IN THE FLESH - LIVE

After the superb but relative commercial failure of Amused To Death, an album that should feature in any Top 10 concept album list, Waters started doubting that he could ever make a really noticeable solo career, while the shadow of Floyd still hung over his head. So he turned the stool he was sitting on around and started acknowledging his former group's heritage as simply unavoidable and these all-time classic tracks became the centrepiece of his tours, unlike the Hitch-hiking shows where the two eras were separated in different sets. Actually the excepts from that very project are sounding a bit lost on this set, since they were torn out of their context, and haven't aged as gracefully as originally hoped. Present in Waters' band are the usual Floyd/Waters collaborators as Fairweather-Low, John Carin and Snowy White.

With this In The Flesh double live album, indeed the concerts mixed both Waters solo and Floyd material throughout the length of the evening. Of his solo works, Waters has rightly selected most of it from Amused to Death and a bit from Hitch-hiking, shunning (and rightly so IMHO) his Kaos album. To this listener, this is precisely that solo stuff that makes this live album worthwhile, as well as the especially-made for the occasion, the rather-involved (politically and musically) Each Small Candle, the Amnesty International ONG dedicated track that received a fair amount of airplay and pulled the whole album into the spotlight.

The Floyd material is very well played but really offers limited interest and unfortunately this makes up almost 2/3 of the content of this set; especially so when knowing that the rest of the old quartet were touring around and also releasing live albums at that time, thus diminishing the interest of the present. Indeed one can hear a bit to much that this is the Wright & Gilmour-less Floyd classic version (especially on Brain Damage), and most of the first disc is filled with them. Certainly not essential, but definitely not unworthy of the Floyd legacy (despite leaning/depending a bit too much on it); this is still a brilliant album from what remains a (if not THE) major actor in the Floyd-Alumni solo careers.