Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Roger Waters

The writing may have been on the wall ever since the shambolic end of the Animals tour in July of 1977, but it was nearly six years later in the anticlimactic aftermath of The Final Cut that Pink Floyd seemed to disappear for good. Of course, there are many who believe that the band never truly reappeared after this time frame, but that is another matter for another forum.

During the period between the release of The Final Cut in March 1983 and the appearance of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason in September 1987, every member of the "classic" 1970s Pink Floyd lineup released a solo album (in many cases their second) and pursued a musical career outside the Pink Floyd framework with varying degrees of passion and success. Also, being the 1980s and all, each member also dabbled in the synthpop genre, with universally middling-to-nonexistent commercial results.

While the subsequent synth-dominated solo efforts of keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason (which we'll examine in a special edition of this column next week) could kindly be described as "bland" and "harmless," such adjectives fail in the face of perhaps the most infamous of all the 80's solo Floyd albums - the second solo effort by the band's estranged mastermind Roger Waters.

While he had found a measure of success in the spring of 1984 with his weirdly tuneless (not to mention grossly self-centered) debut solo release The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking, it was with 1987' s Radio K.A.O.S. that Waters found himself going head-to-head with his ex-bandmates what what, in retrospect, was the worst-possible album to challenge them with on any grounds.

Slated to be one of the dominant albums of the summer, Radio K.A.O.S. appeared in June of 1987, accompanied by a big push from Columbia Records at radio, print and MTV. Realizing early on that he would be fighting a publicity war against his ex-bandmates, Waters finally doffed his carefully-constructed anonymity by appearing in T.V. interviews, magazine articles and even in his own music videos. In spite of his newfound accessibility, however, Waters was never able to sell the idea of Radio K.A.O.S. to the public (though there sure was a lot of appetite for sniping comments at his ex-colleagues and vice-versa), and he could only watch in frustration as the record just grazed the bottom end of the Top 50 while two cuts ("Radio Waves" and "Sunset Strip") briefly reached the Top 20 of the Rock Airplay chart before dropping straight away.

Perhaps the biggest problem Joe Public had with Radio K.A.O.S. was the sound of the record itself. While The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking was essentially a familiar-sounding sonic continuation of The Wall and The Final Cut, K.A.O.S. was steeped in late 1980's white-boy funk and pop music and the music is dominated by busily chittering drum machines and chiming, buzzy synthesizers carried along on upbeat, propulsive rhythms -- a totally alien-sounding construction that sounds like nothing else in Waters' canon before or since.

While the reunited Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason was certainly no one's idea of a spartan, back-to-basics rock record, at least that machine-made monster still managed to sound enough like a Pink Floyd record in the end to keep the fans interested -- with K.A.O.S., Waters sounded like a guest vocalist on his own remix album.

The other drawback to Radio K.A.O.S. (and this is a big one) was the concept itself, which was quite possibly the most harebrained in the history of the form. Imagine if you will a fusion of The Who's Tommy and Planet P Project's Pink World with a dash of the 1938 radio broadcast of The War Of The Worlds thrown in towards the end. Even Waters himself seemed aware of the unweildy nature of his narrative -- while declining an opportunity to discuss the backstory of the album with MTV, he uttered the immortal words: "I can't, it will sound crazed."

Happily, there was an silver lining in this whole mess for the ex-Floyd leader -- while he acknowledged during interviews that the album, as a narrative, was "doomed to failure," the idea of a teenaged Stephen Hawking with the power to destroy the world (that is, until he watched the original Live Aid concert and got all touchy-feely instead) worked far better live than on record. Working around the time constraints of the vinyl/CD/cassette canvas, Waters utilized screened film/computer graphics elements, selected hits from the Floyd canon and a couple of additional songs that were not present on the released version of Radio K.A.O.S. to expand the narrative and flesh out the themes of the record. A true multimedia presentation, Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road enabled Waters to "sell" his ideas to the audience far easier than he ever could have done otherwise.

Aye, but this is where we come to the final rub ... the unkindest of all, you might say: very few people ever saw the Radio K.A.O.S. On The Road tour. While Waters' name and history might have been enough to sell more tickets in a year without any competition from his ex-bandmates, that year was not 1987. In many cases, tickets for the reunited Pink Floyd tour were actually put on sale weeks before K.A.O.S. was even released, and the resulting overwhelming stampede towards the familiar brand name stomped the Radio K.A.O.S. tour into a bloody smear at the box office. Disheartened and bitter, Waters retreated from the road for what turned into a twelve year layoff, with only his excellent 1992 solo album Amused To Death (his only release that truly stands up to any of his work with Pink Floyd) to fill the gap.