The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking: Roger Waters' 'The Wall' Tour Documentary Premieres in Toronto

2014/09/13

Roger Waters' 'The Wall' Tour Documentary Premieres in Toronto

BY DANIEL KREPS | September 7, 2014

Sonia Moskowitz, Getty Images

Roger Waters celebrated his 71st birthday September 6th at the Toronto International Film Festival by attending the world premiere of his new documentary Roger Waters: The Wall. TIFF was the perfect venue for the former Pink Floyd bassist to debut his film since The Wall Live tour actually began its run at Toronto's Air Canada Centre on September 15, 2010, so Roger Waters: The Wall's TIFF premiere was like coming full circle. Also, what better way to follow "Bill Murray Day" than with a film that explores Waters' epic tour from behind "the Wall."

Longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich is credited with "Sound" in Roger Waters: The Wall, along with veteran sound mixer Adam Scrivener. The documentary runs for 133 minutes – 12 minutes longer than the classic double-LP itself – and was co-directed by Waters and Sean Evans, who was The Wall Tour's creative director. Roger Waters: The Wall was filmed in three cities on two continents. So far, no release date has been announced for the documentary, but there will be two more Toronto screenings. Waters also revealed that his tour documentary could double as "an anti-war, protest film."

Following the premiere, and after an impromptu serenade of "Happy Birthday" by the crowd, Waters conducted a Q&A session with audience members and was asked why Pink Floyd's The Wall is so enduring. "I think people are sick and tired of being told that the most important thing in their life is commerce and the new this and the new that," Waters said according to the Toronto Sun. "I think people are probably ready to go now, 'Well, all of that rhetoric lead us to lob bombs over the top of the wall, that divides society ecologically, economically, philosophically and politically, from all our fellow human beings. And we no longer want to be told by our political leaders that they are scum and that we are great.' So that I believe that it may be we're no longer interested in the 'us and them' form of political philosophy that we've been fed on for the last couple of 1,000 years and that we may be ready to move into a new place." All that, plus "Comfortably Numb" is awesome.

"I can't top that tour," Waters told Rolling Stone last November. "First of all, you have to accept the fact that I'm not going to live forever... You just have to accept that when you do something as enormous as that tour. The hardest thing in the world is thinking of something to do, so going and doing it is a reward in itself."

www.rollingstone.com

No comments:

Post a Comment

George Roger Waters

George Roger Waters (born 6 September 1943) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. He was a founding member of the progressive rock band Pink Floyd, serving as bassist and co-lead vocalist. Following the departure of bandmate Syd Barrett in 1968, Waters became the band's lyricist, principal songwriter and conceptual leader. The band subsequently achieved worldwide success in the 1970s with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. Although Waters' primary instrument in Pink Floyd was the bass guitar, he also experimented with synthesisers and tape loops and played rhythm guitars in recordings and in concerts. Amid creative differences within the group, Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and began a legal battle with the remaining members over their future use of the group's name and material. The dispute was settled out of court in 1987, and nearly eighteen years passed before he performed with Pink Floyd again. It is estimated that as of 2010, the group have sold over 200 million albums worldwide, including 74.5 million units sold in the United States.

Waters' solo career includes three studio albums: The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), Radio K.A.O.S. (1987) and Amused to Death (1992). In 1986, he contributed songs and a score to the soundtrack of the animated movie When the Wind Blows based on the Raymond Briggs' book of the same name. In 1990, he staged one of the largest and most elaborate rock concerts in history, The Wall – Live in Berlin, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance. In 1996, he was inducted into the US and the UK Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Pink Floyd. He has toured extensively as a solo act since 1999 and played The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety for his world tours of 2006–2008. In 2005, he released Ça Ira, an opera in three acts translated from Étienne and Nadine Roda-Gils' libretto based on the early French Revolution. On 2 July 2005, he reunited with Pink Floyd bandmates Nick Mason, Richard Wright and David Gilmour for the Live 8 global awareness event; it was the group's first appearance with Waters in 24 years.

In 2010, he began The Wall Live, a worldwide tour that features a complete performance of The Wall. During this tour, at The O2 Arena in London on 12 May 2011, Gilmour and Mason once again appeared with Waters, Gilmour performing "Comfortably Numb", and Gilmour and Mason joining Waters for "Outside the Wall".

He has been married four times and has three children. In 2004 he became engaged to actress and filmmaker Laurie Durning; the duo married in 2012.