2012/07/26
Pink Floyd – The Story Of Wish You Were Here – Blu-ray (2012)
Pink Floyd: The Story Of Wish You Were Here is a worthwhile companion piece to the album.
Interviews with Roger Waters; David Gilmour; Nick Mason; Richard Wright; Storm Thorgerson; Roy Harper; Brian Humphries; Jill Furmanovsky; Aubrey “Po” Powell; Venetta Fields; and many others
Chapters: Prologue; Into the Studio; Have a Cigar; The Album Cover; Shine On You Crazy Diamond; Welcome To The Machine; The Burning Man; Wish You Were Here; Epilogue; Bonus Features
Studio: Eagle Rock Entertainment [6/26/12]
Director: John Edgington
Video: 1.78:1 for 16×9 1080i HD, color and B&W
Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, PCM Stereo
Subtitles: English, German, Spanish, French
Length: 85 minutes
Rating: Audio **** Video****
With the avalanche of re-mastered Pink Floyd material, a wider audience is able to contemplate their strong musical impact. The entire catalogue has been re-released. There has been a specific focus on Dark Side Of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall. Multi-disc boxes, vinyl and hi-resolution digital recordings have enhanced these seminal recordings. The band members, (especially the feuding Roger Waters and David Gilmour) have become very accessible to discuss all things Pink Floyd.
Eagle Rock Entertainment’s latest offering is a Blu-ray documentary entitled Pink Floyd: The Story Of Wish You Were Here. In a concise, informative eighty-five minute film, the various details about the 1975 album are discussed at great lengths. Using simple interview head shots, archival footage and photographs, the narrative contexts are explained. There are incisive musical anecdotes (ex: how the opening four notes of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” served as a base for the album). The three surviving members (Waters, Gilmour, Mason) reminisce all about founder Syd Barrett and his influence on the material. There are abbreviated scenes (black & white and color) of vintage performances (“Astronomy Domine”, “Jugband Blues”) interspersed with the sorrowful recounting of his LSD-induced breakdown.
Of greater interest are the details of the songs and their eventual sequencing. Not lost is the struggle for creative control between Waters and Gilmour. Sound engineer Brian Humphries goes back into Abbey Studios to demonstrate many intricate instrumental and vocal elements of the original master tapes. Veteran musician Roy Harper, whose vocals on “Have A Cigar” were amazing (Waters seems a bit resentful about this), regales the viewer with his version of the story. Throughout the interviews, Gilmour and Waters (in separate studios of course) play bits of songs “live”.
Taking into consideration the visceral artwork of this project, several contributors are interviewed, including Storm Thorgerson (album designer), Aubrey “Po” Powell (album photographer) and Jill Furmanovsky (studio photographer). Another highlight is surreal animation from Geralde Scarfe (who also makes an appearance in the documentary). The stuntman used in the “burning man” cover, talks about the photo session.
The transfer to Blu-ray is clear and balanced. The animation scene of a sea of blood morphing into “hands” is extraordinary. The sound is very clear…you can hear every spoken word easily. Although there is excellent 5.1, there is not a lot of extended musical output. Consequently the PCM stereo is more than adequate. The bonus feature (comprising nearly twenty-five minutes) is exceptional. There are back to back performances of “Wish You Were Here” by Waters and Gilmour, underscoring the brilliance of their songwriting.
TrackList: A Last Recording; Astronomy Domine; Breathe (In The Air); Have A Cigar; Interstellar Overdrive; Jugband Blues; Pow R. Toc H.; Set The Control For The Heart Of The Sun; Shine On You Crazy Diamond Parts 1-5); Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-8); Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 9; Us And Them; Welcome To The Machine; Wine Glasses; Wish You Were Here:
By Robbie Gerson
From Audiophile Audition
Buy amazon.com
Roger Waters - Dark Side Of The Moon Tour - 2007 - FULL CONCERT
Roger Waters - Dark Side Of The Moon Tour - Live in Argentina 2007
2012/07/20
Roger Waters - Radio K.A.O.S.- Video EP - FULL
Roger Waters - Radio K.A.O.S.- Video EP
Tracklist;
1. Radio Waves
2. Sunset Strip
3. Fish Report
4. Four Minutes
5. The Tide is Turning
2012/07/19
2012/07/12
Why Did Roger Waters Leave Pink Floyd?
May 20, 2012
Most people know that Roger Waters left Pink Floyd because of Roger’s ego and the effect this had on the rest of the band and the working relationships between the people who made up Pink Floyd.
Roger did an interview for 60 Minutes on CBS News and embelished a little, and only a little, on why he left. He simply wanted a different direction for the band compared to the others, in particular, David Gilmour who was the other dominant figure in the band. Saying that, musically, they all brought something special to the table including the wonderful tones and melodies from keyboardish Richard Wright and the spacey drumming from Nick Mason who could set the tone of a song in a few beatings of the skins!
Roger wanted grand theatrical productions like The Wall. David Gilmour wanted musicians on a stage with a few spotlights. Check out the video below.
From rogerwaterstours.com
Roger Waters Wall Tour Stats
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| Roger Waters The Wall Yankee Stadium 2012 |
Once the tour ends, Roger will have plenty of time to rest from the monumental tour that has spanned three years and, after the dates above, would have been performed a colossal 192 times! 56 dates in 2010, moving up to 64 dates in 2011 and ramping up even further to an amazing 72 wall concerts in 2012. That is an increase of 8 shows per year. So perhaps Roger Waters Europe 2013 will have 80 shows to look forward to!! Check out the Roger Waters Tour area for dates and concert listings.
Here are the 3 concerts that remain on the Roger Waters Wall tour 2010-2012. As we live in hope, especially in Europe, that Roger will bring the wall back to Europe in 2013. In particular, I think he should play the Echo Arena in Liverpool as I live not too far from there. Excellent!
2012-07-12 – Roger Waters – Verizon Center (Washington) – Washington, District of Columbia – USA
2012-07-14 – Roger Waters – Citizens Bank Park – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – USA
2012-07-21 – Roger Waters – Les Plaines DAbraham – Quebec City (Quebec) – Canada
From rogerwaterstours.com
2012/07/10
Roger Waters Points ‘The Wall’ Toward Abuse of Power - New York Times, July 10, 2012
Roger Waters Points ‘The Wall’ Toward Abuse of Power
By JON PARELES
Roger Waters projected his message stadium-wide, literally, when he brought his new production of “The Wall” to Yankee Stadium on Friday, starting a two-night stand. A white-brick wall, which is both an ideal video screen in concert and the central metaphor of the rock opera he wrote for the 1979 album by Pink Floyd (with additional music by the band’s guitarist, David Gilmour), spanned the stadium and towered 40 feet high.
The message Mr. Waters hammered home — with images including animated regiments of goose-stepping hammers on the march — was distrust of power and authority in many forms: parents, schools, celebrities, corporations, countries, ideologies. Throughout intermission (as elegiac music played), and at points during the concert, the names and faces of people killed by wars, terrorism and government actions were shown on the wall. Quotations from George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Dwight D. Eisenhower also appeared on it. At one point, animated bombers dropped corporate logos and religious symbols; “Run Like Hell” included a WikiLeaks video from an American helicopter firing on Iraqi journalists. Early in the concert, Mr. Waters deplored “all the victims of state terror all over the world,” and preached that giving governments, police and soldiers too much power was “a very steep and slippery slope to tyranny.”
To him, bigger and slicker did not mean better. Except, of course, at his stadium show.
The video wall, which his promoters have billed as “the largest projection surface ever toured in live entertainment,” isn’t the only huge special effect in “The Wall.” It’s an impeccable, stadium-sized show, magnifying even further what began, decades ago, as very private torments for what Mr. Waters, smiling broadly, called his “poor, miserable,” messed-up (he used a stronger term), “little Roger.” There are marionettes as tall as the wall, bursts of pyrotechnics, surround-sound effects that simulated fighter planes buzzing the stadium, a group of 15 children dancing through “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and — a Pink Floyd essential, even if it was from the cover of a different album — a pig-shaped balloon, now a black boar with tusks, painted with mock slogans. When animation warped and crumbled the wall, with flying bricks and metamorphosing colors, it was dazzling.
Actually, “The Wall” isn’t as unified as Mr. Waters’ latest attempt to focus it. It’s a mélange of ideas, ricocheting amid personal and political, insular and activist. Its protagonist, a certain Mr. Pink Floyd, is a rock star going insane. He’s a pampered, miserable, abusive, sleazy, insecure wreck, toying with groupies and numbing himself before going onstage. He’s also the grown-up version of a boy who lost his father in World War II, and who was traumatized by a vicious schoolmaster and an overbearing mother; the combined impact made him wall himself off from feelings. When he leads his band as part of the narrative, Mr. Floyd becomes a fascistic demagogue in sunglasses and a leather trench coat, swaggering among backup musicians who wear Nazi-like uniforms and, eventually, firing a machine gun at undesirables.
The music of “The Wall” is held together by variations on the rising and falling refrain of “Another Brick in the Wall,” which can sound like a playground taunt or a funeral march. But the album also holds some of the most chameleonic music Mr. Waters ever wrote. Pink Floyd’s distinctive slow, plangent anthems — like “Comfortably Numb” — are a big part of “The Wall.” But other songs reach back to doo-wop and Beatles-like vocal harmonies, boogie like 1970s blues-rock, role-play like orchestral show tunes (in the climactic song “The Trial”), pulsate like disco or, in the final song, strum along like skiffle.
Like other operas in repertory, as “The Wall” has become, it is a fixed work. Onstage, it diverges from the album only as much as it needs to in order to suit a concert setting — that is, with no fade-outs, and using newer sound bites for the moments when Mr. Floyd is watching TV. Robbie Wyckoff, on vocals, Dave Kilminster, on lead guitar, and G.E. Smith, on guitar, emulated Mr. Gilmour’s old parts nearly note for note, and it sounded like some arrangements from the album were mixed with the live performance. But Mr. Waters was generally live, groaning and cackling through his confessions and threats, playing the troubled introvert and then making himself the rock star in the spotlight.
Back in 1979 “The Wall” was a rock star’s abreaction to success, but Mr. Waters was also worrying about how media overload could distract and neutralize potential protest. Now, at 68, Mr. Waters has made “The Wall” far less about himself and more about his anger at abuses of power. Yet with amplification, staging, hit melodies and his celebrity status, he got the Yankee Stadium audience following his orders, submitting to his power. For the moment, all paradoxes were subsumed in the spectacle.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 10, 2012
A music review on Monday about Roger Waters’s production of “The Wall,” at Yankee Stadium, misidentified the singer who performed the vocal parts sung by David Gilmour on the Pink Floyd album “The Wall.” He is Robbie Wyckoff — not Dave Kilminster who, as the review noted, plays lead guitar in the live production.
Photo by Chad Batka for The New York Times
2012/07/04
Pink Floyd - Live At Pompeii, 1972
Tracklist;
01:41 - Echoes (part 1)
13:18 - Careful With That Axe, Eugene
19:48 - A Saucerful Of Secrets
29:45 - One Of These Days
35:23 - Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun
45:25 - Mademoiselle Nobs
47:16 - Echoes (part 2)
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii is a 1972 film featuring Pink Floyd performing six songs in the ancient Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy. It was directed by Adrian Maben and recorded in the month of October using studio-quality 24-track recorders without a live audience. The film was scheduled for a special premiere at London's Rainbow Theatre, on 25 November 1972. It was canceled at the last minute by the theater's owners, Rank Strand. Their eventual explanation was that the film didn't have a certificate from the British Board of Censors and they wouldn't allow the Rainbow Theatre, which was a music venue, to be a venue for showing a film and thus could be seen to be in competition with their other established cinemas.
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