Too Much Ass: When Roger Waters came under fire for an overly erotic album cover
Roger Waters really does miss as often as he hits, doesn’t he?
Sure, being (arguably) the creative hub of one of the most successful rock bands ever might give you some licence to push the boat out and try some things that others call a little out there. It also might make you feel like you can treat your fellow bandmates in some pretty heinous ways. Being the man behind The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall will do that to you. That’s not all that Ol’ Rog has been responsible for though, is it?
The truth is that both within and without Pink Floyd, Roger Waters has his fair share of misfires to his name. There was Household Objects, the record which Floyd tried to make entirely out of sampling, y’know, household objects. This was a project that Floyd tried to take on not once, but twice. There’s following up The Wall by bullying the rest of Floyd into making The Final Cut. A record so unbothered about hiding the fact that it was a Roger Waters solo album that the very liner notes say that it’s “By Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd”.
Yet by far Waters’ biggest miss comes from his actual solo career, where the name on the record cover was definitively his and not a colour, nor a relatively out-there boy’s name. What’s more, this was a miss that, for a mind like Roger Waters, was undeniable strange. He was a refined artiste within the world of rock. One who’d made progressive music his whole career, who tried to make capital A Art out of rock ‘n’ roll and, broadly speaking, succeeded.
So why does the cover of his debut solo album look like it’s by Spinal Tap?
What went wrong with the first solo album by Roger Waters?
Perhaps it’s fitting that the story running through the middle of The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking is a man going through a midlife crisis. Roger Waters was clearly going through something similar in the face of the constant infighting in Pink Floyd.
By the time of the record’s release in 1984, Waters was telling the press that the band would never work together again, and he even went to the High Court to try and forcibly dissolve the band. This didn’t succeed, but it’s clear that Waters was in a rut in the early 1980s.
Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why the cover of his debut album is a blonde model, clad only in a rucksack, high heels and shot from behind, standing at the side of a road waiting to be picked up. Loathe though I am to be fair to a tyrant like Roger Waters, but the girl isn’t just there because of the obvious. It does actually fit the concept of the album, as it’s about the aforementioned sufferer of a mid-life crisis picking up a hitchhiker on a road trip through California, cheating on his wife with her and then re-evaluating his life because of it.
Let’s be real, though, we all know the reason why they chose the cover they did. It’s the same reason that they hired softcore porn actress Linzi Drew to model for the record. It’s because rock fans in the 1980s (not to mention rock bands in the 1980s) loved themselves some girls on their record sleeves. The fewer clothes, the better.
The idea was to release it completely uncensored, but the record got such a backlash on release that subsequent editions released by Columbia Records placed a black box over the offending area.
I’ll leave you to figure out where that was.