While he may be a mastermind behind Pink Floyd, there’s an album Roger Waters released outside of the band that he prefers to much of their discography.
Waters would leave the David Gilmour-featuring band in 1985, just two years after the “horrible” experience of making The Final Cut. Despite the fractured relationship around that time, the band were in better spirits before that release, when they worked on the likes of The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Despite the quality releases from the group, Waters believes that one of his solo albums is close to his greatest achievement.
He explained as much when he was asked about where Radio K.A.O.S. and Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking ranked in his discography with Pink Floyd. The ranking comes as quite a surprise, with Waters suggesting that Radio K.A.O.S. is up there with “the best stuff I’ve ever done.” It seems to have trumped his work on Animals and Wish You Were Here, while matching up to the quality of The Wall.
Waters said: “I think Radio KAOS is some of the best stuff I’ve ever done. Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was bitty. The Wall I was very happy with. The Final Cut was absolute misery to make, although I listened to it of late and I rather like a lot of it. But I don’t like my singing on it. You can hear the mad tension running through it all. If you’re trying to express something and being prevented from doing it because you’re so uptight…It was a horrible time.”
The horrors of making The Final Cut are well-documented from all points of view, but Waters would dig in a little deeper and suggest that the death of the band came long before their 1983 release. The album would build on the consequences of the Second World War that had affected Waters so heavily during the writing of The Wall, but it felt more like a solo album than a Pink Floyd project, according to David Gilmour.
Waters explained: “We were all fighting like cats and dogs. We were finally realising – or accepting, if you like – that there was no band. It was really being thrust upon us that we were not a band and had not been in accord for a long time. Not since 1975, when we made Wish You Were Here. Even then, there were big disagreements about content and how to put the record together.”
While Pink Floyd would go from commercial strength to strength without Waters, the bassist never regretted leaving the band when he did, even when he found himself playing to reduced audiences.
Speaking to Word Magazine, Waters says he appreciated the smaller shows and had no regrets about his departure from the band. He said: “Not for one single second. There were times… like when I was in Cincinnati, and I was playing to a half-empty arena, 3,000 people in a 6,000-capacity venue, and Pink Floyd were playing to 80,000 people the next night – this was the Radio Kaos tour, it was 1987.
“I felt like Henry the Fifth, ‘We happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother’, meaning that because there are only a few of them there, it is sweeter. Because of the camaraderie. And there was definitely that feeling from the 3,000 people that were there.”
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