Roger Waters urges Trump resistance
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters last week said the band’s seminal album The Wall had taken on new significance with the rise of Donald Trump, accusing the US president of “creating as much enmity as possible”.
Songwriter Waters was making a rare public appearance with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason in London at a major exhibition charting the band’s journey from minivan tours to the sound-and-light spectacle of The Wall.
“It’s very relevant now with Mr Trump and all of this talk of building walls and creating as much enmity as possible between races and religions,” he said.
“It is about how detrimental building walls can be on a personal level, but also on broader levels.”
The rocker said he was “absolutely” prepared to reprise the album’s epic stage show on the US-Mexico border — where Trump has promised to build a wall — but that “there needs to be an awakening period ... before something like that can happen”.
He issued a rallying cry to fellow musicians to speak out about “the right wing ... raising its ugly head all around the world”.
“Music is a legitimate place to express protest, musicians have an absolute right, a duty, to open their mouths to speak out,” he said.
The 73-year-old predicted “demonstrations in London bigger than any demonstrations than have ever been seen” when Trump makes his planned state visit to Britain later this year.
The first major retrospective of the British prog rock giants will be held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from May, i nspired by t he band’s 50th anniversary.
The show will feature 350 exhibits, including posters, groundbreaking instruments and a recreation of the minivan in which they first toured.
Also on show will be the actual cane used by Waters’ headmaster at his school in Cambridge, South-East England, the inspiration behind the strict teacher in the video from The Wall.
“I want to see the cane they beat me with,” said Waters. “They’ve got the punishment book ... it says 1959, six strokes for fighting, of which I’m inordinately proud.”
The exhibition, entitled “Their Mortal Remains”, is a joint project between the famous London museum and the team behind the band’s revolutionary artwork and stage performances.
Visitors will be invited to join the band as they disappear down the “rabbit hole” into their early LSD-inspired psychedelic sound.
The late Syd Barrett, an original member of the band, never mentally recovered from his prodigious drug intake, leading to his departure in 1968.
Pink Floyd creative director Aubrey “Po” Powell said the exhibition, which opens on May 13, will lay bare the band’s “deaths and madness”, while drummer Mason promised it would be “more than just a wander down memory lane”.
The show follows the museum’s hugely successful David Bowie retrospective in 2013, which attracted 300,000 visitors in London before embarking on a world tour.
Mason said that he had initially been wary about the show, as “I couldn’t see how we could match” the Bowie show.
Pink Floyd was set up by four students in 1965 and has sold more than 200 million albums around the world, with classic release The Dark Side Of The Moon still selling 10,000 copies per week.