(Credits: Alamy)
Mon 29 December 2025 20:02, UK
There’s a certain enigma that comes whenever you listen to Roger Waters playing on his records.
He’s not trying to trick the audience by any stretch, but when listening to any one of his conceptual pieces, he definitely wants to take them on a journey every single time he gets into the studio, whether that’s with a linear story or with unconventional soundscapes. But if he had David Gilmour to work with back in the Pink Floyd days, he was going to need to work a few miracles to get anyone even close to what his old bandmate could do.
In all fairness, though, getting his first choices for guitarists was far from a bad idea. Since Snowy White had been a member of the surrogate band during the group’s first tour of The Wall, it was easy to see why he would be a worthy replacement when Waters decided to turn The Wall into a full-on spectacle when playing in Berlin in 1990. But once he started coming out with his own stuff, the lineup was absolutely stacked.
The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking was already a sturdy enough concept for Waters to want to use it for a Floyd record, but was anyone going to be complaining with someone like Eric Clapton on guitar? If he was good enough for The Beatles, he was more than worthy of taking Gilmour’s spot, but even after a few years of working with ‘Slowhand’, Waters was already looking for a new collaborator.
And while Radio KAOS did show him keeping up with the times, it wasn’t until Amused to Death that he really started to spread his wings. This was a version of Waters that looked a lot more familiar than him being fed through countless computerised soundscapes, and seeing the guest list was also an extra bonus. No one would have predicted hearing someone like Don Henley on the record would have panned, and yet the whole thing sounds absolutely seamless.
But if we’re being completely honest, the album should have really been called a collaboration album between Waters and Jeff Beck half the time. Beck was the extra boost that songs like ‘What God Wants’ needed, and while he may have earned his stripes as one of the greatest rock and roll instrumentalists, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better voice on the record than his guitar half the time.
The focus was still on Waters’s biting commentary, but even he had to admit that there were moments where he had to admit that no other guitarist was on Beck’s level, saying, “I guess we worked with him for maybe three or four days to do the stuff that he does on the album. And it was terrific. He arrived at the studio and he has a brand new guitar, he gets it out of the box, you run the track and he starts doing these kinds of magical things. You tell him what you do want and he does that magically as well. What I find extraordinary is that unless you can watch his fingers really closely and you still can’t work out how he’s doing it.”
Nothing was ever going to be able to replace what Gilmour could do with Waters, but considering Gilmour thought Beck was his all-time favourite guitar player, it’s not like the record was in shaky hands, either. Beck could figure out exactly what the track needed before the rest of the band could, and when listening to his performance, you can hear him wrestling the guitar until he gets the sound he wants in his head.
But even if his tone and technique were otherworldly back in the day, the magic of Beck was the fact that he never stood still. There are countless guitarists still trying to capture the touch he had on Blow by Blow, but up until the day he died, he was always on the lookout for what the next big sound was.
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