Showing posts with label The Wall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Wall. Show all posts
2015/02/05
Roger Waters - Documentary Behind The Wall Berlin 1990
Subtitles in Español, Francais, Deutsch and Portugues.
From the DVD Roger Waters The Wall Live In Berlin 1990
2014/09/13
Roger Waters Says ‘The Wall’ is ‘Unashamedly Anti-War’
Senior Film and Media Reporter
SEPTEMBER 6, 2014
At the Toronto Film Festival premiere of “Roger Waters’ The Wall,” the former Pink Floyd singer and guitarist said he was inspired to make a film of his wildly successful concert tour of the famous album out of political necessity.
“Any armed conflict is an underscore and an exclamation mark to this movie, because this movie is unashamedly anti-war, ecumenical, and about love for all men and women whatever their race, color, creed, nationality or whatever,” said Waters.
It’s also the second time that a film has been made of “The Wall,” but unlike the 1982 Alan Parker film, this isn’t a narrative picture and it’s not autobiographical. That film dealt with an emotionally isolated singer, but the 2014 version widens its canvas, while retaining a soundtrack that includes such rock classics as “Comfortably Numb” and “Hey You.”
“When Roger decided that he wanted to bring it back on the road he said, ‘I’m not that guy. I’m happy. I’m not this angry kid anymore,'” said co-director Sean Evans. “We took the meat of it and made it more about the world and building walls in society, religion and politics.”
Waters has been outspoken of late, criticizing the United States, for instance, for supporting Israel in its standoff with Hamas. At the premiere, he did not speak about any specific war or hot zone, but implied he felt that people needed to become more politically active in order to prevent future bloodshed.
“It’s about our children and about each other and about how we so desperately need to transcend national boundaries in order to cooperate with one another rather than sitting entrenched on our side of a boundary or wall and lobbing bombs at each other over the top of it,” he said.
“We’re on a slippery slope and we need to dig our heels in and say enough, enough, this is not right,” Waters added.
The premiere happened to coincide with the rocker’s 71st birthday, an anniversary that the filmmakers insisted was coincidental.
From variety.com
Toronto fans sing 'Happy Birthday' to Roger Waters
By JOHN CARUCCI, Associated Press | September 6, 2014
.jpg) |
| Photo By Frank Gunn/AP Roger Waters, right, signs autographs as he arrives for the premiere of "Roger Waters: The Wall" at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2014. |
 |
| Photo By Frank Gunn/AP Roger Waters waves as he arrives for the premiere of "Roger Waters: The Wall" at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Saturday, Sept. 6, 2014 |
TORONTO (AP) — Roger Waters celebrated his 71st birthday in style with a world premiere of his new documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival.
When the former Pink Floyd front man walked out on stage to introduce the film, a fan in the packed Elgin Theater screamed out happy birthday. That began an impromptu chorus of "Happy Birthday," and Waters graciously acknowledged his age with an expletive.
"Roger Waters: The Wall" chronicles his recent tour covering the seminal 1979 Pink Floyd album — as well as his inspiration for writing it.
Waters told the audience he began working with co-director Sean Evans five years ago to update the show with a more ecumenical and anti-war approach. Since it kicked off four years ago in Toronto, the tour has grossed nearly $500 million.
Waters came back out for the post-film Q&A to a standing ovation. Moderated by TIFF CEO Piers Handling, the question of Waters' strong political feelings and the criticism he received for it came up early.
Waters politely responded by saying that his strong, humane traits came from his parents, but he wasn't there to defend himself or fight with anybody.
The musician has spoken out about Israeli treatment of Palestinians and has refused to play any shows in Israel.
The film does not have a release date.
From www.chron.com
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters: 'I've made an anti-war movie'
By Rebecca Hawkes and Reuters 08 Sep 2014
The Pink Floyd co-founder say it's time to protest against politicians
 |
| Roger Waters performs in Portugal in 2011 Photo: EPA |
Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters' new film, Roger Waters: The Wall, documents the singer-songwriter's three year The Wall Live tour, which ran from 2010 to 2013, and saw Waters perform Pink Floyd's famous 1980 double album in its entirety.
But Waters says that the film should be seen as a protest against the growing spread of armed conflict, rather than just a concert documentary.
The film, which had its world premiere on Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, documents the band's impressive concerts, that included pyrotechnics, animation, a flying inflatable pig and an actual wall constructed on stage as the show progressed.
But it also includes vignettes of Waters visiting war cemeteries and memorials in Europe, including the grave of a grandfather who died in World War One, and the site of the 1944 battle that killed Water's father when the singer was just a baby.
The concert itself featured projections on its set of veterans, activists and average people who died in wars, protests and attacks on civilians.
Waters said a major theme of the original album is the need to challenge politicians who seem increasingly willing to resort to the use of violence.
"It's a question that's not being asked of our leaders often enough. If this film asks that question, at least in part, then it would be good," Waters told Reuters on the red carpet ahead of the premiere.
"It's a protest movie. It's an anti-war, protest movie."
The film received a standing ovation after a screening packed with fans. The audience also sang an impromptu "Happy Birthday" when Waters, who turned 71 on Saturday, took to the stage.
The Wall Live became one of the top grossing concert tours of all time as it grew to more than 200 shows in Europe, North and South America and Australia.
Waters said he had welcomed the opportunity to spread the album's core message that politicians and citizens must work to overcome the divisions fueling the wars we see today.
"It's very easy for people to say... that will never happen, because they are this, and they are that. And you can't talk to them," he told Reuters.
"They just lived in a different part of the globe and are educated differently. And they need education the same way that we do so that we can cross the great divide that we might call the wall."
From www.telegraph.co.uk
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
Roger Waters Discusses Emotional Anti-War Documentary ‘The Wall’ at TIFF
By Karen Bliss
September 07, 2014
"It has a more universal message, which is passionately anti-war," Roger Waters says.
If a concert film can be emotional and even require a tissue, Roger Waters The Wall is it.
Roger Waters Premieres His New Doc at Toronto International Film Festival
Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder marked his 71st birthday at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday (Sept. 6) night for the world premiere of this unique live concert documentary. The film takes his strong anti-war stance and interweaves a highly personal mission into concert footage from his 2010-2013 sold out The Wall Live tour, which actually started in Toronto.
The 133-minute documentary, which includes all 26 songs from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, The Wall, is still seeking a distributor.
“The only difference in the movie is that I’ve made a road movie about visiting the graves of both my grandfather and my father -- well, my father doesn’t have a grave because his remains were never found. He died in 1944 at Anzio [Italy] in the Second World War, but there is a memorial to him which during the movie I visit,” Waters told Billboard before the screening.
“I basically visit all kinds of serious iconic places with friends of mine from the past, in this movie. I hope that that road movie is integrated within the context of the concert movie we’ve made and serves to accentuate some of the points that we made in the concert.”
Waters worked closely with co-director and co-writer Sean Evans, the creative director on The Wall Live and previous visuals designer for Waters’ 2006-2008 The Dark Side of the Moon Live tour and his opera Ça Ira.
“It has to do with his impetus for writing The Wall,” Evans says of the narrative component to the film. “It’s all one big circle and it’s great how it all ties back.”
In The Wall Live -- based on the songs from Pink Floyd’s classic double album, The Wall, and subsequent tour -- Waters hammered home the idea that war is commerce and the immense cost in human lives. The stage show includes military costumes, animation of fighter planes and bombs, and dozens of fan-submitted photos of people all over the world whose lives were lost to war in this last century.
The original album and Alan Parker’s legendary 1982 film were based on the destructive life of an isolated rock star whose father was killed in action during World War II.
“I wrote this piece nearly 40 years ago. It came to me a few years ago that it had a broader message than the original message of the whiny guy who spat at the kid in Montreal in 1977,” Waters says, referencing his notorious reaction to a disruptive fan during Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh/Animals tour.
“And it has a more universal message, which is passionately anti-war, believing that war is a business -- Smedley Butler’s whole ‘War Is A Racket.’ It’s all about people making money. It actually doesn’t help the people who are expected to be collateral damage -- and most casualties in modern warfare are civilians.”
Like the concert, the documentary includes all The Wall songs in chronological order, but Waters’ road trip makes the message more powerful. He is not just looking at war from the outside; he knows firsthand the lifelong pain such loss has on the families of those left behind.
As the end credits roll, he respectfully shows all the photos of fallen loved ones.
After the screening, Waters did a 25-minute Q&A session, telling the audience at the Elgin Theatre he hoped this new film version of The Wall is “more universal and ecumenical and anti-war and humanitarian than the original version that I did with my much loved old colleagues from Pink Floyd, Dave and Rick and Nick.”
He added another hope -- that we’d “find a different way of organizing our politics and our commerce that don’t require that we murder each other.”
“Because we are all brothers and sisters under the skin and above it,” he says. “I know it sounds ridiculous to say, but it’s super important that we stop lopping bombs over the top of the wall and start trying to dismantle it so that we can say ‘Hi’ to whoever is on the other side, whether the divide is religious or nationalistic or political or economical.”
From www.billboard.com
2014/06/18
Hear Roger Waters’ Early, Work-in-Progress Recordings of Pink Floyd’s The Wall
June 17th, 2014
by Josh Jones
My first exposure to Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall left me feeling nothing less than astonishment. And though I never had the chance to see the outrageous stage show, with its very literal wall and giant inflatable pig, the film has always struck me as a suitably dark piece of psychodrama. Over a great many subsequent listens, the melodramatic double-album can still blow my mind, but I’ve come to feel that some of the strongest material are those songs penned jointly by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and those are relatively few. (Mark Blake quotes Gilmour as saying “things like ‘Comfortably Numb’ were the last embers of mine and Roger’s ability to work collaboratively together.) The bulk of the album belongs to Waters, its autobiographical details and personal themes, and the album and film can sometimes feel as stifled and claustrophobic as its protagonist does. This is either a creative failing or a brilliant melding of form and content.
Inspired by an incident in which an exasperated Waters spat on a rowdy fan at a stadium show in Montreal during the band’s 1977 “In the Flesh Tour,” The Wall documents the painful rise and even more painful fall of a fictive rock star named, of course, Pink (played by Bob Geldof in the film version), whose life closely parallels Waters’, down to the spitting. It has always seemed an odd irony that Waters responded to the alienation of touring massive stadiums by creating a stadium show bigger than anything the band had yet done, but it speaks to the bassist and singer’s grandiose personality and obsessive desire to turn his angst into theater. Oftentimes the results were spectacular, other times bombastic and confusing (at least to critics, some of whom are easily confused). The recording of the album, as many well know, strained the band almost to breaking, and by many accounts, Waters’ imperiousness didn’t help matters, to say the least.
All of the behind-the-scenes drama may or may not eclipse the drama of the album itself, depending on your level of fandom and interest in Pink Floyd biography. Lovers of Waters’ epic rock dramaturgy will find edification at the extensive online critical commentary Pink Floyd The Wall: A Complete Analysis, an online work in progress that delivers on its title. For a very brief account of the story behind the story, co-producer Bob Ezrin’s interview with Grammy.com offers perspective from someone involved in the project who wasn’t a member of what came to seem like The Roger Waters’ Band. Ezrin describes The Wall as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort,” and his own role as “a kind of referee between him and the rest of the band.”
In the beginning we had a very long demo that Roger had written. We started to separate out the pieces, and when we looked at the storyline we realized what we needed was a through line, something to get us from start to finish.
Ezrin recounts that he “closed [his] eyes and wrote out the movie that would become The Wall,” handed the script out to the band, and marked songs missing from Waters’ demo as “’TBW’—‘to be written.’” (Among those songs was “Comfortably Numb.”)
The recordings at the top of the post—which surfaced in 2001 with the title Under Construction—represent a step in The Wall’s evolutionary development between Waters’ rudimentary demos (short excerpts above) and the completed album. (See the Youtube page for a complete tracklist. Contrary to the uploader’s description, Roger Waters certainly does not play all the instruments.) While Under Construction has generally been referred to as a “demo,” Rick Karhu of Pink Floyd fanzine Spare Bricks expresses his doubts about the use of a term he takes to denote “a fairly polished recording”: “Demos are not rough recordings or works-in-progress […]. I doubt very much that Under Construction is a demo of The Wall.”
It’s too rough around the edges—at times shockingly so—to be strictly considered a demo recording. At points, things are haphazardly edited together. Songs cut off abruptly, fade unexpectedly or drop out entirely for a moment as if someone at the mixing desk hit the wrong button at some point. Vocal tracks peak-out, often causing anguish to the listener’s ear drums. Some instrument lines (mostly the bass guitar) meander through the background as if the person playing is making up the part as they go. Equalization is nonexistent on most tracks. Overall, most of it sounds like a 4-track recording by a band who has only the vaguest notion of how the equipment works.
Lest we take this description as disparagement, Karhu clarifies: “It is precisely for those reasons […] that I love them dearly and consider them one of the most valuable, unauthorized Floyd recordings to be unearthed. Ever.” Many Youtube commenters agree, some even arguing that these rough sketches are superior to the final polished product. It’s a debate I won’t weigh in on, though I will say that like Karhu, I enjoy the lo-fi raggedness of this version of The Wall. It seems to convey the emotionally frayed edges of these songs in a way the slick production of the studio album may not at times. Either as a mere document of the album’s early history or an alternate, fragmented—and hence more traumatized—take on The Wall, this unofficial version is haunting and strange. Does it perhaps better represent Waters’ desire to make his psychic unease into art? We invite you to judge for yourselves. And if, like me, you can listen to “Comfortably Numb” (and that incredible guitar solo) on repeat for hours on end, you may be interested to hear David Gilmour discuss the song’s composition in the interview below.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
From www.openculture.com
2014/05/20
Pink Floyd -The Wall Live at Nassau Coliseum - N.Y - 1980.02.27
Pink Floyd - The Wall Live at Nassau Coliseum - N.Y. - 1980/02/27 - Full Concert.
1º Part
01-Intro/In The Flesh?
02-The Thin Ice
03-Another Brick In The Wall (Part 1)
04-Happiest Days Of Our Lives
05-Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
06-Mother
07-Goodbye Blue Sky
08-Empty Spaces
09-What Shall We Do Now?
10-Young Lust
11-One Of My Turns
12-Don't Leave Me Now
13-Another Brick In The Wall (Part 3)
14-Goodbye Cruel World
2º : Part
01-Hey You
02-Is There Anybody Out There?
03-Nobody Home
04-Vera
05-Bring The Boys Back Home
06-Comfortably Numb
07-The Show Must Go On
08-In The Flesh
09-Run Like Hel
10-Waiting For The Worms
11-Stop
12-The Trial
13-Outside The Wall
The Band:
Roger Waters - Lead Vocals, Bass Guitar, Guitars, Percussion, Programming
David Gilmour - Lead Vocals, Lead Guitar
Richard Wright - Keyboards, Vocals, Organ, Piano, Synthesisers, Mellotron
Nick Mason - Drums, Percussion
"surrogate band" wearing masks, with Waters singing. The band consisted of ex-Status Quo's Andy Bown (bass), Willie Wilson (drums), Peter Wood (keyboards) and Snowy White (guitar; later Andy Roberts)
2014/04/09
2013/12/02
Roger Waters - Keynote Q&A at Billboard Touring Conference 2013
Waters talks with Billboard's Ray Waddell about Pink Floyd's first U.S. gig, the music business today and the monumental success of The Wall tour.
Dystopia: “Are There Any Paranoids in the Theatre Tonight?”: Roger Waters’s The Wall as Dystopian Spectacle
November 29, 2013
By Ana Malinovic
Roger Waters, the Easter Island-headed prophet of Pink Floyd, recently revived the band’s seminal 1979 albumThe Wall on a worldwide stadium tour. Just why did Waters return to The Wall? On his official website, he says:
The story of my fear and loss …provides an allegory for broader concerns: nationalism, racism, sexism, religion, whatever! All … are driven by the same fears that drove my young life.
 |
| Roger Waters performs the entirety of Pink Floyd’s The Wall at Wembley Stadium. Photo by Chiazi Nozu. |
While Waters acknowledges that the album initially arose from his own highly personal tale, in recent years he has recognised its potential to relate to a wider socio-political context. Indeed, The Wall is nothing if not a searing dystopian narrative. The OED defines a dystopia as “an imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible”, but more specifically, the following elements are pervasive: constant state surveillance; a widespread lack of freedom and dehumanisation of the masses; corruption and injustice; prolific propaganda within a system of indoctrination; a “personality cult” figure. Each of these elements was very much present in the performance of The Wall I attended in September at Wembley Stadium.
From the outset Waters made clear that this spectacle was intended as a deeply felt protest against injustice and outrages perpetrated by governments and state machinery worldwide. Before performing a sombre and altogether darker version of Another Brick in the Wall, he said: “This concert is dedicated to Jean Charles [Menezes] and victims of state terrorism all over the world.” Waters’s critique didn’t stop there. He continued to hammer home his protest against excessive state power with the songs that followed, without exception.
Prior to this show, I always saw Mother as one of the most personal songs on the album, about a stifling and overprotective mother who nonetheless wishes the best for her son: “Mother will check out all your girlfriends for you,” sings Waters. “Mother will always find out where you’re been.” (Though there remain disturbing overtones: “Mama’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true… Put all of her fears into you.”) However, in this stage incarnation, Mother was taken from the personal sphere and propelled into the expressly political. A giant, sinister-looking Mother came to life on the stage. Cold probing lights radiated out of her eyes, surveying the audience, with a security camera positioned by her. On a screen the words “Big Brother” appeared - so evocative, of course, of the most iconic dystopian novel of them all - with the “Br” in “Brother” crossed out and replaced with an “M”. This represented how dangerous our need to feel secure as a society can be - a need that can be used to manipulate us. The leaders who claim to have our best interests at heart are invariably to be the most distrusted. Such leaders justify the surveillance state by citing increased security, but in fact they rob us of more and more of our freedom.
After Waters sang the line “Mother should I trust the government?”, big red letters were projected onto The Wall, spelling out “no fuckin’ way” - drawing a great reaction from the audience. It’s no surprise that this sentiment had no such resonance: in addition to longstanding political disaffection, this is a country which has between 4 and 5.9 million security cameras (according to a report in July ). That is approximately one camera for every 11 people in the UK – a very disquieting statistic and one that makes Waters’s surveillance state Mother seem all the more plausible.
The larger the state, the more it can impose into our everyday lives. Heather Brooke’s The Silent State is one such exposé of just how much data the government has built up about us in recent years, the extent of which is kept largely hidden from us. If we are kept unaware of what is happening with governmental legislation and the way in which the state uses our data, the state can go ahead even with oppressive laws and experience less opposition than it should rightly have. In light of last week’s revelations that the US and UK governments struck a secret deal to allow the NSA to “unmask” our data, Brooke’s arguments hold greater weight than ever.
Goodbye Blue Sky’s projected animation - which has previously attracted considerable controversy - was a very explicit critique of corruption and abuses of power within corporations, ideological belief systems and organised religion. The crucifix, star of David and star and crescent fell from aeroplanes like bombs, alongside the corporate logos of Mercedes, Shell and McDonald’s - as well as communism’s hammer and sickle and capitalism’s dollar sign.
Such anti-war and anti-profiteering messages were iterated again and again during The Wall. Nobody Home’s animation illustrated the individual’s powerlessness against nefarious military planes flying overhead, while during Vera Lynn, a damning quote by Eisenhower was projected onto The Wall: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies… a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
Again, Waters was focusing on the human fallout of cold, calculated military actions. Malala Yousafzai, the extraordinary campaigner for girl’s education, has drawn renewed attention to the fact that the world’s most powerful nations spend so much on their forces but shamefully little on education. As she defiantly said at the UN in September: “Instead of sending weapons… to Afghanistan and all these countries which are suffering from terrorism, send books.” Unsurprisingly, the 2013 Global Peace Index shows that the world has become less peaceful .
Another Brick in the Wall: Part Three, meanwhile, began with footage of a French newscaster projected onto one of the bricks in the centre of the screen. The surrounding bricks then rapidly filled up with footage of newscasters speaking different languages: a potent Chomsky-esque critique of the way the media gives us a particular slant on certain events, depending on where we live. Tracking back to Another Brick in the Wall: Part Two, this is a continuation of the way we are taught to think in school. We are expected to conform to a particular ideological mindframe (“we don’t need no thought control”), actively prevented from attempting to form our own potentially subversive opinions.
Goodbye Cruel World ended on a particularly disturbing note: as Waters sang in a mocked-up living room from the last brick that was yet to be covered up, he was being targeted by the red dot of a sniper rifle. As the song ended, all went startlingly black - a highly laden critique of the military and political sphere intruding into the personal and domestic.
The finale of The Wall, segueing fromWaiting for the Worms into The Trial, was the most visually arresting projection in a concert loaded with spectacle. The sheer perversion of the judge was highlighted through snippets of cartoonish video, while Waters inhabited the role of megalomaniacal dictator, equipped with a megaphone and wearing a uniform. The song was also accompanied by quotations from 1984 - most notably “he loved Big Brother” - and the opening of Kafka’s The Trial.
The Wall was a forceful, resolutely spectacular reminder of just why dystopias hold such power over the imagination. While they show us a vision of the worst future possible, they simultaneously reveal disturbing and uncomfortable truths in our present. They act as a warning. They are often an attempt on the part of their creator to urge us into action, so that we feel moved to change the things that we see are deeply wrong with our world - a motivation that clearly courses through Waters’s veins.
Waters’s stadium tour coincides with a cultural dystopian turn: Black Mirror on the television; The Hunger Games in the cinema; Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam in the bookstores; Headlong’s acclaimed 1984 on the stage. The sheer variety of The Wall’s multidisciplinary spectacle, and the scope of its concerns, make it a powerful, pounding distillation of this trend. Just before Run like Hell, Waters wryly asked: “Are there any paranoids in the theatre tonight? This song is for you.” As he had shown us repeatedly throughout the evening, we have plenty to be paranoid about.
Ana Malinovic
Ana graduated from Warwick University with a BA in English and American Literature in 2010. Her dissertation was centred on dystopian elements in the fiction of Kafka. She enjoys uncovering innovative works of fiction by a diverse range of authors. She also spends much of her time roaming around London’s arts and culture scene overexcitedly.
From www.litro.co.uk
2013/09/25
2013/09/18
Roger Waters: The Wall, prison mentale
Par Olivier Nuc, 17/09/2013
L'ancien leader de Pink Floyd rejoue le double album mythique au Stade de France. Un spectacle grandiose autour de la folie.
 |
| Crédits photo: Daniel Reinhardt |
Roger Waters n'a jamais cessé de considérer le double album, The Wall , paru en 1979, comme le sommet de sa carrière. Sans Pink Floyd , groupe qu'il a contribué à fonder au milieu des années 1960 avant de le quitter en 1985, le bassiste et chanteur septuagénaire fait revivre le spectacle tiré de The Wallsur les routes du monde entier depuis trois ans. Ce concert au Stade de France marque l'ultime étape d'un périple européen - le dernier? - qui l'a vu sillonner les stades tout l'été.
En 1980, Pink Floyd avait joué ce programme dans quelques villes (Londres, Los Angeles), mais la technologie d'alors ne permettait pas les audaces offertes par les outils d'aujourd'hui. Assemblé brique par brique pendant la première partie de la soirée, le mur est détruit à l'issue du show. Le groupe passe au second plan, la scénographie s'articulant autour du mur lui-même. C'est là que sont projetés les visuels emblématiques de Gerald Scarfe, créatures grotesques illustrant les névroses des différents protagonistes.
Dix ans après Tommy de The Who , Pink Floyd imposait à son tour un concept album qui a marqué plusieurs générations de fans du groupe. L'histoire a été adaptée au cinéma par Alan Parker en 1982, avec Bob Geldof dans le rôle principal.
Ce mur psychologique est celui que le personnage principal, Pink - incarné sur scène par Roger Waters lui-même - a construit entre lui et le reste du monde, avec la contribution de l'école, de la société et de la famille, dans la foulée du traumatisme lié à la mort de son père. Engagé et rageur, le spectacle est une dénonciation de la guerre, qui dépasse le conflit de 1939-1945 pour rendre hommage aux victimes collatérales des conflits de ces cinquante dernières années.
Roger Waters rendra un hommage vibrant à la famille de Jean-Charles de Menezes, abattu par erreur par la police londonienne au lendemain des attentats de 2005. Il rappellera aussi qu'il avait joué The Wall à Berlin en 1990 pour célébrer la chute du Mur. L'artiste s'est rendu mardi devant le dernier tronçon du Mur encore debout afin de s'opposer au projet immobilier qui prévoit de détruire les derniers vestiges du symbole de l'opposition Est-Ouest. «Il doit y avoir des lieux de mémoire pour ce dont nous, en tout cas ceux qui sont assez âgés, avons été témoins durant les jours sombres de la guerre froide», a-t-il déclaré.
Un album décliné au gré des années
En 1990, Roger Waters réalisait un vieux rêve: jouer The Wall à Berlin. Quelques mois après la chute du Mur, le musicien organisa un concert géant sur la Potsdamer Platz, entouré de nombreux invités: Sinead O'Connor, The Band, Marianne Faithfull, Joni Mitchell, Cyndi Lauper et Scorpions. Le 4 septembre, il se produisait à nouveau dans la capitale allemande, au Stade olympique cette fois. Une mise en abîme troublante, dans ce haut lieu du national-socialisme.
Roger Waters au Stade de France, Saint-Denis (93). Tél.: 01 55 93 00 00. Date: le 21 septembre à 20h. Places de 56,30 à 122,30 €.
From www.lefigaro.fr
'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
2013/09/06
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)