No rule says an artist has to like every single song they worked on. In fact, there’s a good chance, just by sheer mathematical logic, that they think roughly half of their work is below average. Roger Waters has never been a quiet mouse when it comes to the work of Pink Floyd, so you can expect that number to be a little higher.
Even though musicians tend to have at least a little faith in the songs that make it onto a record, there are just as many hours spent in the studio working on tracks no one wanted to make in the first place. It’s impossible to please every musician in the studio, and Pink Floyd have always provided ample evidence of that.
Throughout the band’s career, none of the members have minced words when asked about what they thought was the worst in their catalogue. Although each member may have had disdain for the song ‘Atom Heart Mother’ in the early days, the creative tension started to boil over frantically after they had become one of the biggest names in music.
In the wake of Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters spent the next few years daring to dream bigger, making the follow-up, Wish You Were Here, a glowing tribute to former bandmate Syd Barrett. After going after the dangers of the music industry in songs like ‘Welcome to the Machine’, Animals was a dissection of corrupt business practices, comparing tycoons to various characters from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
While every album felt like a distinct leap forward, Waters was looking to convey the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll tragedy with The Wall. Pulling elements from his personal life, the band’s double-album experience would become the most daring project they would take on, with every member trying to make Waters’ vision a reality.
Even though Waters wrote the lion’s share of the music, he fully admitted that he thought a few songs weren’t the most advanced pieces in the world. Despite their reputation for making the most adventurous progressive music that the world had ever seen, Waters thought that the riff from the album opener, ‘In the Flesh’, was a bit too rudimentary for his standards.
Kicking off the story of the album, the opening guitar stabs practically set the scene before anyone begins singing, sounding triumphant, while also indicating that not everything is stable with the subtle guitar bends. When talking about working on the song, though, Waters thought that the riff wasn’t anything special, recalling, “We needed a beginning, so I went into a room with a bass guitar and went, ‘I need something that’s really stupid-sounding. Really loud, monolithic, dumb’”.
While the riff isn’t the most complex musical piece to play, it serves its purpose by capturing the spirit of a rock star’s life, often playing the same riff repeatedly on the road until it hardly even sounds like music anymore. Even though it may have sounded triumphant as the opening track, the song’s reprise further down the album is where things start going off the rails, turning into a nightmare scenario where the main character, Pink, goes on a fascist tirade onstage.
The album was always likely to be a tough thing to pull off. It is difficult to deliver such a deeply conceptual record without losing sight of the main part of releasing any album: expressing yourself and entertaining people. Somehow, the band managed to do both while seemingly not attempting to do either.
While the album did send Pink Floyd into the stratosphere as a stadium band once more, it could never be sustained, with Waters leaving the group for a solo career shortly after recording the next album, The Final Cut. Considering the album’s central theme of a musician being straight-jacketed by success, it’s not hard to see ‘In The Flesh’, and his creative dissatisfaction with he track, as a hint that Waters wanted out of the band.
