“That connection”: The unofficial trilogy of Roger Waters albums
Throughout every facet of his career, Roger Waters was always looking at the big picture. Moving on from Syd Barrett was not going to be easy, so it was almost necessary for him to take charge once Pink Floyd started to spiral out of control in the late 1960s. Being the leader also left a lot of room for him to play with different kinds of sounds, too, and when looking at his records, it’s easy to connect some of his stories under one umbrella.
But understanding Waters’s state of mind also means getting into some serious subject matter. A lot of what the band did before he wrote lyrics was a lot more fanciful to tie into Barrett’s writing style, but as soon as the band started working on ‘Echoes’, something felt different. Waters had finally found out how to work empathy into his music, and the next few years would see him expand even further on that idea.
Granted, it’s easy to see the run from Dark Side of the Moon all the way to The Wall as the key moments in Waters’s musical journey. He had found a way to be productive with his bandmates while making bold criticisms of the evil forces in the world, and when he finally made his rock opera, he seemed to fulfil everything that he set out to do, even if that meant that the rest of the band carried on without him.
If any album should have been connected in with the story of The Wall, though, it should have been Waters’s first solo album, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking. After all, he had presented that idea as a concept for a rock opera along with The Wall, so it’s easy to see them as companion pieces, with one detailing someone’s mental collapse and the other dealing with someone’s life on the road without his other half by his side.
Despite Waters having a clear vision for most of his albums, a lot of his solo material was kneecapped by poor production. Eric Clapton’s guitar licks were great, but they couldn’t match the dry tracks, and even if Radio KAOS coated its tracks in 1980s synthesisers, that only managed to date the album over time. If Waters was going to blow people away, he would need to hunker down and create something up to his standards, and Amused to Death was exactly what he needed.
Compared to all of the Floyd albums released since his departure, Waters felt that Amused to Death helped complete a trilogy of albums starting with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, saying, “There seems to be some connection, people seem to connect them. I certainly do in my mind, you know, there is something similar about them.” If there’s one thing that connects all of them, it’s a certain amount of dread of the unknown.
Dark Side of the Moon already sets the template of the horrors that life has to offer, and The Wall shows what can happen when someone loses all sense of empathy, but Amused to Death is something different. We had started with empathy and knew what it was like to leave it behind, but Waters’s third solo record is a good case study for what can happen when people get too in tune with television and starts becoming desensitised to things like war.
Listening to every one of these albums back to back might not make for the cheeriest of listening experiences, but each of them shows a different piece of what makes Waters tick. It’s easy for people to use songs as an excuse to tell people how to live their lives, but all Waters is doing is showing everyone a version of their lives that can turn into a reality if they aren’t too careful.
