he did stand by it, he felt that a lot of Radio KAOS didn’t deserve to be remembered, saying, “Radio KAOS was a linear narrative and I went a bit modern there. I don’t think Radio KAOS is one of my best paintings, so I don’t think there’s any connection there [with my debut]. However the preoccupations are all the same. In all of them, I’m interested in the core of the individual being and his or her freedom.”
And it’s not like Radio KAOS was that strange of a concept for him to take on, either. A lot of prog bands tried their hand at going robotic throughout their career, and even if not all of them were successful, Waters didn’t go so far as to give up on his old sound entirely when making his records. The album isn’t great, but it could have been the kind of cringey synthfest that ‘Mr Roboto’ turned into, so we should really be counting the blessings that we have.
The record still isn’t one of Waters’s finest works, but given the many avenues that he went down in the future, Radio KAOS seems just fine in retrospect. We happen to live in the timeline where he thought it was a good idea to redo Dark Side of the Moon, so having a handful of songs that didn’t seem to work back in the 1980s feels more like a strange curiosity these days.
