Roger Waters Article

I recently wrote this bugger for Classic Rock. Herr Rowley ummed and aaared about it, then rejected it hands down (because he despises me). Anyway, I thought it was alright and maybe you will too …

Waters Torture

Listening to four Roger Waters solo albums in a row isn’t something I’d heartily recommend. Indeed, I would argue that listening to four Roger Waters albums in a row is the least pleasure a listener can scrape from a musical experience outside of finding oneself kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to sit in the front row of a Cheeky Girls concert where they’re ‘trying out new material’. Listening to four Roger Waters albums in a row leaves you feeling bitter and resentful and ill-at-ease with your fellow man … in short, it makes you feel like Roger Waters.

So why, you may ask, did I subject myself to such misery?

An e-mail arrived from Sian Llewellyn asking my opinion on a list of ‘Must Hear’ Roger Waters tracks she was compiling for an upcoming issue. This intrigued me as I’d been under the impression that once Rog pulled up the drawbridge on The Wall, there was nothing much the miserable sod had produced that would fall into the category of ‘Must Hear’. In fact it struck me as a contradiction in terms akin to asking what were the ‘Must Hear’ tracks of Ultravox, or Spandau Ballet, or, God forbid, Simply Red. There weren’t any, surely?

But then I got a bee in my bonnet about the matter and resolved to listen again to the four proper Roger Waters solo albums to see if I’d missed something. Was there, in this musical Eeyore’s small canon of solo work, standout gems that would qualify for the vaunted title of ‘Must Hear Songs’?

My personal musical Kristallnacht began with The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, Roger’s first proper solo album after he left Pink Floyd. Pros And Cons is a concept album that tells the story of a man (Roger) asleep in his bed next to his wife but dreaming of getting his end away. This being a Roger Waters joint, his attempts to seduce his dream-female are thwarted by his own inadequacies and fears, as well as truck drivers, Arab terrorists and, of course, his wife. In the song 4:50 AM (Gone Fishing) Roger, who’s moved to Wyoming to try to start a new life with his wife on a farm that falls apart around his ears, explains one of the reasons for things going tits-up is that ‘the kids caught bronchitis’ – who else but the Sultan of Suffering could come up with a line like that? Superb. Other highlights of Pros And Cons are the standout 5:06 AM (Every Stranger’s Eyes) and one of my favourites 4:37 AM (Arabs With Knives And West German Skies) which includes a piece of jolly Bavarian accordion music played over Roger cackling in German and shows that even when he’s trying to be light-hearted the effect is downright sinister.

To be honest, it’s all a bit Wall-y. Indeed Roger, in what sounds slightly like an ultimatum, offered Pink Floyd the choice to either ‘do’ The Wall or Pros And Cons as their next album in 1978, which is like asking Poland who they would prefer to be invaded by – Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? That Floyd plumped for The Wall as the lesser of two evils says all you need to know about The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking.

Next up in my descent into someone else’s personal madness was 1986’s soundtrack album When The Wind Blows. The movie, which tells the heart-warming tale of an elderly British couple slowly rotting to death in potato sacks after a nuclear attack, is just the sort of material Roger was born to be involved with, and he gets to display his talents for musical gloomscapes on the album’s second side (the first side being a compilation of songs by the likes of Genesis, Squeeze and Bowie). It’s a mainly instrumental album but Roger still manages to shoehorn a snipe at big business and religion over their treatment of Israel in his vicious Towers Of Faith. The song has bugger-all to do with nuclear war (it did not appear in the movie) but is as fine an example of Roger’s howling hatred for God and the powers-that-be as anything he’s done post-Floyd.

After allowing a few moments to bandage my wrists, I ploughed into the monstrous 1987 concept album Radio KAOS. Radio KAOS suffers from that 80s curse that ruined so many albums of that troublesome decade – the synthesiser.
If I was pushed to give a description of Radio KAOS it would be this – imagine The Wall viciously raping Gary Newman and Gary Newman thus giving birth to a baby with the voice of Kraftwerk and the sunny disposition of Adolf Hitler. And then imagine it fucking your mother. In the ass.

Radio KAOS concerns itself with the story of Benny and his twin brother Billy. Billy is disabled, receives radio waves in his head and uses synthesisers and cordless telephones to communicate (he sounds like a sort of Smurf Stephen Hawkins). After his twin is imprisoned for stealing the aforementioned phone, Billy moves to LA and befriends a DJ who works for a local radio station that only plays Roger Waters songs. After learning to bend electronics to his will our hero, outraged at the actions of the politicians blah blah blah uses his new-found powers to launch a nuclear strike to shake things up a bit. Roger tells us this a good thing in one of the album’s smattering of decent songs – The Tide Is Turning. Roger addresses this final song to Sylvester Stallone. As you do.

As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not Radio KAOS’s biggest fan. I don’t care for synthesiser music and I’m not enamoured with albums that contain this much speech … if I was in the mood for that sort of thing I’d listen to Jeff Wayne’s humdinger War Of The Worlds. And then I’d hang myself.

The finishing line was in sight as 1992’s Amused To Death was dumped unenthusiastically into the CD player. To be honest, I’d had my fill of Roger and his demons by this stage and this Eurythmics-sounding diatribe against absolutely everyone in the world pushed me over the edge into spitting, venomous fury. The premise of Amused To Death is that we are all feckless morons drowning in a sea of drivel spoon-fed us by the world’s media to keep us distracted from all the shit that’s really going on in the world. Our obsession with this infantile putrescence will one day kill us all. We will, literally, be Amused To Death. You dig?

Well I don’t know about you but I don’t need my idiocy pointed out by a war obsessed misery-guts who’s spent the last thirty-odd years standing outside the tent pissing in. I’d had enough of this wander through Misanthropy Meadows and, bellowing vengeance on this blackguard for ruining my night and causing me to miss Dragon’s Den, I turned off the CD player and stormed off, in a huff, to bed. I’d achieved nothing but to identify exactly the same tracks that Sian, thousands of years ago, had asked me about as ‘Must Hear’ songs. This made the whole exercise a pointless waste of time and left me feeling bitter and resentful and ill-at-ease with my fellow man … in short, I felt just like that bastard Roger Waters.