“I’m dropping that”: The one song Roger Waters said was too hard to play live
Every artist tends to have those one or two songs that absolutely defeat them whenever they play live. As much as they might like the idea of translating their tunes to a live audience, there are moments where they either aren’t in the best shape to deliver it or have to sacrifice certain pieces of the music to make it sound passable in those huge arenas. And while Roger Waters was more than happy to play to the stadium-rock audience after The Wall, not everything he made was meant to be treated like an epic the same way ‘Dogs’ or ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ was back in the day.
When listening to Waters’s solo career, though, it’s hard to think of him separating many of the songs from the albums they were a part of. Every one of his solo pieces is meant to tell a story from back to front, and even if albums like Radio KAOS have sounded incredibly dated by today’s standards, you couldn’t fault him for wanting to make a legitimate point between the layers of synthesisers.
Despite having a few upstarts, though, Amused to Death was the first time he managed to get his musical swagger back. The live performance of The Wall in Berlin put him back in people’s minds again, but this was the kind of record that most people had been aching to hear from him since the early 1980s. He was back to social commentary, and he had a few friends in tow to help tell the story.
Even if Eric Clapton’s licks were great on The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, getting Jeff Beck to play the solo parts on tunes like ‘Watching TV’ were a massive shot in the arm. He’s not exactly using the same amount of dramatic bends that we were used to from David Gilmour, but it’s nice to see a glimpse into an alternate dimension where he actually agreed to join Pink Floyd when they asked him back in the day.
Of all the songs on the record, though, getting multi-part suites down to a science would always be a bit of a gamble. After all, Floyd had always done pieces of ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’ rather than the entire epic after Waters left, and when looking at all three parts of ‘What God Wants’, Waters felt that it was a waste of energy trying to get all of the best pieces together for the live show.
It may have been one of the best tunes from the record, but how to get every part of it together would be a logistical nightmare for the frontman, claiming, “I thought the stuff from Amused to Death worked great apart from ‘What God Wants’, which was always hard work every night. It seemed like hard work to me the theatre of the piece was difficult to get across so I’m probably dropping that, I don’t know.”
Looking at its place in the album, it doesn’t seem like the hardest thing in the world, but given how many pieces of it are split up throughout its runtime, how the hell would anyone be able to keep up with it? It’s one thing to use fading transitions on the album, but when the guitar has to come to a complete stop for the vocals to come back in, it’s usually a good idea to throw in a song like ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ instead.
But that shouldn’t discount Waters’s ability to play some brilliant stuff on the live stage. He was always trying out different moves whenever he got in front of a microphone, and while not all of them worked, it’s a testament to his writing style that he built up a song too good to leave the studio.
