Amused To Death is a 23 year old album that couldn’t be more topical. Roger Waters’ portrait of a society that has become a slave to the TV screens will be released in 2015 in a remastered version and with new artwork. Responsible for the reworking of the original tapes is James Guthrie, who also mixed the first release and worked with Waters since the Pink Floyd album The Wall. Since Amused To Death was recorded over a period of almost five years and on three different formats, collecting the master tapes was no easy undertaking. Guthrie traveled to London – and found hundreds of them there, with different takes of the same songs in different formats. The Herculean task was therefore to first recreate the album in order to then tackle the actual work – the remastering of the 5.1 surround and stereo mix.
But the effort was worth it. Amused To Death is a conceptually and musically enormously strong album, for which Waters and his co-producer Patrick Leonard have also brought together outstanding musicians. Exceptional guitarist Jeff Beck is involved in eight songs, Don Henley sings on Watching TV, Rita Coolidge on Amused to Death and soul singer P.P. Arnold on Perfect Sense Part I / Part II. The album also reunited Waters with composer Michael Kamen, who contributed the orchestral arrangements on Too Much Rope and What God Wants, Part III.
The cover artwork for the 2015 edition was done by Sean Evans, the creative director of The Wall Live 2010-2013 tour. Instead of a gorilla, the new version shows a little boy sitting in front of a gigantic television screen. Waters himself says: ‘The way we raise young people, I’m afraid we are encouraging our society to amuse itself to death even more than ever before. What if we used the money we spend building weapons on education? What if children were asked not to prepare for a life as a consumer and producer, but to become adults who think about things that are impartial and who are interested in human rights? Can you imagine what our world would look like then? ‘
Amused To Death is an album that deserves a careful listening – for its sound as well as its content. It’s takes a look at an entertainment-obsessed society and touches on issues that have only become more complex and urgent over the past two decades. In 2015, television is just one option in an endless array of distractions available to us anytime, anywhere. But with eyes fixed on screens, the crises and injustices of the real world can quickly get out of sight.
The multi-channel hybrid SACD with 5.1 surround and stereo tracks appears in a limited edition portrait format digibook.