Amused To Death by Roger Waters (two LPs) released in 1992 on the Mercury record label, value £100

BY MICHAEL BROOKS

FORMER Pink Floyd bass guitarist, songwriter, and lead singer Roger Waters stated: "I've been involved in two absolutely classic albums, The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall and if you do not have Amused to Death, you do not have the full set". A fearless and controversial artist who doesn't hold back on what he really thinks, often referred to as a provocateur, troublemaker, agitator, he became inspired by the anti television content in the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman; Waters chose a similar name for this album.

The album cover features a chimpanzee watching television, a reference to the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the image on the TV is a gigantic eyeball staring at the viewer, the concept is loosely based around the ape randomly switching channels, but the content explores problems of modern life, rampant greed, bureaucracy, egotism, war, including political and social themes based on short stories from the past and the present.

The first track, The Ballad of Bill Hubbard, relates the account of Alfred 'Raz' Rozzell, a member of the Royal Fusiliers who finds a fellow soldier Bill Hubbard to whom this album is dedicated, lying severely wounded on the battlefield. Unable to take him to safety, Rozzell is forced to leave him in No Man's Land. Waters relates the outcome of this story at the end of the album, including the profound effect it had on him.

Most of the other tracks relate to real live events, some sombre, others controversial. On It's A Miracle Waters makes a scathing attack on Andrew Lloyd Webber accusing him of plagiarising the track Echoes from the Pink Floyd album Meddle for sections of the musical Phantom Of the Opera. The Bravery of Being Out of Range relates to the fighting in the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm.

With Amused To Death, Waters sounded the alarm about a society increasingly and unthinkingly in thrall to its television screens; 27 years later, it seems that television is just an option in an endless array of distractions available to us anytime, anywhere, courtesy of laptops, tablets, viewing everything through the prism of our mindless obsession with the media causing us to lose sight of real events, even injustices in the world that should matter to us in favour of reality 'trash tv,' including ridiculous and implausible storylines in soap dramas that beggar's belief.

Amused To Death is a controversial album, reaching number eight in the UK album charts and a career high in the USA making it Waters' best selling album.

The Us and Them tour by Roger Waters will be broadcast to select cinema screens on October 6 and 11.