2013/09/18

'The Wall' creator is still breaking down barriers


BARRY EGAN – 31 AUGUST 2013


Roger Waters talks to Barry Egan about war, hi-tech snooping and soccer.

A gloomy night in the Ferenc Puskas Stadium in Budapest last Sunday, with 40,000 people watching as wave after wave of war planes dropped bombs. The Hungarian capital has seen more than its share of death and destruction down the centuries – the Siege Of Budapest in 1944 chief among them, as the Red Army battled the Nazi occupiers at a cost of many thousands of lives. So Roger Waters' sensory, if chilling, performance of his anti-war, anti-fascist classic The Wall must have had a deep resonance with the locals, and beyond.

Two hours later, I was sitting in a suite in the Four Seasons with the man himself when some equally chilling news came on the television: America was weighing up whether to respond militarily to the "undeniable" use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria against its own people.

Roger had told me earlier that his father's death in 1944 in the Battle of Anzio against the Nazis was, in his view, during the last just war. He doesn't believe America bombing Syria would be a just war. "Absolutely not. I think it would be an enormous error. I have no doubt that young Cameron would follow him in a heartbeat because they rather like a bit of a war some of these politicians, and not just the right wing, not just the Tories obviously. Blair was a supreme example."

I ask does he think Blair was a war criminal?

"Absolutely. I think he is the most horrific character that English politics has thrown up since Thatcher," he says.

Roger adds that he would never think of going into politics because he is "mistrustful of it".

"I also think it is supremely important and I wish more intelligent, qualified people would. But I think it tends to attract a lot of really, really bad people," he continues. "It attracts people who need to feel important and they like the sound of their own voices. They want other people to listen to them and these are character traits that don't naturally bode well for society or the human race in general. I live in the United States now and it is entirely driven by dollar bills. So the whole thing is intellectually bankrupt."

I mention Bradley Manning, the former US army intelligence analyst, who was jailed for the biggest intelligence leak in US history.

"It is completely iniquitous that they have sentenced him to 35 years in prison. I think what he did was courageous, heroic even . I have supported him as much as I have been able."

Before the song Run Like Hell from The Wall, Roger screams: "Are there any paranoids in the audience tonight? Is there anyone who worries about things?" I ask him does what happened to Manning make him paranoid?

"No! It makes me want to rush up and down 5th Avenue grabbing every person that I meet and scream 'Wake up! Wake up! You are all sleepwalking! Why are you allowing this to happen?'

"So, good for Edward Snowden," he adds, referring to the controversial CIA contractor who leaked some of America's most closely guarded secrets, "for at least showing us part of the mechanism. And how all those companies are absolutely in cahoots with the administration. In secret, they have signed agreements with the government to say: 'Yes, we will spy on every body . . . we do not need grounds to spy on you any more.' I mean, it is like East Germany was," he says in the capital of former communist Hungary.

"It is absolutely incredible. What is interesting, though, is that Snowden hit a nerve in Congress, and all the right-wing libertarians all came rushing out and went: 'Oh my God! They can't do this! I don't want anybody looking through my address book." Despite all that, Waters is optimistic, "weirdly enough", for the future.

Because, he believes, somewhere around the corner something may happen: a light bulb may go on for people and they will go: "Hang on! This is the same old shit. Why don't we do this differently?"

"I think that the reasons that they are getting worse are more identifiable," he explains. "For instance, such small voices as I have are more audible than it would have been 50 years ago. We are sitting here at the very blunt end, and at the sharp end, none of us can imagine how horrific it must be – you know one minute you are playing in your back garden. And the next, in Fallujah (in Iraq), and the next minute you have no legs and you are eight years old and you go: 'What the f*** was that about?'"

The Wall is a powerful piece of political theatre set to some of the angriest music ever composed. The actual wall is 40 feet high and 200 feet across. Images of people who have lost their lives in conflict appear at various points. It is not Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. It is about human barriers and alienation.

"Most of the barriers between human beings are artificially created for the benefit of the rich and powerful," Roger says. "They accrue power to themselves but in order to do that it is necessary for them to construct artificial walls between ordinary people who would much prefer to have a job and go fishing on Saturday and, bring up their kids, and go to the football match and do all that. . . rather than being nerve-gassed in Aleppo or engaged in this constant foul play which seems to be going on all over the globe at the behest of and much encouraged by the rich and the powerful."

The Wall's dark sense of abandonment had its genesis in a very real sadness and abandonment: Roger lost his father when he was a baby.

"George Henry, my grandfather, was in the Royal Engineers because he was a coal miner," he says, "so they got them to dig tunnels under Jerry and he was killed in 1916, and my father was born in 1914. So he didn't have very long with a father at home, either.

"I discovered in therapy about 25 years ago," he explains, "that this recurrent dream that I used to have of killing somebody was: 'I get it! I think I killed my father!"

"But I didn't," Roger laughs, "because I was only that big."

Roger says he spent his youth and his young manhood "in a very defensive mode. I was very frightened. I was very embarrassed. I was very sexually insecure. And that's why I was so snotty and aggressive, I think".

When he started working on his stage production of The Wall in 2009 – it was released as a Pink Floyd double album in 1979 and sold 300 million copies – he knew that: "I didn't want it to be about a whiney, frightened 25-year-old. I wanted it to be about larger issues.

"One of the very first things that we did was reach out through social media to discover other people who'd lost loved ones either in war or in some kind of political conflict. We invited them to send in photographs and a short story of what happened to this relative. You get a letter from a 25-year-old woman who is deeply attached to the sense of loss that that entails. So it makes you understand just how powerful it is. We watch it on the telly every day and we go 'Oh another death.' Another 40 people killed in northern Baghdad or Homs. We have become so inured to it."

They are just numbers, not human beings with souls who have been killed senselessly, I say.

"The piece you came and watched tonight is us hoping to ask and hoping to pose that question: 'Why?'"

Roger Waters plays 'The Wall' at the Aviva Stadium on September 18

*Win a chance for you and a friend to go behind The Wall when Pink Floyd Legend Roger Waters brings this mind blowing spectacle to Aviva Stadium September 18.

This show features state of the art production and is one of the most ambitious and complex rock shows ever staged and you will get to take a closer look and witness first hand why critics are calling it 'the greatest rock show on earth'.

This an incredible prize for any music fan - and of course as well as a backstage tour, you will also get killer seats to  see the show.

From www.independent.ie
 

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