(Credits: Far Out / digboston)
Fri 20 March 2026 23:00, UK
Roger Waters has never been shy about talking about which of his songs he loves and which he hates.
It won’t surprise you that there are a number of Pink Floyd albums the psychedelic superstar can’t stand, but a lot of these came from when he originally left the band. Waters made it clear he wasn’t happy about Gilmour continuing to use the Pink Floyd name, and he was even less happy that the music they were making was, in his mind, just a watered-down version of that which had come before.
For instance, with the album A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Waters recognised there was some potential on the album, but that potential wasn’t realised. Instead, the band stumbled upon something and didn’t realise what they had. “Had I still been in the band,” said Waters, “Those chord sequences and melodies would have been made it onto a record that I was involved in.”
He was less generous when discussing The Division Bell, however, as he went as far as to say he feels sorry for fans who went out and bought the album in the first place. “With all due respect to the people who went out and bought those records, they are just rubbish,” said Waters, “Particularly The Division Bell; it’s just nonsense from beginning to end.”
Of course, Waters was never too worried about the (supposedly) lacklustre music that his former band were releasing, as he felt like the records he was putting out as a solo artist were top-tier. He was always relatively confident with the music that he made, but never more so than on his album Amused to Death.
Released in 1992, the album was certainly one of Waters’ most ambitious. It was produced using a new kind of mixing system called QSound, which allowed for a much more spacious feel to the record. He also applied one of his famous complicated concepts to the record, which involved an ape getting its hands on a TV remote and flicking through the channels. The whole thing was classic Waters, and he was convinced fans would love it.
“My fans, the ones who know me, the odd ones who occasionally recognise me in a restaurant and come up, who are kind of, I’m happy to say, quite passionate about what I do, will love this record,” he said. “They will lock themselves away and play it, play it, play it and play it. And it will not disappoint them, and that makes me feel very good… That makes me feel very good, and I’m glad about that.”
Opinions were divided on the album, but no doubt this didn’t affect the former Pink Floydian, as he had always been subject to criticism his entire career. The one person he may have been bothered to learn wasn’t a huge fan of the album, however, was Neil Postman, an author whose name the LP’s title was based on. His book Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, and while it seems Waters was a big fan of his, the same couldn’t be said for Postman. He didn’t besmirch Waters, but his words make it clear that he doesn’t think very highly of psychedelic music as a whole.
“Roger Waters, once the lead singer of Pink Floyd, was sufficiently inspired by a book of mine to produce a CD called Amused to Death. This fact so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason,” said Postman, “Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude.”
