“It makes my blood boil!”: The song Roger Waters thought the mainstream overlooked
It’s hard to tell the exact point where Roger Waters made his full descent into being a miserable moaner who was incapable of feeling any positive emotions about his own career or others, but since his departure from Pink Floyd in the early 1980s, the bassist and songwriter has certainly committed himself to a lifetime of criticism and complaining. On occasion, he’s been well within his rights to feel aggrieved about the state of the world or the music industry, but on many other occasions, you can’t help but feel like he’s just being a contrarian for the sheer sake of it.
After the release of Pink Floyd’s ambitious concept album The Wall in 1979, Waters became increasingly disenchanted with working alongside his bandmates, and after the release of The Final Cut in 1983, he took it upon himself to depart the band and focus entirely on his own solo output. While he would release two albums under his own name in the 1980s, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and Radio KAOS, this significant change in his career was tricky for him to navigate, and he faced the frustration of having to rebuild his status throughout this period.
Unsurprisingly, the loss of such an important figure from the band’s lineup dramatically affected the output of Pink Floyd after The Final Cut, and the final two albums they released prior to their first separation, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell, weren’t as well-received as the work they had produced while Waters was still in the band. As the principal songwriter for the group, Waters’ departure placed the onus on David Gilmour and Richard Wright to become the dominant songwriting forces in the band, and it was clear that the group was sorely missing Waters’ input.
At the same time, Waters missed the contributions of his bandmates on his solo releases, and his own work suffered from having the talents of Gilmour, Wright and Nick Mason present to embellish his songs with small strokes of genius. Pink Floyd lacked potency without Waters, but Waters was equally a spent creative force without the backing of Pink Floyd. Had both parties managed to set aside their differences and continue as a unified force, then perhaps their respective fortunes would have been considerably more positive, and Waters might not have so many things to whinge about.
However, in 1992, Waters was on the third solo album of his career, and by this point, his animosity towards the wider music industry and his former bandmates was beginning to reach the extreme. The release of Amused to Death was preceded by the single, ‘What God Wants’; a track that was split into three parts over the course of the album that covers a total of 14 minutes. This expansive approach to songwriting wasn’t alien to Waters, having often stretched songs over multiple movements during his time with Pink Floyd, and during those years, he never seemed to complain much about this preventing him from getting airplay.
By 1992, his perspective had changed entirely, and he began to lash out at the major radio stations for not giving him the attention he felt he deserved. In a particularly heated interview with Q Magazine in support of the album’s release, he went on a sweary tirade aimed at the BBC’s flagship station, Radio 1, for their lack of interest in playing ‘What God Wants’, even in its abridged form. “Radio 1 won’t play my fucking single because they know it’s no good,” Waters complained. “They know it’s not as good as Erasure or Janet fucking Jackson. They know that the British public shouldn’t be listening to it. It makes my blood boil! If you’re not 17 with a baseball hat on back to front, they don’t want to know.”
While he was seemingly disgusted at the disrespect that he had received from the broadcaster, his reasons were entirely misguided, and there was no need to drag other popular acts of the period into his outburst nor the listening habits of the younger generation. If he really cared so much about getting radio play, then it might have been worth his while trimming down the self-indulgent epics he was known for producing and instead pandering to what the radio stations wanted at the time. That, or a little bit of self-awareness, would’ve prevented him from lashing out in such fashion and might have steered him towards the airplay he desired so much.
