The musical politics of Roger Waters
The ageing rocker reckons we’re living in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. So his new show, Us + Them, is the rock blockbuster to end them all,
The direction from Roger Waters’ people is to steer clear of politics. That stuff chews up precious interview time when clearly, the point of the story is his new show: Us + Them will blitz New Zealand over the next week.
Last year, it blew the minds of 64 stadium audiences and gobsmacked rock critics across the US. The title is, of course, a Pink Floyd song – lest those audiences somehow fail to recognise Waters as the guy who steered that legendary British art-rock juggernaut from Dark Side of the Moon to The Wall and beyond, before jumping a bickering ship in 1985.
As a title in 2018, Us + Them is also as fundamentally, intentionally and unavoidably political as Waters’ new album, Is This the Life We Really Want? In fact, there are few rock artists alive as uncompromisingly political in thought and deed as Waters. But hey, we can talk show first.
‘‘I’m not giving anything away here, because this is all over YouTube now,’’ the 74-year-old artist says.
‘‘The beginning of the secondhalf is all flashing lights and rioting and blah, blah, blah and then these flashing lights come down and hover over the heads of the audience and Battersea Power Station bursts from the ground. Literally.
‘‘The four chimneys come up first, and they’re threedimensional. They’ve been stored in boxes. And then the body of the building has been projected onto Rollios ...’’
Rollios?
‘‘Rollios are screens that can be compressed or expanded horizontally. They’re 20-foot wide and we have eight of them, so there’s Battersea Power Station stretching 160ft out into the auditorium, and we then project on all of those surfaces.’’
It is, by all reports, a staggeringly effective use of advanced concert technology. It would, however, be a hollow spectacle if the song concerned – Pigs (Three Different Ones), from Floyd’s 1977 album Animals – wasn’t pointedly skewed to reference current political affairs.
Donald Trump is the ‘‘leader with no f...ing brains’’ on Is This the Life We Really Want? The new album, which weaves into the classic Floyd-fest of Waters’ show, is a scathing update of his lifelong socialist-pacifist preoccupations, with subtle musical references to Wish You Were Here, The Wall, and other squillion-selling past glories.
‘‘When World War II was over,’’ goes one key lyric, ‘‘Though the slate was never wiped clean/ We could have picked over those broken bones/ We could have been free.’’
It’s to that tragedy of unfinished history that Waters has always returned, and doubtless will always. He was a baby when his father was killed in that war. Profound personal loss and hollow political justification were forever entwined on that day in 1944. In many ways, his latest opus is a bitter lament for 74 subsequent years of human folly.
‘‘And how sad is that?’’ he says. ‘‘Because here we are, in a state of perpetual war, with the warmongers having a firm hold on the reins of power and the media tamed completely.
‘‘We are living in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s just vaguely disguised. Everybody believes whatever they’re told by those who are determined to keep us at each other’s throats.’’
But shouldn’t we be talking about Us + Them?
‘‘There is no ‘us and them’,’’ Waters says. ‘‘There’s only us. A huge body of scientific evidence [tells us] that we’re all African if we go back far enough. We’re all brothers and sisters and it would behove us now, in our time of peril, to accept that simple and basic fact.
‘‘The ‘them’ thing is entirely artificial. It is a device used by our rulers to unify us in support of their great wealth, and to [make us] give our lives to repel the barbarian at the gate.’’
He allows himself a parched laugh. ‘‘The barbarian is always somebody else. It’s never us. But I mean, I live in a country now, the United States of America, which is the barbarian. They are destroying the world but they’re doing it in the name of freedom and democracy and consumerism and capitalism and all of the things that they hold dear.’’
It’s surprising, to say the least, that Waters considers himself an optimist these days. Sure, there is a thread of redemption in the new album, based as always on the power of love and empathy. But the bleakness of his big picture is as panoramically overwhelming as a battery of Rollios.
‘‘I’m not happy with the way things are,’’ he says, ‘‘but maybe because I’ve sorted my ideas out a little bit and I think I’m less spiky than I used to be, and in consequence I’m more capable of communicating with others, I guess that makes me see a general potential for us to communicate with one another.’’
In 2005, after 20 years of poisonous enmity, Waters reunited with David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright for one last Pink Floyd concert for Bob Geldof’s Live 8 charity in London’s Hyde Park.
‘‘It was lovely,’’ the band’s bassist and lyricist-in-chief reflects now. ‘‘I thought it was great and I’m so glad we did it before Rick died. It wasn’t really a making of peace, but it was one last performance and I enjoyed it.
‘‘I rolled over, completely,’’ he adds with a chuckle. ‘‘I never said ‘boo’. I just went, ‘OK’.
Which doesn’t sound like the famously dictatorial Mr Waters.
‘‘No, it’s not me,’’ he says. ‘‘It was me pretending not to be me. I let David have his way. Which was fine.
‘‘I mean, I was the one who made the phone call,’’ he adds. ‘‘Geldof called me and said, ‘Hey Roger, will you call Dave?’ ‘Who? Oh, that Dave’. And I did. And he thought about it for a couple of days and he said yes and that was that.
‘‘I don’t follow rock’n’roll, really,’’ he says on the whole legacy issue, ‘‘but I think the work that the four of us did was pretty special. It was kind of weirdly musical and meaningful and coherent. There was a kind of magic in the combination of the four of us working together. It’s sort of undeniable when you listen to the body of work. So I’m glad young people still get it.’’
It’s an exceedingly rare beast they’ll see, when they roll up with their parents and grandparents to witness, surely for the last time, the greatest hits of Pink Floyd strung into an updated stadium narrative that’s equal parts political polemic and retina-frying multi-media spectacular.
Given Waters’ famously proprietorial grip on every aspect of everything he’s ever involved with, one has to wonder how he sees his role in it all. Musician? Production designer? Activist? Ringmaster?
‘‘You can either say I’m Leonardo da Vinci or you can say I’m a jack of all trades. You can say anything you f...ing want. I couldn’t care less.
‘‘If you feel something, then you discover that for some genetic reason you have the wherewithal to put the words together or to have the musical or visual ideas to get some of it out, that’s, firstly, hugely surprising, if you went to a grammar school in England and told you were f...ing useless.
‘‘And [secondly], it’s very pleasing. And that’s probably why I’m doing this two-year-long tour. Because it’s a huge privilege to find myself in this position. I mean, I’ve worked and worked and worked, but work is its own reward when you’re doing something that you love.’’
Whatever you call him, ‘‘I’ll be that old bloke up on stage giving it a bunch of rock’n’roll’’, he says. ‘‘Just be there when Battersea Power Station grows out of the sea at the beginning of the secondhalf.’’ – The Age ❚ Roger Waters will perform Us + Them at Auckland’s Spark Arena, January 24 and 26, and Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium, January 30. Tickets are available from Ticketmaster.