Pros and Cons

4:30 AM SCENE I (Apparently They Were Travelling Abroad)

(A suburban bedroom somewhere near London) "Shane" plays on the TV. An Englishman, struggling with a nightmare wakes his American wife. She speaks.

Wife: "Wake up, you're dreaming"

Man: "What?"

Wife: "You're dreaming"

The man mumbles disjointedly about his dream. His wife soothes him back to sleep

The album concept is about a man's midlife crisis and how he dreams of committing adultery, among other things. The album takes place in real time from 04:30am to 05:12am. Its cover prompted controversy for featuring a rear-view nude photograph of the model Linzi Drew. In some regions, the album has been released with this picture censored.

In 1978, Waters played demos of this album and The Wall to his band mates, who decided that they preferred The Wall, although their manager Steve O'Rourke thought that Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking was better.[citation needed] In the end it was decided that The Wall would be a Pink Floyd album and, following the split of the band, this became Roger Waters' first solo album.

The Pros and Cons cycle begins with a British man dreaming one night of driving across the German countryside, with "two hitch hikers slumped in the back seat". The protagonist wonders whether to indulge in his sexual fantasies with his female passenger. After an attack of fear, he awakens and propositions his wife, who rejects him. He dreams of a solution to their marital difficulties in which they move out of the city and settle with their children in rural America, the wife's native land. The venture soon collapses, and the wife begins having an affair. The protagonist responds by telling her to leave and take the kids with her, so he can set out alone "on the road again". Picked up by a truck driver, he rants about his wife's dismissal of him, and receives some sympathy that is short-lived. His dream "goes from bad to worse", moving from fantasy to nightmare, until he reaches a truck stop and a waitress treats him with kindness that restores his empathy. The moment having passed, and the "moment of clarity faded", he wakes up, reaches out to his wife and is reassured by her presence.