Roger Waters - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

Live 2007





.youtube-rogerwaterschannel

Roger Waters - Cops

See more youtube-rogerwaterschannel

The New York Times, August 29, 1987

Rock: Roger Waters Sings of Political Despair

By JON PARELES

Roger Waters had a double agenda for his concert Wednesday at Madison Square Garden. He wanted to warn, in no uncertain terms, of the dangers of unbridled militarism and mindless consumption. And he wanted to reclaim an audience that's rightfully his: the fans of Pink Floyd, most of whose songs were written by Mr. Waters.

Mr. Waters has toured on his own before, but this year a group called Pink Floyd, featuring his former band mates, is also touring arenas; it will come to Madison Square Garden in October. In Mr. Waters's two-hour, 45-minute set, the audience sang along wholeheartedly on Pink Floyd songs from ''The Wall,'' ''Wish You Were Here,'' ''Animals'' and ''The Dark Side of the Moon,'' and rallied to the special effects that crowned Mr. Waters's newer material.

Above all, the concert showed how coherent Mr. Waters's career has been. His music is generally slow-moving and enveloping, like rockers and hymns preserved in amber; now and then, his newer material comes close to straightforward hard-rock, but leaving Pink Floyd hasn't changed his approach much. His voice is introverted, better for talking than belting (for some of Pink Floyd's songs, Paul Carrack sang lead vocals); Mr. Waters did deliver strangulated shouts for some of the nastier characters from ''The Wall.''

While the lyrics on Pink Floyd's albums and Mr. Waters's solo albums each have their own concerns -childhood repression, lunacy, star-making, greed - the overriding feeling is one of pessimism and dead-end despair. Pink Floyd's albums have an enduring hold on the rock audience, both for their plush production and their grim tidings. ''The Dark Side of the Moon,'' about incipient madness, holds the record for the longest run on the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

Mr. Waters's current album, ''Radio K.A.O.S.,'' brings his despair to the political arena. One song attacks ''the powers that be,'' and parts of the stage show denounced military spending (to the tune of Pink Floyd's ''Money''), the Reagan and Thatcher governments, and the despoiling of the environment, complete with statistics. Rarely is arena-rock so explicitly political.

''Radio K.A.O.S.'' has a plot line involving a disk jockey and a genius with cerebral palsy who communicates via computer and who can tap into the world's information systems. As with Pink Floyd concerts, the stage was dominated by a circular screen for film projections (some of which were older Pink Floyd animations) and lighting effects; there was also an electronic signboard, carrying what may be the first supertitles seen at a rock concert.

The production's conceit was that it was a live radio broadcast over station KAOS, complete with station jingles, mock advertisements (including jokes about shredders and Senate subcommittees), and a live disk jockey, Jim Ladd, in a simulated studio. Mr. Ladd would sometimes announce between songs (after a set of Pink Floyd material, he named the songs and called them ''music of Roger Waters'') and he carried on simulated conversations with ''Billy,'' the computer genius, whose words were carried on the signboard.

The show didn't reprise the album, but it did lead up to Billy's big moment: a simulated nuclear apocalypse. The band created a whooshing crescendo, aerial projections whizzed by on the screen, numbers and jargon rushed across the signboard, followed by a flash, silence and darkness -and a huge ovation, suggesting the crowd was less than terrified. Eventually, Mr. Waters led the band in a hymn of guarded hope, ''The Tide Is Turning.''

For the encore, Mr. Waters and his Bleeding Heart Band returned to older material. A cameo appearance from Clare Torry, who sang wordlessly through ''The Great Gig in the Sky'' from ''Dark Side,'' gave Pink Floyd's old fans what they'd come to hear.

Smarter in Sixty Seconds: The Zen Of Pink Floyd

By Mark Hermann
September 17, 2012


So you’re working your ass off on your band, your songs, your productions, your blog, your app (fill in the blank with that amazing thing you do). You know you’re not fooling yourself. You’ve really got skills. Yet, it still feels like you’re just not connecting with the world. Why?
Maybe you’re just not sending the right message.
Or maybe you’re searching for some elusive answer to your woes, when you really should be learning to ask a better question.

Is There Anybody Out There?

That’s where it all began for Roger Waters, mastermind behind one of the most successful and influential bands of all time, Pink Floyd.
So here’s a simple but powerful tip that may just help to right your course on your life’s journey to shine your own crazy diamond and make a difference in the world.
(No, this is not a recipe for fame and fortune in the music business.)
In his tiny and most excellent little book, Tribes, modern marketing guru, Seth Godin describes the secret to how ideas spread.
He says that for an idea to take hold and spread to the world, the message must be bigger than the messenger, who created it.
For Roger Waters, that message began as a question.

Is Humanity Capable of Being Humane?

This question burned inside him as a teenager, born into a ravaged England, laid to waste by the Nazis during World War II. The same war that claimed his father’s life.


That question ultimately found its wings — and transformed into a message that would resound around the world for almost four decades and counting when Waters and Pink Floyd put it to words and music — creating one of the most celebrated albums of all time: Dark Side Of The Moon.
Within that big question were sub-chapters in the form of songs that supported the grand view.
Take for example the song, “Us And Them.”
This song speaks to the idea of separation and opposites. Each of us living apart as individuals with differing views, lifetstyles and ideals, who identify with this or that group, as opposed to the one we all have in common: the human race.


The message is that in the end, there really is no “them.” There is only “us.”
We are all the same.
“Us and them/And after all we’re only ordinary men.”
“With…without/And in the end it’s what the fighting’s all about.”
Notice how the idea is much bigger than just a great song. It’s an expansive concept that resonates far and wide.
Or take another song, “Time,” which deals with the concept that we’re so obsessed with the passing of time, we never stop to wake up and live in this moment — the only moment that truly exists. And the consequences we invite when we don’t.
“…and then one day you find/Ten years have got behind you/No one told you when to run/You missed the starting gun”
Brilliant lyrics for certain, but all the more so because the idea itself of this obsession with time is almost universal in human beings. We live either in memories from the past, which is already gone, or hope for some better future that hasn’t happened yet.
It’s really very Zen if you think about it:
The Buddha says there is no permanent self (no Us or Them) and that the only path to enlightenment lies in becoming truly awake in the present moment, not somewhere in the past or some unseen future.
And finally, take a look at the title of the album itself, Dark Side Of The Moon. Waters explained this again as a concept. That in life you have only two choices. You can either walk toward the darkness or you can walk toward the light.
It’s this combination of brilliant music wrapped around a powerful message that has resonated so far and wide for Pink Floyd over the span of their career and beyond.

The Great Gig In The Sky

If you could create just one masterpiece in your life that was loved and celebrated by the world, wouldn’t that in itself be a miraculous lifetime achievement?

Imagine. Your own Mona Lisa. (Your name here’s) Fifth Symphony.
You could leave this world with a smile, knowing you accomplished something grand with your life.
Dark Side Of The Moon has broken all records for the longest-time-running on Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart, along with a wealth of other industry accolades.
If this iconic album were the one and only masterpiece the band ever produced, it would have cemented their place in music history. But for Pink Floyd, it could be argued they did it at least three times, maybe four.
So how could you possibly follow up Dark Side Of The Moon? If you’re Pink Floyd, you create another masterpiece, of course.

By The Way Which One’s Pink?

Wish You Were Here: An ode to their original band leader, lead singer and chief songwriter, Syd Barrett, who suffered a nervous breakdown and basically went into hibernation, disappearing from society.
It was a message in a bottle to someone they cared deeply for wrapped inside a musical masterpiece. As in “Syd, how we wish you were here.”
And though the sentiment was mostly Waters’, the concept was born from the first four, now-indelible notes of a song, guitarist David Gilmour was working on at the time that reminded Waters of Barrett. It became the foundation for the song, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which in turn became the cornerstone of the record.
One major underlying theme was absence.
The absence of Syd Barrett. Or the absence of conscience of, say, a record executive as depicted in “Have A Cigar.”  Thrilled with the band’s success, he claims to be on the same team when really all he cares about is the money they’ve made for the record company. He’s so out of touch, he think there’s really a guy named Pink in the band.
Sure you could read about all the turmoil in the band at this point in their career and who contributed what. But in the end, what resonates is the work itself.
The message.
One could put up a strong argument that Animals, which came out in 1976 was indeed their fourth masterpiece. An opus in three movements whose titles are based loosely on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The concept that people basically fall into three categories: Pigs, Dogs or Sheep.
It’s perhaps Waters’ most directly caustic view of society but no less brilliant a body of work to the other three mentioned here. But whatever your position on Animals as masterpiece, no one would argue about their follow-up album.

Mother, Did It Need To Be So High?

The Wall: Released in late 1979, it was perhaps their most ambitious effort, though tensions within the band were at a breaking point. Their only double album, it sold more than 23 million units.

It was born out of Waters’ deep frustration with — and isolation from — an audience that was growing so big as to become unreachable, due to the band’s monumental success and stadium-sized productions at that point.
The story is built around a fictional rock megalomaniac named Pink. A pop cult leader who stirs his legions of minions into a frenzy with a not-too-distant-nod to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. (The first brick in Waters’ own wall with the death of his father.)
But the real Pink grows ever more insular and disconnected from the crazed world around him until he completes the wall and arrives at a near catatonic state, “Comfortably Numb.”
The Wall is back on tour again now, more than 32 years after the original tour (which this author saw back in 1980 and still remembers quite vividly). Why would people still even care?
Maybe because the work was so profound and the incredible songs that comprise it so embedded in our collective psyche that the message still resonates today across all cultural, geographic and generational boundaries.
So how can you benefit from all this praise — showered upon a band which really doesn’t need the plug at this point?
In all of Pink Floyd’s incredible body of work (and we didn’t even touch on any of their early albums) there are some common threads you could apply to any work, including that unique thing you do.

Remember When You Were Young? You Shone Like The Sun

You begin with an idea. A concept. Your passion. Like say, forming a psychedelic art rock band. You play around with the idea. You nurture it.
If you find yourself returning to it consistently over time and you’re still passionate, one day you decide to dedicate yourself to it. Even when everyone seems to be ignoring you. No matter. You’re committed now.
You experiment with it, toiling away in obscurity. You hone it until it begins to take shape.
If you’ve chosen the right course and you are creating something of real value to others, people begin to take notice of your dedication, of the excellence in your work. A tribe forms. They begin to tell their friends. The message begins to spread.
You endeavor to distinguish yourself from everyone else in your field. You dissect every aspect of your craft, the songwriting, the musicianship, the album production, the live show, and you endeavor to push the envelope to the brink.
Until one day, your work combines with timing and opportunity and you hit that bullseye and explode into a blazing sun that serves as a beacon of inspiration for all to see.

Don’t Be Afraid To Care

So if you’re trying to figure out where your tribe resides, the secret is not to change where you’re looking. Change your focus.

Remember Us and Them?
Start focusing on Them.
If you’re focused on others; what they long for, what keeps them awake at night, if you can find empathy with the human condition you begin to recognize that we are all much more the same than we are different.
Your fears, your doubts, your feelings of disillusionment and alienation are pretty much the same as everyone else. We’re all trying to figure it out. And no one has the answer.
You are not alone.
If you can always keep that focus at the forefront of your craft, then wrap it around your remarkable music, or your product or your service, you’re on your way to finding a message that can resonate far and wide.

A message bigger than the messenger.

There is no dark side of the moon.

Breathe.

NYC-based producer/artist/engineer/more Mark Hermann spends his life in the professional service of music. He has toured the world with rock legends, produced hit artists, and licensed music for numerous TV/film placements. Hermann also owns a recording studio in a 100-year old Harlem Brownstone. Keep up with him at .Rock & Roll Zen

From www.sonicscoop.com

Roger Waters joins bill at upcoming Levon Helm tribute concert

The Poughkeepsie Journal  reports that Roger Waters has joined an all-star lineup of musicians at a Levon Helm tribute concert scheduled for October 3rd at the Izod Center (part of the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey).
Organisers announced  that Waters will perform at "Love for Levon" which will also feature John Mayer, Bruce Hornsby, Ray LaMontagne, Gregg Allman, Joe Walsh of The Eagles, and many others. Tickets are on sale NOW through this direct link and cost $46.50 to $221.50 plus booking fees.
The concert is in honor of Helm, the late Woodstock resident who was a member of The Band and a Grammy-winning solo artist. Helm, along with Rick Danko and Garth Hudson (fellow Band members) took part in Roger's 1990 Wall concert in Berlin. Helm sadly passed away on April 19th this year.
Proceeds from ticket sales will "help support the lasting legacy of Levon Helm by helping his estate keep ownership of his home, barn and studio, and to continue The Midnight Ramble Sessions." More information about the show can be found a loveforlevon.com


Written by Matt  
Wednesday, 19 September 2012

From www.brain-damage.co.uk

Vote Pink Floyd in upcoming 2012 Classic Rock Awards

Voting for the 2012 Classic Rock Awards, sponsored by the UK's respected Classic Rock magazine, has now opened for fans of the nominated bands worldwide to cast their votes for their favourites.
In the "Reissue Of The Year" category, you can vote for the DSOTM Immersion set, which they note: "As a cornerstone release of the epic Why Pink Floyd? reissue programme, The Dark Side of The Moon was treated to a stunning 2011 remaster, and released in Discovery, Experience and Immersion editions. Featuring newly minted packaging across the range, the highly collectable Immersion edition featured a host of rare, unreleased and alternate audio and video content in both standard and high resolution across CD/DVD and BluRay. The Dark Side Of The Moon was the first record to get this reissue treatment, followed by Wish You Were Here and The Wall."
Elsewhere, John Edginton's fascinating film, "Pink Floyd :"The Story Of Wish You Were Here" has been nominated in the "DVD/Film Of The Year" category. Our review of this can be read here.
There are a number of other categories but a number of them are not open to readers' votes. If you decide to place your votes in this popular Awards, make sure you register as part of the voting process, otherwise your vote won't count... It would be nice for the Floyd to be recognised further - in the their sister publication, Prog Magazine, Pink Floyd won the "Grand Design" category for the Immersion reissues, in Prog's 2012 Awards.

From www.brain-damage.co.uk

Written by Matt  
Friday, 14 September 2012

A note from Roger - 16 September 2012

For all those of you who are concerned with the predicament of our brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, check out this link to The Russell Tribunal.

Also, a message for our friends in Russia.

We greatly respect your bravery and resolve. I was much encouraged by the anti Putin, pro Pussy Riot and Freedom demonstrations in Moscow yesterday, we are with you. There are more of us willing to stand up to errant authority, in the fight to create free societies with just laws, than there were yesterday, and there will be more tomorrow. Our numbers are growing.

Roger

www.facebook.com/rogerwaters
                   

Roger Waters Ça Ira - libretto

Open publication - Free publishing - More ca ira

Roger Waters - Ca Ira (There is Hope) - libretto. Music: "But the Marquis of Boulli Has a Trump Card Up His Sleeve" - Act Three, Scene 1 [2]

issuu.com

Roger Waters - ÇA IRA (Poznań, 25 August 2006)

Full operatic performance - 25 August 2006 in Poznań, Poland.

Polskie napisy

Roger Waters - Complete 'Hitch-Hiking' Performance

Recorded live at Radio City Hall, New York City 3/28/85

Roger Waters The Wall Live Rod Laver Arena 7/02/2012

The Pink Floyd And Syd Barrett Story (documentary)

Produced and directed by John Edgington

For sale: House where Pink Floyd formed being sold for first time in decades

For sale: House where Pink Floyd formed being sold for first time in decades

- Highgate house where Pink Floyd  began is on the market for £1.2m

The north London home where Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and Nick Mason formed Pink Floyd has come up for sale for the first time since they lodged there in the Sixties.

The three-storey house, which has barely been altered since then, is being auctioned on September 20 with a guide price of £1.2 million and needs total refurbishment.

It was at the property — in Stanhope Gardens, Highgate — that the young musicians developed the psychedelic sound and look that was to propel them to superstardom.

The Victorian home was owned until his death this year by their influential former college tutor and landlord Mike Leonard, who was also briefly a member of the band that evolved into Pink Floyd.

Rock experts said the house played a crucial role in the formation of the group that went on to record huge selling concept albums such as Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and the rock opera The Wall.

Mark Blake, author of Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd, said: “It was a very good environment for young student musicians to be living. It gave somewhere for them to live and somewhere to rehearse with a sympathetic landlord who did not mind about them making a noise. This is where Pink Floyd started to come together.”

Mason, who became the group’s drummer, and bass guitar player Waters are believed to have moved into the downstairs self-contained flat in September 1963, while early lead singer Barrett arrived about a year later. Barrett was put in charge of catering  — with a budget of 20p a day. Keyboard player Richard Wright also lodged at the house.

The dusty interiors still retain much evidence of the avant-garde musical influences that Mr Leonard — a lecturer at Hornsey College of Art — introduced to the rhythm and blues band then known as The Tea Set.

Instruments such as bongo drums, tambourines and a huge homemade xylophone lie scattered around as well as the spotlights, prisms and crystals that were an influence.

In the attic there is a rare Binson Echorec 2 echo unit. The Binson was used by Barrett and later by David Gilmore to develop the Floyd sound. Leonard’s workshop, where he designed and built the complex “lysergenic” lighting systems that contributed to Pink Floyd’s image and featured in a Tomorrow’s World BBC broadcast from the house in 1968, has also survived.

In a recent interview Mason said that the bonnet of his Aston Martin is buried in the overgrown garden.

Chris Coleman Smith, of Savills Auctions, which is handling the sale at the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair, said the sale was a rare opportunity to buy an unmodernised family house in Highgate.  He added: “Who knows, we might get some Pink Floyd fan flying in to buy it.

By Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor, 10 September 2012

Pic: Lucy Young

From www.standard.co.uk

Geeks Of Doom: Happy 69th Birthday To Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters

Happy 69th Birthday To Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters

Roger Waters, one of the founding members and chief components who greatly contributed to the mind-blowing success of British psychedelic/classic rock unit Pink Floyd, celebrates his 69th birthday today.

In a way, Waters stands alone as a musical architect. His lyrics to some of the most memorable and well-made rock records of all time, bass playing, and British proper nasal vocal inflections are some of the high watermark achievements in music. Approaching music first with a keen psychedelic edge during the fad of the genre during the late 1960s, and then cultivating those sounds with a dark, spacier edge which became the Floyd trademark, Waters has helped create a body of work that is not only successful, but also had the keen foresight to become dazzling in a critical sense as well. Floyd records have the luxury of not only selling in the millions, but also for being regarded and lauded as some of the most ultimate records ever produced.

He started with Pink Floyd since the very beginning, a group he formed with local art classmates Syd Barrett, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason. After using names like Abdabs and Meggadeth (yep, they had the claim on the name first, although spelled differently as you can see), they finally became known as Pink Floyd, a name suggested by Barrett, which is a link of two blues artists’ names together, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. The band started its musical paces off by becoming a heavy psychedelic group, led by the bizarre, wild, and darkly poetic antics of lead singer/guitarist Barrett, and the band became a minor success in its native England. Barrett left the group after he began sporting rather strange behavior on and off stage, which was basically a by-product of too much psilocybin overuse, compounded by mental illness. Barrett was replaced by another school friend, David Gilmour, on lead guitar. Gilmour’s immense command of the instrument, coupled with a chemistry the band now had which was even more trippy than the Barrett era was, but more controlled and tightly arranged, brought Pink Floyd more and more into the mainstream rock arena with each subsequent release.

By 1971, their album Meddle, which included “Echoes,” a track that clocked in at over 20 minutes, started the string of what is considered the “classic” records released by Pink Floyd during that decade. Waters and Gilmour forged a sort of partnership with the writing, and by this time, Waters started chiefly penning the lyrics as well. At first, his lyrics on prior Floyd records were mainly in the alphabet word soup of mixed metaphors and the like, or purposely hard to decipher, but by Meddle, they began to touch on more familiar themes of human nature. Even the one word line growled in Meddle’s opening track “One of These Days,” which is “One of These Days, I’m going to chop you up into little pieces!” speaks of frustrations and hermetically sealed soul torturing that would become Roger Waters and Pink Floyd’s instant trademark.

It all crystallized for the band with their next release, 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. Exploring themes like alienation, money, paranoia, schizophrenia, passage of time, and death among others, and done with the signature Pink Floyd sonic stamp in a quadraphonic production, the record went on to become one of the best-sellers of all time, owned by tens of millions of fans, some who discovered the band for the first time. The record in a way forged its own clique and style with generations of fans who also see the record as a key proponent of their lifestyles as well. Written entirely lyrically by Waters, and also showcasing his memorable bass line on the track “Money,” Dark Side of the Moon remains one of rock and roll’s most classic and best releases of the 20th century and certainly beyond.

For the records that followed, Waters and Floyd still explored the same themes, using the template procured on Dark Side. Wish You Were Here and Animals also held equal weight to the now Floyd standard set with Dark Side. The band arguably topped itself with what has been regarded by many as the Floyd masterpiece, largely written, concocted, devised, created, and produced by Waters, 1980′s, The Wall, which is another highly lauded release and in a way perfectly bookends with Dark Side of the Moon the dazzling success of that era for the band. A tale about a rock and roll misfit megalomaniac who suffers a sundry amount of demons within him, fueled by his past, present, and future, becomes a dictator of his music and to his fans, most of whom aren’t able to see the distinction between rock and roll performer as entertainer and rock and roll performer as czar. The album employed complex arrangements, plenty of sounds and special effects, large orchestras and small musical passages, all swirling around a foreboding, darkness which almost enveloped everything else about the album. Like Dark Side, The Wall continues to also be accepted as one of rock’s heavyweight releases of all-time.

By the mid 1980s, Waters and Pink Floyd parted ways, due to stress, pressures, and Water’s inability to get along with his bandmates anymore, who were starting to feel that Pink Floyd was nothing more than a Roger Waters solo project. Floyd went on to success, Waters went on to critical success, but in terms of sales, he never reached the kind of heights he had with Floyd. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and Amused to Death were two of his standout solo albums, featuring Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck on lead guitar respectively.

In recent years, following the reunion of Pink Floyd at 2005’s Live 8, which was a smashing success but ultimately a one-off performance, Waters has adventurously taken Dark Side and The Wall and toured globally with those productions, The Wall in particular, a big lavish stage show which employs an actual foam wall which gets built brick by brick as the show progresses, massive-sized puppets, crashing airplanes, and eye-opening animation, all rotating around the axis of the music, presented by Waters and his band of musicians. Once in a while, an original member of Floyd will make an appearance at a show here or there, unannounced. These projects keep the public image of Roger Waters and the music of Pink Floyd still in high regard to this very day.

So let’s celebrate the life and career of Roger Waters today, key musician, genius songwriter, innovative musical technician of sorts, who not only makes people groove and listen to some of the best music has to offer by way of various genres that always keeps a rock foundation, but also music that makes them think and feel, reflect and hope, even cry and emote. Happy Birthday, Roger Waters, enigmatic force of nature in the musical world, and one who will always remain that way.

By Stoogeypedia  |  September 6th, 2012 at 3:30 pm

From www.geeksofdoom.com

Pink Floyd Win Prog Rock Award

Prog Rock supergroup Pink Floyd has won a new award at the frst Progressive Music Awards 2012. The event, created by Prog Rock Magazine, bestowed the award of "Grand Design" on Pink Floyd for their Immersion re-issues.

Other awards included in the Lifetime Achievement award which went to Genesis and was picked up by Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks.

Keyboard legend Rick Wakeman from Yes was given the Prog God Award.

Progresive Music Awards 2012 Winners

New Blood: TesseracT

Live Event: Anathema

Grand Design: Pink Floyd's Immersion Reissues

Anthem: Squackett's A Life Within A Day

Album Of The Year: Rush's Clockwork Angels

Visionary: Peter Hammill

Lifetime Achievement: Genesis

Virtuoso: Carl Palmer

Guiding Light: Steven Wilson

Prog God: Rick Wakeman

From www.neptunepinkfloyd.co.uk

Backstage with Roger Waters as he prepares for The Wall spectacular $60 million live show - MailOnline, 7 November 2010

The touring version of Pink Floyd's The Wall is one of the most ambitious and complex rock shows ever staged. Cole Moreton, the only British journalist to go backstage, talks to Roger Waters in Toronto about the bewildering scale of the production  -  and how it was inspired by a loss he has never overcome: the death of his father at Anzio in 1944.

Roger Waters on stage in Toronto. His father's death inspired many of the songs he wrote for Pink Floyd, most notably on the 1979 album The Wall

The way his son tells it, Eric Waters died on a battlefield in Italy on February 18 1944 because of the foolishness of the generals he served.

‘It was just before dawn one miserable morning in black ’44,’ sings Roger Waters, former member of Pink Floyd, in When The Tigers Broke Free, the song he wrote about that day. 

‘The Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.’

Eric Fletcher Waters was the son of a County Durham coal miner and Labour Party activist. He won a scholarship to Durham University and became a schoolteacher. In 1939 he was a Communist and a committed pacifist and refused to take up arms, driving an ambulance during the Blitz instead. But he was changed by the nature and scale of the unfolding conflict. He signed up to fight against fascism.

Waters - on the knee of his mother, Mary - with his father, Eric and brother John, shortly before his father was killed

That was how he came to be a second lieutenant in 8th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, part of a force that landed on the beaches at Anzio in February 1944 and was told to hold the town.

The 31-year-old’s name is one of 4,000 listed on a memorial to those who were killed in action at Anzio but whose bodies were never found. His youngest son Roger was four months old when it happened; just old enough to have appeared in a family picture with his father, taken shortly before Eric’s deployment to Italy.

By the late Forties, at school in Cambridge, Roger was becoming aware of the pain of his loss: ‘When men in uniform came to collect their children, that’s when I realised I didn’t have a father any more. I was very angry. It took me years to come to terms with it. Because he was missing in action, presumed killed, until quite recently I expected him to come home. The sacrifice of his life has been a great gift and a great burden to me.’

He means it has informed a huge amount of his work. His father’s death inspired many of the songs Waters, now 67, wrote for Pink Floyd, most notably on the 1979 album The Wall, which charts the decline and fall of a rock star so emotionally scarred by the loss of his father during the war that he retreats ever further behind a psychological barrier.

The live performances of The Wall in the early Eighties were few but became legendary. The album was used as the soundtrack to a film of the same name directed by Alan Parker in 1982, which included unforgettable animations of artwork by Gerald Scarfe, and starred Bob Geldof as the angst-ridden rock star Pink, a clear stand-in for Roger Waters.

The film opens with scenes of a soldier – Eric Waters – along with his men, storming a beachhead. As the men come under fire, the film traces a single Stuka bomber coming in for the kill. A bomb falls from the sky.

‘It was dark all around, there was frost on the ground when the Tigers broke free,’ sings Waters on the soundtrack. ‘And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company C. They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying. And that’s how the high command took my Daddy from me.’

The film later cuts to a young boy enviously watching other fathers pushing their sons on park swings while he sits on one alone, and at home wearing his father’s old uniform and cap in front of the mirror.

Doors within the brick wall open to show Waters sitting in a motel room

Nearly 30 years after those scenes were shot, Waters is still mulling over his loss. Now he is about to pay homage to his father again, with the most ambitious performance of his long career.

Waters is standing alone on an unlit stage in an empty arena in Toronto. In a few hours he will attempt to surpass any of the concerts Pink Floyd did with a spectacular, supercharged version of The Wall that includes extraordinary 3D animations, explosions, a Stuka bomber that dives into the stage and – of course – a vast wall. 

Black-clad stagehands will build it brick by giant brick during the show, erecting a huge divide – 35ft high and 240ft wide – between the audience and the musicians as they play. It is the first night of a world tour that has cost $60 million to stage.

‘I said I couldn’t do this,’ said Waters when the project was announced, but here he is.

The 20,000 empty seats will soon be filled. Fans are desperate to see a show that has not been performed since Waters recreated the original Floyd show for a one-off performance beside the remains of the Berlin Wall in 1990. But they also love The Wall dearly. It was the soundtrack to a generation, and if Waters gets it wrong tonight he will be stamping all over a lot of precious memories. People will feel betrayed. The pressure is on.

I’m in the privileged position of being the only British journalist allowed backstage. With showtime fast approaching, the star is taking a moment to himself in the auditorium, a still, slight figure in bomber jacket and jeans. 

The wall is slowly built, hiding the band. Black-clad stagehands build it brick by giant brick during the show, erecting a huge divide - 35ft high and 240ft wide - between the audience and the musicians as they play

He is startled to see Mark Fisher, the show’s designer, appear out of the wings with a journalist in tow, and swiftly disappears. Waters doesn’t like the press much and has a reputation for being difficult. He left Pink Floyd acrimoniously in 1985, after falling out with guitarist Dave Gilmour, and spent years in court fighting over who had the right to use the band’s name. He lost, and Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright continued recording and touring as Pink Floyd until 1994. 

But The Wall is his to resurrect. It was written almost entirely by him and it’s personal, as a poem reproduced in the tour programme makes clear: ‘My father, distant now but live and warm and strong in uniform tobacco haze, speaks out. He says: “Stay not the passion of your loss, but rather keen and hone its edge, that you may never turn away, numb, brute, from bets too difficult to hedge.”’

The feelings for his father expressed in the poem have urged Waters to connect with the pain of others who have lost loved ones in conflict. Using Facebook, he has asked fans to post him their own memories and photographs, which will be projected onto the wall during the performance along with images of Eric.

The original production of The Wall was a remarkable achievement, establishing Pink Floyd as masters of stadium rock, but the new version goes way beyond it in both artistic and technological ambition.

Waters sings Mother, while a 34ft high inflatable looms behind him

‘Everyone said that a show like this could never be toured,’ says Fisher, who also designed the original production. A year ago, when Waters asked him to get involved again, he dug out his original notes, drawings and photographs to remind him how the show had been staged back then.

In the intervening years, this bespectacled man with the look of a mad professor has become the most acclaimed designer of live shows on the planet, with recent credits including the sets for the Rolling Stones’ A Bigger Bang tour, U2’s 360-degree shows and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

‘The technology has changed beyond measure,’ he says. ‘We had no mobile phones, no computers, let alone the internet in 1980 – but the rock ’n’ roll industry has also been transformed. Back then being able to move something this big from town to town was way beyond us. There were only individual promoters, not companies that arranged whole tours. We owned our own lighting equipment and took it with us because there were no companies that rented it. A complete industry has now emerged.’

That’s just as well, because once they get past this first night the road crew face 56 dates in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico before Christmas, followed by a European tour that will bring them to the London O2 in May and Manchester’s MEN Arena in June.

The production team of 66 people will travel from city to city in six buses. Ahead of them will go 21 articulated lorries carrying gear weighing 112 tons. It will be unloaded (and loaded again) at each venue by locally hired help, up to 80 people for each show.

With back-to-back concerts the schedule will be tight: the crew will arrive at a venue at dawn and work flat out to ensure a sound check can take place in the afternoon. Later, as soon as the last song ends, they will dismantle the set, load the trucks and be on their way by 2am. Four hours later – and up to 250 miles away – they will start to unload at the next arena.

‘The crew are the real heroes of this show,’ says Fisher. ‘They’re the ones who have to get up really early, put everything together, do the show, take it all down, get on the bus, have a beer, go to sleep, get up and do it all again.’

Because it’s the first night of the tour, the crew have had an extra day to set up at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, home of the Maple Leafs ice hockey club.

They needed it, because this is no ordinary rock show – there’s the almost life-sized dive bomber, which has to fly over the crowd during the first song and explode on the stage; 30ft high inflatables, including a helium-filled pig, to be operated by wires from the stadium roof; and visuals inspired by the original work of Gerald Scarfe to be projected onto the finished wall in a high-definition format 10,000 pixels across.

An almost life-sized dive bomber flies over the crowd during the first song and explodes on the stage

Meanwhile, the animations have taken the best part of a year to devise and the wall-builders rehearsed on their own in an empty stadium for a month before they practised with the lighting, sound and video crews for a week, then with the band for another week. 

All the technicians have learned the script for the show and have to follow it with split-second timing to keep in sync with the computer-controlled elements – so there was considerable alarm yesterday when Waters decided to make a slew of changes.

‘I took a lot of notes from Roger,’ says Sean Evans, the show’s creative director, a cool young American whose natural calm seems to have been sorely tested.

‘There were a lot of changes to the lighting. He wanted to make it brighter and to stand in different positions during the performance. I haven’t had a day off for three months and I’m running on no sleep. I sat there with the lighting programmer and tweaked the entire show. I got back to the hotel at five in the morning.’ 

'I said I couldn't do this,' said Waters when the project was announced

It’s now three in the afternoon and Waters wants yet more changes. ‘For a first show this is pretty panicked,’ sighs Evans.

Mark Fisher has seen it all before. ‘It’s the nature of this kind of creative endeavour that you only see what you’ve got right at the last moment. The perfectionism that Roger has is what separates the people in this game who are very successful from the ones who never get to do shows like this. People like Roger, Bono, Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, Madonna... they are obsessively perfectionist in what they do.’

Having said that, Waters also has a responsibility to make it work. ‘If we change lighting cues so that he can stand here, instead of there, he’d bloody well better remember that he changed his mind,’ says Fisher. Will he?

‘We’ll see.’

Fisher is just about to sit down to a late lunch in the temporary catering room at the back of the venue when two people suddenly come running at him from different directions.

‘Roger...’ says one breathlessly, ‘...wants you.’

Now it’s Fisher’s turn to sigh. He looks down at his food sadly. Radios crackle.

‘Now!’ says the other runner. 

There’s no apology. The star demands it. So the designer stands up, brushes himself down and scrapes the rice and peas off his plate into the bin. Then he runs off to find Waters.

So why does Waters bother? Why try to reinvent something that was considered so effective at the time? The Wall was the show that defined Pink Floyd as the masters of stadium rock and included the band’s only UK No 1 single, Another Brick In The Wall (Pt II).

Waters had just finished touring a version of that other classic Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon in 2008 when his fiancée Laurie suggested he tackle the big one. 

‘I said I couldn’t,’ Waters tells me. ‘But it wouldn’t go away and I wondered whether we could. It was incredibly difficult to do back in 1980 and we lost a lot of money, but I thought maybe it was possible now. Mark said technology had come a long way and that people spend a lot more on tickets than they used to. He thought we’d be able to break even, maybe even come out with some gravy. So I thought, “OK, we’ll do it.”’

The word 'Commerce' covers the wall

So far, 110 gigs have been announced, in venues that hold around 20,000 people. The average cost of a ticket over both U.S. and European legs is £75. So although the cost of producing and touring the show is £37 million, there is a potential income of £165 million from ticket sales alone. That’s before fans have had the chance to buy the merchandising, including a tour programme for £11, a T-shirt for £19 or a limited-edition lithograph for £68. 

A DVD of the tour also seems likely. And Waters has hinted at further dates in South America and Australia. So there could be quite a lot of ‘gravy’ to share between the artist and the tour promoter Live Nation.

Besides the loss of his father in childhood, the man who will later this evening sing the plaintive Mother lost his own, Mary, last year. She was 96.

‘I don’t want to whine about how miserable I was when I was a young man,’ says Waters. ‘The story is basically about a youngish man who walls himself in because of his fear of other people and relationships. I think it can be seen as an allegory for what goes on in the broader political scene around the world, with nations being encouraged by their leaders to be fearful of other nations. So we were encouraged by Bush and Blair to fear the “evil ones” and allow ourselves to be walled in by our ideologies and not listen to what’s going on with the other side.’ 

Heavy stuff. We’re about to see if it works.

The stadium is full now, mostly with men who look like they got into Pink Floyd at college a long time ago. The man in front of me, a powerfully built Canadian in a suit, says he hitchhiked all the way to see The Wall in Detroit in 1981. I don’t get a chance to ask what it was like because the lights go down, the roar goes up and the show begins, with a trumpet in the dark then some of the most famous power chords in rock. Cue explosions. The pyrotechnics are so blinding that most of us miss the fibreglass dive bomber that zooms over our heads and disappears in a ball of flame.

Digital 3D imaginary fills the screen behind the band during Run Like Hell

This is dazzling stuff. The show consumes 3,000 amps of power, running through almost 20 miles of cable. There are 82 moving lights, some flying overhead like UFOs on racks in the roof, some beaming from the stage like Blitz searchlights.

Most are operated from the rear of the auditorium, where the video controller sits at a futuristic bank of computers. It takes three hard drives of two terabytes just to deliver the visuals for the show. The controller is working 23 projectors that beam high-definition images onto a giant circular screen at the back of the stage and on to the half-built wall.

A dozen stagehands will put up the 242 bricks in about 45 minutes. Each brick is a rectangular box of flat-pack cardboard like you might get in IKEA, fitted to a metal frame that telescopes upwards inside to hold it in place. The crew ride 30ft up into the air on hydraulic lifts to reach the top level. 

‘The technique for building the wall and the machinery used are similar to 1980, but they’re just much better at building it now,’ says Waters.

‘Back then we were using sprocketed, rickety old 35mm cinema projectors and could only project an image 80ft wide in the middle of the wall. Now we’re projecting across 240ft. It’s like showing a movie on a football field. It’s pretty amazing. We could not possibly have produced the visual imagery that we’re producing for the show now.’

The end of the show, with children chosen from local choirs

In 1980, cartoonist Gerald Scarfe’s assistants hand-painted images onto transparencies but this time around, the video team had the help of ten MacBook Pros. One sequence, for the song Mother, is made up of 4,000 frames, and each one of these took half an hour to render. It’s one thing putting the kit together, but you’ve got to have something to show with it, says Sean Evans.

‘We had some early meetings last year that were really panicked,’ says Evans. ‘Roger was really nervous, saying, “What are we going to do?”’

The album charts the decline and fall of a rock star so emotionally scarred by the loss of his father during the war that he retreats ever further behind a psychological barrier

As the next song starts, we see what they came up with. The image of Second Lieutenant Eric Waters in uniform fills the giant disc behind Waters’ head. The details of his death are given. Then his picture gives way to those other casualties of war and conflict. There are military men and women who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, and battles going back to World War I.

Slogans and quotations in different languages are being projected all the time, including one from Dwight D Eisenhower that Waters says inspired his whole approach this time around: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.’

Finally, after three hours, the wall comes tumbling down, cardboard bricks everywhere, and nobody in the front row gets killed. Sean Evans says: ‘There was a tremendous last-minute panic. We had a lot of changes to deal with. You know Roger changed a bunch of his stage marks? Well, he missed a bunch of them during the show. You could see an empty special (spotlight) from time to time.’ He can laugh about it now. ‘That’s a first night, I guess.’

So what happens next?

‘There’s an intimate dinner with the band and Roger. He wants an immediate post mortem.’

No big rock ’n’ roll party then. But they’re going to have to do this at least 109 more times. The big rumour is that the former Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour will join Waters for one of the concerts. The two old enemies were reconciled in 2005 when Bob Geldof persuaded Waters and the three members of Pink Floyd to perform at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. Earlier this year Waters and Gilmour also played a four-song set at a charity gig in Oxford.

But there is a lot of packing and unpacking to do before then. The stadium is emptying now. The stage is full of shadows again.

And up there, the men in black who never sleep are already picking up the huge cardboard bricks, carefully and expertly, ready to rebuild The Wall.

The action that cost 7,000 lives and inspired The Wall

The Cassino War Memorial, Italy, which is inscribed with 'Waters E F'

 Allied forces had begun their invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943, landing at ‘the toe of the boot’ on the same day the Italian government agreed an armistice with the Allies. Over the next three months they progressed north, pushing back the Germans.

Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, commanding the Nazi troops in Italy, set up three defensive lines across the country, collectively known as the Winter Line, that frustrated the Allies’ advance in December 1943.

To break German defences, it was decided to land Allied troops north of the line. If the Germans committed to a response, it would weaken the line; if they ignored the landings, the Allies could push onwards to Rome.

Codenamed Operation Shingle, and commanded by American General John Lucas, the plan involved three amphibious landings, at Anzio and Nettuno, 35 miles from Rome.

Just over two infantry divisions were involved in the landing, with 40,000 troops and 5,000 vehicles carried on 238 landing craft.

The Cassino War Memorial

British forces assaulted ‘Peter’ Beach, six miles north of Anzio, landing on January 22 1944. The initial landings were virtually unopposed. 

Having taken the beachhead, General Lucas decided to consolidate his position rather than push on and retain the element of surprise – widely acknowledged as a serious tactical error. 

The surrounding area consisted of reclaimed marshland, hemmed in by mountains, and was easily defensible once Kesselring had mustered all available forces.

Allied troops land at Anzio

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

The Daily Mail reports fighting at Anzio, the day before Eric Waters died

                                                                                                                                       

By Kesselring’s own estimation, an Allied offensive on January 23 would have succeeded; however Lucas delayed until the 30th, by which time his troops were outnumbered 100,000 to 76,000. Having failed to make any ground by February 22, he was relieved of his command.

It wasn’t until May that the Allies managed to sustain a successful offensive, eventually forcing the Axis troops out of Rome. 

Operation Shingle had cost the lives of 7,000 Allied troops, and put paid to any hopes of a swift end to the Italian campaign. 

 By COLE MORETON

From www.dailymail.co.uk

Roger Waters The Wall Live In San Francisco on May 11th 2012

Here is an amazing concert video a fan has put together of Roger Waters The Wall live outdoors in San Francisco on May 11th 2012.

Roger Waters - New York Times interview, July 5, 2012

The Wall Goes On, and Grows Even Longer

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. 

Published: July 5, 2012

ROGER WATERS has never done anything small when it comes to “The Wall,” the 1979 album and rock show about his own psychic struggle that many music critics say signified the end of Pink Floyd’s most fertile period. The first performances, back in 1980 and 1981, were groundbreaking in their scale, requiring stagehands to erect a giant wall between the band and the audience that was knocked down at the show’s climax. With its animated graphics and giant puppets, it set a standard for rock spectacles.

For the last two years Mr. Waters, 68, has been touring through Europe and the Americas with a modern version of the show , studded with antiwar messages that allude to current events and jazzed up with high-definition graphics projected on the wall. It has grossed more than $333 million and helped Mr. Waters, who was Pink Floyd’s bassist and chief songwriter before he quit the band in 1983, to reclaim some of its legacy. This spring, for his last swing through North America, Mr. Waters has created an even larger, outdoor version of the show, which comes to Yankee Stadium on Friday and Saturday.

Speaking by telephone during a tour stop in Atlanta, Mr. Waters — a die-hard pacifist who has long blamed war on corporate greed — talked about why a Pink Floyd reunion is highly unlikely and his plan, once the tour ends, to record his first studio album in two decades. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. Will this be your last tour?

A. I haven’t made up my mind. I’ve become very enamored of the outdoor show. It was a super challenge to see if we could take the arena production and made it work outdoors, and it works beautifully, but it is unbelievably expensive. So we are trying to figure out ways to make the numbers add up to go to Europe late next summer, in 2013. This show is such fun to do that I think I’ve got some more in me.

A. What are the technical difficulties of performing “The Wall” in a stadium?

Q. The thing that makes it really, really difficult is the weather. You can’t guarantee good weather, so in consequence you have to travel with a roof, and because the show is so big we have to travel with a very big roof.

Q. At one point in the show, on the song “Mother,” you do a duet with a film of your younger self singing during the original show. Do these songs still have the same resonance for you as they did 30 years ago?

A. For me the songs have all stood the test of time. Clearly I’m not as close to the events that I described in the song “Don’t Leave Me Now.” All the stuff that was about my early relationships with women is very much in the past. But I can still empathize with those dilemmas. And a lot of the other songs, I have realized, have a much wider political meaning than I understood at the time.

Q. What do you see as the contemporary political message of this show?

A. When it was first done, it was 32 years ago, and I was bemoaning the fact I was a child of the Second World War, and I had lost my father, and that has a severe fracturing nature on the family, and it made me very angry about a lot of things. Since then I’ve realized that somehow the piece is not about little Roger losing his father in the Second World War; it’s more universal than that. It’s about all the children that lose their fathers and continue to lose their fathers because those of us who have the power are still almost entirely devoted to the idea that our only responsibility is to maximize the bottom line and make profits.

Q. Your relations with the other surviving members of Pink Floyd — the guitarist David Gilmour and the drummer Nick Mason — have thawed somewhat in recent years. [The keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008.] Is a reunion tour a possibility?

A. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which anything would happen. There was talk after we did Live 8 together  in 2005, when Richard was still with us, we might get back together to do something political or for a charity. But, you know, the fact is, politically we are not a very close-knit team.

Q. Why did it become increasingly hard for you to collaborate with the other members after the 1973 album “The Dark Side of the Moon”?

A. It became more and more like trying to wade through treacle, as is well known. We were increasingly at odds because we had different aspirations. Up until “The Dark Side of the Moon,” I think our thoughts and feelings were pretty concurrent: We wanted to become rich and famous and we worked together as a pretty close-knit team to that end, but once that end had been achieved, then there were other things that started to become important, certainly to me, and it became increasingly difficult to have to argue about stuff.

Q. Have you forgiven Mr. Gilmour and the other members for continuing to write and perform under the Pink Floyd name after you left?

A. Of course, yeah. He was right, I was wrong. It was really simple. I thought it should be retired but I was wrong. And I’m perfectly content with what they did. I had problems at the time. I don’t have any problems now. In a way you could say it was a great tipping of the hat because they were going all around the world playing my songs — and some of their songs — so I guess it kept my music in the public eye for a few years.

Q. Have you been writing any new music?

A. I have. I have written so much, and it’s been 20 years since I made a record. I came up with a song a few weeks ago on the road and then I started playing it a bit with the band in rehearsals. I think it may be the central part and also the kicking-off point for another album.

Q. Do you hope to work on that album when the tour ends on July 21?

A. Yes. If I don’t work on it later this year, it might disappear, and I might never do anything again. So I think I have to and I’m very enthusiastic about it. And it encompasses a lot of the other songs I’ve written over the years. There are tons of them. I just never found a big enough hook to hang them around.

Q. Is it true you have plans to visit a cemetery in Italy where your father’s remains are?

A. There is a cemetery I plan to visit, again this year, because it’s something I’ve put off and I can’t put it off any longer. There is a cemetery near where my grandfather lies. He was in a mining company — Sappers, the 256th Royal Engineers — and he was one of those guys tunneling under the Germans in the First World War. So he’s in a British cemetery in northern France. That’s George Henry Waters. The remains of my father, Eric Fletcher Waters, were never found. But he is commemorated on Plaque No. 5 in the memorial garden at Monte Casino in southern Italy. So I’m thinking I might gather my children together, if they want to go, and go to both those places, just once.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Wall Goes On, and Grows Even Longer.

From www.nytimes.com